Who- why- where are we ?

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Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Arising_uk wrote:
Belinda wrote:But if by "solitary being" you mean one and only subject , then we have no evidence that the hypothetical one and only subject did not invent objects including social life, language, and language as a social theory. Has solipsism ever been disproved?
I think so as this is only one of the two insights I had when studying philosophy(not that I claim it is original but that I'd not read of it applied this way before nor since) and I think that the language we have is impossible for a solipsist to invent, i.e. there would be no 'internal voice' aspect to the language(probably pronouns, etc, as well) as who would they be talking to? Now I'm not saying that we're still not in Descartes demon's world, just that we know that that 'demon' exists as an other.

Thanks for your reply. Very useful :) Is the specific point about language requiring an object for each subject transferable to other activities besides language? For instance I was thinking of a poem I just read about a man who is a very practised digger with a spade (Seamus Heaney I think) and the object of his subjective intention is the digging activity itself , so sharply described by the poet, and probably the larger aim to grow vegetables.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems- ... tail/47555
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Arising_uk
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Arising_uk »

Thing is that I'm not arguing that our perceptions are the same as what is there just that there is something there that is external to our perceptions, i.e. that Idealism is wrong and the reality of our existence is that we are a body with senses in an external world and we can be certain about this.
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Arising_uk wrote:Thing is that I'm not arguing that our perceptions are the same as what is there just that there is something there that is external to our perceptions, i.e. that Idealism is wrong and the reality of our existence is that we are a body with senses in an external world and we can be certain about this.
But if we cannot know anything about that world, what would a claim that it was external amount to? You couldn't point to anything and say; 'that bit is external'. Kant thought there was a noumenal world, but we could not possibly say anything about it. Does Idealism say there is no noumenal world? Or is it describing the world we live in?
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Arising_uk
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Arising_uk »

Idealism, like you I thought, says that the external world is our perceptions. It is all Idea. Of course they say that the ideas that don't depend on us are ideas in the mind of a 'God'.

My claim is pretty much the same as Kant's and that 'it' is there. That our perceptions are based upon something and so that we can certainly assume that solipsism is not the case.

Although every now and then I get very materialistic and realistic and say that there is only the 3-D world we sense, it really is just space with lumps of matter in it. All the other stuff about it being made of 'energy', 'atoms', et al are just fictions we make up to explain how things occur in the real world.
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waechter418
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by waechter418 »

Londoner wrote:
Arising_uk wrote:Thing is that I'm not arguing that our perceptions are the same as what is there just that there is something there that is external to our perceptions, i.e. that Idealism is wrong and the reality of our existence is that we are a body with senses in an external world and we can be certain about this.
But if we cannot know anything about that world, what would a claim that it was external amount to? You couldn't point to anything and say; 'that bit is external'. Kant thought there was a noumenal world, but we could not possibly say anything about it. Does Idealism say there is no noumenal world? Or is it describing the world we live in?

"World" is what we to believe to know
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Arising_uk
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Arising_uk »

So?
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:Because Descartes starts off by doubting the evidence of his senses, that means that he must start his philosophy from somewhere else i.e. cogito...
Londoner wrote:If you cannot assign a truth value to a proposition then you can't do logic with it.
We don't know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
Yanomami people don't know cars exist. Therefore, they find no use in gasoline.
Philosophers don't know noumena exists. Therefore, they cannot proclaim its existence.
I don't know that my senses are reliable. Therefore, I must put reliability on something else.


The above sentences show that you can make inferences based on the premise of not knowing something.
Londoner wrote: Logic is not about beliefs. It is only about the relationships between propositions.
However, you're confusing the form of logic with the content of the clauses in a set of propositions. In a classic form of logic, syllogism, each premise is a complete sentence with a meaningful proposition, that could be either true or false. Their content could be anything: "God is almighty", "the French are good kissers", etc. And then the logical connection between the premises leads to a conclusion.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:When someone asserts something to be true or false, it is implied that his/her assertion comes from his own internal conviction, his own state of mind. You can call that self-held proposition a belief, or whatever, but it's certainly part of what a logic proposition is made to be.
Not in logic. Socrates is a horse, horses live in the sea, therefore Socrates lives in the sea. That is valid in logic but I have no internal conviction that any of it is true (sound).
You may be caught trying to deceive on what you really think, but for the deception to work as such, it must be based on the assumption that the content of the speech act conveys the state of mind of the speaker. In this case, people might think you are crazy or ignorant, until there's a clue from context or something else, that you don't really mean what you said, i.e. you might be joking.
Londoner wrote:Then let me be clear: I say there is no possibility of knowing - as an empirical fact - that there is a noumenal world (and if there is one its nature) - because empirical facts all relate to the phenomenal world.
That is a false argument for several reasons. First, you have defined the noumenal as that which is not reached by experience, an analytic proposition not known to be true. You have also defined phenomena as that which is reached by experience (actually the experience itself), an analytic proposition not known to be true. Then you advance the synthetic proposition that the noumenal can not be reached by experience because experience does not reach the noumena, only phenomena. Circular reasoning and you have actually said nothing.

Now let's assume that the claim "the noumenal is not reached by experience" was a synthetic proposition in need of empirical proof. In that case, you have already closed the door to the empirical enterprise by stating that experience can only reach phenomena, a proposition not known to be true. Circular reasoning and you have actually said nothing.

Londoner wrote:You write: X (meaning: "I know that X is true"). This is confused because it brings 'I' into it. So is the proposition about X, or about you? If it is about your beliefs, then it is true if it describes you. It makes no difference whether X is true or false. If I believe in dragons then it is true that I believe in dragons; dragons do not have to be real.

But if the proposition is about X, then the meaning would be...X. 'X is true' is saying 'X is the case' (empirically) or 'assume X' (in logic). You need to decide which.
You're just confusing yourself unnecessarily. It's pretty obvious that the proposition is constructed grammatically from the point of view of the speaker, but this is completely irrelevant to the problem, as any pronoun could have been used and nothing would change. The core of the problem is that claims X, Y and Z are statements made and cover all the stances one may have about the subject. Either X or Y are true, or claim Z.

