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Could you point out where you see this in that link?

I'll have to get exact wording later. More accurately, it's Carnap's view, but all logical positivists accept the analytic/synthetic dichotomy.

 

I only mentioned the incompleteness theorem to show that Rand isn't the only one to say axioms can't be proven (or more precisely, axioms of a system cannot be proven by the system itself).

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Edit: The statement, "the possibility that our observations in this universe are wrong is not relevant to our actions," is misguided. The category "wrong" does not apply to the metaphysically given. If the senses are invalid then nothing you or I am saying would be possible!

 

It would be possible, it just wouldn't be very useful, because nothing would be.

 

 

I think Eamon isn't disagreeing, only saying you mischaracterized Hume.

 

Yes, I do think a lot of the people on here are misunderstanding what Hume was saying. Hume was not making a positive claim that inductive reasoning was invalid (As people on here have said, he admitted that inductive reasoning was necessary for humans to function), only that our basis for believing it was valid was not logically sufficient to formally justify that assumption.

 

Also, you are all right that the way I phrased my comment about "arguing" that all logic was invalid was a genuine example of a stolen concept. But, if someone was trying to poke holes in Objectivism, they could respond that the point that deductive logic is based on inductive reasoning about the real world would invalidate deductive logic, instead of validating inductive logic. Of course someone making a positive claim, using logic, that all logic was invalid, would be committing a contradiction. But I can still see how this could be used to refute the responses to Hume's argument which have been posted on here.

 

I do, however, agree with dismissing any such claim, if phrased as a positive claim, as arbitrary.

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No.

 

It's like saying, 'eating exists', 'life exists', and 'running exists'.

 

There is an existence. It is.

 

This is even more important to assert when most intellectuals and even scientists assert that there is no real physical reality that we interact with. Yet others say we live in a simulation or hologram.

Edited by Peter Morris
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Hume was not making a positive claim that inductive reasoning was invalid (As people on here have said, he admitted that inductive reasoning was necessary for humans to function), only that our basis for believing it was valid was not logically sufficient to formally justify that assumption.

At least if induction is treated as really only probabilistic. Objectivism agrees that this is a bad way to do induction and not valid, and suggests different methods. I don't think Hume was arguing about if it could be "proven", though. I think it can be, philosophically at least.

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I do, however, agree with dismissing any such claim, if phrased as a positive claim, as arbitrary.

Then you've got it.  :thumbsup:

If you remember what the purpose of knowledge is, in any epistemological issue, you'll amaze yourself.

 

You asserted that you thought that Eamon may think I was mischaracterizing Hume. You failed to substantiate this in spite of my request for you to do so. What did Eamon say that made you think Eamon thought this?

And by the same token, Hume may not have accepted any of the premises of his reasoning -- he was only using them to show that the system of logic he was arguing against was -- in his opinion -- flawed.

 

And still waiting to hear what's wrong with dismissing the whole thing as arbitrary.

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Harrison, what do you think, in your answer to the question I asked louie, applies to my own characterization of Hume ?

Louie said that Eamon did not object to our criticisms of Hume, per se; only our portrayal of his actual assertions.  You asked for evidence of such a claim and I provided it.

I made no reference to your accurate assessment of Hume's ideas.

 

Harrison said:

 

Are you asking me this?

Yes.

 

In post #42 you said:

The statement, "the possibility that our observations in this universe are wrong is not relevant to our actions," is misguided.

 

I emphatically agree with Eamon's reasoning.  If dismissing Hume as arbitrary is misguided then I have automated an error into my own thoughts.  But I cannot think of what that might be. 

Logically, either you must know something which I do not, or your assertion was simply false.

 

So if you are aware of some error in such reasoning then I would appreciate it if you mentioned it, explicitly.  Call it epistemological greed.

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Does not Hume miss the concept that things ARE, WHAT they ARE? 

 

I mean does not his assertion attacking induction (paraphrasing) "that things having been a certain way up to now is in no way determinative of what things will be tomorrow" amount to an "arbitrary" statement.  Essentially he is arguing it is "possible" things in general are unpredictable or random i.e. "natureless", in the absence of any evidence (and in fact in the presence of evidence to the contrary).  His attack rests on an arbitrary statement having no positive support in the face of facts showing that things HAVE natures and are tomorrow what they are today unless something causes them to change (I know... he denies causation too...)

