I’d say yes it matters, but I’d emphasize that the “falseness” of a belief is, for me, always a situated judgment. So it matters for someone that they don’t interpret the witnessed event as the witness interprets it. I can believe that you saw “something,” but be reluctant to treat it as “physically” relevant.
But maybe I’m a psycho-analyst and I weave your hallucination-for-me-but-ghost-for-you into a causal-predictive story. “He’s on the edge of a breakthrough !” And this I expect to manifest “physically” in the patient’s lifestyle.
I found this footnote in a Blouin paper intrepreting Husserl as an “ontological phenomenalist.” Paper is linked in Fasching thread.
Infinite, because the Idea of the world—which is of an absolute Object “purified of all indeterminacy”—can never in principle be realized, since reality as revealed in and through time-consciousness is essentially open- ended. The following passage (Husserl 2001b, 58 [20-1]) illustrates this idea strikingly: “In this way, an idea that lies in infinity belongs to every external perception, the idea of the completely determined object, of the object that would be determined through and through, known through and through, where every one of its determinations would be purified of all indeterminacy, and where the full determination itself would be devoid of any plus ultra with respect to what is still to be determined, what is still remaining open. I spoke of an idea lying in infinity, that is, of an unattainable idea. For, the essential structure of perception itself excludes a perception […] that would furnish absolute knowledge of the object; it excludes such a knowledge in which the tension would collapse between the object in the How of determination (which is changing and relative, remaining incomplete), and the object itself. For evidently, the possibility of a plus ultra is in principle never ruled out. It is thus the idea of the absolute self of the object and of its absolute and complete determination, of its absolute individual essence. In relation to this infinite idea which is to be seen, but which as such is not realizable, every perceptual object in the epistemic process is a flowing approximation. We always have the external object in the flesh (we see, grasp, seize it), and yet it is always at an infinite distance mentally.” This description makes patent the tension between the object as it is given “in the flesh”—the experienced object that comprises an inalienable horizon of indeterminacy—and the Idea of the object as it is grasped by the intellect, free of all indeterminacy, existing absolutely in itself, like a perfect self-identical sphere. The Idea of the world is but the logical extension of that of the Object—it is the Container of all Objects, the Sphere of all spheres. The key metaphysical insight of Husserl is that the latter is but an idealization, not the concrete, full-blooded reality. The indeterminacy perceived in objects and the world is not a mere accident of our limited perspectives on the world; it is an essential part of reality, which is intrinsically open-ended and flowing. This is why Husserl can assert that “absolute [i.e., fully determined] reality is no more or less valid than a round square” (2014, 102 [106]).
To me this identity theory of truth is an intensification of the correspondence theory of truth that “hides the machinery.” The qualitative singular sounding of the sentence is not much like the sensory presence of a rabbit. Somehow the spoken sentence is “made true” by there being a rabbit over there. So “there is a rabbit over there” is “true” if there is a rabbit over there.
This seems less mysteriously explicated by “seeing is believing” or the primacy of perceptoin I believe that there is a rabbit over there because I see it over there.
To me “ground truth” makes sense as something assumed in a conversation. The “fact” is the presumed uncontroversial basis. We “enact” facts by churning out their implications, without bothering to justify the “fact” itself. And “the truth” also makes sense as the communal belief we hope to achieve.
Perhaps I am “deaf” in some way, but a certain “determinate way things really already are” remains iffy from over here. It’s different in the mouth of Larry or Sue, who give a detailed account of this or that situation. That account “should” be coherent. We tacitly consider their access also, so that the world is “acknowledged in its quality.” That’s the weirdness of claims about the prebiotic past. Can they have definite sense without a tacit reference to future experience ?
That’s a good way of putting my objection, as well. Or not so much “hides the machinery” as “assumes we could describe the machinery if we needed to” – but can we?
As already noted, this may be too big to grapple with here. My only contribution here would be to note that “mirror” has such strong connotations of physical similarity or synonymy that we may be biasing the question by using it as a metaphor.
Like you, I want to avoid this collapse, but I also want to stress maybe a bit more forcefully the ontological or metaphysical import of the second claim.
