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134. The Problem of Universals | THUNK
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- Опубліковано 28 гру 2017
- Is a hot dog a sandwich? Let's examine one of the hardest problems in metaphysics to find out. Because THUNK.
Links for the Curious
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is invaluable for getting a broad understanding of this topic quickly. Some key pages I found helpful:
Metaphysics Overview - plato.stanford...
Platonism in Metaphysics - plato.stanford...
Abstract Objects - plato.stanford...
Nominalism in Metaphysics - plato.stanford...
Tropes - plato.stanford...
The n-tuple representation of tropes was from “Tropes: Properties, Objects, & Mental Causation” by Douglas Ehring - goo.gl/zzYJpp
Is This a Sandwich? Teaching the Platonic Dialogues through sandwiches (M Ritchey, 2014) - / is-this-a-sandwich
A Bro And A Philosopher Debate The True Meaning Of A Sandwich (Scherer, 2015) - firstwefeast.c...
Also, I sorta gloss over defining metaphysics, which is a challenging work of philosophy in its own right - • What is Metaphysics? -...
"There Exists An X, X is a Sandwich," by Joel K Jensen (thanks, grammaticalcrimes!) - goo.gl/zX7wcc
I'm in my first semester as a philosophy major and this has helped me with my metaphysics homework SO MUCH. THANK YOU.
Oh man, glad to hear it! :D Good luck with the course!
do you have any essay that i can read? i need so bad Thank You
My thought, Sir, is that there are at least two kinds of philosophy. I have spent much of my life studying the one kind and the other kind I neither know anything about nor want to and if I had a course of it in school I would probably get an "F". This nominalism stuff is the kind I have avoided. I like existentialism and phenomenology. Professor John Wild once told me he liked me because my concern with philosophy was with life and he was discouraged some of his graduate students were just manipulating neoscholatic jargon. The kind of philosophy in the present lecture is like some mathematical things: I could get obsessed with them and they would drive me crazy, as puzzles, but like Odysseus and the Sirens, I bind myself to the mast of the ship of my life and try to get thru the fatal attraction of the Sirens. I am living today. I am going to die. I think the unexamined life is not worth living; unexamined metaphysical concepts (as opposed to sociology of knowledge), not so important. This stuff is just all just noemata, to use a Husserl term. To borrow from Marshall McLuhan whom I also indirectly know, for me, the message is the medium. Keep well in the pandemic which I do think is real, Sir!
Postmodernist philosophy would simply say something is or is not a sandwich depending on the cultural norms of the society you grow up in.
When I was a kid, a hamburger was never called a sandwich and when I first heard it called sandwich I thought it strange. Now I have heard it called a sandwich a lot, I now even consider it one.
The culture of the society I grew up in has changed over my lifetime.... The main flaw with uiniversalism is things change.
That's one the reasons that I've never really thought the is a hot dog a sandwich thing was a good example. The is mount everest more massive than an a hydrogen atom is a better example because the use of more massive than a hydrogen atom is much more well defined. It would seem stranger to say that more massive than a hydrogen atom is is a trait purely determined by society than to say that sandwich is.
Postmodernist philosophy at least would not say this as size in the case of an atom and Mount Everest is not subjective. As Leotard points out in the Postmodern Condition, Postmodernism makes no claims about the subjectivity of physical world.
Yeah, same. In Germany, "sandwich" means a very specific thing that covers only a miniscule part of all kinds of "stuff on bread" (of which there are many). If you told a German that a Big Mac is a sandwich, they'd look at you strange.
Postmodernism is a skidmark on the underpants of philosophy - A philosophy of kicking the can down the road without ever properly explaining anything.
Far more of an intellectual game than an explanatory framework.
I pity da foo who spends valuable time of their finite life reading that overwrought bunkum
But I think that you must take into account that without universalism we lack an account of what makes things similar to each other. What we see in the world is not chaotic array of phenomena, but constrained.
