The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything.
(p ^ ~p)⊃q. From a contradiction, anything goes. That is, if we allow contradiction then everything is both true and false, and we cannot explain anything. There are various systems of paraconsistent logic that accomodate or mitigate explosive results, so I won't rule out some form of dialectic, but I won't rule it in, either. (see what I did there...?) — Banno
There is a retrojective argument. For things to be crisply divided then they would have had to have been previously just an undifferentiated potential. A vagueness being the useful term.
Our imaginations do find it hard to picture a vagueness. It is so abstract. It is beyond a nothingness and even beyond the pluripotential that we would call an everythingness. It is more ungraspable as a concept than infinity.
Even Pierce only started to sketch out his logic of vagueness. That is why it excited me as an unfinished project I guess. One very relevant to anyone with an evolutionary and holist perspective on existence and being as open metaphysical questions. — apokrisis
Those three puzzles are more of a problem for solipsism than idealism. But I think you think that idealism readily collapses into solipsism. Is that right? — bert1
Another debate. What fun! How pleasing to have a forum that allows such things. Thanks, Busy, for setting this up; your time is appreciated. Thanks also to Landru, for agreeing to meet here.
This topic comes from a thread that I started just last week, and which in that short time has boomed to over seven hundred posts. A hundred a day.
As things stand I simply cannot give the time needed for such a thread. My reading was encumbered by the sheer speed of posting. My slow old head could not make the signal out from the noise.
So I am pleased that one of the more erudite defenders of anti-realism has agreed to spend some time pondering my puzzlement, perhaps to help me understand what is going on here.
To start, I will repeat the opening post from the thread mentioned above. It’s about a problem I have in understanding how ontological idealism avoids being solipsistic.
So, apparently the idea is that a kettle is not a kettle, but is experiences-of-kettle. We might talk of kettles as if they are things, but the more sophisticated of us ought understand that what we call a kettle is no more than one’s experiences. Although we pretend that the thing is a kettle, one cannot separate the kettle from the self that is doing the experiencing. What there is, is the experience of kettle.
What happens here is that the individual kettle dissipates, becoming instead a relation between experience and the self. The boiling kettle becomes my experience of the kettle, my experience of hot water; So the self becomes central to every such account. All I can know is the experience, never the really, really kettle. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.
What bothers me is that having placed the experiences had by the self at the centre of the universe, how does one avoid there only being one’s self?
What about you? There is my experience-of-you. If I am to be consistent in applying this ideal approach, what more is there of you than my experiences of you? That’s what you are. You become my experience of you.
All I can know is the experience of the kettle. There is no kettle apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.
But if this is so, then surely all I can know is the experience of you. There is no you apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about you, all there is, is my experiences.
Hence, if one is consistent, one must accept some form of solipsism.
It will not do to claim that other people are also selves. One cannot experience the self of another, just as one cannot experience the “transcendent reality’ of a kettle. If one is entitled to induce that other people have a reality beyond one’s experience, one is also surly entitle to induce that kettles have a reality beyond experience. If one denies reality beyond experience, then one denies it for both people and kettles.
So demanding a reality beyond experience for other people, but not for the objects of the world in which we find both them and ourselves embedded, would appear to be no more than special pleading.
I hope, Landru, that you can help me with this. How does idealism avoid solipsism?
— Banno
So the "leap" is : things are individuated, and they can only be so if they were an undifferentiated potential. — Moliere
This was perhaps partially answered by the stuff about dialectic. My worry is that @Wayfarer argues for what he calls epistemic idealism when talking to me, yet a form of ontic idealism when talking to other folk. To his credit he's addressing the tension here between beliefs and world. There is perhaps little difference between what he says and what I say, apart from where we place the emphasis - he on the beliefs, but I on the reality.Your use of the Cake metaphor sounds like you think it's a bad (magical?) idea to try to have it both ways — Gnomon
Some folk here (perhaps Wayfarer is an example) have an interest in and sympathy for religious/spiritual metaphysics. I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe. If so, it needn't in my view. Just as realism does not entail physicalism, even though they too are natural partners. — bert1
However I don't see the theoretical bridge in either case. — bert1
I wonder if that sometimes engenders an uncomfortable loyalty to ontological idealist metaphysics of a Berkeleyan stripe. — bert1
Peirce criticized Berkeley’s nominalism, the idea that universals are merely names without any real existence. Peirce, a classical realist, believed that general concepts and laws have a real existence independent of individual instances. He thought that Berkeley’s nominalism undermined the reality of general concepts, which Peirce saw as essential for a coherent theory of knowledge and science. — Wayfarer
I can't tell the difference between Wayfarer and ChatGTP anymore — apokrisis
But this is another way of talking about that holism vs atomism division which a logic of vagueness hoped to resolve. — apokrisis
I am not enamoured with a simple division into ontic and epistemic versions of idealism. — Banno
the world and mind are co-arising — Wayfarer
Do you see how this crosses from the epistemic to the ontic, in the way I tried to encapsulate using cake?...whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding — Wayfarer
My approach is like that of phenomenology - the world and mind are co-arising. — Wayfarer
Ok, whereas I - and perhaps apokrisis - take mind to arise within the world. — Banno
...whatever we consider to be real has a subjective as well as objective grounding
— Wayfarer
Do you see how this crosses from the epistemic to the ontic, in the way I tried to encapsulate using cake? — Banno
The conscious self is a construction that arises in the dialectical process that is a world-making. — apokrisis
We become not just selves but superbeings. — apokrisis
I'm entangled in the hindrancesand have attained nothing by way of higher states. But that's the philosophy or 'way' that I am attempting to understand in some degree. At least it provides, as it were, a vantage point, and also, however remote, a sense of there being a destination. — Wayfarer
In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational". — Banno
The reason for my references to Buddhism, is that I look to it for a normative framework, one that is separate from the cultural mainstream (hence, counter-cultural) . — Wayfarer
A bit more on dialectic. A contradiction leads to explosion, as explained. Dialectic bases itself on contradiction, where "opposite sides" lead to a "speculative mode of cognition".
I would like to place some emphasis on the second criticism I offered above, that " even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear."
In Hegel the first moment, of "understanding", gives way to the instability of the second moment, the "negatively rational", and thence to the third moment, the "speculative" or "positively rational".
But somewhat notoriously, what that third moment consist in remains quite undetermined. Just as from a contradiction, anything follows.
This is close to Popper's criticism, that dialectic is unfalsifiable.
In effect dialectic provides the opportunity to invent a just-so story in support of your preferred third moment, by choosing your first and second. But such a method can explain anything, and so ends in explaining nothing. — Banno
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