Who- why- where are we ?

So what's really going on?

Moderators: AMod, iMod

User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:
Londoner wrote:I beg to differ. If I haven't convinced you, try putting 'not knowing if something is or isn't the case' into a piece of formal logic.

There you go: http://cas2.umkc.edu/philosophy/vade-mecum/3-1.htm The name for the formula "it is not the case that..." is negation.
Yes, negation. You should read it. 'Not' isn't the same as 'not knowing'. If you don't know something, then you cannot say whether it is or is not the case. If I do not know which city is the capital of France, I do not know 'the capital of France is not Calais'

Once again you forgot about what the point in discussion was. I said logical consequences can be inferred from the initial premise of not knowing something, you said it wasn't possible because it couldn't be translated to formal logic; I just showed you that it can:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
It is not the case that Yanomami people know cars exist. Therefore, they find no use in gasoline.
It is not the case that philosophers know noumena exists. Therefore, they cannot proclaim its existence.
It is not the case that I know that my senses are reliable. Therefore, I must put reliability on something else.

It seems you have missed the well known faculty of embedding propositions.
Given X= I dislike (), y= Mary thinks (), z= playing poker is fine, then:
[X (y (z))]
[I dislike (Mary thinks (playing poker is fine))]

The verb "to know" can enter in any of such clauses:
[I know that (Mary doesn't know that (Frank knows the answers))]
Londoner wrote:1) Yes! Discussions about phenomena are not discussions within logic. You were the one who introduced the claim your argument was logical.
2) No it really doesn't.
3) If you are discussing the nature of logic, that is not a discussion within logic.

1) So, by your own admission, I'm the one employing logic in this discussion and you don't. Actually that makes a lot of sense and confirms my suspicion.
2)How come Aristotelian logic does stay in the field of logic, despite you saying only formal logic with notational symbols is the one that counts as logic?
3) No, Quine is not discussing the nature of logic, he's discussing the application of logic. Quoting from Quine himself:
"Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals."

Londoner wrote: I think you may be unclear on what logic is. Remember, in logic you use symbols like 'P' etc. to stand for the propositions, because they represent any proposition.

You are narrowing the scope of logic just to fit your argument. You have reduced all logic to the logical notations of formal logic. Interestingly, that puts outside the field of logic, just to name a few:
1) All of your own statements in this thread.
2) Aristotelian logic.
3) Most of William Quine's essays in "From a Logical Point of View", including his most famous essay. Except for the ones dealing with Mathematical logic, the logical notation symbols are absent.
Londoner wrote:Because science is a part of philosophy; the philosophy of science looks at the context within which science operates.

In other words, because science (according to you) is within the context of philosophy. So then, "within philosophy" is a context, contrary to your initial claim.
Londoner wrote:So, for example, within science we assume the validity of inductive reasoning, whereas philosophy would examine induction.

That is not how it works, but I won't get into that discussion.
Londoner wrote:There is a double negative in that first sentence which makes it hard to follow. I can only repeat:

Noumena' as used by Kant is whatever 'the thing in itself' might be, as distinct from the 'phenomena' which is how it appears to us.

This isn't something I have made up myself; it is what will come up if you Google 'noumenal'. 'The noumenon is a posited object or event that exists without sense or perception'.

Again, I don't think there is any point in my keeping repeating this and you then glossing it next time as 'so what you are saying is...'

Well, Kant may say so, or Google, but what is that Londoner says? You've been caught applying circular reasoning to this noumena/phenomena concept, and it's very unlikely you'll advance any further. By now, I'm pretty much aware that you will not take a clear and firm position on anything. You will just conform to deny statements, resorting to sophistry, even if you have to constantly contradict yourself.
Londoner wrote:Your perceptions are arbitrary in that they depend on the sensory organs humans happen to possess, and the conditions in which they make those perceptions, and the general way you interpret the world.

Three times wrong. First, our sensory organs are not arbitrarily constructed, they have structure and functions, so having them will not make any perception arbitrary, at best just relative to those organs. It's not the same to say that something is relative, than to say is arbitrary. Secondly, perception may be relative to sensory organs, but it would be a mistake to say that ONLY sensory organs participate in perception, as if the origin of sensation were the sensory organ, and nothing else determined the perceptual experience, not even the objects themselves perceived.
Third, is hard to reconcile your claim that nothing we can be certain of, with your statement that "perceptions...depend on the sensory organ humans happen to possess". Sensory organs are, by your accounts, noumena, just the same as grass, and you wouldn't know what and how they are, or that humans posess them. You wouldn't know that perception depends on them, that would be an assumption by faith.
Londoner wrote:So it is not your perception but rather what you call 'reason' that makes you believe it was around 30 million years ago etc.

