Yes, but the issue is decidability not meaningfulness. I for one, already said the LPs went too far in saying that metaphysical statements are meaningless. Decidability is not all or nothing either; as I said earlier it is on a continuum. Statements have to be decidable enough, that disagreement over them (not the statements themselves, mind) can be meaningful. — Janus

Yes, you did. I tend to agree with you. But doesn't that make the dispute in this thread undecidable, if meaningful?

IOW, these kinds of disputes have a difficulty escaping the same critique that they put forth.

From listening to the Partially Examined Podcast on Carnap, he seems to have been a rather tolerant and pragmatic fellow, saying that he had no trouble conversing in different metaphysical talk with people holding those views, while remaining unattached to any of them.

It would seem his argument that metaphysics is meaningless was based more for pragmatic (scientific, empirical) reasons than strictly logical ones.

Carnap was at heart a pragmatist.

Maybe, but it's not relevant to what is being argued by those to whom it is directed. — Janus

Well, almost the entire thread is a disagreement over whether metaphysical statements can be meaningful which boils down to:

Pro: Example provided.
Anti: Not meaningful.
Pro: Yes it is.
Anti: No it's not
Both: discussion of why it is, or is not meaningful.

So on the anti side, how can this debate be any more meaningful than debates over examples given?

You not going to pull the old "If all metaphysical arguments are meaningless, then yours is too" card are you? — Janus

This is a legitimate criticism of Carnap's position on metaphysics and verificationsim in general.

We need to address another issue in considering verificationism, the persistent criticism that it is self-undercutting. The argument for this claim goes like this: The principle claims that every meaningful sentence is either analytic or verifiable. Well, the principle itself is surely not analytic; we understand the meanings of the words in it perfectly well because we understand our own language. And we still do not think it true, so it cannot be true in virtue of meaning. And it is not verifiable either (whatever we choose ‘verifiable’ to mean).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/#EmpVerAntMet — SEP

However, and this ties back to the OP, I do see from that article Carnap came up with the idea of "Tolerance" in response to the criticism the verficationism and metaphysics being meaningless undercuts itself. Under tolerance, verificationism is a practical consideration, because the alternative is endless debates that can't be resolved. So although metaphysicians are capable of proposing grammars and inferences for metaphysical positions that are meaningful, it doesn't resolve the debates.

Correspondingly, what Carnap called metaphysics is then treated as though it is, as a matter of brute fact, unintelligible. But what is announced thus dogmatically can be rejected equally dogmatically. Once tolerance is in place, alternative philosophic positions, including metaphysical ones, are construed as alternative proposals for structuring the language of science.

~ a couple paragraphs down — SEP

If it is possible for someone of my intellect and knowledge to be wrong about the way things are, how do I know that it is not me? — Pseudonym

In my view, you're just making a case for sophistry in this thread.

but really I think its just the latest story we came up with to explain the chaos of our senses, and there's no sense in saying my story is better than yours because it 'feels' right. There's no sense in telling someone else their story is 'wrong' because it doesn't 'feel' right to you. — Pseudonym

I don't experience "chaos of the senses". I experience an intelligible world. This is something Heidegger pointed out. The chaos of the sense which the mind has to make sense of to form an intelligible world is something we infer after the fact. It's not something primary in our experience.

So how do you determine whether someone is "pretending" to not understand. Is this not just narcissism?, Failure of a theory of mind? "how could anyone possibly think differently to me?" — Pseudonym

Because they're refusing to acknowledge points made in a straight forward argument. I've seen and done this myself in dumb arguments about sports or movies before, where metaphysics or the "chaos of the senses" isn't a point of contention.

People want to win arguments and confirm their biases. This is well known.

Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced it's just their conscience or something but they do really feel it" — Pseudonym

Good one, but having God experiences is not universally reported, unlike dreams, imagination, feeling pain, etc.

Subjectivity is universal. But when the nature of subjective experience is argued about it, some are convinced that it's an illusion and not something fundamentally hard to explain in objective terms.

Or they pretend they don't understand what having your own individual experiences means, and they argue about something else related that's third person, such as being awake and responsive, or reports.

Some of these arguments involve a degree of sophistry. Talk of subjectivity is granting ground to the hard problem, so it's easier to argue about something else.