It's amazing how many things in philosophy seem meaningless but actually have a very relevant deeper meaning in how we view and shape the world. I sometimes get the feeling that many people don't realize this and just think of philosophy as some kind of abstract game with words that has no real use is life, like if trees in forests make noises or something.
I agree. Everyone has a philosophy, but most don't care enough to know what theirs is, or whether it's the best one available.
I'm a nominalist, though I think the idea makes more sense if we split it into three parts.
(1) Things in nature tend to form clusters. When it rains, drops of water fall from the sky that are pretty much the same size, and they're >99% composed of two hydrogens and one oxygen arranged in a particular way. Cats try to make pseudo-copies of themselves that look similar, because a cat that tried to make a different animal would not pass its genes to the next generation. The point is we see clusters of similar objects everywhere around us, and we also see predictable phenomena and behavior. I think science does a great job at explaining why this happens.
(2) Our brains are essentially neural networks. Neural networks are amazing at detecting this type of clustering and figuring out how to respond to it. It's not hard to classify handwritten digits (0-9) with only a small number of neurons for example. Since animals get a huge advantage from identifying clusters within nature (predators, potential mates, etc.) it makes sense that they evolved the ability to do so. So now we have animals mapping the clusters in (1) onto the deeper layers of their neural networks. For non-human animals the process stops here.
(3) Humans took the evolutionary path of being social creatures, particularly by inventing language. Today people spend pretty much all day learning for at least the first 20 years of their lives. This involves molding people's neural networks in a way that conforms to what's desirable by society. Learning to notice clustering that's harder to spot and then assigning the cultural label to it. At some point we all learn about cats, sandwiches, interest rates, etc. -- the names, definitions, properties, and how we should feel about these objects. Of course as with sandwiches there are disagreements but there's a good general consensus for most of them.
So to answer the criticism of nominalism -- would a tree be a tree if nobody was there to see it? Well if say dogs still existed you would still have some sort of "tree-ness" in the mind of each individual dog. But they would not be able to form a social consensus on what this really means. Dogs will probably disagree on the concept -- for example ones that live near deciduous vs. coniferous trees. What if all animals disappeared? Well then we go back to (1). The universe will keep clustering with trees, planets, elements in the periodic table, etc. There just won't be anyone left to interpret these clusters.
I think the problem remains if the "clusters" are a fundamental property of the universe itself or just a result of that step of interpretation, no? Is "clustering" a property shared by objects, or is it a fabrication of minds?
According to Derrida: tree is sandwich, foot is sandwich, car is sandwich, cat is peanut butter, thanks to Norm's.
But surely circle is not square?
Personal take: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, there are only nameless physics doing nameless physics things~
The sandwhich = abstract form is perhaps entirely ridiculous but not forms as they relate to geometry and mathematics. The square shape of the sandwhich, the fact that you can cut it in half to make two triangles THAT seems at least a very compelling argument for Platonic universals. And ultimately the fact that Physicists consistently find mathematical symmetry "out there" in our universe both at the Quantum and macro level.
That opening pun, oh dear.
Great installment! I've never liked the idea of platonic solids/universals existing in some 'true form' outside of space and time. Rather, it seems to me that anything we (as the staggeringly myopic, spectra limited, and narrow bandwidth) entities we are take as a 'universal' is really just an emergent state from nature itself, of which our perception of any said universal is ridiculously limited. An example: wetness is an emergent state for any element within the universe that is in the correct (heat/pressure) environment, pure hydrogen or helium could be "wet" in the right environment, however we *only* associate it with liquid water, so the wetness of neutronium is alien to us and outside of our framework, yet it can still be wet. This makes me seriously question all concept of universals as we tend to simply carve up things we don't fully appreciate arbitrarily to meet our limited sensory and cognitive needs. Tropism seems to be this taken to an opposite extreme...if we don't need universals, everything needs its own unique (infinitely long) set of arbitrary properties ? Too complex and inelegant to be natural.