Reason on the basis of perceptions that are corroborated by independent observations.
Londoner wrote:By looking at a bit of rock now, you cannot tell whether it has been around for all that time, or whether it was created a second ago. We humans create a theory, a structure, to explain things like rocks. This structure (usually) matches the nature of our perceptions. But many theories are possible; maybe God created the universe as it is (including fossils etc.) 6000 years ago - we cannot disprove that through our perceptions. Or we are brains in a vat, our perceptions of 'rocks and what rocks are like' being fed to us by the masters of the matrix.

As I have always stated, our natural, immediate understanding of nature is naive, but even our basic cognitive abilities, combined with the regular patterns of the perceived environment and tools acquired in social life, allow us to grasp in our understanding the underlying order of the world. We know the rock was there before we arrived, it occupies a space, and so on. We can go further and study the rock in more detail, discover things that are not obvious to the naked eye and come up with hypothesis of how it came to be. Of all things in general such hypothesis have been proposed, like gods and supernatural entities being behind all, but most of them were disproved using the tools of science, as it progressed. We know now that the hypothesis of a supernatural entity creating all flora and fauna 6000 years ago does not hold water. It's been such a steady, consistent refutation of such ideas that are the ones we have learned to be more skeptical of.
Londoner wrote:So, we create a theory that fits with perception. Where it doesn't fit in with perception, we tweak it until it does. Having done that, then of course our perceptions are no longer understood as arbitrary, of course they all fit together, because that was the object of the theory.

The problem is that you see the theory as the work of one individual, but theories are constructed socially, even if they are being proposed by one individual. Observations and claims about the world are contrasted among many, allowing more objective accounts. To a higher degree in science, eliminating errors of bias or technical issues in obtaining information.
Londoner wrote:Remember, the 'things in themselves' are supposed to be 'a posited object or event that exists without sense or perception'. But you can only know things via perception. You are claiming to know, via perception, things that by definition are beyond perception.

The statement "object or event that exists without sense or perception" means "without the need of sense or perception", not "excluded of sense or perception". And "via perception" means "through perception". "Via" is the latin word for "way" or "road", so perception is the road, the bridge through which knowledge is acquired. And what are the things we know via perception? Aren't they the "things in themselves"? You're claiming this time that they can't be, even though you have claimed before that we don't know, in other words, that it's possible that the things we know via perception are the "things in themselves". If you're not certain of anything, you can't deny anything.
Londoner wrote:But even one particular piece doesn't. The colour of the same piece of grass will be different under different lights, and to beings with different sorts of eyes. If we see the grass as 'green' we also know that what we are seeing is not a specific property of the grass.

But that only means that the experience of colour in grass will arise from the combined effect of the specific properties of light, the specific properties of the grass leaves to reflect light wavelengths and the specific properties of the eyes with their color-sensitive cone cells. Those are a lot of "things in themselves".
Londoner wrote:'As appropriated'? It is very simple; if we make any claims about the accuracy of our mental representation, then we must be making a comparison with something else, some 'non-mental representation'. Unfortunately, we can never get outside our own heads and do the comparison.

What is "getting outside our heads"? We are not inside our heads, our heads are part of us, residing in a world of things. Our body already give us a connectivity with that world of things through our senses. It's called cognition and it implies recognizing at least our sense organs.
Londoner wrote:And (from your analogy) the fact we are obliged to guess about the real nature of the object by comparing all these different representations, rather than having one single consistent representation does tell us one thing; that no particular representation is reliable. So we do not know what THE TRUTH is, but we do know we are not in possession of it.

The thing is: we are bombarded by sensations. And not only that, we can manipulate them, we move and see the changes of perspective, we feel our own locomotion and how our body responds to our commands or to actions from other bodies. We know the truth that we are in the world, that we can act and transform.
Londoner wrote:That's right, ultimately there is nothing we can be certain of. As I have written before, if there is something you believe it would be impossible to question at some level, I will be interested to hear it.

Do you believe that it's impossible to question the claim that there is nothing we can be certain of? Because that looks like something you are certain of...
Belinda
Posts: 8034
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Conde Lucanor wrote:
Do you believe that it's impossible to question the claim that there is nothing we can be certain of? Because that looks like something you are certain of...
But reason is open ended .Despite reason's being our best attempt at truth, reason embraces uncertainty.
Londoner
Posts: 783
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2016 8:47 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: Once again you forgot about what the point in discussion was. I said logical consequences can be inferred from the initial premise of not knowing something, you said it wasn't possible because it couldn't be translated to formal logic;
Pointing out that it could not be expressed in formal logic was just one of the many ways I have tried to suggest you are mistaken about what logic is.
I just showed you that it can:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
I already went through that and all your other examples and explained this.

