[reply="Banno;964071"

I think I will have to look at that paper again, On the idea of conceptual schemes, but I believe I more-or-less agree on things in there iirc.

Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider. — Banno

instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks. — Banno

Yes, I think these are some good points.

I will say that Moliere and I are referring to the same thing with 'chair' or 'rabbit'. — Leontiskos

Yes, you could say that, but I think upon deeper examination it is more complicated. Its your perogative I guess to just say that we don't need to worry about messy details - we both know that we will know it when we see it.

Someone else will come along and tell me that there is a 0.1% chance that we might disagree on what is a chair or a rabbit. And then we can argue about whether that 0.1% chance secures some particular thesis of "inscrutability of reference." — Leontiskos

I think this misses the point partially though in the sense that under the thought experiment there may never be a [dis]agreement, but plausibly one could interpret how words map to each other in different ways whilst preserving the same verbal behavior. The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words. We just use them in certain ways as allowed by our brains. Those are the physical facts. We use words, and interpreting words or debating about reference is also just word-use, albeit in a more meta-cognitive manner. I don't think you need to do away with reference. But all we are are physical beings that say stuff because neurons do stuff because physics allows us to. Thats obviously very blunt and simplified but I think its fine. We believe in an objective world, right?

Edit: [ ] mistype

Our disagreements about the world don't stem from an inability to agree on what it is "in itself" but rather are manifestations of our willingness to negotiate how it is that we can most perspicuously define it in relation to us and us in relation with it. — Pierre-Normand

Hmm, thought provoking statement, very interesting.

"Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object." — Leontiskos

But I would say that the chair concept is in itself fuzzy, vague, indeterminate. If I bring a specific chair to mind then that is only an exemplar. There is no fixed definition of what a chair is. It seems to be a kind of know it when you see it kind of thing.

Sure, I can bring up specific words to say a what a chair is but usually you can probably define a chair in many different ways and the words you use are probably as fuzzy and vague and indeterminate as the original concept you wanted to define. When you bring up a definition it usually helps you in your kind of know it when I see it cognition by prompting things in your brain. But imo, I don't know if it ever specifies something.

When I say a chair refers to something it is almost better said that it refers to a shared ability to make certain kinds of distinctions in the world, and we don't necessarily need to specify this uniquely because we all know that everyone in the room is going to be equally good at agreeing on the distinctions from the same kind of stimuli and predicting the kinds of things they do, using them appropriately, etc.

And its in this sense that the need to give strict definitions or translations of words becomes redundant - learning how to translate words in a foreign language isn't the aim; the aim is learning how to use words in another language. This is why I have thought recently that the translation example can be misleading in appearing to say that "well gavagai could plausible really mean undetatched rabbit appendage", but really I would like to view these kinds of examples (like the kripke one as well) as a kind of reductio in which to say - what is fundamental is the underlying use.

If we want to use the concept of reference it is going to be filtered through how we use words and how we recognize things which can seem indeterminate, fuzzy and vague. Sometimes you can even recognize objects and you aren't even sure how you did it. Sometimes there is something inarticulable about our ability to pick out certain patterns and use words in complicated ways. And in that I would hope we can still use the concept of reference but in this context of fuzzyness, indeterminacy, vagueness. Reference isn't about look-up table or translation manual in your head. And maybe this is obvious to some people who want to talk about reference in a strongly realistic sense.

In some ways, I think the difference between people on different poles of this debate are about whether you are sensitive to the details and in doing so possibly kind of de-emphasize the coarser picture. Or on the other hand, think the details don't really matter because our ability to talk about and engage with things like chairs is so damn good, why worry about them!

For instance, I agree with anthropologists that agriculture brought about changes in human life that would represent a shift in conceptual schemes related to the passage of time and the idea of home. — frank

Would these meet the criteria for conceptual scheme under Davidson though? I believe Davidson's main target is some kind of claim that there are different conceptual schemes, ways (forms) of living (life) that are inherently unintelligible from some other perspectives. So the question is whether changes of norms about home life or concepts of time are unintelligible? I believe if anthropologists can talk about them, then probably not, at least to some degree. I'm sure a spider could never understand the majority of human existence though.