I appear to fall into the conceptualist camp, which seems fine to me...I have no problem accepting the fact that without an observer to classify a strawberry as red, it's just a lot of EM noise. Without someone to conceptualize redness, light bouncing off the strawberry absolutely exists, but the exact radiation it outputs might as well be purely entropic. No one cares what color a thing is if there's no one around to care about it.
As far as sandwiches go, it depends on the scope in which you're asking... PB&J or hotdogs can be a sandwich, but so can two neutron stars squeezing together a bit of spacetime, although I don't know how delicious gravitation waves are as a condiment.
My opinion *may* have been swayed by recently going on a Frank Wilczek lecture binge. In particular this great talk about the modern conceptualization of matter, which is surprisingly relevant to the concept of differentiation which you so eloquently covered in this episode! :D ua-cam.com/video/q63CnyBu3nQ/v-deo.html
Rob Alinder Incredible. You managed to almost perfectly articulate what I was thinking.
Another important note about the "tree in a forest" scenario is that accepting that the tree didn't "really" fall doesn't necessarily have to be a call to absolute nihilism and relativism as some may interpret it.
Just because all of the meaning in these emergent properties in the universe is more or less constructed in our minds doesn't mean it's not useful.
To illustrate, no two people will ever perfectly agree on the meaning of a word. Ever. There will always be a difference between their interpretations. But that doesn't mean we should just abandon language altogether.
Very nicely done!
I had forgotten about nominalism, thanks for reminding me, also very clear video thank you.
Very interesting dissertation on nominalism: by far one of the best channels on UA-cam!
I loved how you examined how unintuitively unintuitive nominalism seems to be. It's easy enough to reject Platonism but the alternative can be just as unsatisfactory.
I'm not sure I understood why resemblance nominalism and trope theory nominalism differ, apart from making the concept of trope explicit.
Fascinating video as always. I never really thought about whether universals had their own existence before. I think you're right that all three schools of thought bring up interesting edge cases and it's hard to really jump in bed with any of them fully and I feel like there's a bridge here between the idea of universals and the debate about the existence (or lack thereof) of numbers. I'm wondering if the same principle I tend to use to explain the existence of numbers could be tweaked to work with properties. I tend to see numbers as a measurement of the magnitude of a set and that they exist in the sense that they give a concrete name to a discrete magnitude that is an inherent property of that set...hmm, might be going in circles here.
Well you've given me more fun stuff to mull over!
This was the best of all the explanations of Plato's forms that I've seen! Thank you.
Wow, high praise! :D
@@THUNKShow it was simplified, not really accurate in my opinion though
As soon as you made that joke about forms, I knew I could like this video before even watching it. I have a problem with forms too...
Aquinas answered this problem. What we perceive through are senses are individual objects with their particular parts as one composite form. The sense knowledge is immediate and intuitive. The universal IS the form. It's what organizes that matter into what it is. It's what makes the object intelligible to us. By participating with the form, the form impresses itself onto our senses and our receptive mid creates an ideal. We use the ideal as a lens for participating with other similar forms. Once the form is impressed on our minds as an ideal, our actually understanding mind can then abstract upon it, drawing out properties and qualities etc.
Interesting model! Do you have an idea of how this plays with e.g. the constructed, cognitive nature of perception? It seems like trying to embed universals in a mental substrate would run into problems with different people having different sense data, attending to different aspects in different measure, etc.
@@THUNKShow The ideal is a generalization. Take a Great Dane. They are different sizes and colour, but the ideal generalizes. Nominalists seem to forget that relationships cannot exist on their own in our mind. We need some universal in the objects we perceive with our senses in order to relate that object to other objects.
In my 'mind'-perhaps channelling Wittgenstein-, I find that this more underscores the inadequacies of language, being a (human) socially constructed device, as a vector of communication than anything else more profound. Any analysis in this direction just reveals the deficiency of language.
