Conde Lucanor wrote:
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.
If their truth or falsity is determined by 'facts of the world', if they are 'synthetic', then you aren't doing logic.
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.
You do not understand what you have read because you don't understand what logic is; you confuse it with 'making an argument' or 'being rational' or discovering 'facts of the world'. Logic itself is entirely formal; you look
at arguments and try to discover the purely formal relationships
within them. Once you have described a formal relationship the
application of that system of logic is (relatively) simple, it is purely mechanical; it is like doing a sum.
What philosophers like Quine are doing is looking at 'semantics' or 'syntax'. That is, they are looking at the relationship of the sort of reasoning we do when we do science, or say something is 'analytic' or 'synthetic' or represents 'knowledge'.
If we could pin those things down,
then we could put them into a logical system and 'do logic' with them, but it turns out to be difficult, perhaps impossible.
But you recognize only mental states, appearances of things.
I am not going to keep engaging with this repeated misrepresentation of what I have said. I think I know why you keep claiming it, but it is simply a misunderstanding of how language works; see paragraph after next, below.
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 ".
Again, you want to tell me what I am saying.
I see a rock, I see a brain, I see a nose. In each case, the process is the same; light reflected by the object impacts specialized cells in my body which sends an impulse along a nerve etc. then my brain converts that impulse to an experience. All I get, in each case, is the experience. I can theorise about the experience, about its origins, I can note how one experience relates to another - but I can only experience the experience.
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.
I experience my body - 'my body' is the name I give for that experience. I say of my body 'it exists' meaning 'it can be experienced'. If I think 'my leg' is not an 'illusion' it is because I can touch it, I can see it, I can make it interact with other things I can see and touch...all experiences. There is no extra test of 'realness' that I can apply that wouldn't also be an experience.
So why isn't being able to experience things sufficient to qualify them as 'real'? What else have we got apart from experience?
I get that this isn't enough for you; that there must also be this extra test to reveal the really-real, the reality behind experience. But there is no extra test available. Experience is all we have got and all we can ever have, so (if you insist on saying) experience is 'illusion' then yes; everything would be 'illusion'. But what you don't understand (and what leads you to claim that
I think everything is only illusion, appearance etc.) is that if '
everything is illusion' then the word
'illusion' in the sense you understand it becomes meaningless!
(But that is you, not me. For me, 'illusion' describes a
misinterpretation of an experience. I see a patch of blue in the desert, I take it to be a lake, but it turns out to be a mirage. But I did see the patch of blue - the experience was real.)
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.
You said those things. I am quoting you. I am not contradicting myself, I first quote what you say, then (if you read on) I explain why I disagree with you.
Oh, really? So, having all our sense perceptions, all our lights on, objects have leapt into noumenal existence?
If our sense perceptions of an object = the noumenal object,
then an
absence of sense perceptions = no noumenal object. If our sense perceptions come into being (the light is switched on) then the noumenal object must also come into being.
Just to be clear here; that is
your point of view. You think sense perceptions
reveal the noumenal; I'm pointing out the consequences.
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.
What you actually wrote last time was '
We infer from the whole data of perception'.
But OK, so our idea that rocks persist over time has nothing to do with perception. In that case, what do we infer it
from?
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.
But you also have the perception that after work you find the house is always where you left it that morning. So, the perceptions are contradictory; when you go to work the house can no longer be seen, but your other perceptions suggest that even though it can't be seen it still persists. You will want to create a theoretical picture of the world to account for
both.
Many theories are possible,(brain in a vat' etc.) that could account for all our perception. These are metaphysical; we cannot know which one is true. However, we are only interested in whether they work; in particular are they useful as a way of predicting
future experience. So, as long as when you come back from work you find your house is there, the theory it exists independently from perception will do. But if occasionally the house is not where you left it, then you can try to find an explanation within your general theory (somebody must be giving me drugs) or you might have to tweak the general theory. And that is what we do.
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.
But what are these 'specific properties'? Nothing is
specific to the grass leaves;
everything we can think of, to say about the grass leaves, turns out to be about other things. If you subtract all the non-grass aspects of grass - there is nothing left!
It isn't that the properties are
giving the grass something, it is rather that the grass, and the properties of grass, are one and the same thing. 'Grass' means (amongst other things) 'that stuff that looks green'. It makes no sense to ask 'but what colour is grass
really?' or 'what colour is grass
in itself?'