It might be worth adding "... and get the same result". The same behaviours might be seen with very different interpretations - we get a rabbit stew even if "gavagai" means undetached rabbit leg. — Banno

Yes, this would be the case in that Quine 'two men' passage I think.

For what could be more obvious then that we do refer to things with our words and mean things by them? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but I am not sure I need an account of this which appeals above and beyond what I find a plausible view of how the objective world works. Nor, from my own introspective experience, can I seem to point to some kind of specific, definitive sense of what it means to "refer"; nonetheless, I can use the word reasonably well. I don't see an issue with embracing vagueness, fuzzyness, indeterminacy in regards to how we engage with the world. If one believes in an objective world then the men in the Quine quote are a part of that, behaving in an objective way where they tend to say and use words in certain kinds of contexts in reaction to certain stimuli. But, if an observer were to describe what those men were doing, they may plausibly be able to do it in different ways.

Except Quine literally says, "the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically." If the meanings and ideas expressed by our identical utterances diverge radically, then I would say we are talking past each other by definition. — Leontiskos

I would say that these meanings and ideas are imposed on the patterns of verbal behavior by an observer. You don't need these extraneous interpretations for people to communicate or use words, and the idea that you can coherently assign divergent meanings is something like a reductio to the thought that verbal behavior, language and understanding is anything above the physical events responsible for word-use. The idea of the two men in this idealized example talking past each other then would not really make much sense if their communication is perfectly fine. And if you think about it, each man's meanings would be indeterminate too, so what exactly are they talking past each other about in that regard? Rather, the fact that they can communicate fine is indicative that they are not talking past each other. If what you say in the following quote happens:

But that becomes more implausible the longer we draw out their conversation (say, from 15 seconds to 2 minutes to 5 minutes to 30 minutes...). The longer we talk the more likely we will realize that we are using words in radically different ways. — Leontiskos

Then it is because their verbal dispositions are clearly not the same as had been thought. But Quine is saying that you can conceive of different meanings for the same verbal dispositions - that is the example.

Doesn't the quote you provide imply that, if they started talking to each other, they may talk past each other entirely? — Leontiskos

Well I guess if they have the same verbal dispositions then there would be no possibility of some event which would lead them to think they are talking past each other. There would be no reason to say they are talking past each other in any radical sense because their verbal dispositions are the same so they communicate perfectly.

Ah, but therein lies the counterintuitive part. If one takes themselves to be making definitive references, or, through one's understanding of one's own sense of making definitive references, takes others to be doing the same, one is mistaken about what is truly going on. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, all this means is being able to anticipate the correct and incorrect times to use certain words.

and one takes another's "that rake right there," to be definitive, one has misunderstood, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What definition of "inscrutable" would you offer, such that inscrutable reference poses no barrier to communication? — Leontiskos

Well I think them misunderstanding each other depends on if the other person agrees and corroborates or rejects their sentences when they have a conversation about it, after which they find out they have misunderstood and have the experience of having misunderstood.

I think you can talk about the idea of an objective world that exists out there that you can engage with, without requiring a single determinate way to parcel [or carve] that world up. I think the same equally applies to parceling up or interpret[ing] how people use words.

Edit: []

That just seems to be implied when you read him or about him. We generally don't have huge problems communicating either, so it would be strange for him to uphold this inscrutability if he thought it affected our abilities to communicate.

From Word and Object, page 26, he says:

Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of classes

If all of their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations were the same, then what would happen if they started talking to each other? If you looked at their behavior, surely it would just look like they understood each other perfectly well despite the possibility of different meanings. Because, if they have identical dispositions, then the behaviors each one expects of the other based on their own dispositions would be fulfilled in general. It would be quite difficult for them to misunderstand each other since I think misunderstanding generally happens when people use words in ways you don't expect, or you have no experience (and therefore [no] expectations [or ability to predict]) of how certain words should be used. Its hard to envision that in the example passage assuming that each man is cognizant of their own dispositions for using words.

Edited: additions in [ ]

Quine clearly thinks that inscrutability of reference is not a barrier to communication, so I am just curious as to what you think Quine was saying in his ideas, considering that he believes communication is possible in spite of indeterminacy. Or do you think Quine was just completely obtuse or in denial regarding this very simple argument you give?