Alright, one of my favorite topics! Metaphysics is a lot harder to solidify a position, imo. There is just so much to go over. I do thunk that it is important for universals to take a good look at our world and realize how much we tend to take something as basic as a circle for granted. I mean some items I can list with circles include the letter "o", the number "0", pedestals, cups, lamps, fans, clocks, seats, tables, eyelids, trashcans, globes, doorknobs, bottlecaps, buttons, blowdryers, bowls, dishes, and so on. Heh, it seems circles play a huge part in our everyday lives! :)
Oh btw Thunk, any chance you might do a video on how philosophy makes progress?
I think sandwiches are alike by virtue of human consensus to call them sandwiches, and not the other way around.
But I also think that hydrogen atoms are alike in a more fondamental way that does not need human subjectivity.
It is a very interesting question, and I can't find out what makes some objects "alike like sandwiches" and some "alike like hydrogen atoms".
Very good explanation!!! Althought I must say that I missed the moderate realists' stance (Aristotle and some peripatetics, notably Thomas Aquinas), which I find most convincing and that differ from "radical realists" (who I prefer calling idealists or platonists like you said) for example in that they dont recognise ideas as having an autonomous subsistence. But I understand the subject is very diverse and even that minor distinction requires a long explanation and has its own variations according to different authors. Very well done with the video!!
Yeah this is admittedly a steamroller of a treatment to a very nuanced & fragile subject. ;) I didn't even get to some of the versions that I wanted to! But I'm glad you enjoyed what I managed! :D
Very well done !
Thanks! /munch munch munch
As my Italian students would say in class "It's not food, sir, it's a sangwich." And then keep on eating in class.
Using metaphysics to bend the rules sounds like something that'd only work on certain kinds of professors. ;)
This video did a good job describing parts of what is, unfortunately, a very little discussed philosophical topic nowadays. Now I know that you can't cover everything in a short-form UA-cam video, but this video did not even touch on Aristotle's moderate realism, which was the predominant view for many centuries and continues today in the form or Aristotelian-Thomism (A-T). Aristotle thought that universals existed, not in some ethereal third realm, but in each instance of the concrete things around us. There really is some universal quality that makes a cat a cat, but it only exists in each and every cat that is in existence.
I would posit that this is how most people treat language and the things in the world around us. We talk and act as if the things around us really are what they are, and can be classified according to their kind.
To deny universals would make communication impossible. For instance, when people talk of snow, it doesn't matter what language they are using to talk about snow, they all mean the same thing when they say the word for snow. We are describing the universal essence by means of a proposition. This proposition transcends language. This proposition is just communicated through a certain configuration of sounds that is unique to each language. Furthermore, concepts like the Pythagorean Theorem really exist. Even if every person went out of existence tomorrow, the proposition of the Pythagorean Theorem would still be true. To say these things only exist in human minds is absurd.
Unfortunately, during the enlightenment era, David Hume lead many to believe that the nominalist view was the only way to rationally view the world and the scientific method was its tool to explore the world. After Hume realism really started to take a back seat. I say this is unfortunate because the philosophies that nominalism bore us have all turned out to be dead ends. If you truly follow their conclusions through, you end up with complete skepticism and with no explanation for why things exist and why they behave in a uniform manner (the laws of nature).
I think A-T is starting to make a comeback, thanks in large part to the work of Edward Feser. He makes the bold claim that the scientific enterprise is likely impossible without moderate realism (including the Aristotelian view of universals). I highly encourage anyone who interested in this topic to check Feser's talks on UA-cam, his blog, and also especially his book "The Last Superstition" for more on this topic.
Interesting, and I largely agree but I feel the conceptualist position is overlooked a great deal. The Pythagorean Theorem "exists", as much as we can say it does, in the Popperian third world. That is, it is not contained on the physical paper it is written nor in the mind of Pythagoras or anyone else but in some other realm. What Popper said existed in this world is "the state of a discussion or the state of a critical argument; and, of course, the contents of journals, books, and libraries." But these no more exist than they are (1) categorized and more so (2) are discoverable (i.e. the laws of nature).
