The actuality you provided wasn't in your head, it was on the forum. — Harry Hindu

??

I said that I actually didn't give an explanation or definition. So how did I "provide an actuality"? I don't know what you're talking about.

Or simply put, if I were to give an explanation or definition (per what I consider that obviously), I would have written something different than what I wrote.

Not only are you wanting to argue for some reason, but I continually need to try to figure out what the f- you're even on about, which makes arguing difficult.

Well, it can be morally permissible to just an individual and to no one else, or to a small sub population, say. And of course objectivists will read it so that it's not about anyone's views.

Did I say that, or use the word, "subjective" in my post that you replied to? Instead of putting words in my mouth, and wondering about things I didn't accuse you of, you should address the points and questions in my previous post. — Harry Hindu

Why are you saying "Now you are providing an actuality" then? So what?

Now you are providing an actuality - what words mean independent of how anyone else interpreted what you said. — Harry Hindu

You're not thinking that I'm someone who says, "Everything is subjective" are you?

It seems to me that you are providing an objective explanation of what is "understanding" and "explanations" - one that is the case for everyone. — Harry Hindu

I actually didn't give what I'd say is an explanation or definition etc. of either--I just mentioned a characteristic. I wouldn't say that a definition of "understanding" is at all a definition of "explanation" by the way. I'd agree that explanations have to involve understanding, though.

So re "objective explanations" I wouldn't say the idea of that makes sense.

Re "one that is the case for everyone," what I'm doing when I give a definition of something like "understanding" is that I'm giving what I consider to be a functional account of what's really going on (ontologically) in conventional cases of the word "understanding" being used. It wouldn't cover unconventional cases, it wouldn't necessarily be how anyone else consciously thinks about understanding--so it might not be anything like a definition that other people would give, etc.

Re the subjective/objective terms, again, I use them to refer to whether something occurs in a brain functioning in mental ways or not.

So the terms have no implication for just how common or uncommon anything is.

Re "explanation," I've never actually tried to construct a functional definition of it (as I have for "understanding"). I've partially not done that yet because I still have a suspicion that some people have a more "technical" idea in mind re what counts as an explanation or not--something akin to the technical ideas of "information" a ala Shannon, say--but I'm not sure that there's any common technical idea of explanations in that vein, and even with "information" a la Shannon, I'm not at all convinced that it's not basically a bunch of gobbledygook.

Oh, I get it. I'm right to interpret your "concepts" as mental events analogous to general terms like adjectives. (No?) But when I blithely speak of using them to sort particulars you are alarmed because you see a general term as naming (or pointing at or designating or referring to) a whole class of or abstraction from the instances, as an entity in its own right. You can't see it referring to a particular and still being general? (Correct me.)

But can't a nominalist deny the class or abstraction, and reconstrue a general statement (e.g. a predication or attribution or description) quite simply as shared naming, i.e. as ascribing the property to, or simply pointing out and thereby sorting under the term, all of the instances, severally? I'm not saying that approach doesn't throw up problems. But it's what I was about in the second paragraph. — bongo fury

I'm still confused about what you're getting at here. Concepts are a means of calling/considering phenomenon a and phenomenon b the "same thing"--namely whatever the concept term is. So I think we used "yellow" as an example. That way you can see the color of, say, a car and the color of a guitar and use the term "yellow" for both. (Which is using a general term--that's what concepts are, and referring to particulars--the particular yellow of that particular car--for example, if that answers that question).

I don't know how someone could deny that we do this--that we utilize concepts this way, because if we don't utilize concepts that way, then language is impossible. It would just be a string of proper names (effectively) with never-ending variety . . . and even then, writing would be difficult, because the whole idea of writing "g" and having a particular repeatable set of sounds indicated by it is a concept per what I describe above.

It looks like you're simply arguing in favor of a law requiring a day off of work so that people working multiple jobs have some time off without having to take sick days, without having to worry about losing their job by insisting on a particular schedule, etc.?

I'm confused . . . and the first thing I'm confused about is this: what the heck is a "sub" blue law?

True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.

Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.

Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).

Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.

Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.

I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course). — Isaac

People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status. There are a number of reasons for this, but I suspect that one of the primary reasons is that people tend to assume that the anonymous people they're interacting with must be more or less in the same boat as they are.

