Here in Australia, there was no eclipse. Eclipses are perspectival as a matter of definition.
Also the remainder of that paragraph is important:
Frankly, that’s a ridiculous statement, a profound inanity. Even though the eclipse was not visible in Australia, it occurred.
Your talk of perspective amounts to the observation that an observation requires an observer. Nothing to do with what is observed. And so back to the 100m race - yes, I can’t run your 100m race for you:
Knowing stuff requires an observer. Truth doesn’t.
Whatever truth you bring forth in support of this contention, will always require that you indicate it, and I assent to it. The truth may not require an observer; but an argument about truth necessarily presupposes a knower and a shared framework within which the claim can be understood and assessed. And aside from that, what truth is there to speak of?
“All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system" ~ On Certainty
Incidentally I’ve noticed in reading around on general philosophy that there’s a scholarly consensus that Schopenhauer was a major influence on Wittgenstein. Do you have any knowledge about that? for instance this abstract:
Wittgenstein’s thought was profoundly shaped in both Tractatus and post-Tractatus periods by Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism. In the later Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953, Wittgenstein identifies rules of philosophical grammar for language-games in relation to their pragmatic point and purpose, practically grounded in forms of life ~ Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer
And yet
I don’t understand how you reconcile these apparently contradictory assertions.
I didn’t say the eclipse didn’t occur. I said it is perspectival, it is dependent on the position of all of the bodies involved.
What I’m objecting to is the contention that what is objective exists entirely independently of an observer. I’m not disputing the empirical facts but the tendency to ‘absolutize’ them. Empirical objectivity is not the same as metaphysical absoluteness - but it tends to be treated that way.
Whereas @noAxioms seems to be saying that the facts are entirely perspectival - that an observer with a different perspective can claim that there was no earthquake. I would not say that.
None of that is problematic.
As for the change of topic, Wittgenstein admired Schopenhauer, but as a foil.
“One could call Schopenhauer an altogether crude mind. I.e., he does have refinement, but at a certain level this suddenly comes to an end & he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his finishes.
One might say of Schopenhauer: he never takes stock of himself.”
Schopenhauer didn’t have access to the developments in logic that were available to Wittgenstein.
And notably, one philosopher often influences another in the rejection of their ideas.
1 Like
And the apparent counter is that the stuff around us exists, observed or unobserved. Your car is in the garage or carport or wherever, it hasn’t ceased to exits because no one is looking at it.
That additional word, “objective”, is it there to make things disappear when unobserved?
Once more around the merry-go-round?
“The coin is in my pocket” is true if and only if the coin is indeed in my pocket, and regardless of whether the coins are being observed or not. Your use of “objective” and “subjective” only serves to confuse the issue.
To quote from an earlier essay: I am not arguing that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ¹. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object."
At the time I said this, you took me to be saying “Left-to-right is true for me; right-to-left is true for you; therefore there is no observer-independent truth.”
But I’m not saying that. I’m saying the empirical event is objective - true for any observer - but its description in perspectival terms is observer-dependent. I’m not denying that there are perspective-independent descriptions, but even so, any description or comprehension still relies on a perspective. Without any perspective (in space) or duration (in time) how could you describe or even conceive of where or when an event happened? This is why the sense that ‘reality exists as it would do even if there were no observers in it’ is mistaken. Not that it doesn’t exist, but that nothing whatever can be said about it.
None of which matters, since it is true that the coin is in your pocket when it is unobserved.
It was never in question, but neither is it the point.
And yet now it is true that the eclipse occurred, and…
How’s your back?
I’m making a distinction between empirical and metaphysical realism. Empirical realism recognizes that there are objective facts. Metaphysical realism goes further, regarding the world as possessing a determinate nature in itself, wholly independent of any perspective from which that nature might be apprehended. The distinction is germane to the question posed in the OP.
And is that a distinction that we need? There are truths. Some of those truths are not believed, some are. Some of those truths are justified by observation, others are not. Adding talk of metaphysical and empirical truth confuses the way a belief is justified with its truth.
1 Like
100%. It’s the distinction that I think is behind the original post. It is intended to show why scientific realism does not carry the metaphysical weight that is often attributed to it.
Here’s the thesis of the OP:
That is, that there are truths of which we are unaware. Now how does dividing truths into metaphysical and empirical - that is, dividing them on the basis not of whether they are true, but on the way in which we might decide to believe them or not - help here?
I assumed that if the question was simply ‘are facts facts?’ then @Javi wouldn’t have asked it. He’s implicitly asking ‘how can philosophical anti-realism be justified?’ That’s the question I’m addressing.
Indeed; that’s not what @Javi ask, and not what I answered.
Whether an eclipse actually occurred is jejune. This is a philosophy forum after all.