“Quine, in essence, claims that whatever we were calling “a priori knowledge” is within a web of belief that originates from sensation.”
Oh wow, I thought that was only my theory! It strikes me as completely obvious that all conscious experience is sensation, hence all knowledge must be from sensation. The problem I suppose people have had with this is, “What about thoughts?” My response is that all conscious thought is only available to us via sensations (see my sig), and that this is already entailed in what we mean by the word “conscious”: if we are not aware (i.e., sensing) something, it cannot be called a conscious experience.
Now this is exciting because I’ve never heard of anyone who shares this idea with me. However, what about subjectivity? Sure, as a third party we can talk about neurons and such, but the only evidence I have as a consciousness (or a committee of consciousnesses in this mind as it may be) of the existence of said neurons is through my subjective experience in the five senses. At this level of analysis, it no longer makes sense to put scientific discoveries about neurons ahead of my own sensory experiences, because it is only through these subjective senses that I can even read about these theories of neurons at all. The tail would be wagging the dog, as it were.
Neoclassical: “The only caveat I want to make is that sensory receptors are more fundamental than your consciousness.”
If I read you correctly here (i.e., if you could have written “my consciousness” instead “your consciousness”), this is an abuse of standards of evidence. If you’re conscious experience is anything like mine, you can only say you “know” about sensory receptors through your conscious experience (synonymous with sensory experience). Whatever your method of evaluating the evidence for sensory receptors, that evaluation must pass through your conscious sensory experience.
After all, you could have just dreamed you read a paper about sensory receptors.
Now for others - since you said “your consciousness” - this is fine, but if you include yourself this becomes inconsistent. (Or rather, if I include myself it becomes inconsistent - you could just be a figment of my imagination! (This is only half-joking…I believe this is the level of rigor we need to to maintain in order to keep making sense here.)
Wow, I wonder if I’d technically be considered an empiricist or more of a trivial empiricist.
Anyway, thanks for the link. The thing is, Dennett’s whole pursuit seems to be talking about the search for communal knowledge. Yet at the end of the day, I (and I assume you) are really interested in just what I myself can know. I mean, sure, I agree with Dennett in terms of how to extract useful evidence from third parties, and that’s quite useful. Just relying on their own subjective descriptions for my evaluation of their mental state is surely inferior, but this is not what I am after.
I am talking about my subjective evaluation of my own mental state (or, for example, your subjective evaluation of yours). In such case it would make no sense, or at least be of no use to me, if scientists were to prove I am not experiencing pain when in fact in my subjective experience I am. See what I mean? It’s not that subjective sensation is primary in general, it’s that my subjective sensation is primary for me (and presumably yours for you, etc.).
I probably need to have “sensations” to be able to prefer, but preference isn’t a “sensation”. It isn’t possible to observe preference in the public world until you observe it in your private world.
Just because a computer can’t run without a hard drive doesn’t mean that all computing is just having a hard drive. So, by the same token, just because we prabably can’t think of anything if we aren’t “sensing” something doesn’t mean that all of our thoughts are “sensations”.
Like Dennett, I actually think your “first-person” perspective is not more privileged than an outsider, scientific viewpoint. That is, you could be mistaken. For instance, you will not verbally inform me of your saccadic eye movement, but I could observe it. Additionally, you can have inform me of pain without painfulness!
Furthermore, it is technically feasible to observe your brain and understand what processes are happening–those that are leading to conscious experience or otherwise.
I most definitely am not just interested in “what I myself can know,” at the exclusion of a community of inquirers. I believe knowledge is very social, like Wittgenstein’s consideration of language.
Once again, I actually don’t believe your statement: “my evaluation of their mental state is surely inferior.” I think it can be far superior.
I. Ryan: “…just because we prabably can’t think of anything if we aren’t “sensing” something doesn’t mean that all of our thoughts are “sensations”.”
That’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that, by referring to “conscious thought,” we can only mean sensations - if I am aware of any conscious thought as something other than sensations, then how I can be “aware” of it at all? What sense would it make, even in our own subjective experience, to call that thought “conscious”? To be aware or conscious of something just means to sense it.
"Like Dennett, I actually think your “first-person” perspective is not more privileged than an outsider, scientific viewpoint. That is, you could be mistaken. For instance, you will not verbally inform me of your saccadic eye movement, but I could observe it. Additionally, you can have inform me of pain without painfulness!
Furthermore, it is technically feasible to observe your brain and understand what processes are happening–those that are leading to conscious experience or otherwise."