Just putting in the word 'therefore' does not necessarily make it deductive. Is the 'therefore' telling us the meaning of the words? In 'He is a bachelor therefore he is unmarried', all we are doing is explaining what the word 'bachelor' means. So are you telling us that 'a case that remains open' means the same thing as 'one where we do not know who did it'? That is not deductive; a dictionary is not a work of logic.

If you were to start to turn it into a logical argument you would have to clarify what you mean, and not just by getting ride of the double negatives. As it stands, it does not follow. For example, it might be the case that we did not know who shot Kennedy (because we are ignorant of that fact) but everyone else, including the legal authorities, do and have therefore closed the case. Or that everyone does know who shot Kennedy, but the case remains open for some other reason (they cannot prove it, or they have lost the files, or whatever).

If you are doing logic, you have got to turn your sentences into propositions (premises). If it is a proposition, it must be capable of being either true or false, which is why the whole of your example (if it was meant in the dictionary sense) could not be a proposition. And it has to be propositions (plural), because the conclusion, the 'therefore' will follow from the relationship between those propositions. When you write the conclusion you are supposed to refer to the logical rule you have used.

And finally, you will have proved no fact about the world. In logic, we simply assume the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions. When you write your 'therefore' line, you should note any assumptions on which it rests, in other words the conclusion is always provisional . The form is always 'If....then....'.
3) No, Quine is not discussing the nature of logic, he's discussing the application of logic. Quoting from Quine himself:

"Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals."
I have no idea why you think quoting that sentence supports your argument.
Me: Because science is a part of philosophy; the philosophy of science looks at the context within which science operates.
In other words, because science (according to you) is within the context of philosophy. So then, "within philosophy" is a context, contrary to your initial claim.
Yes, science and logic have their own sets of rules. We can do science or logic, that is we can follow their rules, or we can question those rules. They are types of knowledge, whereas philosophy looks at the problem of 'knowledge' in a general sense.
Well, Kant may say so, or Google, but what is that Londoner says? You've been caught applying circular reasoning to this noumena/phenomena concept, and it's very unlikely you'll advance any further. By now, I'm pretty much aware that you will not take a clear and firm position on anything. You will just conform to deny statements, resorting to sophistry, even if you have to constantly contradict yourself.
I have simply explained what those words mean; and yes, the meaning of one excludes the other. You must have come across this before in language; the meaning of 'real' excludes 'unreal', 'red' excludes 'green' etc.

If you are uncomfortable with this, if you do not think the expressed distinction exists, or is meaningful, then say why. But as I have said before, you seem to want to preserve the distinction but deny it at the same time.
Three times wrong. First, our sensory organs are not arbitrarily constructed, they have structure and functions, so having them will not make any perception arbitrary, at best just relative to those organs. It's not the same to say that something is relative, than to say is arbitrary
.

But that would be the same for any sense organs. A cabbage also senses its environment and reacts. So it's organs also have a function. What is arbitrary is deciding that the configuration of your own sense organs just happens to be designed to give you a special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation. You will need to bring in God, as the benevolent designer of mankind, to explain this leap of faith.
Secondly, perception may be relative to sensory organs, but it would be a mistake to say that ONLY sensory organs participate in perception, as if the origin of sensation were the sensory organ, and nothing else determined the perceptual experience, not even the objects themselves perceived.
The 'perceptual experience' is only determined by our organs of perception. If you go blind, you will find your 'perceptual experience' of seeing is drastically altered. If you go into a darkened room, you will get a similar effect.

Yes, there may still be 'objects themselves', somewhere in that darkened room, but they will not 'determine my experience' because you will not experience them.

We can try introducing more humans into that darkened room, but they will have just the same experience as us. So by using our perceptual experience have we have verified that there are no 'objects themselves in the room?

Because you can't have it both ways. If our sensations tells us about what really is in the world, then you must extend the same authority to any absence of sensation.
Third, is hard to reconcile your claim that nothing we can be certain of, with your statement that "perceptions...depend on the sensory organ humans happen to possess". Sensory organs are, by your accounts, noumena, just the same as grass, and you wouldn't know what and how they are, or that humans posess them. You wouldn't know that perception depends on them, that would be an assumption by faith.
I think that my perceptions depend on my organs of perception because 'perception' involves myself as subject. If I close my eyes, I find my experience changes.

But yes, since we are doing philosophy we must allow that it is possible that I am just a brain in a vat, and that I do not really have eyes. So all I can really know is that I had a changed sensation, and that my 'close eye' experience is usually related to the 'goes dark' experience.

I do not understand the reference to 'noumena'.
As I have always stated, our natural, immediate understanding of nature is naive, but even our basic cognitive abilities, combined with the regular patterns of the perceived environment and tools acquired in social life, allow us to grasp in our understanding the underlying order of the world. We know the rock was there before we arrived...
No, we don't; not via perception. You cannot see the rock before you were there to see it.