It's rather pointless to claim any particular achievements or status online. The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it.

'It was morally permissible' (past tense) however, can't be an expression of a moral attitude a person wants to voice (because it's the past), but only really makes sense as a description, of a group of people having had those moral feelings. — ChatteringMonkey

What I wrote was "We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible."

"Conventionally considered" is another way of saying that most individuals thought such and such.

When they are introduced a large body of water, could they use their reasoning skills alone to know that they couldn't breath underneath it, or would they have to test this hypothesis out first? Likewise, would they know upon seeing fire that it's hotter the closer you get to it, or would they have to find this out empirically? — Gregory

I don't see how those notions could possibly be derived from reason alone. You'd need empirical info.

All you need to think about to realize this is that phenomena could appear to be just like water and fire (perhaps as some sort of orchestrated illusion) while having completely different properties.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking.

The first question seems to be about concepts where they aren't abstractions ranging over a number of particular instances. I wouldn't say that would qualify as a concept. It would just be a name and/or description of the particular. ("Description of" isn't really possible without concepts ranging over a number of particulars, though.)

But the paragraph that you're quoting after that question doesn't seem to be what the first question is about. Re the content of that paragraph, I don't think there's any way to experience someone else's consciousness--I think that in principle that is impossible.

Sure, though I'm not entirely sure what "it was morally permissible" could mean otherwise in the absence of an objective morality. — ChatteringMonkey

"It's morally permissible to do x" is an opinion that someone can have, a way that they can feel about interpersonal behavior.

I can’t believe you really just overlooked slaves moral opinions and said it was conventionally considered morally permissible when it was widely debated by slaves, freed men and white advocates of freedom.

So can we take your relativistic stance to mean that if you’d been around at the time, you wouldn’t have seen any value in even debating whether or not it was right to keep slaves? This just makes you a moral apathist in my eyes. Your apathy is probably the biggest indicator of a fundamentally immoral mind. — Mark Dennis

So, in a post in another thread that was a response to Artemis, I responded that a view he brought up wasn't a view that I agreed with, after he'd said "anywhere in the world you find the same underlying principles to ethics."

You responded with "the majority would agree," as if that fact were significant, and minority dissent wasn't worth mentioning.

Now, in this thread, I brought up the fact that in the southern US in, say 1820 (or whatever similar date I used), the majority would say that it's ethically permissible to have slaves.

But now, you don't care that the majority would agree. You're bringing up minority dissent as if it's suddenly worth mentioning.

I'm certainly not in any way advocating that there's any significance to consensuses about this stuff. In fact, I asked you what you believed the significance of it was, and I didn't see you answer that (though you might have and I just didn't see that post yet--I've been busy; I'm just checking out responses to posts now). At any rate, the reason that I'm bringing up consensuses, majorities, etc. is because other people, including you, brought them up in a normative context.

But my eyes just keep glazing over.

I didn't say the absence of properties wasn't a concept. There's a difference though between positing the absence (or skepticism) of properties and the positing of some particular property (light, location, shape etc) as being real.

One is simply agnosticism, the other dogmatism. — Isaac

You weren't being skeptical. You claimed that there are no objective properties.

The claim is that properties are incoherent without a person to define them thus. Not that they aren't there. — Isaac

Wait so now there are objective properties, it's just that the objective properties are incoherent?

I said "to my satisfaction". I prefer consistency, I can't really conceive of a reality that can be two ways at once, so two apparently conflicting models are sufficient to convince me that they can't both be right. — Isaac

Given your ontology, there's no way to make sense of "this model is right." You don't even believe that there are any objective properties.

For (a) we're talking about some way the world really is, — Isaac

The way the world really is is perspectival. "Perspective" there isn't referring to persons or their consciousness. It's referring to frames or points of reference (not strictly in the physics sense, so don't be misled to think that I'm strictly talking about Special Relativity) or situatedness--relative spatiotemporal locations. Frames/points of reference can be "of" a person, but they need not be. There's no frame-of-reference-free frame of reference, so to speak, or there's no "view from nowhere." Properties are unique from every point of reference, and there's no preferred point of reference.

For (b) if it is possible for someone to be wrong, then our brains are not inevitably arranged to reflect reality accurately. — Isaac

They're not infallibly fixed to get things right. That doesn't imply that we can't get things right. To even say that we can't things right would require knowing that things are different than we suppose, but we can't know that unless we know how things are.

