are you happy in false realitly?

@fresco,

And yet, words are much more impermanent and transient than most other things.

@JLNobody,

Except Fresco denied having to change anything. He can't change his mind, living as he is in the mental prisons of idealism. Apparently he can't even decide what his philosophy is talking about... Mumbo-jumbling misunderstood bits and pieces of Heidegger or Wittgenstein is the best he can do.

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Ultimate reality is ultimate happiness. False reality is a false happiness, and a lesser reality is a lesser happiness.

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@Olivier5,

However, it seems to me that words seem to be permanent (abstractions) while concrete pre-reflective experience is patently impermanent. the former are the tools by which we attempt to impose order on the latter.

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@JLNobody,

Rorty and Heidegger's Being (Sein)

Quote:

There is no way to escape the contingencies of language to get at Being-in-itself. We are all enmeshed in final vocabularies that present Being in diverse and incommensurate ways. No understanding of Being is better than any other understanding. Heidegger thus cleared the way for Rorty’s dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate.

IEP

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Rorty and Heidegger's Being (Sein)

Quote:
There is no way to escape the contingencies of language to get at Being-in-itself. We are all enmeshed in final vocabularies that present Being in diverse and incommensurate ways. No understanding of Being is better than any other understanding. Heidegger thus cleared the way for Rorty’s dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate.
IEP

Sounds to me as though what is being discussed in this excerpt is "understanding"...not "being."

You have always had trouble differentiating between "understanding" and "what actually IS", Fresco...and you continue to do so.

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@JLNobody,

Quote:

words seem to be permanent (abstractions) while concrete pre-reflective experience is patently impermanent

Not sure what you mean by "concrete pre-reflective experience". Seems complicated. But compared to other stuff, words are quite transient:

- What was the word the ancient Egyptians used for those pyramids again? Not even sure there's an Egyptologue out there who knows the answer... The word is gone, but the pyramids are still there. Dozens of them, too.

- What was the word those prehistoric men use for a silex arrow tip? Their words are all gone, but we still have their arrow heads.

- The atoms that your body uses to maintain its structure are billions of years old. As for your body's structure itself, the general map and shape of the human body is at least 100,000 years old, and not very different from previous similar species that are millions of years old.

- any natural stone you can pick is millions of years old in its present configuration / structure.

The words you and I use today won't be understood by anyone save a few specialist 1000 years from now. But our bones could still be around...

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@fresco,

Quote:

Rorty’s dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate.

Did you get the memo, fresco? Your anti-realist crusade is outdated.

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@Olivier5,

I should not need to say this but is you who thinks I am taking an idealist/anti-realist line which is what Rorty is talking about. Attacking naive realism is not postulating idealism or anti-realism. It is an assertion about the shifting contextual functionality of the word "reality" as opposed to anchoring it in some hypothetical independently existent "stuff".
Rorty was a pragmatist who understood the non-representational nature of language . (As did Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and the later Heidegger) Language does not "reflect the world", it constructs it according to social context.

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@fresco,

Quote:

Attacking naive realism is not postulating idealism or anti-realism.

What would be, according to you, non-naive realism? And how does it differ from naive realism?

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@Olivier5,

Realism is about the assumption that there are observer independent "truths" or "mechanisms" underlying or causing the phenomena of reported "states of affairs". Anti-realism is the negation of that requirement for such a substrate. The resolution (perhaps implied by Rorty, not researched by me), is that what appear to be underlying principles at one level (e.g. Newtons Laws of Motion) are open to deconstruction at another (as in the questioning of "action at a distance") In other words, explanatory adequacy may be sufficient to support a concept of "reality" at one level, but not another. There is an infinite regress regarding levels of sufficiency of axioms somewhat reflected by the infinite regress in language of words defining words in the process of reporting.

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@Olivier5,

Naive realism is the view that that there are "things in themselves" which are observer independent. Those "things" are not confined to "mechanisms" or "truths" but extend to all classes of physical and non-physical objects.

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@fresco,

Quote:

Realism is about the assumption that there are observer independent "truths" or "mechanisms" underlying or causing the phenomena of reported "states of affairs".

In my book, what you describe is positivism: the belief that there are positive (objective, absolute) laws organizing the universe, and that science can discover them all, given enough time. Positivism is indeed a realist philosophy, but a very idealist one in fact, since the Logos rules the Cosmos.

Many other forms of realism exist, in which reality may not be fully organized or organizable through natural laws, and may retain a part of chaos.

Realism only assumes that there is some stuff out there, which presence is observer-independent.

When you lost your keys, they are somewhere. They haven't gone poof into thin air. Whether you remember where you put them or not, whether you understand how they work or not, or whether you appreciate their intricate atomic structure to its full extent or not. The darn keys are still there somewhere... That's what realism says. So if you're looking for your keys when you misplaced them, you're a realist.

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We are all 'realists' in our own way.

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@Olivier5,

Finally (I hope). Its not the terminology (of -isms) that matters. It's how you use the word "reality". Of course "loss of keys" presumes "their physical continuity", but the essence of that continuity is one of functionality rather than "structure". If, for example the keys were damaged in some way whilst lost, you are back to the Ship of Theseus problem about the continuity of identity. Or if the key(s) were programmable like in modern hotels, and "went out of time", what you have functionally lost is "access to your room". Such discussion highlights the naive realism of "the key" as merely "an object in its own right".

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fresco wrote:

My final comment in the matter of "reality" which is the subject of this thread, is to re-iterate that it is a word that denotes agreement between humans about "states of affairs". Anything more than that is to extrapolate from the persistence of words to the persistence of those states, contrary to our knowledge about the transience of states.

Thankyou for your comments.

Hummmm...!

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@fresco,

And what is 'non-naive realism' then?

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@fresco,

Quote:

Of course "loss of keys" presumes "their physical continuity", but the essence of that continuity is one of functionality rather than "structure"

So if you were to find your keys but somehow they've been turned into little colorful birds which you need to get close to the key hole and then the right 'key bird' sings a little song and the lock opens up, you'd be fine with your "continuity in functionality". Nothing wrong or odd to report, right? You still have a set of functional keys after all. Structure be damned!

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@Olivier5,

Avec le foutage de gueule, on quitte !

1 Reply

@fresco,

Tu connais bien ça, le foutage de gueule je crois... Un peu plus de précision et d'humilité te feraient du bien, et d'inventivité aussi.

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are you happy in false realitly?

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