All this 'cognitive abilities' and 'grasp in our understanding'...absolutely. That is indeed how we interpret the world, and very well it works too. But it is not about perception; indeed we can only understand perception if we think outside-the-box of perception. When we stop being a baby playing peek-a-boo. When we can get our heads around the (non)sensational hypothesis that 'the rock is there...even if we can't see it!'
But that only means that the experience of colour in grass will arise from the combined effect of the specific properties of light, the specific properties of the grass leaves to reflect light wavelengths and the specific properties of the eyes with their color-sensitive cone cells. Those are a lot of "things in themselves".
So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'. OK, so can we say anything about thegrass-in-itself? Since every other perceived property of the grass will also involve combined effects, the specific properties of our sensory organs and so on, I do not see that we can. So we are left with the notion that the grass-in-itself may have some qualities, but we cannot say what they are. And we are back to Kant and the noumenal.
Me: That's right, ultimately there is nothing we can be certain of. As I have written before, if there is something you believe it would be impossible to question at some level, I will be interested to hear it.
Do you believe that it's impossible to question the claim that there is nothing we can be certain of? Because that looks like something you are certain of...
Then question away.

I can only point to all the things we might describe as 'knowledge' and say it is true of them. It might be that you or somebody else will discover a new sort of knowledge, something that is both necessarily true but not just a tautology...but pending this discovery it remains a fact about us humans and our knowledge that there is nothing we can be certain of.
Belinda
Posts: 8034
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Correction. I wrote that reason embraces uncertainty. but reason includes not only inductive(synthetic claims) reasoning, but also formal logic, which is deductive and analytic not synthetic.

Reasoning:

1. analytic, deductive, formal logic

and also
2. synthetic, inductive, probabilistic logic.
User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:Pointing out that it could not be expressed in formal logic was just one of the many ways I have tried to suggest you are mistaken about what logic is.
Your attempt fell short when it was proven that it could be expressed in formal logic and in any type of logical analysis.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:I just showed you that it can:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
Just putting in the word 'therefore' does not necessarily make it deductive. Is the 'therefore' telling us the meaning of the words? In 'He is a bachelor therefore he is unmarried', all we are doing is explaining what the word 'bachelor' means. So are you telling us that 'a case that remains open' means the same thing as 'one where we do not know who did it'? That is not deductive; a dictionary is not a work of logic.
Nothing in the example has to do with definitions, it is not an analytic statement. That is completely absurd. It's interesting how you shifted from the problem being whether you could or could not put "it is not the case that we know..." as an initial premise in a logical proposition, as has been proven, to the connective value of other terms in the statement, or the complete structure of the syllogism, as if it would make any difference:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Lack of knowledge of the authors of assassinations, makes those cases to remain open. Therefore, the John F. Kennedy assassination case remains open.
It is a logical proposition that starts with the premise of "not knowing something".
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:3) No, Quine is not discussing the nature of logic, he's discussing the application of logic. Quoting from Quine himself:

"Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals."
I have no idea why you think quoting that sentence supports your argument.
It's more than obvious: you said Quine's essay was discussing the nature of logic, but Quine himself is saying what it was all about.
Londoner wrote:I have simply explained what those words mean; and yes, the meaning of one excludes the other. You must have come across this before in language; the meaning of 'real' excludes 'unreal', 'red' excludes 'green' etc.

If you are uncomfortable with this, if you do not think the expressed distinction exists, or is meaningful, then say why. But as I have said before, you seem to want to preserve the distinction but deny it at the same time.
As I already explained, as an epistemological distinction, I don't mind much. The problem is you seem to take for granted an ontological distinction, where noumena is one world and phenomena another, which don't touch each other. It all comes down to separating the world of objects from the world of the subject, on the basis of the subject being the one that declares the existence of objects. But if we wanted to be skeptical of the existence of objects, we are obliged to doubt the existence of the subject's body. Only mental states would exist. Hello solipsism, idealism, etc.
Londoner wrote:What is arbitrary is deciding that the configuration of your own sense organs just happens to be designed to give you a special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation. You will need to bring in God, as the benevolent designer of mankind, to explain this leap of faith.
That's the intelligent design argument and no, it's not true. No one has designed sense organs and there's no mysterious undisclosed domain of noumena for which "special insight" is needed. Sense organs have structure and functions because that's the order of nature.

But again, on what basis you would recognize the existence of sense organs, how do you get that "special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation" that you accept for yourself, but deny to others?
Londoner wrote: The 'perceptual experience' is only determined by our organs of perception. If you go blind, you will find your 'perceptual experience' of seeing is drastically altered. If you go into a darkened room, you will get a similar effect.

Yes, there may still be 'objects themselves', somewhere in that darkened room, but they will not 'determine my experience' because you will not experience them.