1. If reference is inscrutable, then we cannot communicate (or learn new languages).
2. But we can communicate (and learn new languages).
3. Therefore, Reference is not inscrutable. — Leontiskos

So where is Quine going wrong?

Not that there has been none, but there was plainly a massive sea change in the conception of man's place in the universe — Wayfarer

Like democracy, ending of slavery, workers rights, womens rights, the condemnation of racism and xenophobia, the welfare state, animal rights, positive attitudes to the environment, list probably goes on and on.

'Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;...his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.' — Wayfarer

I think skepticism about religion or the belief in God is a good thing. Neither does the absence of such things mean one cannot draw meaning out of life in whatever way they see fit.

that those who are transfixed by technological and scientific progress fail to grasp the shadow side of modern civilization which manifests as the meaning crisis. — Wayfarer

Baseless, empty rhetoric.

But I also agree on the shortcomings of ‘scientism’ and the evils of what has been described as the ‘reign of quantity’. (I sometimes wonder if from the Renaissance forwards, the West has taken all those elements of Platonic and Aristotelian thought useful for engineering and science, while abandoning the ethical dimension which went along with it, in their eyes.) — Wayfarer

So are you saying that there has been no kind of ethical or socio-political thought or advancement since the renaisance? Seems to me this is almost akin to missing the wood for the trees. People who throw about the word scientism are so focused on what they dislike about science that they fail to see the rest of western thought and philosophy outside of that. Neither is there a mutual exclusivity in entertaining these things.

Because we lack a compelling "top-down" explanation for consciousness and intentional aims, fields such as neuroscience tend to default to "bottom-up" explanations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think this is strictly true. The brain works on various different scales so you have to study it on various different scales, whilst bottom up explanations in terms of biology must coexist with more top-down explanations in terms of things like computation and information. Neither do embodied, enactive, extended, ecologocal perspectives neatly fit into a bottom-up view. One of the most in-vogue ideas in neuroscience, the free energy principle, is unambiguously a top-down, unifying principle akin to "top-down" explanations in physics. I have even heard the author of the theory use the phrase "downward causation" in an interview.

and I find it so odd to see people hell-bent on impugning it. — Leontiskos

What kind of benefit do you think they would get from not impugning it? If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. But why do I need to use the word "essence"? Seems to connote something more than is required so I don't need to use the word.

I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be: — frank

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant.

No doubt, the claim that "you need language to do any philosophy," is true. However, the person who champions a reduction of philosophy to neuroscience will be on similarly strong ground: "no one ever does philosophy without their head." The advocate of phenomenology will likewise argue that no one ever did philosophy without first having experiences and perceptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All these things are equally valid; but replace philosophy with knowledge. It applies to all knowledge whether science, philosophy, folk psychology, sports. Difference between different areas of knowledge are what you are talking about and your means of engaging with it. In that sense there are no essential features to any given parts of our knowledge and methods can vary. You don't need some specific foundation to philosophy; you just engage with things your're interested in, usually appealing to methods and insights that have accumulated over the years in those particular areas. The things stated in the quote are a field of interest in and of themselves, one I find interesting, and - from my perspective - in the kind of vein of naturalized epistemology or even Dennett's Heterophenomenology - which are kind of just particular uses of cognitive and brain science. But obviously there are many other fields not related to this. I don't have to view the things in the quote as some kind of foundation for a philosophy. They are just a particular area of philosophy I am interested in as opposed to certain other areas. I am not sure one needs some foundation - but then again, everyone settles into particular ways or habits or inclinations of belief in how they do philosophy. But this is no different to how different scientists or historians have certain inclinations or attractions to certain methods, opinions, ideas - and they don't need to be particularly philosophical about it. I have always been interested in things in the most general sense, in any field - history, nature, music, whatever. Philosophy is naturally interesting so it Was always hanging around. What became my first or top intellectual love though would be in the sciences. I would be dipping into areas of philosophy from random books I came across, random classes I chose to take. Things pop out like say philosophy of science. But then I think the real snowballing came when I start to notice parallels between narratives about how brains work (from neuroscience and cognitive science) and discussions in philosophy - people like Berkeley, Popper, Wittgenstein, others. (Philosophy of mind also obviously takes an interest for similar reasons, or because cogmitive/neural science fails to answer all questions). And I cultivate an interest in how those problems are related or diffused, deflated in a certain way. And thats just an interest, not a concerted attempt at making some foundation - albeit, obviously everything we do (and all knowledge) is actually "founded" in the brain, language and experience inextricably connected. But at the end of the day I am just doing the knowledge I find interesting along my inclinations. And in talking about this in a long paragraph all I am doing is questioning this idea of philosophical foundations as some need.