The fact that I'm constructing people does not lead to the fact that I can construct them however I'd like to construct them. — Isaac

Why not? What would constrain it? Especially what property-free thing?

We're getting way off topic with fundamental ontology. I want bring you back to the question this whole sideshow seemed to distract from

what is missing from the third party account? — Isaac


I just answered this: the perspective of being those states. — Terrapin Station


But where is that perspective if not in "Particular dynamic state of synapses, neurons, etc"? I'm afraid "At various reference points, including the reference point of being the thing in question." isn't really a coherent location for me. — Isaac — Isaac

I don't think there's a way to straighten it out for you without you sorting through the more general ontological mess you've gotten yourself into.

Subjects are points in spacetime? — fdrake

In my view everything has a spatial and temporal location, at least defined relationally with respect to other things. (I don't buy the idea of "spacetime" as a thing in itself.)

If we define that which benefits a life, as things like having enough to sustain its life until it’s natural end. Is morality useful to life? More specifically, is morality useful for you? Does it help your position to have humans who believe in morals around you or would it be better if every single one of them was a moral antirealist? — Mark Dennis

Aside from some extreme medical conditions, I don't think it's really possible to have a human who doesn't have a whole host of moral stances. It doesn't matter what they think the status of moral utterances is ontologically; they're going to think that some behavior is morally kosher and other behavior isn't. And most people aren't going to have extremely unusual moral stances--or at least they're not likely to have stances that result in extremely unusual behavior. Some will, but not that many.

But it is true that it was morally permissible to have slaves in the South of the US in the 1820's. — ChatteringMonkey

We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible. That's an important distinction to make.

It’s only morally permissible if you don’t take in the moral opinions of actual slaves at the time. Pretty sure they weren’t calling it morally permissible nor were their white advocates. It might have been legally permissible at the time, doesn’t mean it wasn’t morally reprehensible though. — Mark Dennis

No stance is going to be unanimous. You just pointed that out yourself a few posts back (well, maybe in another thread . . .I don't remember if it was this same thread or not)

:up:

you have in previous threads claimed to outright reject any overarching princples in ethics. — Artemis

That's right. I wouldn't say I don't have an ethics, but it's not any sort of systematic ethics, sure.

True or false is the context of morality simply means whether or not it is in accordance with fixed convention... — ChatteringMonkey

That's the argumentum ad populum fallacy, and it results in saying that it's true that it's morally permissible to have slaves (if you're in the US in the 1820s in the South), that it's true that it's morally permissible in certain historical tribal settings to cannibalize neighboring tribes, etc.

the majorities of most countries would agree with at the very least, not having unnecessary suffering inflicted upon themselves individually, as a community, as a country. — Mark Dennis

Maybe most people in most countries would agree with that, although we never actually did an empirical study to discover whether that's the case, and I'd suspect that we'd need to clarify the terms for most people in order for them to give an answer that isn't fleeting or easily so ambiguous because of different semantics that the response wouldn't actually tell us much. We'd need to clarify just what counts as unnecessary, just what counts as suffering, etc.

The more important point though is what does it matter for the sub-discussion that was occurring?

In other words, suppose that's a fact. What would you say the relevance of it is to Artemis' response to god must be an atheist's comment?

And.... people agree on certain dispositions and enforce those agreements. Those agreements in turn influence what moral stances people adopt. Moral stances aren't found in the external world, but morality is very real in that there are consequences if you fail to match it. — ChatteringMonkey

Sure, no disagreement with that. It just doesn't make any of it true/false, correct/incorrect, etc.

It seems to me that if you want to get right what the world is like, this should at least be part of your description — ChatteringMonkey

It's just that that stuff is irrelevant when we're talking about the ontological status of moral stances re whether they can be true or false. You're not going to say every single thing about every aspect of morality every time it comes up. You'd have to write a book over and over.

Ok, but I thought you were happy to at least class all the particular cases of yellow-wavelength-reflection together as cases (albeit different particular cases) of possession of "yellowness" (in the objective sense) by an object?