We can try introducing more humans into that darkened room, but they will have just the same experience as us. So by using our perceptual experience have we have verified that there are no 'objects themselves in the room?

Because you can't have it both ways. If our sensations tells us about what really is in the world, then you must extend the same authority to any absence of sensation.
But sense perception rarely or never happens isolated. We are always living multiple sensations and the absence of one does not eliminate the experience of perception as a whole. The room might go completely dark, but we may still be able to hear, touch or smell the objects, figure out its size, shape, distance from us, etc. Sense and experience may vary, but they don't just go away.
Londoner wrote:I think that my perceptions depend on my organs of perception because 'perception' involves myself as subject. If I close my eyes, I find my experience changes.

But yes, since we are doing philosophy we must allow that it is possible that I am just a brain in a vat, and that I do not really have eyes. So all I can really know is that I had a changed sensation, and that my 'close eye' experience is usually related to the 'goes dark' experience.
Whenever you make up your mind that your own body does not exist, in other words, that all perceptions of things are only illusions, simulations of your mind, you might want to ask yourself why it is that you can't jump as high as buildings like Neo or Morpheus, or why you can't avoid finding Conde Lucanor's post at the simulated philosophy forum.
And if you do make up your mind that your body exist, then hello noumena for you.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:We know the rock was there before we arrived...
No, we don't; not via perception. You cannot see the rock before you were there to see it.
I said "we know the rock was there before", not "we perceived the rock there before". We infer from the whole data of perception that the rock necessarily was there before we arrived.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:But that only means that the experience of colour in grass will arise from the combined effect of the specific properties of light, the specific properties of the grass leaves to reflect light wavelengths and the specific properties of the eyes with their color-sensitive cone cells. Those are a lot of "things in themselves".
So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'.
No. Didn't I mention the specific properties of the grass leaves? And surely we can say a lot of things of those properties in combination with the other conditions that surround the grass (light, molecules in the air, wind, gravity, season, etc.), all of which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes.
Londoner wrote:but pending this discovery it remains a fact about us humans and our knowledge that there is nothing we can be certain of.
How can it be a fact if there's nothing we can be certain of? I wonder how you can express such an obvious contradiction and not realize it.
User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:
Do you believe that it's impossible to question the claim that there is nothing we can be certain of? Because that looks like something you are certain of...
But reason is open ended .Despite reason's being our best attempt at truth, reason embraces uncertainty.
Belinda wrote:Correction. I wrote that reason embraces uncertainty. but reason includes not only inductive(synthetic claims) reasoning, but also formal logic, which is deductive and analytic not synthetic.

Reasoning:

1. analytic, deductive, formal logic

and also
2. synthetic, inductive, probabilistic logic.
Reason can embrace uncertainty, but there's a difference between the absolute uncertainty proposed by Londoner, to having different levels of certainty. The alternative to absolute uncertainty is not absolute certainty. My level of certainty of the sun coming out tomorrow at dawn, or an object falling inside a vacuum at the speed of Earth's gravity, may not be the same as my level of certainty of a black hole being 10 billion light years away, but that is not to say I'm absolutely uncertain of everything.
Belinda
Posts: 8034
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Conde Lucanor wrote:
Reason can embrace uncertainty, but there's a difference between the absolute uncertainty proposed by Londoner, to having different levels of certainty. The alternative to absolute uncertainty is not absolute certainty. My level of certainty of the sun coming out tomorrow at dawn, or an object falling inside a vacuum at the speed of Earth's gravity, may not be the same as my level of certainty of a black hole being 10 billion light years away, but that is not to say I'm absolutely uncertain of everything.

You seem to be uncertain how levels of probability are established. I quite understand the examples you give. My levels of probability are much the same.

I am pretty sure that statisticians have ways to decide upon probabilities in their predictions. Insurers must do so for instance and I expect they employ statistics experts.
osgart
Posts: 517
Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2016 7:38 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by osgart »

