The past events exist in your memory if you could remember them. They also exist as the causes for the present effects.
They don’t exist in material / physical level of the present.
There are different forms of existence.
We have already been there. I have already shown that the observed events only exist as mental images in us. I thought you agreed after I gave you the example of the building. Now, you are saying the same thing again.
For some reason, you don’t seem to be accepting there are different forms of existence, and your pasts exist in your memory or as the causes for your present.
It is up to you. Your claim is that you have no past, and your present moment has no causes. If that is your belief, then it is ok. Let’s just agree that we have different views on the existence of the past.
I make a distinction between events that occur externally to us and their mental image that we observe. It is you who carelessly says that the past events exist in us.
I didn’t say that the past events didn’t exist. I am saying that past events don’t exist.
But they exist in your memory if you can remember them. Or they exist as the causes for your present.
Please read the first comment in the previous post. And I am done here!
The notion of a “truthmaker” strikes me as a philosophical garden path. We have the cat and the mat, no need to add a “truthmaker” as well in order to find that “The cat is on the mat” is true.
Again, it is true that the OP was written in the past. It follows that there are truths about the past. The past is not the sort of thing that we quantify over. In effect the question “does the past exist?” is malformed. The past is not a thing.
This is seen most clearly in formalisations of temporal logic. The singular advantage of such formalisations is that they oblige coherence. We can construct such a logic, after Prior, simply by adding a few temporal operators - see the account in the SEP for details, I’ll not repeat them here. The upshot is that we have "P(the cat is on the mat) and P(The OP was written by j_j), along with a standard Kripke-style semantics.
The formalisations in SEP show how the question “Does the past exist?” is malformed. “The” past is not a substantive, not something that might or might not have existed. It’s like the little man who wasn’t there, a figment of grammar.
And yes, that takes away all your fun. Analytic philosophy is like that.
This formal reframing can now be applied back to Meillassoux and Peirce. Both are mistakenly presuming that “the” past is an item that can be subjected to quantification.
We can improve and clarify what Peirce has to say by rejecting this quantification. Dropping the ontological mechanics Peirce uses shows that his claims are epistemic, they are to do with the direction of inference. He does not need to claim that the past does not exist. His claim becomes that past-tense statements are to be evaluated only in terms of the implications they have for the future.
And this blocks the Orwellian reading. The truth of statements about the past is not inherently dependent on the truth of statements about the future.
The temptation is to slide from this into thinking that claims about the past can only be evaluated in terms of claims about the future. But that is to illegitimately reverse the direction of inference.
The same applies to Meillassoux. The truth value of claims about the past can be quite independent of our knowledge or representations of the future. the correlationist’s error is one of the direction of inference.
This conflation of epistemic and ontological statements stems at least from Kant, and is what grounds the interminable diatribe between realism and antirealism. All of this from the simple failure to notice the difference between “p is true” and “We believe that p is true”.
Indeed, falling for this simple error accounts for most of the metaphysical disagreement in these fora and is seen repeatedly in this very thread.
I’m curious as to whether you believe there is a fact of the matter as to whether the events you remember happening in your past did or did not happen. Note, I think this question is inseparable from the question as to whether memory can be fallible―it would be incoherent to speak about fallible memory if there were no fact of the matter about whether events believed to have occurred did or did not occur.
For me, belief is not “internal” and contrasted with “truth.” Instead the revision of belief is the transformation of the world (from POV).
As counterintuitive as I know it sounds, I prefer to avoid the term “fallible.” Instead I think we can get by with the single concept of belief. I revise my beliefs. I might call my old belief “false” and my new belief “true,” but IMV there is nothing more in this “truth” and “falsity” than that transformation belief.
My objection to “truth” or “fact of the matter” as typically understood is that it seems to invoke a “reality-from-God’s-POV” that doesn’t make sense to me. If “God” is a witness too, then why should “his” perceptive by more real than mine ? If “objective reality” is instead reality from “no” perspective, this makes even less sense to me.
So I’m not saying that “the fact of the matter is that there is no fact of the matter.” It’s more like “I can’t make this of this round-square talk that so many seem to take seriously.”
I can be very certain about some aspects of the past, while most of the past is indeterminate for me.
This is the gist. The past is continually updated. It exists in some sense as a topic of conversation. So it’s a matter of getting a better grip on this topic.
Whether there is a cat and a mat in the first place is, and not just whether the cat is on the may, is a matter of situated belief. Such is my own situated belief.
Is there a “true world” “behind” world-for-you and world-for-me and so on ? I’d say the phrase is pretty empty. And yet we must largely share beliefs to understand one another. So there’s a limit on perspectivism. Too much divergence dissolves the forum. I speak in the hope that others will “see what I see.”
Fair enough! I find I cannot dispense with the idea that my memories of the past, my beleifs about what happened in the past, can be more or less accurate on a continuum from completely inaccurate up to completely accurate. Of course I don’t know for sure which memories are which beyond my feelings of certainty about some memories and my creeping doubts about others.
And again this ties in with my thinking that the invisible―what we cannot know via the senses― is an ineliminable part of what we can know via the senses. Also if the past did not, or does not, exist, then it seems to follow that what I believe to be knowledge, since it all concerns the past, however immediate, cannot be true or false, and hence cannot even count as knowledge. I have to confess I find that conclusion untenable.
Fair enough ! For me it suffices that knowledge is merely relatively warranted belief. Instead of JTB, we can get by on JMB — Justified My Belief.
I might find a claim warranted and yet not believe or endorse it. For this reason, I wouldn’t call it knowledge. I would call “knowledge” those beliefs that I both share and find warranted.
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Well, no. The past is not continually updated, although our beliefs about the past might be. And yes, the past, just like the little man who wasn’t there, is indeed a topic of conversation. Yet with no ontological implications.
Language is a curious thing.
In my view, the problem is assuming that “P is true” means anything more than “we believe P and we find P warranted.” Typically the “strong” notion of truth presupposes a dualism that is then hard to think around.
The ontological assumption that there is a gap between experience and world gives rise to epistemological confusions, various pseudo-problems. Some of experience/world is “denied” as “unreal” in a “deep” sense, when it suffices to treat “real/unreal” as a merely pragmatic distinction. An experience might be classified as a “hallucination” rather than a “perception.”
I think Mach handles this confusion well.
Well I count myself as basically a logical positivist, so I won’t let you claim that flag as your own. Talk of “taking away all the fun” is itself part of the rhetorical-poetic “substance” which is itself just as guilty of this “fun.”
If we don’t methodologically alienate ourselves from the entire lifeworld context of conversation, then we do indeed take note of the basic attitude or interpersonal role-play at the root of this or that approach to philosophy.
In an importance sense, “analytic” philosophy is just the same old metaphysics. Analytic statements, deep truths about language…it’s just Kant all over again. Typically there is an appeal to Logic or Language as an independently valid transpersonal authority. “Not I, but analytic philosophy through me.”
This is not a personal attack. As a “logical positivist,” I came to see that “nonsense (from no POV or from God’s POV)” is itself more “language on holiday” or crypto-theology. The basic move is a flight from situated belief, a claim of special methodological access to “reality” or “language” or whatever the trendy idol happens to be.
I’d go further and say truth doesn’t mean even that. There are things that are true, and yet not believed. And there are things that are true yet unwarranted.
Again, “we believe that p” and “p is true” are independent.