That’s because the intellectual active powers of man (both practical and theoretical) are what it is that Earth’s past potency is relative to, on the one hand, and the specific actualizations of those potencies in the shape of our form of life is what it is that we now actively sustain, develop, revise, etc. The universe, we might say, does give rise to us (or creates us) but it doesn’t do so independently of us, since we aren’t separate from it, and we merely seem to be separate from (and hence rigidly constrained by) its “past pre-biotic state” due maybe to something like Kim’s fallacious Causal Exclusion Argument (or van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument) that make it look like our own past constrains us from outside of ourselves, as it were.
So far so good, but I also wonder if the foregoing is sufficient to forestall a view that I don’t want to suggest. There is a sort of restricted social constructivism (advocated by John Searle) according to which there are socially constructed items such as money, institutions, wars, promises, etc. This is supposed to be contrasted with things like rocks, planets, and electrons. I of course want to endorse a more radical form of constructivism according to which this contrast is drawn between two sorts of ontological domains that both are constructed in the sense that what it is that counts as an exemplar of either still is dependent on the conceptual nets (and scientific practices, including quantum theory, etc.) that we cast. So, there is the danger of giving the impression that there already were “things” making up the pre-biotic Earth that are being individuated differently when caught under our nets than they are “in themselves,” and the fish example, where we grant that since fish, qua autopoietic entities, individuate themselves, encourages this picture.
Likewise, if we say that what it is that makes up the boundaries of a mountain (e.g., where it is that the mountain ends and the valley begins) are social conventions regarding something like an underlying rocky terrain that is allegedly not socially constructed, we invite the same misunderstanding. What I’d rather want to argue is that we are like the fish in some respects (since we are animals) and unlike it in others (since we are navigators of the space of reasons, which is, in my view, just the natural/social world individuated in a particular way different from the way a fish individuates it into the affordances of its Umwelt) but there is no pre-biotic world that we can make sense of as being other than a determinate set of potentialities for the actualization of our Umwelt or, equally intelligibly to us, for a fish’s Umwelt.
Here I think Sokolowski may be helpful. The relation between phantasm and intelligible content is not that of the less perfect actualizing the more perfect. It’s a relation of modes of presentation. The very same intelligibility (eidos) presented perceptually/imaginatively is now presented intellectually/formally through an act of categorial articulation. So it’s not a hierarchical relation between two different “things”, it’s the same intelligible content presented via two different modes of disclosure.
The simple answer is that a false proposition fails to refer. But the question you seem to be driving at is regarding the ontological status of the hallucinated rabbit. What does “white rabbit” refer to in the true statement, “I hallucinated a white rabbit”. Again, I think the answer is straightforward: it refers to the intelligible contents of my hallucinatory act.
By the way, I agree with much of what @Pierre-Normand wrote in his reply. The worry you raised about how propositional content can be identical to some physical arrangement in the world is understandable, but it assumes a certain metaphysical picture of the world that most identity theorists wouldn’t accept. For instance, for someone who accepts hylomorphism it’s no longer a question of how propositional content can be identical to some physical arrangement in the world, because the world is not reducible to physical arrangement in the first place.
Fair enough ! But I might ask what then does “correspondence” mean ?
I think the temptation to say that the “meaning” of a claim “is like” the way things are. The “way things are” to “be like meaning” would have to be “articulated.” So again the “ideal witness” or “the truth is what God believes.” Almost Berkeley here, because it’s only a hallucination if “God” doesn’t share it.
Essentially nothing, if it’s my belief. To make belief the primary concept is to go from two concepts to one. But here I’m trying to “foreground” this possibility, so of course I will use both “belief” and “truth.”
But the beliefs of others that I do not share call for the word “belief” or something that plays this role. “Jerry believes that his house is haunted.” I would not say “Jerry’s house is haunted” if I didn’t believe his house was haunted.
I could “lose the self-consciousness here” and say
I would not say Jerry’s house was haunted if it was not haunted. I would just say that Jerry believes that it is haunted.