What we surely don't know is what you stand for.
Londoner wrote:
Yes...more or less. So when you declare 'there is just the one-and-only-world' which is it? But you do not say!
In case you missed it, it's the physical world.
Londoner wrote:
Yes, that is my view, because I do not claim to be able to know some sort of metaphysical truth that lies beyond all possibility of human experience.

If you think my modesty is correctly described by the word 'solipsism', so be it.
The problem is not that you're a solipsist, but that you're a partial time solipsist, only being skeptical of objective truths when they don't fit your argument, and later positing other statements as truths when they do fit. In each instance, you avoid following the logical consequences. For example, if you really wanted to be the radical skeptic, to be consistent with that line of thought all you could have ended up saying was: "anything goes", but you refuse to follow the logical consequences.

Londoner wrote: If our heads - the ideas in our minds - are not differentiated from the 'one-and-only-world', then what did you mean by saying our mind 'represented' that 'one-and-only-world'? My brain is partly made of carbon, so is the rest of the world. The carbon in my brain is simply itself, it doesn't 'represent' carbon generally. Nor does my brain understand the carbon that exists in the world - by being partly made of carbon.
That two or more things are part of the physical realm, does not mean they cannot be differentiated. Their mode of being does not imply either an ontological realm for each one. The image from a camera is not to be confused with the camera itself, nor the world it represents, but they are all still part of that world. An image in a mirror is still just a reflection inside the world of things, not another world apart from it.
Londoner wrote:To talk at all about something 'representing', then you need something for it to be representing to. In that case we have a dualism;
No, as I said, there's no substance dualism in an object and its image.
Londoner wrote:(I do not understand what you are saying in your occasional references to computers.)
It's just the well known analogy between humans and computers and the interchangeable concept of minds and operative systems. Another analogy relates the real world with the "virtual world".
Londoner wrote:
Yet, despite all this, you insist that your own internal experiencing 'green' is not in any way subjective, or conditional on your own sensory organs or brain. That you just know that the 'green' in your own head just now is how things are 'in themselves', such that any alternative description of that form of radiation would be incorrect - even though this claim is inconsistent with the way we know perception works.
No, that's not what I said. My "internal" experiences are always subjective, but by way of such experiences themselves I can realize that they are determined by conditions independent and prior to my perception, thus becoming objective to my intellect. In the case of the perception of colors, what is being perceived is one property of objects to reflect light with different wavelengths, all of which (objects and wavelengths) exist independent of my perception, but produce a sensation in which another set of conditions in my eyes participates. As personal as the sensation of color may be, it is always related to objects that exist independently of my perception, and still dependent of the physical conditions of the objects and the organ of perception (the eyes), so much as to be able to determine what colors people get wrong when they present anomalies in their vision. That is possible because we can independently validate the results of viewing events with different observers and conditions.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Belinda wrote:Conda Lucanor wrote:
I disagree, since I think (as many others in the history of philosophy) that the Theory of Form advances a theory of existence, specifically the existence of universals opposed to the existence of concrete singulars.
The key to our disagreement here is the word 'existence'. Can universals be said to exist? Universals have no mass. Please don't say that mass is nothing to do with it; you yourself used the word " concrete" , as would I.
I have the slight impression that you think I support Plato's idealism. To clarify: I just made the point that Plato's Theory of Forms is a theory of existence, but I'm not endorsing it, nor any other form of idealism.
Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Arising_uk wrote:Thing is that I'm not arguing that our perceptions are the same as what is there just that there is something there that is external to our perceptions, i.e. that Idealism is wrong and the reality of our existence is that we are a body with senses in an external world and we can be certain about this.

I agree; I trust to neutral monism, and to Spinoza who is neutral monism's champion.

I was referring to solipsism and the notion that it's impossible to be a subject of experience without an object of experience. For example it's impossible for shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe to experience social morality after his shipwreck before he met Man Friday. For another example it's impossible to experience caring for one's dog unless there is some object which one identifies as one's dog. It's a relative world, and any subject of experience is only a subject of experience relative to the object of their experience. Does not total sensory deprivation cause a person to die or go mad?
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: We don't know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
Yanomami people don't know cars exist. Therefore, they find no use in gasoline.
Philosophers don't know noumena exists. Therefore, they cannot proclaim its existence.
I don't know that my senses are reliable. Therefore, I must put reliability on something else.


The above sentences show that you can make inferences based on the premise of not knowing something.
No they don't. The first just says the same thing twice.

In the second, saying the Yanomani people don't know something is to assert something. The correct parallel would be 'I cannot know if the Yanomami people know cars exist'. If that was the case, then you could not go on to deduce whether they know of a use for gasoline.

The third is tautological, like the first. To 'not know' something means the same as 'being unable to proclaim it is (or isn't) the case.

