(1) It is not clear what motivates the questioning, (2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. (4) And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and (5) how could there be when there is no real question? — SophistiCat

I'll go ahead and answer these directly (numbers my addition):

(1) The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them.

(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.

(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk.

(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism).

(5) No real question if one agrees with Carnap, Hume or Witty on this. But if not, then there is a real question.

The question of whether there can be meaningful metaphysical statements is essentially a debate over meaning.

Well, I explained why your question makes no sense — SophistiCat

You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless — SophistiCat

That's exactly the sort of starting point Carnap wanted to argue from.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. — SophistiCat

Can you explain in what way it's senseless? Because I'm failing to see how it is.

The only sense I can make of the claim that it's senseless is a preexisting commitment to the argument that metaphysics is senseless.

If by definition all such statements are without sense, then of course no example will convince you otherwise. If only everyone would agree to that definition, then we could be done with wasting time on metaphysics!

Every time you use or think the terms ‘is equal to’, ‘is’, ‘is not’, ‘is more than’, ‘doesn’t mean’, ‘must mean’ then essentially you’re relying on universal abstractions in order to arrive at a judgement. Even in order to arrive at a ‘neuroscientific analysis’ [or any scientific analysis] you need to do this. But you don’t notice you’re doing it, and if it’s pointed out you don’t see what it means. — Wayfarer

Or someone will cry out that it's meaningless to point this out, because metaphysics.

Hume was wrong; he was tricked by his tendency to reduce perception to the visual; of course it's true that we don't actually see causality. — Janus

That's an interesting thought. Philosophers do seem rather focused on the visual. Makes me wonder what would happen if we met aliens whose primary sense was smell. How would their philosophical views differ from ours?

What sorts of claims are (1) and (2)? Are they empirical? — Srap Tasmaner

Good question. Revisiting:

(1) We can only think about what we have experience of.
(2) We only have experience of particulars. — Srap Tasmaner

I would say they are claims about epistemology. Can epistemological claims be settled by psychology (or neuroscience)? I don't know. Not yet, anyway.

Hume provides an example of a concept that is neither in experience nor from logic: causality. Psychology might someday explain how we came to form that concept. I don't know what implication that will have for philosophy. There might be a good reason we formed the concept.

Yes, thank you. The problem for empiricism if (1) is false is that non-particulars are often about things in the world (dog, tree, planet, force, society), and not just logical constructions. So empiricism needs a mechanism whereby the mind turns particulars into non-particulars.

I submit this is impossible, unless the particulars have similar properties and relations, which then requires inquiry into what it means for individuals to be similar.

ou need to spell out why these two conditions give rise to a problem. What problem? — Srap Tasmaner

How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form universal properties and relations such that we can group them into categories?

One possible answer is that universal properties and relations exist in the world in some manner.

Take E=MC^2. This is a universal relation between mass and energy that science has discovered. One interpretation of this is that science was able to discover this equation because there is a law of nature forming a causal relationship such that matter always converts to the energy in the same manner.

Now if the world was made up of individual bits of matter and packets of energy (both matter and energy are also universal concepts), then how is it we can formulate an equation across all of them?

A different interpretation would be that all the bits of matter just so happen to form a regularity whereby they always convert to the same amount of energy given their mass. This regularity becomes it's own universal pattern that we notice and form an equation from. So the world has at least universal patterns to it, even if they're just regularities.

Ray Kurzweil has called himself a "patternist", which I suppose is an alternative to universal categories (or classes). This is probably similar to Dennett's use of the Game of Life whereby the starting conditions and a few simple rules can generate complex patterns, or Wolfram's cellular automata.

Let's take a related topic. Our ancestors realized the could count different things. Three rocks, three sticks, three birds, etc. From this they generalized to the number three, and from countability, math was born. We can ask two questions about this.

