There's no such thing as the truth; there's only the truth of a sentence, so this remark doesn't make much sense.

What you should say is that the non-existence of a sentence doesn't affect the existence of rain. — Michael

It does make sense given that I described what I mean to say something is true in the same sentence.

It also seems to follow from what I said that: to say a sentence is true is to say that what sentence is about is the case (i.e. exists). To say something is true is to say that it is the case. Seems to me that what truth is actually about is the existence of things, where things are the case (Analogous to how the word "gold" is about gold). The fact we need sentences to assert that is incidental. If an observer sees something and asserts that it has the property of being the case, what is the case is a property of the observation / thing that is seen, not the assertion itself. How they say that it is the case or the very fact that they say it is incidental to the thing that has the property and was observed.

This notion that the existence of rain either entails or requires that something has the property of being true is misguided. — Michael

Yes, it just requires the property of rain existing. To say something is true simply asserts this, and the non-existence of a sentence doesn't affect the truth, only the existence of the thing the sentence is asserting the existence of.

For me, I think truth possibly would make sense as more like a condition that asserts what those sentences are about, which then maybe eases the problem I said in my post after I acknowledge that you already said you don't fail to distinguish them.

Abstractions might be conceptually useful, but given that they lead some to Platonism I'd rather just not give them much significant thought. — Michael

For me, I would say everything we talk about is an abstraction on some level. Sentences are abstractions, "conceptually useful" is an abstraction, thought is an abstraction. The beauty of the complexity of the human brain is that we can use these abstract concepts even when it is not always straightforward what they actually mean in some clear, concrete, determinate sense.

A truth-maker can exist even if a truth-bearer doesn't, but if a truth-bearer doesn't exist then nothing exists that has the property of being either true (correct/accurate) or false (incorrect/inaccurate). — Michael

The way you've been presenting this thought completely fails to acknowledge the fact that you can distinguish between the existence or non-existence of a sentence and what that sentence is about. If you cannot do that then I don't think it can be a complete or good characterization from my perspective because this is something i can do very intuitively, regardless of what i think about truth or objectivity. My intuition is that your analysis is making a similar kind of error that moral realists sometimes make when they confuse normative statements with meta-ethical statements, in the sense that your account obfuscates the distinction between a sentence and what a sentence is about. Obviously, I have seen you say that you don't do that. But in order to do that you have to use sentences that says gold exists in some world even though you have said that sentences about gold existing cannot exist and so gold doesnt exist in that world.. and that makes no sense to me. This kind of paradoxical thing wouldn't happen if you acknowledge the distinction - you need to distinguish truth and meta-truth. This seems rather general; we must always make the distinction between "objects" and talk "about-objects" otherwise we get paradoxes - trivially if a sentence about an object becomes the object it is talking about, you get paradoxes - e.g. I am lying. And this doesn't have to be direct, e.g. if you have networks of statements that are about each other recursively.

That ability includes, but is not limited to, language. When we gaze out at the external world, or back at the geologically ancient world, we are looking with and through that conceptual apparatus to understand and interpret what we see. That is the sense in which the mountains (or objects generally) are not mind independent. They're mind-independent in an empirical sense, but not in a philosophical sense. — Wayfarer

Yes, I see what you mean though I may have put it a different way.

The only part I don't agree with is the assertion that the things are not also both mind dependent and mind-independent in the philosophical sense, depending on perspective. Whether we think of them as being one or the other just depends on the perspective we take. Why should we think there to be but one philosophical perspective and sense? — Janus

Yes, I sympathize with a pluralistic way of looking at things in comparable kinds of ways. And ofcourse, the enactive / embodied viewpoints.

I think I could plausibly talk about this involving minds and ask a similar question. Not as an argument but I am just interested how you will answer...

What if me and you both existed 8 million years ago and we saw these mountains but had no language. Incapable of it. But now we are: did the mountains exist 8 million years ago?