 

So Hume, far from launching an actual reputable attack on induction, has simply stated the arbitrary while ignoring all that conceptual knowledge (based on reality) tells us ... in particular:

 

A is A.

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Hume's failure is the failure of Moderns.  He was searching for a type of "reified", omniscient and immutable knowledge that exist independent of the mind.  Even though he was a product of the Enlightenment, he still inherited the baggage of Christianity and the idea of a divine order in the Universe.  Failing to find such an order, he resorted to belief/probability to justify knowledge.  It was modern, secular and scientific for it's age.

Edited by New Buddha
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Hume's failure is the failure of Moderns.  He was searching for a type of "reified", omniscient and immutable knowledge that exist independent of the mind.  Even though he was a product of the Enlightenment, he still inherited the baggage of Christianity and the idea of a divine order in the Universe.  Failing to find such an order, he resorted to belief/probability to justify knowledge.  It was modern, secular and scientific for it's age.

Could you elaborate on this a tad?

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Buddha said:

Hume's failure is the failure of Moderns. He was searching for a type of "reified", omniscient and immutable knowledge that exist independent of the mind. Even though he was a product of the Enlightenment, he still inherited the baggage of Christianity and the idea of a divine order in the Universe. Failing to find such an order, he resorted to belief/probability to justify knowledge. It was modern, secular and scientific for it's age.

What the hell does "knowledge independent of the mind " mean? How do you see your proposed "divine order" sought by Hume, as characterizing his criticisms any differently than the application of them to the orderliness of an objective universe with identity (causality)?

Edited by Plasmatic
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@Plasmatic & @dream

By independent of the mind (of man) I mean that much of Christian philosophy studied how God has ordered existence, identity and morality.  There was an ontological order to the Universe decreed by God.  Philosophy was an attempt to discover that order.  Hume was looking for a naturalistic approach.  From Wiki  Hume 

 

"Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature."

 

"....he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience."

 

And regarding the secular nature of his thought:  From Stanford  Hume on Religion

 

"Whatever interpretation one takes of Hume's philosophy as a whole, it is certainly true that one of his most basic philosophical objectives is to unmask and discredit the doctrines and dogmas of orthodox religious belief. There are, however, some significant points of disagreement about the exact nature and extent of Hume's irreligious intentions. One of the most important of these is whether Hume's sceptical position leads him to a view that can be properly characterized as “atheism”. Although this was a view that was widely accepted by many of Hume's critics during his own lifetime, contemporary accounts have generally argued that this misrepresents his final position on this subject."

 

Now, do I need to spell out for you Plasmatic that I do NOT advocate Hume?  I mean, what the hell?

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Buddha said:

Now, do I need to spell out for you Plasmatic that I do NOT advocate Hume? I mean, what the hell?

Well, it looks like you already assumed that I thought this, but I didn't, and nothing I asked could rationally be construed as such. I don't know what your all worked up about.

You didn't answer my question. Nothing in what you quoted addresses the idea that anyone was looking for "reified" knowledge independent of the mind , or what such string of symbols even means.

Also, I did not ask about any secular notions of Hume. My question is how do you see Hume's critique of causality as applying any differently to natural orderliness than any sought for divine orderliness. I don't see how this would somehow be defining of the criticism he directs at causality...?

Edited by Plasmatic
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Hume's skepticism with regard to induction and causality is self-refuting. Aristotle analyzed and derived inductively the criteria dealing with a wide range of deduction, identifying what constituted both valid and invalid applications therein.  Up until now, one of the guidelines for valid induction warns of the pitfall arising from confusing correlation with causation. Mill's methods provide a few more.

 

Hume's conclusion that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience is consistent with, in part, what knowledge is derived from. His conclusion that we cannot rationally justify nature will continue to be uniform is, in short, an attack on the law of identity.

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Harrison said:

Louie said that Eamon did not object to our criticisms of Hume, per se; only our portrayal of his actual assertions. You asked for evidence of such a claim and I provided it.

I made no reference to your accurate assessment of Hume's ideas.

The question I asked Louie was to provide evidence that Eamon thought I personally mischaracterized Hume. The quote you gave doesn't implicate me personally.