I'd contend that what most addresses the tension between the total idealist concern that we can never escape our minds and the realist insistence that the world necessarily existed before and thus independent of humans are the double slit experiments of John Wheeler that led him to forward his "it from bit" thesis. Therein, the bottom of regress is that the only imaginably physical thing in existence is a ‘bit’ of information deriving "its ultimate significance" from "binary yes-or-no indications" and all subsequent manifestations are but agglomerations and variations of such bits under the act of "observer-participancy’" Thereby, what consequents as ‘real’ or ‘physical’ beyond mere honorary terminology are instantiations of continuity in time and space. So when we are discovering the laws of nature we are discovering the spatiotemporal manifestations of their contents.
The point about language is easily addressed by it being a subsequent act of mental experience, its imperfections and messiness having more to do with our exile in our own minds and the faulty mechanisms we are forced to trust to convey beyond them. That "snow" exists in other languages and indeed in semiotic form via easily discernible graphics of snowflakes that we very rarely see in our lived experience speaks more to the information transferal of extant communicatory systems and the varied mechanisms developed to articulate referents than any supposed transcendental location.
This is conceptualism as I would forward it, perhaps not as others would.
thisguy I agree, Conceptualism is the most disregarded self evident proposition in all of philosophy.
Nicely explained!
Thanks!
In my opinion an object obtains "sandwichness" on several conditions: the first being DO PEOPLE AGREE IT'S A SANDWICH.
The second is based solely on "if-then" statements.
- If it has either 1 or 2 slices of bread.
- If there is two slices of bread then both are eaten (or attempted to be eaten) at the same time
- If there is something edible placed on the single slice of bread OR in between both slices of bread.
Now the big 3 questions my statements raise, in my mind at least, are this: What is bread? What is "the same time"? And what is edible?
Could you make a video on the one and the many problem?
Cool video, though I'm usually more interested in finding out how people choose to define something like "sandwhiches" or "soup" than any sort of hard determination. It's interesting to me to see how we categorise the world. But I might just be weird.
Yer a descriptivist, Harry! ;)
I watched this while eating a sandwich.
At least I think it was a sandwich, it was two slices of bread, with roasted meat in the middle.
Anyway, I think the solution to this is defining what "a sandwich" (or anything you want to classify) is.
If you have a solid definition, you can define anything.
Is a sandwich anything edible wrapped in bread? Does the bread have to be separate in two distinct pieces? Does it need a certain percentage of food inside the breading to be a sandwich (so you wouldn't classify a rock with some sauce on it wrapped in bread a sandwich).
After you clearly defined it, you can easily examine the object you want to classify, and do it.
/platonist pokes head in
"Oh hey! I see you're trying to define things clearly. By virtue of what is something edible or not edible, or bread/not bread, or one, or two, or a piece, or a percentage, or food, or breading, or an object? *I* can just say that it's a sandwich because it's sandwich-y, but *you* are going to have a hell of a time defining everything you need. OK byyyyye!"
Man. I hate that guy. ;)
How are natural kinds related to universals? can universals be a argument against natural kinds?
Thank you! This makes a lot more sense than my textbook definition of universals... :)
>.> I'd trust a textbook more than me, but definitely check out the SEP if you're looking for totally accurate & comprehensive definitions of this stuff. :)
Yes, love the SEP! :)
I go for concept nominalism. A sandwich is not a sandwich if no one thinking about it. Don't get me wrong, a particular something is still there, just no one is thinking sandwich.
Assuming there is some fundamental thing/s to the universe, why not just understand it as symbols being giving to things that have statistically significant similar/different makeup of said fundamental stuff? How is this not the most likely scenario?