certainty can kill you. knowing is better or leaving things non assumed. And our environment there is quite a bit to know and not just be certain.
Londoner
Posts: 783
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2016 8:47 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: Nothing in the example has to do with definitions, it is not an analytic statement. That is completely absurd. It's interesting how you shifted from the problem being whether you could or could not put "it is not the case that we know..." as an initial premise in a logical proposition, as has been proven, to the connective value of other terms in the statement, or the complete structure of the syllogism, as if it would make any difference:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Lack of knowledge of the authors of assassinations, makes those cases to remain open. Therefore, the John F. Kennedy assassination case remains open.
It is a logical proposition that starts with the premise of "not knowing something".
It isn't a matter of me shifting; it is that you cannot express things clearly so I attempt to address all the various possibilities of what you might mean. If you say it was not meant analytically, then as an argument it does not follow, for the reasons I explained last time.
It's more than obvious: you said Quine's essay was discussing the nature of logic, but Quine himself is saying what it was all about.
I agree its obvious. Have you read the book?
As I already explained, as an epistemological distinction, I don't mind much. The problem is you seem to take for granted an ontological distinction, where noumena is one world and phenomena another, which don't touch each other.
'Touch each other'? Another metaphor!
It all comes down to separating the world of objects from the world of the subject, on the basis of the subject being the one that declares the existence of objects. But if we wanted to be skeptical of the existence of objects, we are obliged to doubt the existence of the subject's body. Only mental states would exist. Hello solipsism, idealism, etc.
Yes, it is a drag, but there we are. But you have created the problem; you are the one who is proposing that the existence of some mysterious shadow really-real realm is necessary to support the existence of phenomena. I'm fine with saying the phenomena are reality.
But again, on what basis you would recognize the existence of sense organs, how do you get that "special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation" that you accept for yourself, but deny to others?
I recognise the existence of my sense organs the same way I recognise the existence of everything else, through phenomena.

I do not think the configuration of the human brain or sense organs gives me a "special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation"; that is your claim.
Whenever you make up your mind that your own body does not exist, in other words, that all perceptions of things are only illusions,...
I have dealt with this 'illusions' thing many times.
But sense perception rarely or never happens isolated. We are always living multiple sensations and the absence of one does not eliminate the experience of perception as a whole. The room might go completely dark, but we may still be able to hear, touch or smell the objects, figure out its size, shape, distance from us, etc. Sense and experience may vary, but they don't just go away.
But suppose you don't see, touch, smell or hear those objects in the darkened room. Sense perception is our guide to the noumenal, noumena and phenomena are always 'touching'. You have no sense perceptions, no phenomena. So, those noumenal objects can't exist.

But then...somebody turns the light on, and suddenly some phenomena and thus the noumenal objects leap into existence!

So your claim is that the existence of the noumenal world is not only detected by our sensing it, but created by our sensing it. And I was supposed to be the idealist, solipsist etc.!

These sorts of contradictions will always be created, because you are trying to use the physical to justify a metaphysical idea. No matter what form of words or imaginary situations you use, there is no way for you to get one from the other.
I said "we know the rock was there before", not "we perceived the rock there before". We infer from the whole data of perception that the rock necessarily was there before we arrived.
So you do not say 'we perceived' but rather you say that we had 'data of perception'? And what is the difference? How would we get 'data of perception' except via perception?

What 'data of perception' tells you that something was there before you got that 'data of perception'?

Once again, the key word there is 'infer'. The idea that the rocks are there, even if we are not looking at them at that moment, is a theory that fits our perceptions, it makes sense of them, but that inference is not itself a perception. I can never perceive 'rocks being there when I am not perceiving them'.
Me: So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'.
No. Didn't I mention the specific properties of the grass leaves? And surely we can say a lot of things of those properties in combination with the other conditions that surround the grass (light, molecules in the air, wind, gravity, season, etc.), all of which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes.
So what are those 'specific properties of the grass leaves'? What does the word 'specific' mean there, since everything we say about the grass turns out to depend on things that are not the grass?

Rather than repeat the same points I make above, I would comment here that the mistake is to think a word like 'grass' is the sign of some 'thing' either an set of sensations or an internal mental state, such that if we could only analyse 'grass' carefully enough we could nail it down as being simply the 'sign' for that thing. But I think that 'grass' is only a tool in communication; it has no fixed reference but rather the reference is fixed by what we are communicating. (My pal Wittgenstein agrees).
Me: but pending this discovery it remains a fact about us humans and our knowledge that there is nothing we can be certain of.
How can it be a fact if there's nothing we can be certain of? I wonder how you can express such an obvious contradiction and not realize it.
Because the subjects are different. 'I do not know the way to Glasgow' is not a fact about Glasgow. That we have not discovered an example of a 'synthetic a priori' (in the sense discussed) is a fact about us, not about the hypothetical 'synthetic a priori'.