The existence of rain or a cloudless sky might determine whether the sentence "it is raining" is correct/true or incorrect/false, but it is nonetheless the case that it is the sentence that is correct/true or incorrect/false. — Michael

Yes, exactly. So the fact that language didn't exist 8 million years ago doesn't affect the fact that mountains existed 8 million years ago, because the what is the case does not depend on the incidental existence or non-existence of language. The existence of mountains determines whether such sentences are correct, not whether a sentence exists.

So it is appropriate to describe the sentence "it is raining" as being correct/true/incorrect/false but a category error to describe either the rain or the cloudless sky as being correct/true/incorrect/false. — Michael

Sure, but when you say a sentence is correct, you are asserting something about the thing that that sentence is about.

'if "there is gold in those hills" does not exist (1) then "there is no gold in those hills(2)".'

Does not seem correct if (1) is about the fact that the specific sentence doesn't exist but if (2) is about what that sentence is about. I don't really see how this exact sentence could be seen in any other way.

But surely, truth isn't really about the sentence itself, its about what the sentence is about. Changing the sentence or making it disappear doesn't change truth values, changing things in the world is what changes truth values. Even if a sentence doesn't exist, what that sentence would be about exists / does not exist.

At the same time, I'm not even sure what you mean by "a sentence exists". If people decides to burn all the words and stop talking for 5 minutes, would all sentences stop existing for 5 minutes? Does a sentence exist only if uttered? Does a sentence only exist when someone is reading and interpreting it directly?

I keep it simple — Michael

Sure, and nothing there is different from what I implied in the post I said. You make the distinction between the sentence "I am 25 years old" and what that sentence is about, the 25 or 26 year old. What the sentence is about doesn't depend on language.

There's certainly no need to bring up mind-independent abstract objects that exist even if language doesn't. — Michael

I don't think you necessarily have to be determinate on ontologies here for the definition to still be valid or at least intelligible. And I think it is intuitively reasonable to talk about the difference between a sentence in terms of words or sounds, and what the sentence is about, a proposition then being "the type of states that declarative sentences denote".

Edit:

I realize that I am thinking about states in terms of literally what sentences are about, so it doesn't make total sense to identify propositions with them strictly.

I see further down the wikipedia page I see the definition:

"propositions are often modeled as functions which map a possible world to a truth value."

I guess then propositions are more about the mapping between states that sentences are about and truth values??

Or maybe propositions are the mappings between sentences and what sentences are about? The communication about something??

But I don't think that changes much of what I intended because it seems to me that the truth value of what sentences are about does not depend on the existence of language. Maybe the sentence existing does but then the sentence is just sounds or scribbles. Whether 'what a sentence is about' is true doesn't seem to depend on language based on my intuitive notions.

Similarly it doesn't seem to me that [the truth of what "there is gold on these hills" is about] {} entails the existence of the sentence "there is gold on these hills".

So what I mean by saying that the proposition "there is gold on these hills" is true is that what the sentence "there is gold on these" is about is true. And that shouldn't depend on language; but when I say it, it effectively comes out to:

"There is gold on these hills is true iff there is gold on these hills."

Maybe that makes more sense, I dunno.

Edit: deleted the word doesn't where {} now is.

[ ] just to enclose this phrase

I keep it simple — Michael

Sure, and nothing there is different from what I implied in the post I said. You make the distinction between the sentence "I am 25 years old" and what that sentence is about, the 25 or 26 year old. What the sentence is about doesn't depend on language.

There's certainly no need to bring up mind-independent abstract objects that exist even if language doesn't. — Michael

I don't think you necessarily have to be determinate on ontologies here for the definition to still be valid or at least intelligible. And I think it is intuitively reasonable to talk about the difference between a sentence in terms of words or sounds, and what the sentence is about, a proposition then being "the type of states that declarative sentences denote".

Fair enough. When I was thinking of object, I wasn't thinking about it in any way that I think would be different from what you are saying is a state.