On conceptualism, they are concepts not the reality that would not exist without the observer. So, they would all exist physically except for the berry being red
An apple is a sweet, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (wikipedia). if we find an object that hasnt come from an apple tree but is exact same with an apple we call it an apple? i mean how we make definition of something? we define something from its image or from its image and some unique properties? sry for bad english
Nice vídeo. You have a new follower.
What's your take/personal opinion on the problem of universals?
Seems more like all entities have properties themselves that are literally another part of that object, however these properties are mere attributes, humans come and realize these attributes and come up with a socially shared concept about those attributes or patterns of attributes. Whether or not a tree is a tree without humans is thus that the tree has its attributes without us, but there's no labeling to what the attributes are by humans. That a tree exists is the concept of a principle definition that gives way to the attributes, i.e a table has 4 legs and a flat top as the principle of table, but really is a gathering of certain attributes to form a thing humans imagine as a principle, which is then carried on in the "web" of human knowledge. At least, that answers a few things.
Sandwich-ness exists. It would exist apart from human thought as matter with a certain chemical composition and proximity between its components, such that if a person sees it, it appears as two pieces of bread with a filling in between.
Many objects could share the defining chemical composition and proximity between its components that makes an object appear to a person as a sandwich.
Where does sandwich-ness exist? Everywhere there is a sandwich. What about back in time, before the invention of a sandwich? It existed only as a potential object, a possibility that could be predicted to come about at some point in the future.
I suppose that makes me a realist, but I don’t believe in Plato’s World of Forms exactly.
Anyway, explaining makes my head hurts. Maybe someone will tell me I’ve committed myself to some dire contradiction, but I feel the problems with being a realist that I can think of, lead to only some minor adjustment in my thinking, and I still end up being a realist.
How does mereology play into this question?
Very good, but to the point about conceptualism you are conflating it with the greater position of idealism. That we cannot escape our minds to verify any reality beyond our cognitive experience leads the idealist to say that all things can only be argued to be ideas (against the realist position of objects existing independent of cognition). Conceptualism offers that the specificities of "redness" or "height" are referent categorizations subsequent to our mental investigations and thus does not content that "there's no such thing as a tree" because of course the world existed before humans (unless you're a hardcore idealist) but the categorization of "tree" and any supposed object independence or properties therein are inflections of cognoscitive operation.
Ah the problem of identity! Rather than having a sandwich, why not something easier, or at least somewhat easier than a sandwich. Water is freezes at 0 deg Celsius and Water boils at 100 deg Celsius, but Ice melts at 0 deg Celsius and Vapour condenses at 100 deg Celsius. At 0 deg Celsius we have both melting point and freezing point. We know that water has 3, perhaps 4, phases and we know that water, by it's physical properties is colorless, odorless, tasteless and shapeless, but nevertheless we declare that water's identity is its molecular identity, H2O, but we also infer that the model, in this case H20, makes what the real world object is, water. This reminds me of Hilary Putnams question that if you were in Mars or some other universe and who encounter this object that has all the physical properties of water but its chemical identity is not H20, would you still call it water? He claims that no it is not. But I disagree, it is water, but the chemical model for it is wrong. Chemistry and Physics is not reality but a modelling of reality. A history of Science shows this. I think Universals are useful but is not fixed and can be updated or reformed. When you learn basic Geometry, you learn that a triangle has always internal angles equal to 180 degree. But when you go beyond Euclid geometry, you tend to find things that breaks this rule and sort of expands it. You can also find crazy geometric shapes that go beyond 3D and so on.
Humans are pattern detectors, give names to noteworthy patterns and also use them to classify things.
hey man. would you maybe be interested in doing a vid on the idea of yoga and the bhagavad gita?
It's easy, if philosophers didn't make things up, there would be no problem with universals. There would be no universals.
😝 Good news, your mechanic called: she says the problem is that you purchased a car, & if you hadn't, you wouldn't have any problem with it starting.