1. How does the human brain from the abstract concept of number?

2. Is there something interesting about the world that lets us do this?

Question two is best exemplified by asking why math has been so useful for the sciences. Does that imply a mathematical structure for the world?

The third question isn't empirical, it's an ontological question.

And that is the root of Marchesk's problem: after so many pages of discussion, not only can he not explain the answer and how it actually answers the question, he cannot even explain what the question is and why it needs to be answered. — SophistiCat

I have it explained it. But some of the posters pretend that they can't understand it to support the verificationist argument against metaphysics.

The question and proposed answers can be boiled down to this observation:

We perceive a world of individuals, yet our language is full of universal categories of properties and relations. So how do we reconcile the two?

As for the verification argument against metaphysics being meaningful, it falls prey to the same objection, since it's neither analytic nor verifiable.

By the protagonist of a life-experience story, of course a physical world is perceived. Your experience is of being a physical being in a physical world. So, what else would you expect, than to experience a physical world that produced you, and is consistent with you. — Michael Ossipoff

Right, so from that I infer that I'm a physical being. However, the mental is not so easily subsumed under the physical, so maybe I'm not entirely physical.

At any rate, a question does arise as to whether the world is physical, a combination of physical and mental, mental, or something else. This is a metaphysical question, and it's easy enough to see how it came about. It was being debated in one form or another in the ancient philosophical world of several independent cultures.

The dispute over the theories of time doesn't make sense to me — Snakes Alive

How is it that the dispute doesn't make sense to you?

Now it's just a matter of time before Quantum Mechanics makes its introduction into a metaphysical dispute.

We can meaningfully discuss gravity because we all agree on our experience of it, — Pseudonym

Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was no concept of gravity, despite our experiences in common of falling things.

How else do you account for differences of opinion on metaphysical matters? — Pseudonym

The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. It doesn't make the disagreements meaningless, the questions that led to the disputes, or the potential answers provided.

And so it seems we're back to where we started. Yes, it may lead to "the question", but none of this shows any reason to believe we can provide a meaningfulanswer to it. — Pseudonym

The answers provided are meaningful, but it's not a settled manner which one, if any, are true.

This is better than the situation in philosophy; vague terms are meaningful, but meaningless ones are not. — Snakes Alive

Any dispute on any topic will require moving beyond vague terms. If I ask whether Thor is more powerful than the Hulk in the Marvel Universe (comics or movies), then this is going to lead to a discussion of who's physically stronger versus who has access to what powers in various incarnations of both characters such that you won't end up with a simple answer.

but we can have virtually no meaningful discussion about something like universals or tropes because we do not even begin to agree on the nature of the experience that they are attempting to define. — Pseudonym

Actually, we can do so by noting that while we perceive individual things, our language is full of universal talk. This is at least partly based on the further perception that some universals have the same property values. This leads to the question of what is it about the world or ourselves which results in creating universal concepts.

The SEP entry spells this out in detail. There's nothing so incredibly esoteric or mystical about the debate that any person of average intelligence sufficiently motivated can't understand.

Some aspects of the various positions and disputes might be technical enough to present difficulties in understanding for non-philosophers, but that would likely be the case for any long standing philosophical discussion.

You're begging the question. How do you propose to demonstrate that the disagreements are 'understood'? — Pseudonym

This is a silly game to play. How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate?

What possible reason do I have for thinking that an analysis of the sentences used in an argument about those terms will actually yield some information about the way the world actually is? — Pseudonym

Well hopefully one isn't just talking about linguistic analysis when asking questions about the world. Seems like that's what the anti-metaphysical crowd would prefer to do. But when someone like David Chalmers is talking about consciousness, he's not interested in only the words being used, but rather whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world (whether it be physicalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc).

It's a perfectly ordinary question with a perfectly ordinary answer – anyone will tell you that a human is conscious much of the time, but a plant never is. — Snakes Alive

LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mean more than one thing. A little bit more discussion, and you'll find out that people don't always agree on what it means for a human to be conscious.