There is gold and there is the sentence "gold exists". Why add some third thing? Having a sentence, a proposition, and gold seems superflous. — Michael

Not sure there is a third thing, based on the wikipedia definition. There are sentences and objects (states). Propositions are arguably also a special case of states insofar as they are states that sentences denote. Sentences themselves are arguably a special case of states too insofar that utterances, written words (and generalizations of those things) are states in the world.

the existence of propositions depends on the existence of language — Michael

I dunno, when I look up the definition of "proposition" on wikipedia, and it says that they are "the type of object that declarative sentences denote", then it is not clear to me that "the type of object that declarative sentences denote" should depend on the existence of language. Is that a faulty analysis?

The Timeless Wave. I don't think it is really 'mystical' although it does consider the idea of what is outside space-time.) — Wayfarer

I would actually say this article is more or less exactly what was meant by mystical in the video.

(This is also represented by constructive empiricism, as advocated by Bas Van Fraassen — Wayfarer

I'm not sure I would agree unless there is some further record of Van Fraassen talking about this topic. But I feel like the fact that his view takes the meaning of unobservable scientific theories in a semantically literal sense is not really in line with the kind of view you're saying. I think what you say is more similar to logical positivists who are more stringent that meaning in scientific theories is tied to observability.

that much the same can be said in modern physics, which doesn't tell us about what nature is, but only how nature responds to our methods of questioning. — Wayfarer

Highly recommend you watch this video:

https://youtu.be/7oWip00iXbo?si=bxEOt_Iau2tJmQa7

You may want to start at the clip from 01:30:00 to 01:33:40 to get an idea about what the video is about.

1. Deny the existence of mind-independent objects and/or

2. We cannot grasp the features of external objects which happen to be mind-independent and/or

3. We cannot justify our knowledge of mind-independent objects — Sirius

Imo, I want to remove 1. because I don't see how you can do this in a way which [doesn't] either suggests you hold a view like idealism or is just something that has been expressed by 2.

Regarding 2.? I think the problem is that realists and anti-realists will often assent to the same "facts" about reality or at least acknowledge them. The issue is that they have different notions of what it means to "grasp" which in a way is kind of subjective. I feel like realists may actually agree with an anti-realists analysis of how science works but they just consider this enough to "grasp". Then again, when asked what "grasp" means or related terms like "ontology you just get into dead ends imo that compromise whether "real" has any kind of useful, distinctive meaning beyond use in contexts which are just that... context-dependent, dependent on one's personal use of language and perception and envisioning. Ofcourse, the Davidsonian/Banno-ian does not consider this a barrier to realism as long as you can seemingly, coherently say things are 'true' or 'false'. I have sympathy for this because I have no problem with people saying things are 'true' or 'false' or making similar assertions, including myself. I just don't think such things have a determinate, unambiguous meaning when you look at it in higher order terms. Its not clear what people mean when they say things are 'true' or 'false' or whatever in a way which is[n't] context-dependent or relies on prior assumptions or relies on other people just agreeing or understanding you, which doesn't necessarily imply anything else about reality imo, [at least not in a metaphysically fundamental sense, albeit perhaps still in the sense that you can agree where Paris is and behave coherently in a physical world because of that. If you want to be extremely blunt and coarse and commonsensical you might then say that we agree that Paris has an objective physical existence].

Regarding 3. ? Similarly, I have no idea what justify means and I don't think anyone can give me a good version of that which anymore overcomes the drawbacks of my analysis in my preceding paragraph. Similarly to before, realists and anti-realists all agree on things like problems of induction and that people often are wrong.

I think realists then rely on the idea that someday we may come across unique "correct" descriptions of reality. But I don't see how a realist can overcome the fact that pluralist descriptions are ubiquitious. It then comes down to whether you think empirical adequacy can be identified with truth. Then again, what 'truth' means rears its head again. Our use of 'truth' is nothing over its use like a 'tool' in how biological organisms use words, communicate, behave. Exactly the same can be said for all facets of theories, ontologies, sciences, folk knowledge.