The claim 'there can be no synthetic a priori' would be a different claim. And it would not necessarily be self-contradictory, because you do not need to assert a 'synthetic a priori' to argue there could not be one; for example you might say that the idea of a 'synthetic a priori' was incoherent.
Londoner
Posts: 783
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2016 8:47 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: Reason can embrace uncertainty, but there's a difference between the absolute uncertainty proposed by Londoner, to having different levels of certainty. The alternative to absolute uncertainty is not absolute certainty. .
Londoner did not propose 'absolute uncertainty'. Londoner pointed out that there was no assertion that could not be questioned on some level. Since you also do not seem to be claiming you can have 'absolute certainty' then it seems you agree with Londoner on that point.
User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote: Nothing in the example has to do with definitions, it is not an analytic statement. That is completely absurd. It's interesting how you shifted from the problem being whether you could or could not put "it is not the case that we know..." as an initial premise in a logical proposition, as has been proven, to the connective value of other terms in the statement, or the complete structure of the syllogism, as if it would make any difference:
It is not the case that we know who shot John F. Kennedy. Lack of knowledge of the authors of assassinations, makes those cases to remain open. Therefore, the John F. Kennedy assassination case remains open.
It is a logical proposition that starts with the premise of "not knowing something".
It isn't a matter of me shifting; it is that you cannot express things clearly so I attempt to address all the various possibilities of what you might mean. If you say it was not meant analytically, then as an argument it does not follow, for the reasons I explained last time.
It's not a matter of whether "I meant it analytically" or not. The statements are synthetic, they convey facts of the world (that could be either true or false). Remember, all we wanted was to test your claim that we couldn't build a logical statement starting with the premise of "not knowing something". It has been tested and your claim is simply wrong.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:It's more than obvious: you said Quine's essay was discussing the nature of logic, but Quine himself is saying what it was all about.
I agree its obvious. Have you read the book?
I'm glad we can agree that Quine's essay is not discussing the nature of logic. I've read most of the essays in the book, which apply logic without using formal logic. It shows logic is not necessarily reduced to formal logic.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:As I already explained, as an epistemological distinction, I don't mind much. The problem is you seem to take for granted an ontological distinction, where noumena is one world and phenomena another, which don't touch each other.
'Touch each other'? Another metaphor!
So what? Connected to, in relationship with, linked to, etc... the point is that you seem to claim there are two worlds apart.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:It all comes down to separating the world of objects from the world of the subject, on the basis of the subject being the one that declares the existence of objects. But if we wanted to be skeptical of the existence of objects, we are obliged to doubt the existence of the subject's body. Only mental states would exist. Hello solipsism, idealism, etc.
Yes, it is a drag, but there we are. But you have created the problem; you are the one who is proposing that the existence of some mysterious shadow really-real realm is necessary to support the existence of phenomena. I'm fine with saying the phenomena are reality.
But what you call phenomena is meant to be only mental states. Since that view is problematic, as it has been shown, monistic materialism and realism are the only alternative.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:But again, on what basis you would recognize the existence of sense organs, how do you get that "special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation" that you accept for yourself, but deny to others?
I recognise the existence of my sense organs the same way I recognise the existence of everything else, through phenomena.
But you recognize only mental states, appearances of things. Your sense organs account for the same category of "things in themselves", the very same things you say are proposed as "the existence of some mysterious shadow really-real realm....necessary to support the existence of phenomena." Therefore, you cannot recognize the existence of your sense organs, unless you want to correct yourself on your previous claims.
Londoner wrote:I do not think the configuration of the human brain or sense organs gives me a "special insight into the noumenal world behind sensation"; that is your claim.
No, that's all yours. You're the one claiming that there's no way to know about things in themselves (which include brains and sense organs). So, when you go back to claim that you recognize your brain and sense organs, you are suddenly having that "special insight into the noumenal ".
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:Whenever you make up your mind that your own body does not exist, in other words, that all perceptions of things are only illusions,...
I have dealt with this 'illusions' thing many times.
If your mind creates a simulation that pretends for you to have a body, and you already made up your mind that your body does not exist, then you are obliged to reach the conclusion that your body is an illusion. And so all things. There's no workaround to it.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:But sense perception rarely or never happens isolated. We are always living multiple sensations and the absence of one does not eliminate the experience of perception as a whole. The room might go completely dark, but we may still be able to hear, touch or smell the objects, figure out its size, shape, distance from us, etc. Sense and experience may vary, but they don't just go away.
But suppose you don't see, touch, smell or hear those objects in the darkened room. Sense perception is our guide to the noumenal, noumena and phenomena are always 'touching'. You have no sense perceptions, no phenomena. So, those noumenal objects can't exist.
I don't really know what to say: when you claim that "sense perception is our guide to the noumenal, noumena and phenomena are always 'touching'..." you are advocating for everything you have opposed in this thread". Your ability to contradict yourself is staggering. But then you don't even follow the obvious conclusion derived from your statement. If, as you claim, noumena connects with phenomena via sense perception, and sense perception is temporarily blocked, the conclusion is not that there isn't noumena, but just that there is no connection to noumena.
Londoner wrote:But then...somebody turns the light on, and suddenly some phenomena and thus the noumenal objects leap into existence!
Oh, really? So, having all our sense perceptions, all our lights on, objects have leapt into noumenal existence?
Londoner wrote:So your claim is that the existence of the noumenal world is not only detected by our sensing it, but created by our sensing it. And I was supposed to be the idealist, solipsist etc.!
Well, besides your blatant contradictions when running away from the label, by this time there's little doubt you advocate for solipsism. Remember, it's you who claim that the world is a creation of our minds. I only claim that is not, that it exists independently of our minds sensing it.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:I said "we know the rock was there before", not "we perceived the rock there before". We infer from the whole data of perception that the rock necessarily was there before we arrived.
So you do not say 'we perceived' but rather you say that we had 'data of perception'? And what is the difference? How would we get 'data of perception' except via perception?