So, given that is right, I am left wondering how we would go about gauging the explanatory power of metaphysical theories. — Janus

Metaphysical theories are explanatory on conceptual grounds. You argue for or against the ideas. How well they hold together, what their flaws are, whether there is anything contradictory or confusing, etc.

Nagel thinks there's something it's "like" to be us and calls this consciousness, others disagree that there is something it is 'like' to experience being us and equate consciousness directly with awareness. — Pseudonym

Yes, but it's hard to believe them when they say there's nothing it's 'like' to experience being us, unless they are philosophical zombies.

I think it's far more likely they know what it's "like", but they're convinced it has to be an illusion on other grounds, so they argue that there is no actual subjective experience. That's been part of Dennett's career.

At any rate, the philosophical discussion on consciousness centers around the hard problem and subjectivity, not other areas which are more amenable to science. Dennett understands what Chalmers is saying and vice versa. They just don't agree.

Oh, and Carnap was wrong as a result of working from an utterly impoverished criterion for being meaningful... — creativesoul

Agreed. It's similar to the claim that religious believers don't really believe in their theology, when it's making claims about God or the afterlife, but are rather animated by it.

But I know that's simply not true. Some of them really do believe that way, in addition to being animated by it. Their worldview is just very different from some intellectual making a claim about what sort of statements can be believed (only the empirically grounded ones I take it).

This takes out the sort of questions you are asking with respect to metaphysics and knowledge. There is nothing to say on the level of verification. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But I've argued against verification being a requirement for statements being meaningful. Metaphysical statements can't be verified. They go beyond the empirical domain. But they can be argued for. And they can be true, if there is some real state of affairs the metaphysical argument is about.

That's a realist take on truth and metaphysics, anyway.

Right, but verification-transcendent propositions support the meaningfulness of metaphysics. I believe this is a Michael Dummett distinction for settling such disputes.

The Andromeda Galaxy is probably far enough away that we'll never know whether an intelligent civilization exists there.

Yet we have every scientific reason to think that the following proposition is true or false:

There is an intelligent civilization in the Andromeda galaxy.

But the 2 million light year distance might be too far in space and time-delay to ever detect such a civilization. For that matter, we may never verify whether we're alone. But even if we fail to find evidence, the following proposition would also be true or false:

We are alone (as a technological civilization) in the cosmos.

Unless one thinks the light from space is all just an appearance (maybe fed to us from the aliens to fool us into thinking the cosmos is empty!)

takes an instance we know to be unverifiable... then supposes to address the question of whether it's veritable or not. The supposed "metaphysical" condrum being tackled, to have some verfied account of what is true or not, is directly obliterated by its definition. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, I was giving an example of a situation where we have good reason to suppose that the truth is verification-transcendent. You can't verify whether there exists aliens too far away for us to ever detect. However, the universe appears to be fairly similar overall as far as we can see, with the same physics and distribution of matter, stars and most likely planets.

So it is verifiable in principle but not at the present time? — Janus

Beyond our light cone, or even a few billion light years away is probably not ever going to be verifiable for us. But I don't know what advanced technology or new discoveries in physics might yield someday.

Oddly enough there are mamy examples of what we count as knowledge which are not verifiable even in principle unless time travel were to turn out to be possible. Any claims concerning the past, for example. — Janus

Depends on the past claim, doesn't it? Some past events have tons of evidence, even video. Some things, like the exact number of T-Rex in the year 69,335,678 BC, are not knowable, short of a time machine. (And even then, counting all the T-Rex would be a challenge, despite their size).

Whether or not there are aliens is not a metaphysical question, though, is it? — Janus

No, but whether or not there are aliens too far away for us to know about it is unverifiable.

Of course they have meaning, just as poetry does, which is to say that they are more or less rich in conceptual and perceptual associations. It's a question of aesthetics, not of truth. — Janus

Not sure I agree with that last part. Just because metaphysics might be undecidable for us doesn't mean there isn't truth. It's undecidable whether alien civilizations exist beyond our light cone, but I see no reason to say it isn't a matter of truth whether they do. Either they do or don't exist. We have reasons to believe the universe is bigger than our light cone, and so they might exist.

My view is that truth can be verification-transcendent There are some things we just don't have the means to find out, but that doesn't mean there isn't a truth. It could be mathematical, physical, metaphysical, whatever.

Otherwise, we limit truth to what human beings can know, despite all the evidence that humans aren't the center of existence.