I may report pain without feeling it, but that is a separate issue. Again, I’m not talking about my ascertainment of knowledge about the reports of first-person experience of “a person,” but my own experience. I may derive benefit from knowing that I am reporting something that I am not actually experiencing - sure - but no scientific evidence that I am “not actually experiencing pain” will be relevant to me if my subjective experience is that I am in agony (regardless of what I report to others). Someone may prove to me that I am imagining the pain, and that the pain nerves in my hand are not actually firing and nothing’s actually hurting me, yet my subjective experience of pain is what matters to me in the end (and I assume to anyone in the same situation).
“I most definitely am not just interested in “what I myself can know,” at the exclusion of a community of inquirers. I believe knowledge is very social, like Wittgenstein’s consideration of language.”
I don’t think we’re communicating here. I’m talking about, in the end, what I myself can know. Sure that can be informed by the inquiries of others, but ultimately the whole purpose of study is to gain knowledge for myself (or of course to impart it to others, but I mean as far as one’s own understanding). That is why I say I am only interested in what I myself can know (qua thinker). Once again, I could just be dreaming that I am working with other scientists. But note that this objection doesn’t work for my own subjective experience. You could tell me, “You are just dreaming you are in pain. Your sensory receptors show no evidence of that,” but what would I care?
“Once again, I actually don’t believe your statement: “my evaluation of their mental state is surely inferior.” I think it can be far superior.”
That’s not in context. I wrote, “Just relying on their own subjective descriptions for my evaluation of their mental state is surely inferior [to scientific observation],” in agreement with Dennett. I have no disagreement with Dennett as far as the communal pursuit of information, but I am saying that the reason for me as a thinker to pursue information as a group is ultimately so that I can improve my own level of knowledge. However, for me, it will always be impossible for any outside evidence - which after all must be viewed through my five senses - to somehow “contradict” my subjective sensory experience. To claim otherwise would not even be wrong; it’d be incoherent.
Oh, here’s an important ambiguity we’re running up against:
Sensation of something vs. subjective experience of sensation in itself
When I say sensation I am referring to the latter, even though they may be one and the same. It is important to maintain the difference, because my subjective sensory experiences are irrefutable* (not irrefutable in terms of “how accurately they reflect the world I am sensing,” but simply in the fact that I am sure that I am indeed subjectively experiencing them).
*From my perspective, not from a third party’s! In fact, in either case it wouldn’t even make sense to “refute” them; Dennett is not talking about refuting subjective sensory experience, he’s talking about refuting reported subjective sensory experience.
I don’t think that you are using the word “sensation” how Neoclassical defined it, as experience of the public world.
In my signature, the first link is one to a thread in which I show that Mises and Hume, two of my favorite writers, weren’t opposed to each other at all at least in epistemology, though most people would think that they were, because they would see the words that they used, such as “experience” and so on, and see that they used those words in superficially contradictory ways.
If you don’t want to read it, I can give you a quick summary of what I was saying, and why it is relevant to what is going on here. Mises defined “experience” as that of the public world, and “reason” as that of the private world, yet Hume defined “experience” as that of either the private world or the public world. So people see Hume talk about experience like it is the only thing that matters to science, and see Mises talk about experience like it can’t tell us anything about praxeology, and they think that they are saying entirely different things, and would be super opposed to each other. But they are missing what I already said, that they defined the terms in different ways.
I think that you are doing the same thing.
I asked Neoclassical whether he was using the word “sensation” to mean experience of the public world, and he said yes. But I think that you are switching it up to mean experience either of the private world or the public world. How Hume used the word “experience”, yes, I think that experience is the only basis of science. But, how Mises used the word “experience”, no, I don’t think that experience is the only basis of science. So, in the same way, how you used the word “sensation”, yes, I think that sensation is the only basis of science, but, how Neoclassical used the word “sensation”, no, I don’t think that sensatian is the only basis of science.
I am an empiricist in the tradition of Hume, but a rationalist in the tradition of Mises. I think that the same thing probably applies to you. How that is possible is that people just got tripped up by the words that each of them used, and didn’t get a good understanding of what they actually were saying, and they came up with terms to use to contrast them.
But I might be entirely incorrect about you.
Do you think that we can base economics only on our “sensations” how Neoclassical defined it, only on our experience of the public world? Or do you think that we have to base it also on our “sensations” how I think that you defined it, on our experience both of the private world and the public world? Do you think that we can “see” choice in the public world without first having seen it in our own private world? Do you think that we can see preference in the public world without first having figured out what it is by seeing it in our own private world?
