Bill Snedden

As to why:

Short answer: this conversation. How could it occur if there were not something to act and/or interact?

Longer answer: perceptions, qualia, etc. Not the "things" that appear to be perceived or felt, but the phenomenon themselves. They would seem not to require semiotic interactions and thus would appear to be devoid, on their most base, subjective level, of any interpreted content.

As to how:

Nasty question. Sensory perception mediated through consciousness? Too simple, but I'm wary of treading this terribly contentious territory. Right now I'm more concerned with trying to understand the relationship (if there is one) of ontology and epistemology. If nothing exists, we really don't need to worry much about neurophysiology, do we?

Oooh. I feel your pain. I seem to be afflicted with a similar turn of mind.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

John Page

Thanks. I guess we come to the game with very different perspectives. For the "why" my take is a competitive advantage in the survival stakes - awareness of our surroundings and ability to interpret/anticipate them are powerful capabilities. This doesn't mean, though, that the something that exists is the soemthing that we think exists (or that the way we understand it is accurate).

For the how, I'd answer differently but in the same vein. If we know because of the thinking process, it comes down to unraveling what thinking comprises.

Cheers, John

Hugo Holbling

Hi, Bill. Feel free to bash coherence all you like, 'coz i ain't sellin' it.

The explanation is simple: John is forwarding me some diamonds; when i get them, i'll sell 'em and you'll get your cash.

I have it, and i'll wager Luise does too. Feel free to quote therefrom.

Have you had a crack at answering this yourself, rather than supposing it to be evidence for intrinsicality? I don't mean to be trite in my response, but perhaps you're in the matrix with me? (Hopefully John's diamonds are too...)

The question of causality that you raise is an interesting one, no doubt, and there is a nice paper on it in the last edition of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, if you can get hold of a copy. Consider the comment of Venn, quoted therein:

The author proposes to bin talk of the causal relation and instead discuss the many ways in which events are related. What do you think? Moreover, what would you say of the part you play in determining which sensation you experience?

I didn't say they were; rather, if we can know nothing about either of your "IFs", such talk of reality is meaningless, or not far therefrom. It's partly on these grounds that talk of reality in the philosophy of science is considered so difficult, which of course impacts upon whether it makes any sense in general philosophy.

I hope you'll consider my latest wriggling worthy of a response. I am trying to explain what i'm questioning no less than you are, but i think the difference between us is so subtle that it may take us awhile to get there.

Dominus Paradoxum

Rank verificationism. The very point at issue in the debate over realism is whether we can meaningfully say something about a reality we can't be directly aquainted with, so you cannot simply declare without argument that talk of it is meaningless simply because we have no direct access to it. I think I can discuss your sensations quite meaning fully irrespective of the fact that I myself can know nothing about them. If that is so, it would seem your theory does not hold. You have argued in other threads that some of our knowledge of the history of science is inadequate. How can this be unless our conjectures do not match the way it "really happened"? And I base my estimate of Wittgenstein's response on the Philosophical Investigations, numbers 689 and 691. What do you base yours on?

Hugo Holbling

I don't think you know what verificationism is, nor understand the debate over realism. Moreover, the idea that an instrumentalist account cannot explain the rejection of ideas is long out-of-date in the philosophy of science. If you think history is troubled by the question you pose, you may care to look into the matter via Shapin's A Social History Of Truth. More importantly, though, you are no doubt aware of the principle of charity and its use in philosophical discussions. I suggest you employ it, or this conversation will cease very quickly.

Dominus Paradoxum

I know full well what verificationism is, and your view, if not verificationism proper, is still verificationistic. Only instead of verifying propositions and calling them true, the instrumentalist says they "work" if they pass the test of experince. You said:

It does not follow, simply because we have no direct epistemic access to reality, that talk of it is meaningless. Whether or not we can meaningfully discuss reality is the very point at issue, and you cannot simply stipulate that such talk is meaningless.

I never said that. What I pointed out was that we can perfectly well discuss that to which we have no direct cognitive access. What I also pointed out was that your characterization of our (the posters here) knowledge of the history of science, for example, the Galileo affair, as innaccuate makes no sense unless you accept that there is some way it really happend, as opposed to the way the posters he think it happened. What I intended to convey was, if you accept a minimal realism about propositions concerning history, why can't you accept a minimal realism about the propositions of science?

Hugo Holbling

Perhaps some do, but the point is rather more that theories with greater predictive power are called useful.

To answer your previous point, i was refering to Wittgenstein's Lecture On Ethics. You may not consider this applicable to the current discussion, but i think it's one of his most overlooked works. The latter part and closing remarks are interesting here because i consider talk of realism to be "running against the walls of our cage"; i.e. i agree with Laudan that realism is the "ultimate petitio principii" and am more suspicious that he about the possibility in principle of a realistic epistemology. Nevertheless, this is far from the OP and i suggest we discuss the matter privately, if you wish to do so.

This - again - is far from the OP, but i don't agree. We have a number of theories that attempt to explain what we take to be facts and some of the former appear to make more sense of the latter better than others. In this case, as elsewhere, it simply doesn't follow that greater explanatory power implies being closer to "what really happened."

My apologies, but i regard the latter as pretty hopeless; although not definitively, i think realists have a long way to go before they overcome their "monumental case of begging the question".

Bill Snedden

That's an interesting line of thought and I can't say that I disagree. Have you read Alvin Plantinga's "evolutionary" argument against Naturalism? ("Naturalism Defeated?": IIRC, it's the last chapter of "Warrant and Proper Function") He touches on your "thesis", although he's not nearly as sanguine about the possibilties as you and I. Anyway, I think you'd find it interesting (if not very convincing). There's a copy on the web somewhere, but I don't have access to the link from here.

I can go along with that as well. I have high hopes that future advances in neurophysiology will reveal more and more about how we think what we think...

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Luiseach

I thought TD's contribution earlier in the thread was rather good, actually, at explaining some of the interesections between the idea of 'truth' and religion.

However, to take it a step further, I would say that the idea of 'truth' has the following religious connotations:

'faith'

The semi-recent etymology of the word 'truth' is rather enlightening:

Middle English trewthe, from the Old English treowth (fidelity), akin to Old English faithful. (Merriam-Webster, s.v. 'truth').

With regards to philosophy and 'truth,' here's some of what we get:

'A transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality' (MW, s.v. 'truth').

These dictionary definitions of 'truth' seem to suggest that these may be the sub-texts for our philosophical discussions of the idea of truth. How far do we think that these traces of religious 'meaning' in the history of the word still affect our secular/atheistic/agnostic/philosophical conceptualisations of what is true?

Luiseach

lol...chance would be a fine thing! ;-)


We shall never know the 'true' nature of any given signified...the signifiers are all we have to work with. 'Reality' is represented to us through the text we inherit, through the signifying system, and our perspectives are 'constructed' within and by its self-referentiality.

Derrida has the same dilemma in mind...since we are forced to use the language to analyse the language, how can we ever hope to develop a language about language, a 'meta-language'? It would seem to be an impossible task, yes?