Christianity is a dead religion. It's a vestige of a world now gone. It's absurd stories and ridiculous requirements have been superseded by secular authority and science. Good riddance. — frank

For some people in the Western world, but it seems pretty vibrant in South American and Africa. I'm an atheist, but to call a religion with 2+ billion followers as dead seems kind of silly. A dead religion would be one without any followers, right? Or one that was dying off. Something like Zoroastrianism (325,000 followers according to Wiki which I guess is in perpetual decline).

Even in the west, there are still plenty of passionate followers. Maybe it's not so prominent in Europe, but in the US, you have a significant evangelical movement. It's not dead to them.

That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity. — StreetlightX

Exactly. For example., It can't all just be a dream, because a dream implies a waking world. If I"m always in a dream, I can't fall asleep to dream or wake up to stop dreaming. So then dreaming collapses into what's real.

The only way around that is to propose that someone else (God I guess) is dreaming me, meaning that God must be able to wake up and realize she was dreaming. But that's just something we invent because we can distinguish between being awake and dreaming.

Similarly, it it were all just appearance, then appearance stops being an appearance. But we already have an appearance/reality distinction because there are appearances to contrast with what's real, just like we awake from the dream realizing it was a dream.

Reality is necessarily primary. All skepticism is parasitic upon it.

We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. — Snakes Alive

This is confused. Our perceptual experiences are about things or events, but the experiences themselves are a mental activity. There is an important distinction to make between the activity of perceiving and what is being perceived.

I'm interacting with some legos, seeing them, feeling them, putting them together. The interaction is not the legos. That's what I'm doing. The legs are something else as evidence by the fact that other people can interact with them.

Right, and there was an analogous kind of self-awareness when the empiricists noticed that you could come to 'see' things as just rearranged as different sizes in the visual field, instead of representing objective distances. We just naturally see these things as distances, but we only do this by means of the visual field being stimulated in this way, and when one turns to epistemology one 'sees' this again. Usually one sees 'through' it. — Snakes Alive

But does that work as well with the other senses? Overly relying on vision can distort one's philosophical "picture".

Csalisbury brought up the sun as a counter example. One reason for thinking it's not just a small object in the visual field as opposed to far away is because the sun is a hot object that only manages not to burn (and irradiate us) because it's far away. An active volcano is not simply small in the visual field, it's at a distance or it would be burning us up.

The point here is that one's epistemology needs ot integrate information from all the senses across many different scenarios, and not just propose one possibility based on how vision works. Otherwise, you end up with a "distorted view" of how we experience and know about the world.

I can disagree with your statement that "Unicorns have pink tails" by simply stating that "Unicorns have blue tails". At no point does my ability to do this indicate anything about my understanding of you use of the term 'Unicorn' — Pseudonym

Come on! Unicorns aren't hard to understand, anymore than drgaons or wizards are. They're just fictional creations. That doesn't make them meaningless.

Now an Invisible Pink Unicorn has an inherent contradiction in what sort of thing it's supposed to be, so that falls under the umbrella of incoherency, which was the point of the term (to parody incoherent religious concepts). Just like a four sided triangle is an incoherent concept. But a triangle in a time travel story isn't incoherent, it's just part of a fictional story.

I think that is really the issue; not that such speculation is meaningless, because it is obviously meaningful in that it involves using words and phrases that mean something to us; the issue is that it is undecidable. The mistake of the Logical Positivists was to conflate 'undecidable' with 'meaningful'. — Janus

That might be so. Colin McGinn postulated this is because we lack the cognitive makeup to answer such questions, although we can ask them somehow.

For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge “stands on its own feet.”" My own attempt to paraphrase this was to say that "one cannot simply 'read off' a claim of knowledge from a state-of-affairs". — StreetlightX

Seems rather obvious on the face of it. Did empiricists really believe that the raw sensory datum could be used to construct an understanding of the world? On what basis?

if two people arguing understand one another, and can articulate eachother's position -- then it's just true that the debate is not nonsense. — Moliere

That's what makes sense to me.

If two people can disagree while being able to explicate the position of who they disagree with then that's a good indicator that the terms are being used the same. — Moliere

I suppose a third person could come along and claim the disagreement is meaningless, as what happens in this thread. But then how do you decide whether the third person is right, or the other two are right that it's meaningful?

If one group claims a statement is meaningful, and another claims it is not, then what determines who's right? An argument about the definition of meaning? And what if there is no consensus on meaning?