The fourth is not reasonable, let alone logical. If I do not know that X is is true, it doesn't follow that I must find a Y to put my faith in. That sounds rather 'needy'!
However, you're confusing the form of logic with the content of the clauses in a set of propositions. In a classic form of logic, syllogism, each premise is a complete sentence with a meaningful proposition, that could be either true or false. Their content could be anything: "God is almighty", "the French are good kissers", etc. And then the logical connection between the premises leads to a conclusion.
That's right; so you agree with what I wrote; Logic is not about beliefs. It is only about the relationships between propositions.
You may be caught trying to deceive on what you really think, but for the deception to work as such, it must be based on the assumption that the content of the speech act conveys the state of mind of the speaker. In this case, people might think you are crazy or ignorant, until there's a clue from context or something else, that you don't really mean what you said, i.e. you might be joking.
This has nothing to do with logic; logic is nothing to do with 'deception' or 'ignorance' or 'joking'. Once again, logic is only about the relationships between propositions.
Me: Then let me be clear: I say there is no possibility of knowing - as an empirical fact - that there is a noumenal world (and if there is one its nature) - because empirical facts all relate to the phenomenal world.
That is a false argument for several reasons. First, you have defined the noumenal as that which is not reached by experience, an analytic proposition not known to be true. You have also defined phenomena as that which is reached by experience (actually the experience itself), an analytic proposition not known to be true.
Not my definitions. I have explained what the words 'noumena' and 'phenomena' mean, with reference to Kant and other philosophers. You seemed to go along with it. If you now want to suggest an alternative meaning for those words then go ahead.
Then you advance the synthetic proposition that the noumenal can not be reached by experience because experience does not reach the noumena, only phenomena. Circular reasoning and you have actually said nothing.
No, it is still analytic. Experience/phenomena necessarily involve a subject; us. But the noumenal would be what things are independently of the subject. So since we are always a subject we can never know the noumenal. It is what these words mean.

Many philosophers have come up with alternative approaches, claims that we can approach the noumenal from another direction, or that we should understand both words in a different way. But as far as I can tell, you understand both words in the sense I have given, where the meaning of one excludes the other, yet you still want to say they are the same thing.
You're just confusing yourself unnecessarily. It's pretty obvious that the proposition is constructed grammatically from the point of view of the speaker, but this is completely irrelevant to the problem, as any pronoun could have been used and nothing would change.


That is not the case. (1) 'God (it) exists' and (2) 'I believe God exists' do not mean the same thing. You can tell this because (1) can be false but (2) can be true, and vice versa.
Me: Yes...more or less. So when you declare 'there is just the one-and-only-world' which is it? But you do not say!
In case you missed it, it's the physical world.
The 'which' refers to your comment: Here applies the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. I was asking if your claim 'there is just the one-and-only-world' was meant to be analytic or synthetic. Saying 'it's the physical' is not enlightening!
The problem is not that you're a solipsist, but that you're a partial time solipsist, only being skeptical of objective truths when they don't fit your argument, and later positing other statements as truths when they do fit. In each instance, you avoid following the logical consequences. For example, if you really wanted to be the radical skeptic, to be consistent with that line of thought all you could have ended up saying was: "anything goes", but you refuse to follow the logical consequences.
I think that all claims of truth are contextual. I think that there is no ultimate certainty about anything. So, for example, we can say that something is true in the context of science, meaning it is supported by the sort of evidence used within science.

So, 'anything goes' is not the case within science. I cannot declare that the earth is flat. However, if I move outside science by saying 'suppose we are all in the Matrix' or 'suppose an evil demon is feeding us illusions' then I can no longer be certain the earth is not flat. And if we refused to put a statement into any context at all, then yes; 'everything goes' .

But if you know better; if you are in possession of some ultimate metaphysical absolute certainty, so that when you say 'the grass is green' there is no possibility that this could be questioned on any level, I look forward to hearing your argument.
That two or more things are part of the physical realm, does not mean they cannot be differentiated.
Exactly, and whether we do or not would be your choice. You can draw attention to the difference between a dog and a cat, or their similarities. There is no right answer, or rather which description was right would depend on the context of any discussion. I do not see how this helps.
Me: To talk at all about something 'representing', (the 'one and only world' being 'represented' in our heads) then you need something for it to be representing to. In that case we have a dualism;
No, as I said, there's no substance dualism in an object and its image.
So what did 'represent' mean? If I say a landscape painting 'represents' a view of trees, fields etc., I would not mean 'the landscape picture is the same substance as the trees, fields etc.' And when I look at that landscape painting, I do not think that my brain is now full of trees, fields etc. - plus the canvas and pigment of the painting.

The way to avoid these absurdities is simply to acknowledge that when we say something is 'represented', we are not making an absolute claim. The landscape painting resembles the trees, field etc. It is like them in some ways, but not in others. So if we say it is a 'true' representation, this is understood to be true in the context of paintings, not in some absolute sense.
No, that's not what I said. My "internal" experiences are always subjective, but by way of such experiences themselves I can realize that they are determined by conditions independent and prior to my perception, thus becoming objective to my intellect.
So that is a dualism. There are the 'conditions independent and prior to my perception' which are distinct from 'My "internal" experiences (which) are always subjective'.

I do not see how they can become 'objective to my intellect'. If they are objective, then they must be independent of your intellect.
In the case of the perception of colors, what is being perceived is one property of objects to reflect light with different wavelengths, all of which (objects and wavelengths) exist independent of my perception, but produce a sensation in which another set of conditions in my eyes participates. As personal as the sensation of color may be, it is always related to objects that exist independently of my perception, and still dependent of the physical conditions of the objects and the organ of perception (the eyes),...
This is still begging the question by using the word 'related'.

We can say that everything is 'related' to everything at some level; all events are events, all objects are objects, all words are words, all ideas are ideas....We return to the same theme; if the word 'related' is to have a meaning it must be given a context; 'related - how?'

To return to the analogy of the landscape painting, if I am to say that it 'represents' the scenery I would need to be able to say how, in what way. Similarly, if our personal sensation of colour is related to what is 'independent of perception' then we need to say how; if we just list all the things involved in perception (light, pigments, the eye, the nerves, chemistry, physics...) we aren't describing a relationship.
...so much as to be able to determine what colors people get wrong when they present anomalies in their vision. That is possible because we can independently validate the results of viewing events with different observers and conditions.
Yes, validate - as understood in that context. If somebody cannot distinguish red from green in the same way as most people it is valid to say they are 'colour blind'. But we do not mean they literally cannot see red things. Nor do we mean that everyone else can always distinguish red from green (in the dark, for instance). We do not think their colour perception is wrong in the sense that they are telling lies. Nor that their internal sensation is not a real internal sensation. Nor that the range of colours most humans can distinguish are in some sense 'more valid' than the range of colours a bee can distinguish. 'Validate' has no absolute meaning.