That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it.

And then lo and behold, you find out some people think that plants are actually conscious (along with rocks and everything else).

I’m confident users of this forum are capable of understanding metaphysical questions.

I agree with this; although I would say some people do take it seriously, in the sense that they are emotionally invested in reality being one imagined way or another, even though those imagined ways are not really clear conceptions of anything substantive. — Janus

It's interesting that appeals are made to emotion to explain away the existence of arguments for metaphysical positions. As if a philosopher's motivation has anything to do with the soundness of the arguments they produce. And if it does, then all argument is impugned, since humans make arguments, and humans possess emotions.

But that's a logical fallacy. It really doesn't matter what sort of emotional investment someone has in an argument, when it comes to analyzing the argument itself. The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true.

There are abstract implication-facts, in the sense that they can be stated and discussed. What more "existence" should they have? — Michael Ossipoff

There are many reasons to think experience is not primary.

1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.

2. Our bodies were born.

3. Human bodies evolved.

4. The universe existed prior to human experience. It's also much larger than our experience.

And so on.

Is Hawking some sort of universal expert such that he can make pronouncements on the status of entire domains and declare them "dead"?

Or does he just draw media attention?

It seems reasonable to me to say that in the real world as well as in maths, a universal is the set of all objects that have the relevant property. — andrewk

Right, so we at least recognize that the world and math have a structure such that we can classify based on relevant properties. And yeah it makes sense that we know about properties by the fact that there are different properties to distinguish between. The world appears to be both particular and universal.

The examples used by Carnap are statements unlike those, made by a philosopher I will not name and involve what the nameless one called "the Nothing." — Ciceronianus the White

And it may very well be that Carnap is right in this case. I'm not arguing that all metaphysical statements are meaningful. However, I'm not well versed on Heidegger, so I don't know what he was trying to say there. Maybe it was like poetry.

If your question is about why, given that people perceive that something has a certain property, they conclude other things have it too, this is a psychological question. — Snakes Alive

So you're saying that things in the world don't actually have the same properties, we just think they do.

There is no one answer to this question. For example, tigers have a bunch of properties in common because they sexually reproduce according to a biological template. Nuts and bolts made from a factory have a lot of properties in common because they're cut according to a mold. Jokes by comedians can have properties in common because comedians have similar sense of humor, etc. — Snakes Alive

Alright, here is the thing. If there are properties that are the same across particulars, then there are universal properties. That means in addition to particulars, there are properties. However, we only ever perceive the individual properties. You still end up with this dichotomy between the particular perception, and the generality of properties. So you've replaced the problem of universal categories with the problem of universal properties.

You can group things together however you want. It can be by a shared property, or not. It makes no sense to ask "how you group." — Snakes Alive

Sure, but we do in fact group things in non-arbitrary manner most of the time, and it's based on properties in common.

If the class is what is common to the particulars in the group, then you seem to be talking about a property. If so, why not speak ordinary English and refer to it as a property? — Snakes Alive

A class isn't one property, it's all the properties shared by a group. But okay, we can focus on one property. How is it that particulars can have the same property?

I have no notion of a class except a group of individuals, or a criterion for sorting individuals into groups. — Snakes Alive

So hard core nominalism. Are your groupings completely arbitrary? You mentioned before that individuals can share the same properties. I assume you group based on shared or similar properties. The class is what is common to the particulars in your group.

I would add a caveat about "determining" the truth: a verificationist would at least like to know what would count as evidence, whether obtainable or not, whether dispositive or not. — Srap Tasmaner

I believe I only need to provide the truth condition for a non-verificationaist account of meaning. What would it mean for a verification-transcendant statement to be true?

In the case of universals, truth would be that particulars have the same properties because of universals. It could be possible to determine this truth if an argument showed that universals were necessary for particulars to have the same properties.