So I thought you would be happy to form a corresponding class of cases (each of them particular and different of course) of possession of "yellowness" (in the mental sense) by a brain state? — bongo fury

"Classing all the cases together" is a way of talking about the concepts we formulate as such--those are abstractions that range over a number of unique instances. And sure, insofar as we're talking about concepts, that's fine.

What those concepts are in response to, though, what any occurrence of yellow is in an object, or in experience is a particular state, a particular brain state (on my view) in the case of experience, or a particular object (reflecting EMR) state in the case of the external thing we're perceiving.

. . . or in other words, I'm a nominalist, so the only "reality" of types is as concepts (and even there, every instance of the concept in someone's mind is unique). But types make sense as a particular occurrence of a construction that abstracts certain features from particulars to range over a number of them.

And anywhere in the world you find the same underlying principles to ethics: don't cause unnecessary suffering, for example. — Artemis

That's not a view I agree with. So how would it be the case that you find that everywhere in the world?

1. That conception is done in our minds and I can't think of a single reason why we would, by chance, construct the exact properties that somehow reality has (if maybe you take a Berkelean view that God conceives of properties). — Isaac

Why would you think it's by chance? We seem to have access to the world, right? Via our senses. So you'd need a reason to believe that that's not in fact the case.

2. Physics has demonstrated to my satisfaction that many of the properties I think objects have cannot be reconciled with each other. — Isaac

Physics can't demonstrate anything if you think we can't tell at all what the world is like. Besides, you have to conclude that you made all of physics up.

3. Different people seem to have different phenomenological conceptions and so it seems impossible that the 'real stuff' is some way or other, that someone is just right about some of it. — Isaac

You'd need a reason to believe that (a) the world can't be different from different perspectives, and (b) that some people can't be wrong while others are right

4. I think it's impossible to even think without foundational model, concepts on which to base thought. So I can't conceive of anything without those models. — Isaac

If you need to construct a foundational model in order to think, then how would you even get started? Don't you need to think in order to construct a foundational model? Otherwise it would be the case that you could think without a foundational model.

Yes, that's right. The idea of 'a person' is something I've constructed. — Isaac

Right. So essentially you're a solipsist--at least an epistemological solipsist. So why would something like hate speech ever be a problem? You're just constructing the other people anyway, and can't you construct them however you'd like to construct them?


In short, your ontology is a complete mess, and I'm guessing there are psychological reasons behind it. It probably stems from needing a way to cope with things that you otherwise feel you can't cope with. Keep in mind that apparently this is your concepts telling you this.

Presumably you wouldn't say that other people exist outside of your concept of rhem, right?

No, but the stuff they're about doesn't actually have the properties we phenomenological conceive them having — Isaac

How in the world would you know this?

Again, it's hard to believe that you'd not just be trolling in not being able to disentangle concepts from what the concepts are about or in response to.

But 'coin' and 'location' are both concepts. Physical matter is a concept. — Isaac

There are concepts, but the concepts are not about themselves.

Apparently you are incapable of understanding language usage without thinking that we're necessarily talking about concepts as such. Re the use/mention distinction, you must think it's incoherent. We can only do mention.

I'm not saying anything about where it begins or ends or whether it's separated from anything else. Again, I'm not talking about the concept as such.

No. I don't see how there can be a frame of reference that is the coin itself. — Isaac

There's a coin, and it has a location, right? I have to use the word to refer to it on a message board. I'm not talking about the concept, or identifying it, or anything like that. Just "that lump there" or whatever. (Again, I need to refer to it here so you know what I'm talking about)

That's fine. Nevetheless, I'm not talking about concepts.

If I tell you that the cat ran outside when you opened the door, I have to employ concepts, as you do in order to understand what I'm saying, but what I'm saying isn't about concepts.

But where is that perspective if not in "Particular dynamic state of synapses, neurons, etc"? I'm afraid "At various reference points, including the reference point of being the thing in question." isn't really a coherent location for me. — Isaac

So forget about talking about mind for a moment.

Take a coin for example. There's a frame of reference that is the coin itself, and there's a frame of reference that's not the coin itself, but that's relative to the the coin from some other position, right?

That you think you're providing a theory neutral description of phenomenal character is part of the problem. — fdrake

You were hinting at concepts. I'm not talking about concepts. I'm not saying something about it being theory-neutral. I'm just saying that I'm not talking about concepts.