Terrapin Station wrote:You'd be implicitly adding some additional claims here, including that:
(1) Events as we experience them (colored as they may be on your view by representational perception) are identical somehow with our descriptions of them ("somehow" because we'd be glossing over how events would be identical to linguistic utterances)
(2) Ontological relativism isn't true, so that the same thing experienced by two different people would have to be objectively identical in your view from reference point A and B, where A does not equal B.
I do not buy either (1) or (2).
Regarding (1), it is nothing to do with the language, although that would add another layer.
Regarding (2), I do not think that two different people ever experience 'the same thing' precisely because they are two different people. We do not just passively experience; each experiencer is part of their own experience. Not just because they are in a different location, but because they have different organs of perceptions, different interpretations of the world, different mental tools etc.
It may be that there is some 'thing' out there that is in some sense the originator of those two people's experiences, but if so we can never know it. We only ever have our experiences, and we can never differentiate within our experiences, such that we can say '
this bit of my experience is 'the thing' and this bit comes from me'.
You add:
Also, I wasn't asking anything like "Do events occur exactly as we believe they do, where we're not missing a single detail of them" (where we're pretending that a "complete detailing" of them makes sense in the first place, and where we're pretending that people believe something along the lines of events occurring in vacuums with respect to all other phenomena).
I was simply asking if they occur on his view, period.
I do not understand what 'this view' refers to.
Regarding 'events', I think these are ways we talk about our experiences. If I call something 'an event' I am telling you something about it, perhaps that it had a significance for me personally. Or perhaps I am drawing attention to a particular relationship of cause-and-effect.
For example, I might say that
''The Battle of Waterloo' was an event in the Napoleonic Wars'. But if somebody asked me '
Were there any other events on that day in 1815?' I would have to include a complete description of the entire universe. But since everything in the universe will qualify as 'an event' then to pick out any one part and call it 'an event' is not to say anything.
So, when I do pick out one thing and call it 'an event', I am saying something not about the universe but about me, about how I experience or interpret it.