'Something it is like to be...' is actually an awkward way of referring to 'being' as such. — Wayfarer

Hmm, interesting observation possibly.

that there may be other ways of doing philosophy that, to the deflationist, are not even wrong, not just invisible, but plain unimaginable. — Srap Tasmaner

Many people here have views here that directly contest mine which may be what you call "deflationary style" (but tell you the truth I read this and "deflationary style" and "model-building style" look exactly the same to me - so I would identify as both unless I have probably misread something).

I am so in at the deep end with my views about how I think brains work though that I think that all of these different philosophical views are implicitly a kind of behavioral-style because in my views, that is the only way that brains do understanding. All views are compatible with a "deflationary-style" on the meta-level insofar that all views are "deflationary-style" models from a brain perspective. I have a kind of view that brains, minds are actually kind of like scientific instrumentalists at the deepest level but this is not immediately obvious to us because of the richness and automaticity by which beliefs and thoughts and behaviors work. We take everything we do and say for granted without thinking about it. Again, this is the meta-level, and so to it applies to debates about realism and anti-realism - a dichotomy far too coarse and flimsy to say anything interesting without serious caveats.

On the floor-level what differentiates "deflationary-style" from "essentialists" and others? Perhaps we all have a choice of at what level to deflate or decompose explanations - some prefer deeper levels than others. On shallower levels, you can hold up concepts without trying to give deconstructing analysis of what it actually means to use the idea. You just assert it and say it is right and know that it is meaningful to you in a commonsense way. Like many people do with God and say they just believe in God and don't want to deconstruct what that actually means - often science would bring up difficult questions too - rather, they just settle that they don't need to go deeper, it doesn't need to be explained: it just is. The "deflationary-stylist" will go deeper and deeper deconstructing everything: it just isn't and there is no essential nature to anything. But whats the difference between shunning further deconstruction versus deconstructing and concluding on a deflation of the essential being? Not much difference to me. Sure, you may be able to create new empirical questions and testable parameters for God. But the meaning of the thing within our perspectives has no foundation beyond what - in my opinion - the instrumentalist mind or brain, and instrumentalist networks of interacting instrumentalist minds or brains. You can conceivably be right or wrong (approximately) in some sense about hypotheses concerning empirical structures under some very strict caveats. Is there a meaningful distinction between the "deflationary-stylist" and the "essentialist" beyond this? I guess not so much from my perspective. You just end up discussing the compatibility of your concepts and what you consider good standards for acceptance or rejection - which is the same story for all knowledge for instrumentalist brains.

Hmm, but what about discussing the compatibility of "deflation" and "essentialism"? What does one bring to the table that the other doesn't? This must be a genuine question. Perhaps at a guess it is a matter of something like accuracy vs. complexity trade-offs. Do you embrace the details (that would deflate the more abstract level of analysis [by effectively prioritizing the bottom level?]) or coarse over them (and effectively ignore them)? Insofar that truth is about accuracy in some sense then where you stand on these trade-offs affect what you say is "true" or "real" or "deflated" or "idealized" - but we can choose different levels for different things. Does that mean then that "true" and "real" is just a kind of abstract label in enacted, instrumentalist models? Yes, maybe. It becomes more tangible when there is an easy answer to whether your predictions are correct or not - but the more abstract you go, the more murky this gets and the less is resolved. And obviously another issue is that, you can change assumptions on the more abstract levels to change what the easy answer is on a more concrete level. Some people reject chairs exist. But again, changes on the abstract level are so murky - mereology doesn't really change our experiences of "chairs" because we all experience similar regularities about them, presumably due to the fact that there is an outside world beyond our perspectives or experiential purviews.

