NialScorva

If pigs had wings, they'd look pretty funny. We don't have telepathy, thus any hypothetical simularity is meaningless. The sensation is a brute fact, not a truth claim, and is subjective anyway. Water that is hot for me may not be too hot for you, and hallucinations of burning, freezing, and crawling insects are all brute fact sensations but not true by most definitions.

Draygomb

NialScorva

What's not true about the concept of heat/temperature?

YHWH666

>>NialScorva

>>Communicate to me what "square" and "circle" >>mean without using any empirical references.

While you can't communicate (externalise) an imagineary mental concept with out an empirical referance point, you can imagine (internally) ANY hypothetical concept.

How would you comunicate to Hellen Keller what "blue" was like? You can't.

Thats not to say that Hellen Keller can't build various imaginary models of what "blue" might be like, one of wich might happen to real.

case

This is the first message I've posted to the forum, and I thought I would sink my teeth into this one. There is an interesting dialogue between the father and son in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Matinence", where the father tells his son that he neither believes in ghost nor the laws of science. Shermer covers this in one of his books, I think.

Basically, the father says that that the law of gravity was not discovered until Newton, and yet gravity surely existed before this time. And yet, like ghosts, the law of gravity has no mass, energy, and was known by no one. It just passed every test of non-existance that we have. It didn't exist until Newton thought it up, in his head.

Just thought I'd throw that out. Let me know what you think.

Francois Tremblay

That is patent nonsense. The theory of gravity is a proposition, and ghosts are not supposed to be propositions - they are supposed to be existants. If the analogy was correct, then ghosts are nothing but vain discourse, and I would agree because that's all that they are.

This is nothing but a rephrasing of the old saw "God is love". You should know better than get your information from a book called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (^_^)

[ February 10, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

NialScorva

How can they be false? I guess a better way to say what I was trying to say is that such direct empirical concepts are trivially true. Yet they cannot be truth claims because claims must be *about* such brute facts, rather than *being* brute facts. It's like claiming that "+" is true. There's no way to judge whether it's true or not because it's a simple object in itself. You can say "1+1=2" or "+ is a closed operation among integers", but then you're either using it as an element in a truth claim, or speaking about it. Just like Helen Keller in the excerpt, the brute fact of the whole doll experience had no connection with the other doll experience until she had a symbology that she could relate them. Suddenly {experiences X} became more than a brute fact, they became an extension onto a different set of experiences and she could make the claim that {experiences X} is equivalent to "doll", and she could sympathize with the label, not just the brute experience.

NialScorva

Welcome to the fray.



Remember that we're talking about truth claims, and though she might imagine various possibilities, there's no confirmable way for her to know that she has the correct imagine.

Quine talks about this in his book "Word and Object". As you note, we deal with words and concepts all the time that we have not or could not experienced. He points out that this is a syntactic learning rather than experiencial learning. We can learn the symbol "blue", how it fits in with the language, how it is used and combines to make true statements, all without knowing the experience of "blue". This just further shows the distinction between a truth claim (and the language it's claimed in) being disconnected from that which the claim is *about*.

Clutch

Whether you need to name something in order to be able to make truth-apt statements about it is very different from whether you need a language to do so. The two come apart if, for example, expressions like "that" and "this", and ostensive acts like pointing, are not taken as names. (As seems plausible on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic grounds.) Language provides at least these means of referring to an object without specifying a concept under which it falls, except perhaps "object of this act of reference", or some similar essentially indexical concept.

case

The analogy was that like ghosts, the law of gravity has no mass or energy. It isn't someting that you can "see". You can see the effects of gravity, but not gravity itself, and certainly not the "law" of gravity. Suppossedly, ghosts act in the same way. I don't believe in ghosts, but the point was that how can you believe in the law of gravity if it is essintially the same as a ghost?

Why this is relevent to the title of a book is beyond me.

Francois Tremblay

I've already explained, if you had read my last post. Ghosts are entities, the theory of gravity is a proposition. That's like using a comparaison between apples and oranges to say that fruits are illogical.