My statement:

The statement, "the possibility that our observations in this universe are wrong is not relevant to our actions," is misguided.

Is not about the arbitrary. Its about the inapplicability of the category "wrong" to perception. So I never commented on it being arbitrary. Its an invalid proposition. In that sense its invalidity is the problem not arbitrariness. Edited by Plasmatic
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@Plasmatic

"You didn't answer my question. Nothing in what you quoted addresses the idea that anyone was looking for "reified" knowledge independent of the mind , or what such string of symbols even means."

 

The term "reified" knowledge, as I used it, is along the lines of Kant's "because we have eyes, we cannot see...."  It's ties into philosophers who devalue knowledge that has been gained by a "process".  The belief that our perception has distorted reality as it really is.  That's ALL I meant by the use of term.  Knowledge that is a priori. 

 

Hume's attempt to naturalize knowledge, by discarding the theory of innate ideas, was fairly radical and exposed himself to claims of his being an Atheist.  However because he did not understand that essence is epistemological and that the senses are valid, he could only conclude that induction was justified psychologically  (by "habit"). 

 

I'm not presenting anything radical here, or a new interpretation of Hume.

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@Plasmatic

"You didn't answer my question. Nothing in what you quoted addresses the idea that anyone was looking for "reified" knowledge independent of the mind , or what such string of symbols even means."

 

The term "reified" knowledge, as I used it, is along the lines of Kant's "because we have eyes, we cannot see...."  It's ties into philosophers who devalue knowledge that has been gained by a "process".  The belief that our perception has distorted reality as it really is.  That's ALL I meant by the use of term.  Knowledge that is a priori. 

 

Hume's attempt to naturalize knowledge, by discarding the theory of innate ideas, was fairly radical and exposed himself to claims of his being an Atheist.  However because he did not understand that essence is epistemological and that the senses are valid, he could only conclude that induction was justified psychologically  (by "habit"). 

 

I'm not presenting anything radical here, or a new interpretation of Hume.

First, i believe that it's important to understand that Hume's attack on induction was against Bacon: his 'new method was insufficient, not wrong.

 

For Hume, Innate ideas belong within the realm of imagination, as does the existencof god. This diovision between the sensible 'is' and the imaginitive 'ought' is what is referred to as 'Hume's fork'.

 

They are simply incommensurate domains--hence the Kantian challenge to re-unite them, so to speak. Is metaphysics, defined as the synthetice a priori, possible?

 

The twist to Hume was to have doubted the verifiability of sensory data to begin with. So yes, for better or worse, this puts him at odds with 'existence (as sensory data) exists (as a true entity)'..

 

But he knew this all along, and his critique of Bacon was made precisely on these grounds. Induction is 'true' if and only if all of the paerticular empirical facts are themself true. In other words, inductively, 'tuna, salmon, bass= fish, yes; tuna, salmon, whale=fish, no.

 

So what kind of background information do we neeed to tell us thqat a whale is not a species of fish?.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Do you have a reference to instantiate this view of LP?

Quotes with full context:

 

http://imgur.com/tN3Q75Z

http://imgur.com/CbM3nPE

The key point is that Carnap is saying we can deduce perceptive propositions of, for example, kangaroos, but we can't *deduce* the physical world, reality. So that is basically how Rand said you can't deduce the axioms, and many would agree, and also the core point of Godel's theorem - Godel sometimes visited the Vienna Circle, so he at least picked up on some early ideas. The thing with Carnap is that he is saying that assertions about reality in terms of metaphysics don't really mean anything at all since there is no deductively verifiable metaphysical facts. Nor is empirical investigation philosophy in his view, since they are unverifiable by nature of being empirical.

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Louie, that book is like 100 bucks. Where did you get access? I asked because given the doctrine of the Positivist of the verifiability criteria of meaning your statement is false. You misunderstand what you have posted. The vienna circle rejected metaphysical-philosophical questions as neither true nor false but meaningless, precisely because they are non empirical, that is, they contain non-observation language.

The thing with Carnap is that he is saying that assertions about reality in terms of metaphysics don't really mean anything at all since there is no deductively verifiable metaphysical facts. Nor is empirical investigation philosophy in his view, since they are unverifiable by nature of being empirical.

Not at all. What makes something meaningful in this view is exactly that it is empirical -verifiable. You need to look up the verification theory of meaning. Its not a deductive endeavor . Observation statements are empirical not deductive.