Why mention the beliefs of others ? To justify or predict their behavior, for example.
It’s an interesting question. Let’s say I have one hundred trees on my place in the more or less open spaces. I could assign each tree a number and write up a description of each tree and their locations such that a diligent reader could discover and correctly assign the same number I have assigned to each tree. In that sense the different trees are locally determinate and their characteristics and positions correspond to my descriptions.
This strongly suggests a human independent actuality that our linguistic enactments, if they are true to the actuality could be said to mirror, or be isomorphic with. This is not to say that we are able to explain just how this is possible, but it does seem that we do know it is not merely possible, but achievable.
I prefer to settle for a “sufficiently shared reality” between humans that is sufficiently independent of individual humans. I think that rational conversation assumes this much. How can we discuss a world if we don’t share it, and if we don’t trust in our ability to “mostly understand” one another ?
To me the “mirror” metaphor is most tempting when we compare imagined empirical situations to perceived empirical situations. I promise to bring a red glove in a mason jar. I “actually bring” a red glove in a mason jar. “Actuality” seems, in use, to be strongly associated with perception. But perception is mine or yours. We can verbally compare perceptions. “So you saw that too ! Then I am not hallucinating.”
Fair enough. I go further, especially given that we can tell that animals see the same features of the environment that we do. Even on the human level the commonality seems to be explicable only on either the assumption of a mind-independent actuality or the assumption of a universal mind we are all connected to or a collective mind that we are not aware of.
The thing about things in the environment is that we don’t merely see them, we do things with them. Say my dog likes to piss on a certain tree. I cut it down, and he no longer pisses at that location but chooses another tree instead. I can infer that he no longer sees the tree.
I’m with you there also. The animals “have the same world as us.” Just to be clear, I am very very against the idea that “the world is in our heads.” A terrible idea. On the other hand, this terrible idea looks like a “misreading” of “the world is from many perspectives.” The “experience” I call “mine” is our world but from “over here.” Dogs are included, and their language has significance. But they don’t join us in this type of conversation.
This issue is whether “a-perspectival reality” makes sense as more than a practical map that we mostly agree on. Which makes it an artificial or fused perspective perhaps.
The scientific image is created “toward” independence from any particular observer. But some “inflate” this to an independence from observation altogether, so that the perceptions that “inspire” the map become “less real” than what is built on them.
Agreed. There is no accessible a-perspectival reality―it is something we are forced to assume even though we cannot imagination “what it is like”. It cannot be like anything, or at least we have no way of saying what it could be like, since all our sayings are perception-oriented. It seems we are pretty much on the same wavelength in this.
Very cool. I don’t often meet others who see the issue this way. Because I am not at all a subjective idealist. What is there is world. Shared world. World with horizon, corners, and shadows.
And yet, so far as I can make sense of, always from a perspective within that world. However weird that is compared to practical talk about “objective reality.”
Reminds me of a point made by Heidegger. If I talk about the chalkboard behind me, then I am intending ( I am directed towards) that chalkboard. Not an “image” of the chalkboard in my head.
But postulated images of chalkboards are themselves possible intentional objects in the space of reasons. If I intend the image in your head, than I intend that image, and not my image in my head of your image in your image. Though here the “image” theory runs into difficulties. This weird example suggests how philosophers get knee deep in piles of entities that other philosophers don’t even recognize as more than useless fictions.
Quite right. And, in my opinion, this bears directly on the question of perspectivality that you and @John were discussing above. For it is the eidos of the thing that makes it the same thing across all perspectives.
Very nice to hear ! Yes. For me, the form or eidos or essence “glues” aspects of an object together so that they are aspects.
I once played with the phrase “constituting ideality” for this. Or “the substance of the object is logical.” Or “bite the object like a false coin, you will not taste its essence.”
It’s easy to understand the temptation to talk about “immateriality.” Which problematically frames the “material” as something “mind independent but formed anyhow.” These days anyway, where the “physical” is taken for granted as an “easy” concept.
So the “other” of the “idea” would be something like “ineffable quality.” Perhaps “the dyad” in Plato’s unwritten doctrine.