(I would add a caveat about "determining" the truth: a verificationist would at least like to know what would count as evidence, whether obtainable or not, whether dispositive or not.) — Srap Tasmaner

(1) Classes aren't individuals
(2) Therefore, there can't be classes, if there are individuals? — Snakes Alive

No, there can't only be individuals. Classes are a universal concept.

Why on Earth would the existence of individuals be in conflict with the existence of classes? — Snakes Alive

Because classes aren't individuals.

But as I said then, this is silly: to ask why a tiger is a member of the tiger-class is to ask why a tiger is a tiger. If this is the "problem," then it's not a very difficult one. — Snakes Alive

The simplest way to put it is that if the world consists of individuals, then how can there be a tiger class? Your answer is that they share properties. Okay, how do they share properties? What do you mean by "share"?

My evidence for this is that when asked what it is about, they can't explain it. — Snakes Alive

Did you find the programming example lacking in explanation where you can create a class for objects which share behavior and types of properties in virtue of the class? You can also create class-level properties that all objects of that class have access to.

Classes are the role universals would play in the real world if they exist. The idea of classes and objects is inspired by our conceptualization of the world.

Can you come up with a hypothetical way to verify that there really are entities you'd call universals? — Srap Tasmaner

Actually, I don't think we have to be able to in principle determine the truth of a proposition to say it's meaningful. Universals are meaningful because the issue that gives rise to them is the discrepancy between our perceptions of particulars and the use of universals in language. How is it that we come to think and speak of the world in abstract terms? Does this say something about the nature of the world, or just our cognition or linguistic practices?

That's a meaningful question.

Can you come up with a hypothetical way to verify that there really are entities you'd call universals? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not a verificationist, so I'd say an argument could in principle settle the manner. According to the SEP entry, hard realism and trope nominalism are the only two candidates left standing in the debate, as all others have been shown to be untenable.

Street or Apo might have a different approach to the question that avoids the typical answers in the universals debate. My contention is that it's intelligible because we can meaningfully debate the issue (regardless of how it's approached), with the in principle possibility of resolving it in favor of some theory one day.

Nobody thinks that's a criterion for meaningfulness. Anyone who goes down the verificationist road will say, x is a meaningless proposition if it cannot in principle be verified. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay, so dragons on planets too far away for us to ever visit or resolve the image to tell. For Caesar, we have no means for recovering the number of hairs on his head. Of course we can invent hypothetical ways to verify both involving time machines and warp drive, but then the verification turns into a theoretical exercise, which is not empirical.

However, certain of those concepts, ideas, thoughts, whatever you wish to call them, are not empirically verifiable as others are. They serve a different purpose, It's merely that we should distinguish one kind from another, and not treat them as the same or having the same function. — Ciceronianus the White

Sure, but say we wanted to know whether dragons could exist on some other planet. The first line of inquiry would be whether there is a reasonable path evolution could take to produce a creature we would consider a dragon (large reptile that can spit fire and fly at a minimum). If not, then the second line would be whether a dragon could be bioengineered within what we know of chemistry and biology.

We don't have any empirical evidence for dragons, nor do we possess the means to check for them on extrasolar planets, but we might be able to conceive of them coming to exist within known science. If so, the existence of dragons somewhere in the cosmos would be a possibility.

The point here is that dragons existing somewhere else is an intelligible proposition despite our inability to verify it (at least currently). Similarly, the number of hairs on Julius Caesar's head the moment before he died is intelligible, even though we lack the ability to extract that information from the past.

Language is an empirical phenomenon, its existence and its use are verifiable; why should its meaning be otherwise? — Ciceronianus the White

Language use is empirical. Language understanding is cognitive. We can form concepts which are not empirical. Some of these can be applied to the world in order to explain the observable.

A metaphysical question is meaningful if it's content is intelligible. I'm convinced that universals, as an example, are intelligible. They may not exist, but they are a concept with cognitive content that doesn't involve contradiction.