What 'data of perception' tells you that something was there before you got that 'data of perception'?
You're again twisting the sense of the statement. I did not say "we know the rock was there before because we had data of perception", which would look the same as "we know the rock was there before because we perceived the rock" to fit your argument. I said we infer, we arrive to the conclusion of the rock necessarily being there before we arrived.
Londoner wrote:Once again, the key word there is 'infer'. The idea that the rocks are there, even if we are not looking at them at that moment, is a theory that fits our perceptions, it makes sense of them, but that inference is not itself a perception. I can never perceive 'rocks being there when I am not perceiving them'.
Your argument has another problem: you say that we devise theories that fit our perception, but then you would have to explain why, when not perceiving something we have perceived before, we don't devise theories that fit our current perception of the object being absent, in other words, we would have to switch automatically to the the theory of the object not existing. I see my house: I claim it exists; I go to my office: I must claim my house exists no more.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote: So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'.
No. Didn't I mention the specific properties of the grass leaves? And surely we can say a lot of things of those properties in combination with the other conditions that surround the grass (light, molecules in the air, wind, gravity, season, etc.), all of which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes.
So what are those 'specific properties of the grass leaves'? What does the word 'specific' mean there, since everything we say about the grass turns out to depend on things that are not the grass?
How many times do I have to explain it? Aren't the grass leaves essential constituents of the grass?
Londoner wrote:Rather than repeat the same points I make above, I would comment here that the mistake is to think a word like 'grass' is the sign of some 'thing' either an set of sensations or an internal mental state, such that if we could only analyse 'grass' carefully enough we could nail it down as being simply the 'sign' for that thing. But I think that 'grass' is only a tool in communication; it has no fixed reference but rather the reference is fixed by what we are communicating. (My pal Wittgenstein agrees).
But you're dealing there only with the word "grass" and the abstract concept of grass, but that's a different discussion. The problem here is whether we can grasp in our understanding the world as it really is.
User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Londoner did not propose 'absolute uncertainty'.
Oh, yes he did:
Londoner wrote:it remains a fact about us humans and our knowledge that there is NOTHING we can be certain of.
A contradictory statement, by the way.
User avatar
Conde Lucanor
Posts: 846
Joined: Mon Nov 04, 2013 2:59 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:
Reason can embrace uncertainty, but there's a difference between the absolute uncertainty proposed by Londoner, to having different levels of certainty. The alternative to absolute uncertainty is not absolute certainty. My level of certainty of the sun coming out tomorrow at dawn, or an object falling inside a vacuum at the speed of Earth's gravity, may not be the same as my level of certainty of a black hole being 10 billion light years away, but that is not to say I'm absolutely uncertain of everything.

You seem to be uncertain how levels of probability are established. I quite understand the examples you give. My levels of probability are much the same.

I am pretty sure that statisticians have ways to decide upon probabilities in their predictions. Insurers must do so for instance and I expect they employ statistics experts.
Degrees of certainty or uncertainty about the causal regularities of the world are not exactly the same as statistical levels of probability. No one would defy common sense betting on the chances that the speed of an object falling inside a vacuum will be different the next time the experiment is carried out under the same conditions.
osgart
Posts: 517
Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2016 7:38 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by osgart »

what if reality is there regardless of your senses?. and what if our senses are telling us the truth?

senses themselves change with understanding and increasing awareness.

And senses could be 70% accurate.

And they are trustworthy enough to function everyday. so there must be truth to the reality of them.

experience is real. prove its not.

reality also has much that are senses are just blind too, but they don't lie.

maybe we are alive in a vast dark abyss with inanimate grains of matter that are brute and indifferent.

there is actually there. a real location.
Belinda
Posts: 8034
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:13 am

Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Conde Lucanor, when we do inductive reasoning, whether it's the layman's commonsense variety or the statistician's more controlled uncertainty factor, uncertainty is a fact of our lives.

For practical purposes laymen, sociologists, medics, educationists, engineers, and physicists, etc. allow for different proportions of uncertainty /probability.

Deductive(formal) logic has conclusions that are certain inasmuch as validity of the reasoning is certain. However deductive(formal) logic does not advance the structure of knowledge within a culture of belief. Within any given culture of belief knowledge has a margin of uncertainty. Statisticians can narrow that margin of uncertainty, as can scientists who deal in both stats and empiricism.
Post Reply