This statement:

Logical positivists took this fact to say that all empirical facts are indeterminate, and logical syntax the only thing that is determinate.

Is basically the opposite view of the verification theory of meaning...

The two different senses of "reality" Carnap is differentiating here is done so by exactly the "observed in an empirical way" (and therefore have "sense" which here means meaning)standard mentioned in the first page you linked to.

Edit:

"4. Meaning and Verifiability

Perhaps the most famous tenet of logical empiricism is the verifiability principle , according to which a synthetic statement is meaningful only if it is verifiable. Carnap sought to give a logical formulation of this principle. In The Logical Structure of the World (1928) he asserted that a statement is meaningful only if every non-logical term is explicitly definable by means of a very restricted phenomenalistic language. A few years later, Carnap realized that this thesis was untenable because a phenomenalistic language is insufficient to define physical concepts. Thus he choose an objective language (“thing language”) as the basic language, one in which every primitive term is a physical term. All other terms (biological, psychological, cultural) must be defined by means of basic terms. To overcome the problem that an explicit definition is often impossible, Carnap used dispositional concepts, which can be introduced by means of reduction sentences. For example, if A, B, C and D are observational terms and Q is a dispositional concept, then"......

http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/iep_utm?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iep.utm.edu%2Fcarnap%2F&dm_redirected=true#2965

Edited by Plasmatic
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Quotes with full context:

 

http://imgur.com/tN3Q75Z

http://imgur.com/CbM3nPE

The key point is that Carnap is saying we can deduce perceptive propositions of, for example, kangaroos, but we can't *deduce* the physical world, reality. So that is basically how Rand said you can't deduce the axioms, and many would agree, and also the core point of Godel's theorem - Godel sometimes visited the Vienna Circle, so he at least picked up on some early ideas. The thing with Carnap is that he is saying that assertions about reality in terms of metaphysics don't really mean anything at all since there is no deductively verifiable metaphysical facts. Nor is empirical investigation philosophy in his view, since they are unverifiable by nature of being empirical.

I believe that it's safe to say that Carnap took the standard logical-positivist party line regarding metaphysics: it's all nonsense.

 

This more or less corresponds to an orthodox understanding of Wittgenstein's Tractatus--"Those things of which one cannot speak must pass into silence". facts that aren't within a frame of reference (Bild) have no case (Fall) to be made for or against...

 

Wittgenstein's later work, 'Logical Investigations' more or less broke with this. metaphysics become viably and important because the frames of reference depend upon precisely those notions and assumptions which are groundless, epistemologically speaking

 

Godel's incomplerteness seems to justify the project of 'Investigation' in so far as he demonstrated that even simple arithmetic cannot be fully axiomitized. To this end, ZF-C is wrong. there is always an out-of -bounds set wich will de-axiomitize any math.

 

Then again, Rand's whole approach seems to run to the contrary.....

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Godel's incomplerteness seems to justify the project of 'Investigation' in so far as he demonstrated that even simple arithmetic cannot be fully axiomitized. To this end, ZF-C is wrong. there is always an out-of -bounds set wich will de-axiomitize any math.

Godel ultimately concluded that no axiomatic system can be formally demonstrated, meaning deductively proven. That is, no axiomatic system is complete. Systems can be axiomatized still. Even if incomplete, that doesn't mean axiomatization is impossible, it just means you need a method besides a formal deduction to demonstrate the validity of a system.

 

Carnap is different, to the extent he still made claims about reality. All Godel did was talk about proving and validating statements, and on his own terms, there is no problem. To Carnap, reality is a problem for verification.

 

Plasmatic, that book was published in 1931, so maybe it still has Carnap's view that he later rejected as untenable. I checked out the book from my school's philosophy department's library. Anyway, the verification method he talks about is a deductive endeavor, because he doesn't think empirical statements have meaning until they are given a formal description. With a formal description, then you could proceed to verify - but observation itself is not sufficient, the senses are irrelevant for verification. Keep in mind I wrote that all empirical statements are indeterminate under Carnap's view, but that isn't to say no verification is possible with indeterminacy. Because of indeterminacy though, logical syntax is required to say anything meaningful about an empirical statement. I shouldn't have said "empirical fact".

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