It seems to me that the claim to meaninglessness tends to undermine itself.

The problem then isn't that we can't know reality prior appearance, but we can't even discuss a reality without appearances. — Hanover

We can and we do with science.

so to ask how can I know the rock without reference to how it looks, smells, or taste seems nonsensical — Hanover

The properties that don't depend on how we perceive the rock are how science describes a rock. But really, it's the objective account of things, where we remove the perceiver dependent qualities. A rock's mass, size and shape, and molecular arrangement don't depend on how humans perceive a rock.

Your ''substance'' would be incomprehensible without properties. It's the way the world is.I don't like it but that's how it is. — TheMadFool

Hahaha, funny! Do you wish you had an essential substance that didn't rely on properties?

Is that really so odd? I'd say it's the rule rather than the exception! — Aaron R

Sure, and no doubt that is ammo for the anti-metaphyics side. Questions raised about meaningfulness in this thread:

Can a debate be meaningful if the different sides can't agree on what constitutes an acceptable answer?

Can a statement be meaningful if it's imprecise?

Is meaning grounded in the empirical and analytical such that you can't make meaningful claims about that which is beyond experience?

Is meaning a precise term or is it fuzzy?

Is a statement claiming that all statements of type X are meaningless a member of X?

I don't believe we could coherently imagine what such a reality could be except that it consists in some kind of timelessly existing Idea (Platonism). But the notion that there is a timeless somehow independently existent idea for every generality (and there would need to be a unique idea for every individual similarity and difference) leads to absurdity. It's a really overloaded, top-heavy, cumbersome and in the final analysis, incoherent, ontology, so why should we adopt it or even bother with it? — Janus

I think essences in the things themselves would be an alternative to Platonism, but it's not without it's own difficulties. So sure, what you said is a standard criticism of realism about universals.

As on poster in this thread pointed out, the odd thing about this debate is that none of the positions is without problems. I don't think this is because of lack of meaning in the dispute.

There are ongoing debates in matters like unsolved crimes where there isn't a question about meaning. What's questioned is the interpretation of the known or alleged facts and related matters for the case.

Yes, and such debates are meaningless. If the two sides do not agree on the meaning of the term 'better', then how is it different to debating which player is the most 'flibertyjibit' - another term which neither side agree the meaning of, yet we would easily see the sentence Michael Jordan is the most flibertijibit player as being nonsense. — Pseudonym

Better already exists as a comparison in language. There's no problem saying that MJ or LJ are better than the average player. You will get consensus on that. And better here means superior statistics, MVP awards and all-star selections, championships, and a general recognition of rare ability while watching a player play the game.

So better is not like the made up word flibertijibit. The problem with better is that it's not precise enough when you have two players close enough in career achievements to fix the criteria for determining who is better. And so then people are free to choose what criteria they wish to use.

This isn't a matter of better being meaningless, it's rather imprecise and opinionated.

That is still much too vague. — SophistiCat

Well then:

Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called "particulars"), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial.

Whether universals are in fact required to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals has engaged metaphysicians for two thousand years. Disputants fall into one of three broad camps. Realists endorse universals. Conceptualists and Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to accept universals and deny that they are needed. Conceptualists explain similarity among individuals by appealing to general concepts or ideas, things that exist only in minds. Nominalists, in contrast, are content to leave relations of qualitative resemblance brute and ungrounded. — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Do you find that also too vague?

. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat. — SophistiCat

I listed the well established positions in the debate, about which much has been said. My argument is that the problem of universals is an example of a meaningful debate, not that universals are necessarily real (I don't know).

A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. — SophistiCat

I wasn't demonstrating polymorphism with the simple example. The general idea of class-based OOP languages is that the class defines the complex data type for any instances of that class. The data type has bundled with it the methods which can operate on any instance. The properties available are defined in the class along with the methods.

This serves as a good example for universals, and indeed introductions to OOP often use the example of an Animal, Shape or Person class, claiming that it's modeled after the world. The class defines the type of object for a bunch of instances.

Now it's true that you can create a hierarchy of Shape classes and treat them the same when you want to perform the same kind of geometric function on them, or have them draw to the screen (the actual implementation might differ form class to class). That doesn't mean that the Triangle or Circle class are somehow less universal to their instances.

It's also true that some languages let you mutate individuals and change the inheritance relationships at runtime, and other wild stuff. Some languages don't really care about the class of an object, only if it behaves like a type it expects.