[INSULT DELETED] You can’t be an empiricist like Hume and a rationalist like Mises! One has to budge!
I still can’t even believe you find the two thinkers compatible. If you were right, Kant didn’t have much work to do after he discovered Hume.
Let me quote Hume who, really, was a proto-logical positivist, When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
See that? He likes mathematics and experimental observations. I mean, when A.J. Ayer likes you, you know you gotta have a pretty hard-nosed epistemology.
If you were to claim that preference is “ill-defined mentalistic garbage”, you would be preferring to claim that preference is “ill-defined mentalistic garbage”, and would be caught up in a contradiction. The fact that you will see that as a contradiction will reveal the meaning of preference to you. But I will switch to trying to define “desire”, because it will be easier to define, and I could have used it to make the same point that this is a response to what you were responding to.
If I were only to desire having A, and were to believe that only doing B would lead only to having A, I would only desire doing B. And, if I were to believe that I don’t have A, I would do B. I greatly simplified it to make it into an example, but I think that you probably will be able to get the gist of it. That is the foundation of praxeology, wanting X, believing that you don’t have X, and believing that doing Y would lead to having X. That is the starting point of praxeology.
I tried to explain what desire was by showing how it interacts with things like “belief” that I don’t think that you will be confused about.
Don’t use “fact” so loosely. I didn’t spot the contradiction. How do you know what I “prefer”? Once again, please define it simply, without examples or some sort of supposed logical trap.
I can’t clearly understand your notions of “desire” and “belief,” either. Are these psychological states, dispositions to act, or what?
Why can’t you just stick to the discussion? Why do you always try to embarress your opponent with such irrelevant, counterproductive attacks? Because you dragged me into this, I will answer the challenge, though I ask that you stop distracting us with such nonsense.
In English, starting a sentence with “that” used as an embedded clause introducer is very awkward. So people tend to either put the noun phrase “the fact” in apposition to it, or switch around the first argument and the second argument of the verb phrase, move the verb phrase to the front, and add “it” in front of it. I chose the first one because it would let me avoid the awkwardness without making what I was trying to say difficult to understand. I don’t know why the second option is difficult to understand in this case, but you will be able to see that it is when I show you the three examples.
Awkward: “That you will see that as a contradiction will reveal the meaning of preference to you.”
Difficult to understand: “It will reveal the meaning of preference to you that you will see that as a contradiction.”
Fine: “The fact that you will see that as a contradiction will reveal the meaning of preference to you.”
As I already said, the first is awkward, the second is difficult to understand, and the third is fine, so the third is what I chose. The phrase “the fact”, in that case, doesn’t add any meaning to anything. It is just a weird aspect of the syntax of English. We usually use “that” as the embedded clause introducer when the embedded clause doesn’t start the sentence, but use “the fact that” as the embedded clause introducer when the embedded clause does start the sentence. What people use to introduce embedded clauses in a language is a part of the syntax of the language, not a part of the semantics. It doesn’t add any meaning to anything because, the only time that it appears, the sentence is already an assertion asserting what the speaker thinks is a fact.
That is what happens when you try to embarress your opponents in such counterproductive, irrelevant ways, and they know how to respond to it. You get into a ridiculous arguments about things completely irrelevant to what the discussion originally was about.
Just to tell you, though, most people probably would just think that you are annoying, but not tell you about it. To make this more general, one of the most annoying things in arguments is when the person throws out a bunch of appositions to the conclusion of their argument, which is what you do. What I mean by that is that you make an argument where the conclusion is that I am wrong, but then you throw out a bunch of appositions to that, like “don’t use the word “fact” so loosely”, “you’re crazy”, and so on.
Why shouldn’t I use examples to define it? What if the only way that I can think of to define it is by using an example?
And the “supposed logical trap” wasn’t supposed to be something like, “oh, look, I embarressed you, haha”. It was supposed to be an example. It was supposed to show you what I meant by “preference” by showing you that merely questioning preference is a preference.
But I said that I was going to switch to talking about the definition of “desire”, so I don’t know why you are again trying to get me to define it.
I don’t know what I should call them, but they are the foundation of praxeology. To act, we must believe that we have situation non-A, desire to have situation A, and believe that something that we can “will” ourselves to do lies in a causal connection with having situation A.
The categories “means and ends” comes from the combination of the categories “cause and effect”, “desire”, and “belief”. If we desire a situation A and believe that a situation B causes the situation A, the situation A is the ends and the situation B is the means. That might help you understand what “desire” and “belief” is.