So, same old theme. If we are to claim we are in possession of TRUTH; some metaphysical standard that will apply in the same way to everything, irrespective of context, then we have to say where we got it. The answers usually involve the idea that something in our human nature is entirely different to the world of normal experience, an opening to a world-beyond-the world. This might be 'pure reason', it might be 'revelation' and so on. I think you have to come up with something along those lines.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote: We don't know who shot John F. Kennedy. Therefore, the case remains open.
Yanomami people don't know cars exist. Therefore, they find no use in gasoline.
Philosophers don't know noumena exists. Therefore, they cannot proclaim its existence.
I don't know that my senses are reliable. Therefore, I must put reliability on something else.


The above sentences show that you can make inferences based on the premise of not knowing something.
No they don't. The first just says the same thing twice.

In the second, saying the Yanomani people don't know something is to assert something. The correct parallel would be 'I cannot know if the Yanomami people know cars exist'. If that was the case, then you could not go on to deduce whether they know of a use for gasoline.

The third is tautological, like the first. To 'not know' something means the same as 'being unable to proclaim it is (or isn't) the case.

The fourth is not reasonable, let alone logical. If I do not know that X is is true, it doesn't follow that I must find a Y to put my faith in. That sounds rather 'needy'!
You have completely forgotten what we were discussing. Let me remind you: we were discussing whether logical consequences can be derived from the initial condition of not knowing something. You argued that it can't be and I just showed that it can.

The funny part is that a couple of these examples correspond to arguments you have defended and now you call them unreasonable and tautological!!
Londoner wrote: That's right; so you agree with what I wrote; Logic is not about beliefs. It is only about the relationships between propositions.
Again, you keep shooting yourself in the feet. In this very same post you argue in favor of considering beliefs in the analysis of logical arguments. You even demand that the clause "I believe" is added.

Anyway, since statements in arguments include beliefs, the requirement that logic is only about the relationship of the statements proves that beliefs are part of logical arguments. They just happen to be in the content of those arguments.
Londoner wrote:
This has nothing to do with logic; logic is nothing to do with 'deception' or 'ignorance' or 'joking'. Once again, logic is only about the relationships between propositions.
If that were true, there wouldn't be an entire field of study called Pragmatics.
Londoner wrote:
Not my definitions. I have explained what the words 'noumena' and 'phenomena' mean, with reference to Kant and other philosophers. You seemed to go along with it. If you now want to suggest an alternative meaning for those words then go ahead.
So, you would not define noumena as that which is not reached by experience?

I can bet anything that you won't answer this straight, but will departure away in circles to avoid the logical consequences of your own answer.
Londoner wrote: But the noumenal would be what things are independently of the subject. So since we are always a subject we can never know the noumenal.
That is precisely what you are to demonstrate. If you say that you have demonstrated it because you already had defined the noumenal as different from experience, that's just circular reasoning.
Londoner wrote:Many philosophers have come up with alternative approaches, claims that we can approach the noumenal from another direction, or that we should understand both words in a different way. But as far as I can tell, you understand both words in the sense I have given, where the meaning of one excludes the other, yet you still want to say they are the same thing.
I have always defined noumena and phenomena as "things in themselves" and "things as they appear to us", respectively, which is consistent with Kant's treatment of these matters. And I have kept saying that it is through our experience that we know about "things in themselves", in other words, that through our experience we come to the realization that the "things in themselves" have existence independently of our mental states.
Londoner wrote: That is not the case. (1) 'God (it) exists' and (2) 'I believe God exists' do not mean the same thing. You can tell this because (1) can be false but (2) can be true, and vice versa.
Weren't you the one claiming a couple of sentences before that beliefs played no role in logical arguments? Anyway, again you have misrepresented the problem, changing the formula "X is true/I believe X" to "X exists/I believe X exists". My argument still stands unchallenged.
Londoner wrote: The 'which' refers to your comment: Here applies the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. I was asking if your claim 'there is just the one-and-only-world' was meant to be analytic or synthetic. Saying 'it's the physical' is not enlightening!
I think my explanations have dealt extensively with the notion of experiencing the world through the senses and getting to know its existence as a concrete reality.
Londoner wrote: I think that all claims of truth are contextual. I think that there is no ultimate certainty about anything. So, for example, we can say that something is true in the context of science, meaning it is supported by the sort of evidence used within science.

So, 'anything goes' is not the case within science.
And from which frame you make your claims? Do you think "anything goes" is the case within philosophy?
Londoner wrote:But if you know better; if you are in possession of some ultimate metaphysical absolute certainty, so that when you say 'the grass is green' there is no possibility that this could be questioned on any level, I look forward to hearing your argument.
Interesting that your notion of an "ultimate metaphysical absolute certainty" is that the "grass is green". I wonder what you do when encountering traffic lights. Do you step outside the road to decide whether you cross the intersection? Since there's no certainty that everyone sees the same light color...
Londoner wrote: Exactly, and whether we do or not would be your choice. You can draw attention to the difference between a dog and a cat, or their similarities. There is no right answer, or rather which description was right would depend on the context of any discussion. I do not see how this helps.
Of course we construct abstract mental categories of the objects we find in the world. And such classifications are a bit arbitrary, depending on the criteria we choose for categorizing objects, which does not imply that their properties are not real. In the end, we know that we can't get dogs from cats and it does not have to do with a relative point of view.
Londoner wrote: So what did 'represent' mean? If I say a landscape painting 'represents' a view of trees, fields etc., I would not mean 'the landscape picture is the same substance as the trees, fields etc.' And when I look at that landscape painting, I do not think that my brain is now full of trees, fields etc. - plus the canvas and pigment of the painting.