That's not what non locality here means and Many Worlds is tenuous at best. — Darkneos

I'm not so sure what I think about Many Worlds here actually. But - where in the Bohmian interpretation are particles in many states at the same time? I don't think they are.

Well that’s what they are. It’s not a matter of belief. That’s is until they interact with anything, at which point they settle. — Darkneos

There are several interpretations which disagree with this though, including Bohmian and Many Worlds.

Woops, I mean't indeterminism!

It isn't compatible with determinism, I don't think. I just meant that it is possibly meaningful for the name to point out that the mechanism isn't indeterministic, separating it from alternative indeterministic interpretations.

Not sure I agree that "superdeterminism" is a type of determinism. It is just a mechanism for Bell violations which has a silly name because of how far-out it is. The use of "determinism" in the name is meaningful in the sense that many people do think of quantum mechanics as random, so pointing out that the mechanism is deterministic is informative - however it seems incredulously deterministic, "superdeterministic" if you will. But I think thats just rhetoric.

Aha I wasn't responding to the OP - I was just puttung down thoughts. I think most people probably don't disagree with the OP at its core, but some people emphasize the points more than others.

There is no scientific evidence for dualism - verifiable separability of mental stuff and physical stuff. It is also not metaphysically parsimonious and borderline incoherent. So which is it? Mental stuff or physical stuff?

Scientific theories, or any knowledge, or even any concepts about either experience or topics like "being" and ontology cannot tell us about "stuff" or what "stuff" is independent of limited perspectives that we don't usually identify with the "stuff" we are talking about - apart from experiences. Obviously we have direct aquaintance with experience; regardless of limitions of our concepts about experience, it is hard to deny that we experience. But I would argue concepts of experience play a similar role in naturalistic scientific knowledge as any other scientific concept as does concepts of "being". And ultimately there is no self-sustaining foundation for these things independent of enactive roles within perspective.

What actually is experience metaphysically? There is no criteria for what is and what is not an experience. There is no criteria to give that question the meaning that we want it to either - what does "metaphysical" mean? Just another concept we use, and (albeit) within experience too. But again, any coherent metaphysical generalization of our direct aquaintance is impossible.

To say the world is made of experience in the same way as houses are made of bricks also doesn't avoid the hard combination problem. The strong emergence involved in stacking layers of experience on top of each other.

Talk of any fundamental metaphysics is on some deeper level a enactive game as any other knowledge - it will always be found lacking in the sense that when we talk about fundamental metaphysics we are wanting something deeper than say the mathematical descriptions that make science superficially effective. Obviously no strict dividing line between science and metaphysics (or philosophy of science I guess) though. Best we can do is have concepts that make things coherent. Does saying the world is made of experience make things coherent for me? No, because experience is something deeply tied to my personal perspective which I may share with others in virtue of being organisms.

What I can say is my experience is some coarse-grained structure in the world undergirded by finer structures.

I have been thinking all scientific paradigms are united by notions of causality.

Steven Frank:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=5393718917133646068&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16974184348648837789&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

We cannot access anything else but causal relations between "things" on different scales.

If I make the assumption of equating my aquaintance with experience as ontology (whatever this means), then it suggests reality should be conceptualized as scale-free.

Reality is just causal structures all the way down (and this is akin to scientific statement with all the limitations of our physical theories that cannot tell us what the physical is - theories of reality cannot tell us the nature of reality intrinsically):

e.g.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33286288/

We cannot arbitrarily make more fundamental some causal structures over others even if they arise from coarse-graining over others. We can only at most make the distinction that finer-grained structures carry more information about reality. Insofar as causality is like communication, that is how we may relate it to minds - information and statistical physics are two sides of the same coin. There is a weak emergence aspect of information in the sense of scaffolding causal structures on top of each other. But also a strong emergence aspect in information when we look at how structures can detect or distinguish other causal structures in a "brute" way - almost like with our own phenomenal experiences.

I cannot tell you anything else about reality other than causal structures existing that can in some sense be construed as communicating information - what does "causal structure" mean? Again there is no non-circular foundation to this concept. Maybe we can talk about cause in terms of non-redundant temporal structure? These concepts bottom out in spatio-temporal structure.

But this talk about causal structure is not distinct from how when you dissect physics, what is fundamental is things like energy and work - which are just ways of quantifying how things change, or their propensity to do so - i.e. causality.

