William wrote: "But I was suggesting that some arguments remain that insist on a mind-independent form (or incipient gestalt -- the rabbit-duck example comes to mind). This opposes your view that nothing immaterial can exist outside the mind. If so, what gives rise to the idea? Some say that something material gives rise to a patterning and gestalt in the mind, is necessary to it, and thus the (a) mental construct is dependent on physical stimulus -- thus can't occur without it. If this is not the case then there is no way to test your view except by sharing some guesses and beliefs or being bullied into agreement. Wc"
I replied that I'm working on a posting to address what I see as the key question there: Cheerskep claims that in the non-mental world there are no abstractions whatever - no meanings, categories, qualities, sets, relations, "ideas"; no referring, no "naming", no implications. Then how come so many thoughtful people - philosophers and non-philosophers alike - believe there are such entities? Cheerskep himself believes there is a "material" world out there - including other people and their notions - even though, strictly, he can't "prove" it. So why not believe in non-notional abstractions? The major reason is that every abstraction I've ever read about entails absurdities when pushed to its conclusions. A lesser reason is that, like Ockham, I'm inclined to dismiss alleged entities that are superfluous; for example, if I can "account for" all our cogitations and "communication" without any resort to non-mental "meanings" (and their concomitant absurdities), I lose all faith in the "mind-independent existence" of such "meanings". I accept the external existence of material objects and other people because I can't otherwise "account for" my everyday experiences. In the end, "accounting for" is no more than supplying an alleged description of "how things work" that is persuasive, and by "persuasive" all I have in mind is: winning assent, willing acceptance from the persuaded person. For example, I personally cannot embrace a notion that entails contradictory "statements", or implications that I feel are ludicrous. I find no inherent contradictions in solipsism, but the notion that I am "making up" absolutely everything that I consciously entertain, including, say, all those numbers in the telephone book, strikes me as intolerably ludicrous. It's now my assignment to finish the posting in which I try to convey persuasively why I cannot accept that there are non-mental abstractions -- like "meanings".