The way to avoid these absurdities is simply to acknowledge that when we say something is 'represented', we are not making an absolute claim. The landscape painting resembles the trees, field etc. It is like them in some ways, but not in others. So if we say it is a 'true' representation, this is understood to be true in the context of paintings, not in some absolute sense.
No one has argued that the mental representations of the world are a perfect match to each and everyone of the properties of the objects. They are mediated by our senses, which have their limitations and we also lack the gift of ubiquity. That was the starting point of this whole thread. 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. Any imperfection in our individual perception is compensated by the enormous amount of perceptions, the high order functions of the neocortex in the mammalian brain and the advantages of socialization.

Interesting enough, impressionist painters played with the limitations of our perception to depict scenes "unrealistically", which still managed to express the full idea of a tree, a house, a bridge, etc.
Londoner wrote: So that is a dualism. There are the 'conditions independent and prior to my perception' which are distinct from 'My "internal" experiences (which) are always subjective'.
No, that's not true. Both the "things in themselves" and my perceptions of them are part of one physical world. That they can be differentiated does not imply two "ontic substances".
Londoner wrote:I do not see how they can become 'objective to my intellect'. If they are objective, then they must be independent of your intellect.
That they are objective to my intellect just means that my intellect comes to the realization of their existence, even when I'm not present.
Londoner wrote:If we are to claim we are in possession of TRUTH; some metaphysical standard that will apply in the same way to everything, irrespective of context, then we have to say where we got it. The answers usually involve the idea that something in our human nature is entirely different to the world of normal experience, an opening to a world-beyond-the world. This might be 'pure reason', it might be 'revelation' and so on. I think you have to come up with something along those lines.
Or just the synthesis of the empirical and the rational in a social context where the tools of philosophy and science are highly developed.
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: You have completely forgotten what we were discussing. Let me remind you: we were discussing whether logical consequences can be derived from the initial condition of not knowing something. You argued that it can't be and I just showed that it can.
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.
Again, you keep shooting yourself in the feet. In this very same post you argue in favor of considering beliefs in the analysis of logical arguments. You even demand that the clause "I believe" is added....

Anyway, since statements in arguments include beliefs, the requirement that logic is only about the relationship of the statements proves that beliefs are part of logical arguments. They just happen to be in the content of those arguments.
I do not think you have understood me if you think I'm saying that our beliefs are part of logic. 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. If logic was about our 'belief' in specific propositions then you couldn't do that.
Me: That is not the case. (1) 'God (it) exists' and (2) 'I believe God exists' do not mean the same thing. You can tell this because (1) can be false but (2) can be true, and vice versa.
Weren't you the one claiming a couple of sentences before that beliefs played no role in logical arguments? Anyway, again you have misrepresented the problem, changing the formula "X is true/I believe X" to "X exists/I believe X exists". My argument still stands unchallenged.
Again, I don't think you understand what logic is about. It is like maths; if I say 1+1=2 then the 'ones' do not stand for anything. They can have the value positive or negative, but that isn't the same as 'true' or 'false' regarding a fact. If I write 'minus 1' it isn't like saying 'It is not true there is an apple' or 'I am an atheist'.
If that were true, there wouldn't be an entire field of study called Pragmatics.
Pragmatics is about linguistics, not logic. It is curious that you mention Pragmatics since it is based around what I wrote about elsewhere; that the meaning of words arises from the context in which we say something.
So, you would not define noumena as that which is not reached by experience?

I can bet anything that you won't answer this straight, but will departure away in circles to avoid the logical consequences of your own answer.
'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'.
I have always defined noumena and phenomena as "things in themselves" and "things as they appear to us", respectively, which is consistent with Kant's treatment of these matters.
Yes! So what was the problem with my explanation of 'noumena'? When I say exactly the same thing, why aren't I giving a 'straight answer'?
And I have kept saying that it is through our experience that we know about "things in themselves", in other words, that through our experience we come to the realization that the "things in themselves" have existence independently of our mental states.
When you write we 'know about' "things in themselves", in what sense do we 'know' about them? We plainly do not know what they are like, since we can only know them "as they appear to us", as distinct from as they are "in themselves".

So you do not quite claim that we know them as such. Instead you say we somehow "come to the realization" of their independent existence. That is the step that is hard to follow for the reasons I have explained.

For example, if something has an existence independent of my perception, how would that fit with your notion that there is only the 'one-and-only-world'? What would the word 'existence' mean when describing "things in themselves"? We couldn't say 'they exist because it is the case that they have the quality X' because we do not know whether they do have the quality X, or Y, or anything about them. It is like me saying 'I know God exists'. But when asked 'And what is God?' I reply 'I don't know anything about God, I think something is true of God but I don't know what'.

The only reason we think there is a noumenal world is because we have chosen to distinguish noumena from phenomena. If there are 'phenomena' (and that word is to have a meaning), then there must be things which are not phenomena. And so the meaning of one term is then derived from the meaning of the other; the phenomenal is not the noumenal and the noumenal is not the phenomenal. But we don't have to divide the world in that way; we can deny that there is a real distinction.

You seem to want to both retain the distinction and also deny it. Your position seems to be that the phenomenal and the noumenal are 'independent' of each other, but they are also the same thing; the 'one-and-only-world' .
Interesting that your notion of an "ultimate metaphysical absolute certainty" is that the "grass is green".
It is an example of a phenomenon; that is how grass appears to us. But I do not think we can 'know' grass, the "thing in itself" is green, from the phenomenon because under different conditions the phenomenon is different. And thus we cannot come to the realization" that 'green' is part of the independent existence of the grass. I think the same would be true of any example of phenomena we pick. And if we admit that there can be exceptions to the idea that phenomena belong to the "thing in itself" then we have shifted from saying there is only the 'one-and-only-world', and it is the one revealed by phenomena. Now we are instead saying some phenomena are more reliable than others, which means that phenomena are not themselves the guide, rather the guide is some external standard by which we judge phenomena.
No one has argued that the mental representations of the world are a perfect match to each and everyone of the properties of the objects. They are mediated by our senses, which have their limitations and we also lack the gift of ubiquity. That was the starting point of this whole thread. 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. Any imperfection in our individual perception is compensated by the enormous amount of perceptions, the high order functions of the neocortex in the mammalian brain and the advantages of socialization.
OK, so we are agreed that phenomena do not allow us to 'know' the 'things in themselves'. Or are we?