Is there a "bottom" to reality? What would that actually mean. Don't know. Maybe cannot know.

On the otherhand, does it make sense to say experience is what it is like to be some kind of causal structures in reality? Maybe. Could we then go on to say that all structures are just experience? Maybe. But the vacuousness of this makes it almost like a personal choice.

My personal choice is not to because it brings so many other connotations that complicate the naturalistic picture of reality, sometimes not making as much sense to me. If experience is another way of just talking about information (personal to, accessible to me) then the most fundamental notion in all this is something like causality. Reality is not made of blobs of "stuff" arranged or stacked, but causal structures instead. Maybe reality should be seen in terms of blobs of "stuff". But we cannot talk about intrinsic "stuff" in a way that does justice to the word "intrinsic". We can talk about causal structure, information...

... Insofar that causal structures relate things that are sensible to us... we don't need to think about it in terms of cause as some "intrinsic" things... things too may be talked about or given meaning in terms of relations to other things.... relations all the way down another way of saying causes all the way down? Or perhaps structure.

A kind of structuralism. I have generally pushed back from Ontic structural realism in the past. I think my thoughts are closest to Otavio Bueno's empirical structuralism I think he calls it. (Or perhaps structural empiricism). Imo ontic structuralism is kind of empty or trivial -

[perhaps anti-realism too insofar that I think questions of realism may be subject to similar indeterminacy as scientific theories themselves - debates about theories being right or wrong, how right or wrong (or which bits) and in what sense right and wrong mean (e.g. Newtonian physics could be right or true in the sense of describing some of our data approximately, it could be wrong if you take it as the general principles of the universe).

Can we justify theories being correct in contexts of pluralism and empirical adequacy? Is there even a discrete dividing line between theories insofar that you can deconstruct, change them, throw bits out, retain others. Theories can be right (or useful) in some ways, wrong in others, often idealized. The significance may depend on perspective - as said before once, scientific anti-realists and realists often accept the same facts about science in terms of underdeterminism and losses with theory change.]

- while we only access structure through enactive perspectives. I guess it in some ways boils down to what you think "right" means. If you have a loose or indeterminate standard for what "correct" or "true" means then theories may seem more "real" compared to someone in which "true" requires stronger standards.

But ultimately, many theories are idealized and go on to be rejected - its always an open question how long things will be rejected or accepted for. At the end of the day, the story I use about scientific theories is an enactive one, truth too. So there is a strange loop aspect - debating about whether theories are true when you have already decided that uses of truth is nothing more than an enactive process in a real world of structure. One could try and clear this up with a simpler picture of separating subjective from objective, real from non-real - but a clearer picture comes at the cost of greater idealization. And here we see there is an element of personal preference in selecting meta-theoretical views where you trade off clarity and precision or complexity and accuracy in the context of model selection. But I think regardless of meta-theoretic views of what "truth" or "correctness" means I always endorse notions of knowledge fundamentally in terms of enaction, idealization and agnosticism of future acceptance (to various degrees of subjective certainty depending on what we are talking about - and even then, graded certainty has an arbitrary relation to acceptance or rejection in the sense that someone may have higher standards of certainty to which they accept something compared to others - belief and justification always have some kins of normative aspect in general: i.e. its not strictly about whether something is true or false but whether I ought to believe it and why. Induction may not be the best argument in general, deflating enactivism better so).

Pictures of the world typically do not end up being testable or falsifiable. They are constructed after the fact to fit to the facts themselves as we intuitively see fit.

It's to yield a sense of what certain scientific philosophers have called 'understanding'. Not to be identified with knowledge or any truth-aptness.

If all you cared about was concordance with observations then science would devolve into bare observational statements and mathematical modeling. Nothing much else that wouldn't just be considered besides the observational facts would be highly speculative. I.E. philosophical or creative speculation — substantivalism

Its very simple. Science is about solving problems, regardless of whether you want to talk about it in terms of "truth", "understanding", "mathematical predictions". All these things feature. It is multi-faceted.

I don't believe quantum interpretation is necessarily an unsolvable problem, or at least one where people can't find consensus as they do in other scientific areas.