And similarly, the real world is more complicated than simple examples of universals. That doesn't change the question of how individual things can be similar. But it does illustrate the concept in a simple manner.

Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real? — Janus

Good question. It's the contents of the mind which are not always real. We can both perceive a tree, which means there is a tree independent of your mind and mine. But if you dream, imagine or hallucinate a tree, that's your mind generating it. You can also lie or be mistaken about seeing a tree.

When we say that Harry Potter isn't real, we don't mean the literature, which is obviously real, we mean the character and the story is fictional.

This might lead to thinking that only the perceive is real, but then we do make both everyday and scientific inferences to things unperceived, such as the tree falling when nobody is around, or the majority of the EM spectrum we can't see.

The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said. — Janus

Real in these discussions means mind-independent. Objects of perception are generally taken to be mind-independent things that exist without humans perceiving them, unless one is a subjective idealist.

An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. It's true that we don't perceive abstract forms, but if argument showed that they have to come from somewhere other than our minds, then they would be real.

Let's take a sports example. Is athlete A greater than athlete B in a sport?

Is Lebron James better than Michael Jordan? (pick your athletes and sport)

There is a consensus that both players are all-time greats at basketball, but there isn't a consensus as what counts as being greater between the two (which often means the best ever).

And yet there are many discussions on this. What happens is that the Lebron James supporters will list criteria that supports their claim that Lebron is better, and reasons why Jordan is not. And the Jordan supporters will do the same.

This isn't because they don't understand each other, it's because they don't agree. Similar to political debates where a conservative and a liberal will base their arguments on their political persuasion. They can usually understand each other, but they don't agree on the politics of the other side's position.

So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym

At least until you get deep in the theoretical physics weeds. Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a meaningful scientific debate? I think so, on a theoretical grounds, but some have said it's pure metaphysics and shouldn't be in science.

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning?

From my experience of also being involved in political, religious, sports and true crime debates, people often don't agree as to what would count as settling the debate. Each side has their own criteria.

Take the Dyatlov Pass Incident for example. 9 Russian Hikers were found dead in 1959. According to investigators, they cut their way out of the tent at night in the middle of the Siberian winter, hiked down to the tree line poorly dressed, and attempted to survive the night there unsuccessfully. The head investigator concluded that some "unknown compelling force" caused them to do this.

There are many theories as to what happened. Several books have been written in recent years, each with their own conclusion. Some say they were forced out of their tent by other humans on the mountain that night, and their injuries revealed in the autopsies are consistent with this being attacked and killed. Others will say that no, their injuries are consistent with natural causes that happened to them after leaving the tent, such as a snow den collapse, and falling out of a tree, the broken limbs of which were used in a small fire, or falling face first on the rocky terrain in the deep snow.

So what would count as settling which theory is true in a case like this, if no new evidence comes to light? But they did abandon their campsite without proper clothing for some reason. One of the theories is probably close to the truth.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere

Exactly.

So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.

Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal? — Pseudonym

That sounds like conceptualism, which is one answer to the problem of universals. It doesn't really matter for this discussion if universals exist. It's whether the debate is meaningful.

My view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. — Wayfarer

So basically Kantian? Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? That these categories of thought have to already be there because they can't come from the senses. The senses are just blobs of color, random noises, smells, etc that need to be categorized, fit into a conceptual framework or what have you.

. What's the difference between "universal talk of something" and just regular talk of something? — TheWillowOfDarkness

So I can talk about a particular dog, call him Beast, who happens to be bigger than most dogs. Notice that Beast is grouped into the category dog. All dogs are unique individuals, but there is something about dogs that motivates us to put them into the dog category. Now beast is taller and weighs more than most dogs. Notice how we can compare across the class of individuals.

We can also use the dog category to talk about a generic dog, or draw the shape of a dog. So a no dogs allowed sign has an outline representing any dog.

Now the question becomes how we're able to do all this if we all perceive are individual dogs. We never do experience the dog category, the average dog, the image of a generic dog, etc. It's a concept we form related to all dogs.

We "see" the casualty of a ball breaking a window because the causality of interested is of those things-- the causality of a ball braking a window (if someone is present), involves the sight of the ball and window in a certain reaction/relationship. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Right, but we go one step further and assume there is something necessitating the relationship, such that any future ball will break any future window, all else being equal (same glass strength, same speed and weight of the ball, etc).