I do not see that if my brain does not allow me to 'know' the 'things in themselves', why more brains of the same type would make any difference. All those brains are still dealing only with phenomena, which we have agreed are suspect. Although you half take this back by saying that our mental representations are not a 'perfect match'. How can we say that? If I say something is not a 'perfect match', I could only do so if I could compare it to what would be a perfect match. If I say 'that painting is not a perfect match of the landscape' that implies I can see the landscape independently of the painting, and compare the two. But no human, singly or in combination can see the 'noumenal' colour of the grass and compare it to the phenomena. Indeed, I'm not sure if we are still claiming colour is a noumenal feature at all.
Me: I do not see how they can become 'objective to my intellect'. If they are objective, then they must be independent of your intellect.
That they are objective to my intellect just means that my intellect comes to the realization of their existence, even when I'm not present.
Really? Because 'my intellect' never does anything unless I'm there with it! Seriously, I don't see how we can use the word 'objective' in that way.
Me: I was asking if your claim 'there is just the one-and-only-world' was meant to be analytic or synthetic. Saying 'it's the physical' is not enlightening!
I think my explanations have dealt extensively with the notion of experiencing the world through the senses and getting to know its existence as a concrete reality.
My questions about analytic and synthetic were meant as references to Kant, since we are using his language elsewhere. (Kant uses the terms in a different way to earlier philosophers).
Me: I think that all claims of truth are contextual.
And from which frame you make your claims? Do you think "anything goes" is the case within philosophy?
Since all (meaningful)claims of truth are contextual, and since the context supplies the criteria for truth, then it is never the case that "anything goes".

'Within philosophy' is not a context; to ask 'what is true within philosophy' would be like asking 'what is the correct answer to a sum?'. You can only have correct answers to particular sums, similarly what 'goes' in philosophy depends on what we are discussing. In this thread, I do not think the form of materialism you have written about makes sense in its own terms.

But Philosophy in general as a subject is unusual in that it studies its own limitations. As I have said before, it isn't like supporting a football team; realists v. idealists, such that one wins and the other loses.
Me: If we are to claim we are in possession of TRUTH; some metaphysical standard that will apply in the same way to everything, irrespective of context, then we have to say where we got it. The answers usually involve the idea that something in our human nature is entirely different to the world of normal experience, an opening to a world-beyond-the world. This might be 'pure reason', it might be 'revelation' and so on. I think you have to come up with something along those lines.

Or just the synthesis of the empirical and the rational in a social context where the tools of philosophy and science are highly developed.
What is an example of this synthesis? It would have to be 'synthetic a priori'. Something that is true of the empirical world (so not a tautology) - but also not falsifiable, therefore not asserted as a result of empirical experience. Science only deals with the empirical; a meaningful proposition in science must be capable of being falsified, so science is not going to provide it. There is a lot of philosophy around this question, traditionally explored during attempts to prove the necessary existence of God by working from the definition of God. This is where all that stuff about existence not being a predicate arose.

Philosophy has indeed developed, but has been more about understanding the nature of the questions we are asking than coming up with THE ANSWER to 'who - why - where are we?' .
Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

King Lear:

Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer
with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.
Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou
owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep
no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on
's are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare,
forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!
come unbutton here.


Compares men with other animals. Comparison with other animals is one way we can say who, why, where we are.
However a man's possibilities can be different from what he is. The existentialists say that, apart from physical facts, men are free to change what they customarily have done.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

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.
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:Pragmatics is about linguistics, not logic.

There is plenty of work on the relationship between linguistics and logic. And guess who was the father of Pragmatics? None other but Charles Sanders Pierce.

The example of Pragmatics had to do with being a systematic body of work that uses logical analysis and deals with the intentions behind statements.
Londoner wrote:'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'.

So, you would not define "the thing in itself" as that which is not reached by experience? And the "thing as it appears to us" as that which is reached by experience?
Londoner wrote:When you write we 'know about' "things in themselves", in what sense do we 'know' about them? We plainly do not know what they are like, since we can only know them "as they appear to us", as distinct from as they are "in themselves".

So you do not quite claim that we know them as such. Instead you say we somehow "come to the realization" of their independent existence. That is the step that is hard to follow for the reasons I have explained.

We know about "things in themselves" because there's no arbitrary conjunction of perceptions. What I perceive is consistently shown to be caused by things that exist without sense or perception. If I get information on the intrinsic properties of a mineral, and other evidence allows me to reason that this mineral existed since 30 million years ago, when not only I was not around, but no perceiving being at all, I can also reason that the properties of the mineral I perceive come from the thing in itself and are not occurring in a realm of imagination.
Londoner wrote:For example, if something has an existence independent of my perception, how would that fit with your notion that there is only the 'one-and-only-world'?

If I say that there is only the one and only world, and I also assert that I never saw Christopher Columbus because his existence was separated from mine for about 500 years, how does that change my notion that there's only the one and only world?
Londoner wrote:What would the word 'existence' mean when describing "things in themselves"? We couldn't say 'they exist because it is the case that they have the quality X' because we do not know whether they do have the quality X, or Y, or anything about them. It is like me saying 'I know God exists'. But when asked 'And what is God?' I reply 'I don't know anything about God, I think something is true of God but I don't know what'.

But we do know that things in themselves have the quality X or Y. Unlike a god, a posited thing of which we perceive nothing.

Londoner wrote:The only reason we think there is a noumenal world is because we have chosen to distinguish noumena from phenomena... But we don't have to divide the world in that way; we can deny that there is a real distinction.