Those other fields typically aren't complete black boxes. — substantivalism

But some probably were at one point.

I can give a picture of a virus, end of story. I can't of an electron without a tremendous amount of speculative holistic open-ended philosophical interpretation to even analyze the output of said detector. — substantivalism

Quantum interpretation is the way it is because there are many problems. A good way of gauging a good interpretation is how it plugs those gaps. I don't think an interpretation needs to necessarily be validated in terms of empirical predictions that others don't make. It just needs to plug conceptual gaps others don't plug satisfactorily. I think those gaps are pluggable in principle.

There doesn't have to be a consensus because it makes no sense to ask which is 'right' or 'wrong'. Nor does it make sense to ask which is 'closer' to how it really is. — substantivalism

I don't understand what you mean. We are talking about science here. The whole point is to construct a picture if the world that makes sense and fits to what we observe. Quantum interpretation is as fair game as any other part of science or knowledge in general. Are you going to make this comment to other fields of science? I doubt it.

There are already ways of doing so. — substantivalism

Well yes but I mean in terms of a consensus on some kind of interpretation which makes sense to people within a scientific context.

Seems, from my perspective, that part of Michael's idiosyncratic views is the idea that the word "truth" cannot be about something in the same way that a word like "gold" is about something. To me, "truth" is about "what is the case", regardless of your broader metaphysics, ontologies or inclinations toward realism or anti-realism. The same way "gold" is about something regardless of metaphysics, ontologies or inclinations toward realism or anti-realism. "Truth" is an abstract word, but so is "gold" and every other word we use to refer or point out things. No concepts come without abstraction. Nothing we talk about is completely devoid of abstract conceptual baggage that makes it meaningful. If a concept like a "proposition" requires some kind of mind-independent abstract ontology, I don't see why that isn't the case for concepts like "rock". Sure, it's harder to point at a "proposition" but our uses of a word "proposition" is induced by statistical structures of events that actually happen or we at least experience; no doubt, from reflecting upon our own word-use inextricably related to non-word events. Similarly can be said for "economies" or "money". From a neuroscientific or cognitive perspective do these concepts need mind-independent abstract objects to explain their use? No, ofcourse not. Is the use of these concepts that much different from pointing out rocks or chairs? No. Fundamentally both reflect our cognitive and neurobiological ability to pick out statistical structures in the world, in our sensory inputs, in our experiences; some are just much more complicated than others.

The use of words like "truth" or "propositions" or "numbers" as about things in the same sense as "gold" is about things is absolutely coherent imo. Abstraction is by degree, without a determinate or discrete dividing line.

And again, this is just the story of how we use words in relation to the world, and navigate the world - veridically or not, whether or not there are big caveats like: indeterminacy; underdetermination; inherent fuzzyness; perspectival aspects or even isolation due to our biology; vicious or strange circularities in our ability to articulate information about the world, etc. Nothing, "concrete" or "abstract" is exempt. We can have a Quinean jungle where "gavagai" is fundamentally indeterminate and we practise linguistic and epistemic behaviors "blindly", but the scientific story about what is going on is a story about brains bi-directionally interacting with the wider world, responding to it and the world responding back. You can argue about what exactly it means for words to be about something or whether their effectiveness requires or even is "veridicality" - or simply pragmatism by blind Darwin-esque selectionism. I would say this is fundamentally indeterminate - you can plausibly gerrymander or redefine either side in various different ways and the differences may be ones of degree - and all words, all concepts, share a core of this fundamental indeterminacy, fuzzyness, abstraction in the same sense when they are used and related to - or occur in relation to - other parts of experience, including the word about itself ( a word that seems to be about or related to the mappings we make that pick things out in experience). But again, at the same time they all played out in this bi-directional interaction between brains - and the underlying states that cause their dynamics - and what brains cannot see beyond their sensory inputs. At least, that is what makes sense in the idealized scientific story. There must be some statistical coupling in some sense (not excluding the general messyness that might come with talking about it: e.g. indeterminacy, fuzzyness, pluralistic models) to what you might call "events" or "things" in the objective world, regardless of deeper examinations about what that "objectivity" actually means, cannot mean or simply alludes to (also statistical coupling between events in ones own brain). And statistical coupling can be scale-free, with many levels of abstraction. Coupling doesn't have to be unique in some sense either.