The whole thing is under-self-specified like some strange loop. [Easy example of this when I make a statement about what truth is... I am clearly acting within the paradigm to making a statement about the paradigm, which risks contradiction given I am trying to deflate 'something is the case' but using it at the same time. But I don't see any conflict since I am acknowledging that when I say these statements, they are about 'use'... but I did it again! Smells like Munchausen trilemma! - correction and to clarify, the Munchausen trilemma reference maybe isn't the best one. I think the strange loop analogy better describes what I meant there maybe. But there is something trilemma-ish about it. The fact that I end up using the same 'something is the case' just clarifies that it really is something one just uses almost automatically if anything, without explicit foundations. And this was always the case! So by clarifying the deflation is not to change something about the way one is using words]

Edited: additions in [ ]

Sure, it’s a path that involves struggle, but it’s a different kind of struggle- one that cuts through the noise instead of adding to it. — schopenhauer1

Why would that struggle be anymore preferable? If you are not an insular person and are also adept at social situations and dealing with stress then this may be the lesser option.

and in doing so, they find a quieter, more enduring form of satisfaction. — schopenhauer1

Yes, and its likely there is something in that life that attracted and continues to pull them in because they are compatible with it. I'm sure some people find it is not for them or change their minds.

At the same time, are all of these institutions really living up to the ideals they purport? Are they engaging in a different kind of withdrawal?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63792923

You might not see on the surface that withdrawing leads to greater happiness.. You become content with yourself and you will see the tremendous amounts of strife in interactions — schopenhauer1

But why should I believe this dogmatism that withdrawal would be any better? What is this based on? Why should it be so general to every person on the planet. Just seems like your intuition that oversimplifies human experience. You don't think many people would absolutely struggle with this kind of existence? Who's to say that this struggle is any less than the alternative for those people? I don't tend to believe there is some natural idyllic state of human existence and I am hesitant to say people naturally can just block out the kind of desires people have and then withdraw anymore than you can pretend you don't feel pain. Sure, some people may naturally like that kind of existence. I am not convinced it is the same for everyone. Like in virtually every single dimensoon of human existence you can get a whole bunch of people to try something but probably a large amount will also be simply unable to do it or not like doing it. Are monks not a selected group of people? You seem to be railing against one kind of dogmatic, perhaps unsubstantiated prescription of how people shpuld live and simply offering another one.

You don't think monks do what they do because they want to do it and think it is beneficial to them? Differences that most people don't need convincing about things they are already inclined to like doing or at least want to do. Its obviously very clear that you think withdrawal is the right thing to do. I don't see anything in your post that is convincing from my perspective. Sure, some people may want to do that or like doing that or find it benefits them and thats fair and fine but my issue is with the prescription here. I just don't see any fantastically backed up or convincing grounds for saying this is some general thing people ought to do.


Don't know what this means.

I just don't see why I should do it if I don't think its going to benefit me at all.

Sounds very tiresome to me. I would consider it if there was some good evidence that this would make life much better.

Well this is not really the context of what I was talking about and I dont agree with his sentiment anyway.

Right. Like the standard model of particle physics itself. Something which physicalism tends to overlook. — Wayfarer

Not sure what you mean by this.

I really meant in a much more trivial way that doesn't threaten physicalism tbh. The fact that some constructs in science don't represent real physical objects doesn't imply anything about physicalism vs. alternatives.

That wasn’t the point at issue — Wayfarer

It was because you were saying quantum theory undermines objectivity, to which I say - not necessarily.

‘name one thing that is outside space and time’ that the wavefunction fits that description, and yet is also at the heart of the success of modern physics. — Wayfarer

But this can be in the trivial sense of the wavefunction being a predictive construct without explicit physical instantiation. There are many other constructs in physics and science that fit that description.

It's supported by an argument based on the double-slit experiment. That argument is that the interference exhibits the same wave-like pattern even if photons are fired one at a time. — Wayfarer

Nothing about that inherently suggests anything about subjectivity. There are quantum interpretations with a mathematical basis from which you can build models showing particles going through slits and forming interference patterns one at a time in an objective way, even if the wavefunction may not be real in these interpretations.

That Ψ is not inside space-time. — Wayfarer

Well this is interpretation dependent. It isn't a fact that quantum mechanics formally, or otherwise, entails inherent subjectiveor non-objective universe. There are interpretations where the wave function is not a real object but the world is still perfectly objective in the sense of pre-quantum classical kinds of physics.