I think is fine that philosophers came up with that distinction, but as you may agree, is a theoretical, or let's say epistemological distinction, not an ontological one. There's no reason to claim that there's an ontological realm of noumena limited by the boundaries of another ontological realm of phenomena. That would be consistent with dualism, not monism. Phenomena is a relationship among "things in themselves" and one of those things is a subject.
Londoner wrote:It is an example of a phenomenon; that is how grass appears to us. But I do not think we can 'know' grass, the "thing in itself" is green, from the phenomenon because under different conditions the phenomenon is different. And thus we cannot come to the realization" that 'green' is part of the independent existence of the grass. I think the same would be true of any example of phenomena we pick. And if we admit that there can be exceptions to the idea that phenomena belong to the "thing in itself" then we have shifted from saying there is only the 'one-and-only-world', and it is the one revealed by phenomena. Now we are instead saying some phenomena are more reliable than others, which means that phenomena are not themselves the guide, rather the guide is some external standard by which we judge phenomena.

Color is just one property the grass can display and it doesn't have to be the same color. A particular piece of grass will have a particular color and we can come to the realization of that specific property of that specific object. A sum of other properties in the specific object perceived and its context will allow us to identify it as "grass", that is, a member of that class of objects, a conceptual general category in which the particular is subsumed. We know there are different grasses and different colors of grass, but their properties are not a subjective quality originated in the mind of the observer and imposed a posteriori on the things in themselves. I don't think that's what is meant by phenomena. We do take part in the experience of grass through our senses and there are cognitive "enabling conditions" of perception, which are not to be confused with conditions of existence.
Londoner wrote:OK, so we are agreed that phenomena do not allow us to 'know' the 'things in themselves'. Or are we?

No, phenomena is not that curtain that veils reality from us, but the opposite: what unveils the order of reality.
Londoner wrote:I do not see that if my brain does not allow me to 'know' the 'things in themselves', why more brains of the same type would make any difference. All those brains are still dealing only with phenomena, which we have agreed are suspect.

First, that is an invalid inference. What you can say about brain, you can extend to a group of brains, right? Well, no. There is never a situation of brains living outside subjects and hanging around doing their brainly parties. Brains belong to subjects, subjects belong to societies, societies belong to environments, and so on. The relationship between subjects and objects is a bit more complicated than mere contemplation, we actually transform these things and they transform us. I not only see carrots, I can grow them and eat them.

Secondly, I have not agreed that "phenomena are suspect". You mean suspect of the "appearances" not being determined by the "things in themselves", but that's just your interpretation of the noumenal as a separate region, of which we have absolutely no contact with, and "appearances" as another type of "things in itself", some sort of "sub-thing", which we do grasp. It isn't clear why we would grasp that, if ultimately the same problem arises: how can you be sure, if nothing is grasped, but offered by our minds?
Londoner wrote:Although you half take this back by saying that our mental representations are not a 'perfect match'. How can we say that? If I say something is not a 'perfect match', I could only do so if I could compare it to what would be a perfect match. If I say 'that painting is not a perfect match of the landscape' that implies I can see the landscape independently of the painting, and compare the two. But no human, singly or in combination can see the 'noumenal' colour of the grass and compare it to the phenomena. Indeed, I'm not sure if we are still claiming colour is a noumenal feature at all.
Your analogy doesn't work. You take a pictorial representation of something, which the subject sees, and try to compare it to a mental representation of the same something, also appropriated by sight. Besides, the pictorial representation takes place after the landscape has been represented mentally, so all the time you're just comparing representations, not a representation against its thing represented. So, the real question is still the same we had from the beginning: whether the representations of something ultimately depend on the existence of that something independently (in absence) of the subject. A more appropriate example would be that we had a landscape, a pictorial representation of the landscape, a photographic picture of the landscape and our mental image of the landscape. And the key question will be not why all the representations differ among each other, but why they have things in common. Even realizing none of them is a perfect match to the thing represented, how come the same information about the landscape can be obtained? Why shouldn't we infer that the coinciding data speaks about something in the object, more than about something in our minds?
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:
Londoner wrote:I do not see how they can become 'objective to my intellect'. If they are objective, then they must be independent of your intellect.
That they are objective to my intellect just means that my intellect comes to the realization of their existence, even when I'm not present.
Really? Because 'my intellect' never does anything unless I'm there with it! Seriously, I don't see how we can use the word 'objective' in that way.
As usual, you go for the most deformed interpretation of my statements to try to make a point. I said the realization that the object exist even when I'm not present, not that I'm not present when my intellect realizes.
Londoner wrote:Since all (meaningful)claims of truth are contextual, and since the context supplies the criteria for truth, then it is never the case that "anything goes".
But by "context" you still mean the ideas ordered somehow in your mind, since according to you, that's all you have to work with. And that's why you claim there's nothing you can be certain of, because your consciousness of the world is just a self-constructed reality of your mind, in which you are inevitably trapped. Consistent with that, your criteria for truth is supplied by your internal, private disposition, in which no one else has a saying, so from that point of view, it is the case that "anything goes".
Londoner wrote:'Within philosophy' is not a context; to ask 'what is true within philosophy' would be like asking 'what is the correct answer to a sum?'.
I really wonder: how come "within science" is a context for you, but not "within philosophy"?
Londoner wrote:What is an example of this synthesis? It would have to be 'synthetic a priori'. Something that is true of the empirical world (so not a tautology) - but also not falsifiable, therefore not asserted as a result of empirical experience. Science only deals with the empirical; a meaningful proposition in science must be capable of being falsified, so science is not going to provide it. There is a lot of philosophy around this question, traditionally explored during attempts to prove the necessary existence of God by working from the definition of God. This is where all that stuff about existence not being a predicate arose.

