|
p.2 Experiences that agree are still just so many personal experiences that happen to be in accord. Consensus is not yet objectivity.
p.2 There is... an inevitable gap between perceptual - and thereby personal - experience and objective fact. Contentions... are always about ourselves and will inevitably fall short of stating an objective fact... For appearing does not guarantee being... all such experience-detailing statements will, strictly speaking, be about the experiencing individuals at issue and not about the real world as such. The reports of experience are invariably autobiographical.
There is, accordingly, an unavoidable evidential gap between statements regarding the experience of people (oneself included!) and those that concern the world's objective and impersonal arrangements.
[JLJ - Yes, but we as humans are virtual experts at controlling the inductive jump from 'I see' to 'there exists'. We have so many ways to test what we see with richly-detailed cues or diagnostic tests - 'is that a cat on the mat or merely an elaborate trick involving a stuffed animal and a hidden hand making it appear to move'? In order to 'go on' we must constantly jump to intelligently crafted and reasonable conclusions, from our perceptions, over and over again, wary at all times that the 'cat on the mat' might just be an elaborate hoax. We ought to be paranoid, in certain conditions, but realistically it is typically ok to make the jump from 'I see' to 'there is' because the world is often just as we perceive it to be, and trusting our perceptions (including careful scans for the likely cues of a trick or hoax) is often good enough for practical purposes - for our scheme for 'going on.']
p.3 every objective property of a real thing has consequences of a dispositional character and these are never completely surveyable because the dispositions that particular concrete things inevitably have endow them with an infinitistic aspect that cannot be comprehended within experience.
[JLJ - Yes, but our intelligence operates - not by a need for infinite detail - but by categorization - once we categorize, we often find that we are able to 'move on' within our current predicament by 'filling in the gaps' with what typically is the case, and this 'trick that works' is often enough 'good enough' for our operating scheme.]
p.3 a thing effectively is what it does
[JLJ - ...and exactly how it is triggered to do it.]
p.9 Reality... is the realm of what really is as it really is.
[JLJ - <satire>Thanks for that brilliant insight, Nicholas. The world is far, far less mystical due to your extraordinary explanation efforts alone.</satire> I would instead argue that reality is first a perception - then a construction of the mind in order to determine how to 'go on.' How truly 'real' this construction is depends on many mental issues, but generally - perhaps in the limit actually - corresponds to 'true reality' due to the pressures of the life world and its demands. Evolution likely sees to it that those whose perceptions of reality are not anchored in the truly 'real' leave fewer offspring. I would argue that the purpose of the mind is to reduce the complexity of the current predicament into actionable categories that in a crisis can simply be executed, and in quieter moments can be pondered with an experienced and acquired cultural wisdom. 'Things' exist in reality, and therefore in the mind, as part of this complexity reduction process. In a world without minds, do individual 'things' exist? How about relationships, do they exist, between and among the 'things'? Without categories created by a mind, it is hard for individual 'things' to exist. Are there truly 'things' where there are no minds?]
p.49 The pivotal thesis of conceptual idealism is that real things as we conceive of them are infused with mind-supplied aspects... what is at issue is that mind-patterned conceptions are built into our idea of nature: that the way we standardly conceive of real things is in some crucial respects patterned on our self-conception as mind-endowed agents: we ascribe to the real characteristics in whose conceptual constitution the operation of mind are implicated. In particular, even the concept of a particular individual thing is of this nature.
[JLJ - Yes, but the purpose of the mind is not simply to determine and contemplate 'real things,' we must somehow determine how to 'go on' within our current predicament. One part of this problem is to determine the driving forces in our situation, including the 'things' and associated forces that are 'real', the other part is to develop (and then execute) an action-posture based on that determination. 'Things' exist out of necessity due to the simultaneous complexity of our world, a need to make predictions in the face of missing information, and the intelligent use of subtle cues which allow us to make practical inductive leaps.]
p.50 The fact that real things must be identifiable means that reality is a matter of existence-as; to exist at all is to exist as a certain sortal type of thing. And sortalization depends on mental operations... Accordingly, a realism of identifiable individuals is operatable only on the basis of an idealism of mental capacities in identification, description, and classification.
p.51 conceptual idealism sees mind not as causal source of the materials of nature but as indispensably furnishing some of the interpretative mechanisms, such as individuality and agency, in whose terms we standardly conceive of them.
p.99 Its reliance on a presumption of typicality, normalcy, or the like means that any inductive process is inherently chancy. Induction rests on presumption-geared default reasoning, and its conclusions are thus always at risk to further or better data
[JLJ - ...which is why induction is usually combined with some sort of risk mitigation process in our scheme to 'go on.' For example, we might spend some time considering the top several explanations, rather than just the most likely one. We might consider asking a co-worker to review and comment on our reasoning. We might consider doing nothing now and waiting until matters become critical before we act, etc. Induction is simply a trick that sometimes works, nothing more, and nothing less, and can be intelligently combined with certain practical mitigations in order to be used effectively and reasonably.]
p.106 one can envision both as to perception and as to conception the operation of a difference-obscuring myopia that admits of two related modes of item assimilation:
- Confusing one item with a somewhat similar item from which it is actually different
- Conflating two actually different items by failing to notice their differences
...What concerns us here is the process of representation, which involves taking one item (the "object," the "reality") and letting another (the "model," the "appearance") represent it.
p.108 cognitive myopia is rooted in the inability to distinguish differences.
p.114 when the truth of our claims is critical we generally "play it safe" and make our commitments less definite and detailed. Vagueness effectively provides a protective shell to guard that statement against a charge of falsity. Irrespective of how matters might actually stand within a vast range of alternative circumstances and conditions, the statement remains secure, its truth unaffected by which possibility is realized.
|