[Or maybe our seemings about statistical couplings. Models we want to assert in terms of seeming pragmatic effectiveness. And that could be wrong. But what do we mean when they assert they are true? ... Not strictly determinate.]

So there is at least a fuzzy aboutness; we may debate about veridicality, etc. But nonetheless we can also agree amongst ourselves about the aboutness of words and concepts in a practical sense as we sample the world in real-time.

Part of the paradox is that trivial and non-trivial indeterminacies coexists with a sense in which our lives cannot be made coherent without a world that is actually out there. Another part is that there are no inherent foundations; there is no ultimate story that all others sit on infallibly, just as the scientific one isn't infallible - you can just argue about its virtues based on what people agree or disagree about. But then its our nature as epistemic beings to have stories to make the world we live in coherent, stories that seem to acceptably reflect or communicate what we see.

And I think we can coherently distinguish talk about "truth" and how we coherently use the word, from "meta-truth" - questioning whether that has some objective meaning, analyzing and deconstructing it where the illusions of essentialism are removed. In the same sense you can debate about how to use a certain word in everyday life and then question whether what it actually means for that word to have meaning. Similar to how in ethics, you can have a moral anti-realist say "murder is bad" and really means it, but then you can separate this from the meta-ethical stance of deconstructing "murder is bad" in a kind of anti-realist sense in terms of indeterminacy or other things. You can say the same for the realist though; their claims that "murder is bad" is also different from their claim that "murder is objectively bad" because ethics and meta-ethics are two different topics talking about normative statements in different ways or frameworks, different levels of abstraction or analysis, different assumptions that are added or forgotten. But again, for me, all concepts stand on a similar foundation, whether truth, everyday words, science, ethics, normativity, belief or justification.

Of course we have nothing else to work with, but for me the point is that there is no reason to think that we must be able to make the microworld phenomena intelligible to us in ways we can visualize. — Janus

Not sure I agree. Someone might only think that because there is no consensus on quantum interpretation, but that doesn't necessarily mean a reasonable one cannot be found eventually and ways of visualizing it.

I actually should add that my picture makes it look less weird than it is.

Non-local correlations of particles also depend on measurement settings at the point the particle is measured, which are chosen by the experimenter or by some other random event.

Superdeterminism would also mean not only that a common cause is affecting particle behavior but also the choice of measurement settings. If you chose the settings then that common cause is making you pick those settings. If you chose settings with a dice roll then the common cause is causing the outcome of the dice roll. If you chose settings by looking at the light patterns of quasars very far away and that originate from billions of years ago (because of how long it takes light to reach us) then the common cause is causing the behavior of those quasars billions of years ago.

Bohmian mechanics just means simple communication between particles faster than light given the measurement settings.

In superdeterminism, you get non-local correlations because a common cause in the past affecting both particles through chains of local events tracing back to that common cause, and so don't require faster than light communication.

In Bohm, you don't need a common cause in the past, particles communicate faster than light across space directly.

Yes, definitely true; but I guess the exact ways people say the microworld is strange depense on their interpretation of quantun mechanics.

What do you mean?

They just mean surreal as not typically compatible with classicality.

Yeah I couldn’t even understand that much. Like I said you guys overestimate what the knowledge of most people is on this. — Darkneos

Maybe! Who knows, maybr someone else will!

They are actually closely related. The kind of non-realism Gnomon expresses about position and momentum is the same kind of non-realism as in the non-realism / non-locality issue. I actually think the dichotomy of realism vs locality is a bit of a pointless dichotomy because you cannot really choose the non-realism option without an ontology that basically still looks as non-local as the non-local option... for the intents and purposes of commonsense anyway. You would [still] have to talk about non-separable states that exist over space which I would say is about as bizarre as the non-local option.

Edit: [ ]

Just realized I forgot to link paper showing the actual hydrodynamic pilot-wave model:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=9134117041907264858&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16295625758829094935&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1



Its long but its not written at a particularly difficult level I would say. I explain what I mean by stochastic interpretation immediately after anyways. Its realist in the sense that it has particles with real, definite properties all the time.

I have no idea. I am not familar at all with those philosophies.