William writes: "Cheerskep refers to the fact of the material world by saying "When I refer to a rock". But of course there is no "rock", only a particular material substance."
William's underlying point is still a good one, though I have to point out that in fact I didn't say, "When I refer to a rock". I said, "When I observe a rock". (I mention it for a reason that I won't take time to elaborate on here: The act of "referring" is chimerical in a way that the act of eating or walking or throwing a rock is not chimerical. Similarly, though I can mention a "name", I cannot "mention" a man.) As I've confessed before, my lingo is often not philosophically rigorous, for two reasons. The first is, I sometimes purposely avoid composing a tedious-to-write and tedious-to-read philosophically defensible phrasing because I judge that kitchen English will not be significantly harmful in the given instance. And sometimes I'm just too damn oblivious because of haste or fatigue or lagging intellect. I should warn listers ahead of time that this entire posting is a mish-mosh of kitchen English and a few scattered moments of rigor. First, a word about my "dualism". I'm a dualist, which is to say I can't shake the conviction that consciousness is different from "material substance". When a neurologist points at a wriggling neuron in my brain and says, "That's your pain, that physical tissue; and this wriggling over here is your enjoyment of Mozart; and this over here is your idea about the indeterminate and transitory nature of notion," I say, "Like hell that wriggle is my idea!" I concede that notion, consciousness, probably depends on tissue-states in my brain, in that if you destroy those tissue-states, certain parts of consciousness will probably disappear. But, as I said a few days ago, I believe the light in this room depends on that bulb, but I don't confuse the bulb with the light, the magnet with the magnetic field, or the brain with its epiphenomenon, consciousness. I'm not unaware of how primitive my dualist conviction is - but so is my conviction that there "is" a material world. When I get up in the night and "bump into a table", my primitive, unshakeable conviction is that my physical body has encountered another bit of the physical world. I'm similarly convinced that there are other physical bodies out there -- and other people's notions as well as my own. (Now take the phrasing, "When I observe a particular material entityb&" I agree with William's inclination to use the word 'particular' there, but why? Because included in my belief in a material world is a conviction that, despite limitations on how much we can "know" about the material world, I can occasionally serviceably distinguish "parts" of that world. When I pick up a chair and put it in the other room, I'm convinced that I'm moving bits of "material" around - including not just "the chair" but "my own body". When I move the chair I'm convinced that I'm leaving other particular bits of "material" behind -- like, say, the desk. (I put scare-quotes around 'the chair' and 'my own body' there because I'm aware of the indeterminacy and indefiniteness of my notions of those two objects, and, indeed, of those two objects themselves.) That is my blurry justification for agreeing with the use of 'particular' there. ) But to get back to a basic point in William's posting: I don't agree with William's point about the "fallacy of infinite regression": "I agree with Cheerskep. But one problem is what I call the fallacy of infinite regressIon. Cheerskep refers to the fact of the material world by saying "When I refer to a rock". But of course there is no "rock", only a particular material substance. And then there is no material, except something more or less different from some other material. And then there is no substance....ah, you see the problem. It all comes down to the rather placid observation that there is something independent of our knowingb&" As I recall, William is a physicalist: He believes I'm wrong to think that consciousness is something different from materiality. He believes that wriggling material neuron IS my pain. So I take it that in the paragraph I just quoted -- "there is no material" -- he is playing devil's advocate - asserting a position he does not in fact believe. I DO accept that there is a material realm, a realm that is not notional. (In an earlier posting I remarked that, though none of us can refute solipsism, none of us can believe it either, and I'm uninterested in trying to do long hard philosophy about something that I'm unshakably convinced is hogwash. My effort in philosophy is to try to "make sense of" what I unshakably believe.) (If, during that effort, my belief is in fact shaken, that's okay. For example, when I was younger I unquestioningly accepted that "words have meanings". Other philosophers have -- failingly, say I -- worked at "explaining how this can be". I now accept my assumption was wrong because the more I examined the idea that "language means", the less I could "make sense" of it. Meantime I realize that my notion of "making sense" is something I have to make sense of, but I won't do that in this posting.) What I don't believe in is a third kind of entity: non-notional, non-material abstractions. I certainly accept that we have notions of alleged entities (including various alleged actions) that our minds have a tendency to hypostatize, reify, think of as "things" that, though they are mind-independent, are not material. We think of them as "abstractions". I gave as examples alleged "categories", "qualities", "sets", Platonic "forms", "absolute standards", "THE meanings of", "relations", "language", "referents", "beauty", "sin", "justice", "terrorism", or even "art". I can add such reifying "words" as Freedom fighters Freedom Flotilla Islam Catholicism Humanitarians Soul Justice Massacre Slaughter Aggression New Same Life Fair New York Racism Elitismb& The list is effectively endless. We have "notions" behind all these words. What does not "exist" is any non-notional, non-material "thing" that any of those words "refer to". As I noted at the outset, words don't "refer to". We observe material events and objects all day long, and we reflect on notions. But the "categories", "qualities", "essences" that we attribute to those events and objects are all notional; as non-notional entities they are chimerical. Indeed, even the alleged "wordness" of "words" is chimerical. We call certain utterances and scriptions "words", but it's wrong to believe that terming anything makes the anything BE that what we call it. That "BEING" is what most of us mistakenly attribute to the alleged non-notional, non-material abstractions. When William implies that this is basically a "placid" observation, I think he's using an adjective almost all philosophers of language (and philosophers of mind; and ontologists) would reject. Their adjectives are likely to be far more damning and dismissive.