↪Apustimelogist Check out The Timeless Wave.

"I suggest that the interference pattern is not caused by a physical wave — because, as we shall see, no conventional physical wave can account for the actual observations. So what the “wave” is, is one of the greatest conundrums posed by quantum physics, and the philosophical implications are profound. Let’s explore them." — Wayfarer

Not sure what you are trying to convey here.

That is where quantum physics undermines the intuitive sense of the objectivity of the external world. I'm not denying that there are objective facts - that would be out-and-out relativism - but that objectivity can ever be complete. — Wayfarer

There are quantum interpretations which are entirly objective.

Alas, such interpretations don't afford sell-able book titles as the ones you suggest.

The question is whether "ridding ourselves of physicalism" has any actual meaningful consequences for physicalists. I think what gives physicalists meaning and contrasts them to others like idealists is not just the weight they put onto scientific rigor and perhaps consensus, but the story that science seems to tell you about the centrality of physics compared to other ontologies. Maybe not always in a practical or epistemic sense but it seems hard to contradict the picture that things kind of all sit on top of physics which describes reality at the finest granularity and prescribes the most general descriptions of how our sensory world changes, when we strip away all the redundant complexity. I think many physicalists would then contrast themselves with idealists and others in the sense that idealists don't believe in this kind of centrality, which usually means subscribing to or being open to scientifically unsubstantiated ideas like the afterlife or Kastruppian dissociative alters or psycho-physical laws. I think a lot of these metaphysical debates like physicalism vs idealism can be boiled down to whether you entertain certain hypotheses about nature. Other than that, any underlying fundamental metaphysical notions seem for all practical purposes indistinguishable, unfalsifiable, uninstantiable. Similarly, the idea of a "scientific method" comes up with similar problems. So what are you left with but contending these hypotheses about the afterlife or alters or psycho-physical laws. Anything else isn't substantially different from physical metaphysics which itself is vague and unfalsifiable and insubstantial.

We haven't chosen this arbitrarily though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, but in general things are not mutually exclusive like that in our language use. The same physical scenarios can have overlapping descriptions which is not mutually exclusive.

Well, I suppose ones attitude towards reductionism and smallism will probably guide the extent to which one thinks quantum foundations is particularly relevant here. On the one hand, there seems to be increasing consensus around the idea that there is no hard dividing line between "quantum and classical worlds." On the other, there is strong consensus in physics that the same living cat cannot be simultaneously in College Park and strolling the the Champs-Élysées.

If we are unsure that being in Rome, New York differs from Rome, Italy, I think we have left empiricism and the natural sciences behind a long time ago.
40m — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think it matters whether it is actually the case or not; what matters is whether someone cpuld plausibly hold this kind of conception of the world in a cohetent way.

Jha et al. argue that various presuppositions such as the principle of mass conservation and the physical integrity of individual objects (this has to be assumed in order to get “whole and unbroken”) — J

Disagree, because the question is clearly independent of the exact physical content. You can draw arbitrary boundaries on the world and apply this question.

Q3: Why must the LNC hold (under the usual constraints) as a principle of thought?
Q4: Why can’t my cat be on my lap and in Paris at the same time? (constraint: I live in Maryland) — J

Again, I think these rules are so abstract that they do not depend on the physical content. The fact your cat can't be simultaneously be in Maryland and Paris is because you have chosen to define "Maryland" and "Paris" in ways that are mutually exclusive and so one is not the other. But there is no need to do this for any physical things, whether in the trivial senses we talk about all the time or in more fundamental ways; for instance, some quantum interpretations will ascribe an ontological realism to the idea that a thing can be in two places at once in the sense suggested by traditional conceptions of quantum superposition.

Don't know what you mean

Continentals
Scholastics
Ancient Greeks
Postmodernists

So do you say that relationship is hierarchical up to down or down to up or just mutual. — Ludwig V

Mutual in the sense of just reflecting how we choose to apply labels and where those labels end.

we need to say that the explanation in physics is an analysis of the rainbow, not a cause. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would say so; but I would say what we would call a genuine cause is also just an analysis in the same way, so no distinction here imo.