Philosophy has indeed developed, but has been more about understanding the nature of the questions we are asking than coming up with THE ANSWER to 'who - why - where are we?'
I don't think science has ever worked alone without philosophy and whenever it has tried to do so, has failed. And the same happens to philosophy, so the only way are interdisciplinary studies from all fields.
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote:Me: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'
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.
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.
Me: 'Within philosophy' is not a context; to ask 'what is true within philosophy' would be like asking 'what is the correct answer to a sum?'.
I really wonder: how come "within science" is a context for you, but not "within philosophy"?
Because science is a part of philosophy; the philosophy of science looks at the context within which science operates. So, for example, within science we assume the validity of inductive reasoning, whereas philosophy would examine induction.

I will leave this part of the discussion at that. The fact is that you cannot use logic to move from a position of 'not knowing' to one of knowing.
So, you would not define "the thing in itself" as that which is not reached by experience? And the "thing as it appears to us" as that which is reached by experience?
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...'
We know about "things in themselves" because there's no arbitrary conjunction of perceptions...
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.
...If I get information on the intrinsic properties of a mineral, and other evidence allows me to reason that this mineral existed since 30 million years ago, when not only I was not around, but no perceiving being at all,
Exactly. So it is not your perception but rather what you call 'reason' that makes you believe it was around 30 million years ago etc.

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.

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.

(There is stuff about this in Quine)
Me: What would the word 'existence' mean when describing "things in themselves"? We couldn't say 'they exist because it is the case that they have the quality X' because we do not know whether they do have the quality X, or Y, or anything about them. It is like me saying 'I know God exists'. But when asked 'And what is God?' I reply 'I don't know anything about God, I think something is true of God but I don't know what'.
But we do know that things in themselves have the quality X or Y. Unlike a god, a posited thing of which we perceive nothing.
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.
Color is just one property the grass can display and it doesn't have to be the same color. A particular piece of grass will have a particular color and we can come to the realization of that specific property of that specific object.
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.

At night, the grass looks black. It only looks green under white light. So, one could reasonably argue that the green is a property of the light, not the grass. The colour is not a 'specific property of that specific object' . And we could then bring in the nature of eyes, and thus make the green quality even less specific to the grass. And so on.

If I say 'the grass is green' it takes its meaning not from any specific sensory experience but from the general framework, the theory, we have adopted to understand all sensory experience. We could regard qualities like colour as the defining feature of grass, such that if a piece of grass looked black at night, or turned brown, we no longer regarded it as being the same object. But usually there is no single feature, rather it is more like Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances'. There is a loose bundle of qualities which go with the name 'grass'; where we draw the line depends on what we are trying to do, on how that word 'grass' is used.
Me: I do not see that if my brain does not allow me to 'know' the 'things in themselves', why more brains of the same type would make any difference. All those brains are still dealing only with phenomena, which we have agreed are suspect.
First, that is an invalid inference. What you can say about brain, you can extend to a group of brains, right? Well, no. There is never a situation of brains living outside subjects and hanging around doing their brainly parties. Brains belong to subjects, subjects belong to societies, societies belong to environments, and so on. The relationship between subjects and objects is a bit more complicated than mere contemplation, we actually transform these things and they transform us. I not only see carrots, I can grow them and eat them.
I do not understand the carrots analogy.
Secondly, I have not agreed that "phenomena are suspect". You mean suspect of the "appearances" not being determined by the "things in themselves", but that's just your interpretation of the noumenal as a separate region, of which we have absolutely no contact with, and "appearances" as another type of "things in itself", some sort of "sub-thing", which we do grasp. It isn't clear why we would grasp that, if ultimately the same problem arises: how can you be sure, if nothing is grasped, but offered by our minds?
Well, as I wrote, I was not sure whether you had agreed or not. Regarding the noumenal, I can only repeat that I am using the conventional meaning.
Me: Although you half take this back by saying that our mental representations are not a 'perfect match'. How can we say that? If I say something is not a 'perfect match', I could only do so if I could compare it to what would be a perfect match. If I say 'that painting is not a perfect match of the landscape' that implies I can see the landscape independently of the painting, and compare the two. But no human, singly or in combination can see the 'noumenal' colour of the grass and compare it to the phenomena. Indeed, I'm not sure if we are still claiming colour is a noumenal feature at all.

Your analogy doesn't work. You take a pictorial representation of something, which the subject sees, and try to compare it to a mental representation of the same something, also appropriated by sight...
'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.
A more appropriate example would be that we had a landscape, a pictorial representation of the landscape, a photographic picture of the landscape and our mental image of the landscape. And the key question will be not why all the representations differ among each other, but why they have things in common. Even realizing none of them is a perfect match to the thing represented, how come the same information about the landscape can be obtained? Why shouldn't we infer that the coinciding data speaks about something in the object, more than about something in our minds?
Perhaps it does...but the trouble is we cannot know (a) that it does and (b) if it does, in what respect?

Suppose I am viewing all these things while wearing a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. Then the coinciding data will be that 'everything is pink'. I could only know whether that was a fact about the object, or if it came from the spectacles, if I could take off the spectacles, i.e. see with a different pair of eyes. But we cannot do that; we cannot know whether we humans are wearing spectacles or not.

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.
But by "context" you still mean the ideas ordered somehow in your mind, since according to you, that's all you have to work with. And that's why you claim there's nothing you can be certain of, because your consciousness of the world is just a self-constructed reality of your mind, in which you are inevitably trapped. Consistent with that, your criteria for truth is supplied by your internal, private disposition, in which no one else has a saying, so from that point of view, it is the case that "anything goes".
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.

But you write ' your consciousness of the world is just a self-constructed reality of your mind'. I think that reflects the way you always want to present this discussion as if there are only two options; 'naive realism' or 'anything goes'. It is a false dichotomy. I may not be able to pin down how my perception 'green' relates to some noumenal 'grass', but nevertheless I do have that perception. It is not 'anything goes' in the sense that I can see the grass as red if I wish to. That is the basis around which these discussions normally take place.
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