Does our picture of pictures/maps at large and small scales - and there's nothing wrong with it - or a piece of furniture with parts that constitute the whole, make sense of the rainbow? I think they are all different from each other. That's all I'm saying. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you are saying here

Wow, this is a genuinely interesting position.

No, because you can have observations at multiple different scales and independently apply the abstract concept of design to each scale. It has nothing necessarily to do with the relationship between different scales in a way that is different from how the observations at different scales relate to each other.

The design is not a physical object; it is an abstract object - it belongs in a different category from the parts. — Ludwig V

True, though this could apply to any scale of description I think.

Yes, true; though they still have a correspondence to the same area of reality, which injects redundancy. By virtue of coarse-graining itself, the coarse picture also loses information about distinctions or events in reality, like blurring over the details in a photo.

So a map of a single grain of sand cannot signal distinctions between grains, and a map of the inside of a grain cannot signal the whole grain — Ludwig V

Well I don't want to take this example too seriously but surely these distinctions are more or less at the same scale or granularity? At the same time, the mapping of a whole grain is mapping to the same part of reality as mappings to different parts of the grain so there is a redundancy. The parts mapping is mapping to the same part only it makes more distinctions, more information. The coarser grain mapping ignores distinctions that exist.

What is what you are saying to do with? — Ludwig V

Simply that observations about reality naturally carry more information about it at the smallest scales when looked at through a kind of correspondence view of truth.

You really hate an example, don't you? Nothing but large-scale generalizations. So you miss the detail. — Ludwig V

What are you implying? I don't understand what you are saying here. My answer reflects the fact that I am saying something much more general than the status of specific contemporary theories in physics or chemistry.

But then you don't get the bigger (larger-scale) picture. Then you can't see the wood for the trees. You may know the wood is there, but that's only because you've looked at a larger scale picture. The larger-scale picture doesn't tells you about the wood, but not the trees. The smaller-scale picture tells you about the trees, but not the wood. — Ludwig V

Yes, I agree. But that has not much to do with what I am saying imo. Hence why I can agree with this and also uphold what I said. What I am saying isn't to do with the pragmatics of navigating one's picture of the universe. It is not really about strong reductions as in the wikipedia descriptions I gave.

You don't get information about the unobservable reality beyond the picture. It's unobservable in the picture. So it is observable, but only in a different picture. — Ludwig V

What I mean by information here is purely about distinctions one can signal that map to distinctions in reality. There doesn't have to be a fact of the matter about the meaning or content of the signal for the observer and the observer doesn't need to know anything else about the unobservable reality causing the signal. The only assumption is that in principle there is consistent mapping between some area of reality and a signal being made by the observer. Coarse-grained distinctions will obviously smooth over and blend finer-distinctions that would have only been possible with a more fine-grained observations - and they are both caused by the same areas of reality.

That seems to fit what you are saying pretty well. — Ludwig V

Not at all. I haven't been talking about prescribing explanations to get smaller.

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the analysis of water as H2O captures all the information about it. — Ludwig V

I'm just saying when you make observations at finer, smaller scale, you get more information.

What do you mean "more information"? — Ludwig V

In the sense of distinctions. When we make obaervations we are forming a map between our acts and the external world, distinguishing parts of reality. Finer-grained observations make distinctions that do not exist for coarse-grained observations even though they may be mapping to the same sets of events.

but wider scope. — Ludwig V

But this is a pragmatic issue that doesn't negate the idea that, in principle, it is always missing details in our mapping to reality.

A picture of something close up which is 5" x 7" or 100,000 pixels has the same amount of information whether it is a picture of a landscape or a picture of a molecule. — Ludwig V

Its not about information in the picture but information about the unobservable reality beyond. Neither is it about the picture as a.whole but simply the fact that any coarsed-grain observation of events in reality could be swapped for a finer-grained pne which reveals more distinctions or details whether you're talking about the cameras or the weather or bishops or whatever. The point has nothing to do with what information is "relevant" or useful for us to do science, which is why it has nothing to do with methodological reductionism.