Wittgenstein has answered this already.
Sure, as have many other philosophers. :) Answers aplenty!
¹⁹ And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and He brought them to the man to see what he would name each one. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
²⁰ The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
(Gen 2:19-20)
...simples - aka divine conceptualism
You forgot plywood. 🧐
I liked him better in The Wonder Years.
This seems weird. Flirting about with these, when they are nothing more than mere human-made concept. With conceptual nominalism, strawberry's do not cease being red with nobody to think it. Madness, these words are descriptors humans thought up for it. There are thousands of properties of things humans don't even use to describe said things in the current time, words that don't exist now that may exist later - to say these things don't have those properties because we haven't though them is bizzare word salad-y philosophy. Everything has properties, from the atomic level, but vague shit like "sandwich-ness" only exists when a human defines them. It doesn't need to be that uselessly complicated. Physical properties always exist, the human comparison of said properties is purely human tho.
What if Thales was right, and all of universals are just water?
I’m unsure if the intro was a fun fact or satire. I’m a philosophy noob
It's a dumb joke about Plato's Theory of Forms! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
Hotdogs are not sandwiches
The bread is connected although if it rips the hotdog becomes a sandwich
Sandwich = Bread
Stuff
Other Bread
Hotdogs = B Hot D
R Dog A
E
By that reasoning, sub sandwiches are hot dogs, not sandwiches
Why can't you just say that these concepts (as a nominalist) does not require minds to be there to label them. The particular things still exist,, there's just noone to observe them. I don't see why this would be so radically different, and it doesn't seem to struggle with some of the other strange problems.
Afteral, electrons existed well befre we humans came up with a name for them, and they'll exist long after we're extinct.
What made me understand the concept was this little text from the wikipedia article of the 'Linguistic turn':
"...These various movements often lead to the notion that language 'constitutes' reality, a position contrary to intuition and to most of the Western tradition of philosophy. The traditional view (what Derrida called the 'metaphysical' core of Western thought) saw words as functioning labels attached to concepts. According to this view, there is something like 'the real chair', which exists in some external reality and corresponds roughly with a concept in human thought, chair, to which the linguistic word "chair" refers. However, the founder of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, held that definitions of concepts cannot exist independently from a linguistic system defined by difference, or, to put it differently, that a concept of something cannot exist without being named. Thus differences between meanings structure our perception; there is no real chair except insofar as we are manipulating symbolic systems. We would not even be able to recognize a chair as a chair without simultaneously recognising that a chair is not everything else - in other words a chair is defined as being a specific collection of characteristics which are themselves defined in certain ways, and so on, and all of this within the symbolic system of language. Thus, a large part of what we think of as reality is really a convention of naming and characterising, a convention which is itself called language."
When you think about electrons or any other concepts, these thoughts are shaped by our (inter?)subjective construct of what an electron is. How we look at a chair and know what a chair is is unique to us and if there's no observer, there is no subjective rule that tells how the composition of a blob of atoms should look like to make up for a chair. This rule is something that is governed by our brains. This is when cognitive science comes handy, for example - You and your friend is looking at an abstract painting. For you, there are no recognizable shapes in it, but your friend definitely sees something. Indeed, it's a dickbutt. You've no idea what a dickbutt is, never seen one, but as soon as your friend introduce you to one, you immediately see it as well in the painting. The idea is that chairs and every other objects work similar. Someone socialized by wild animals probably wouldn't recognize that a chair is *not everything else*, that it's in itself relates to a concept that we have a word for.
So you're saying according to that school of thought there's no discrete difference between the chair and the air surrounding it. Only when minds give it names and recognize it as being different does it become a real thing?
Yes, there's difference, but only to us, because of how our brain structures our perception of the environment. Look up 'German Idealism' if interested, it's closely related and it was one of the major advances in the history of philosophy.
My last comment was only an answer to your first sentence.
"Only when minds give it names and recognize it as being different does it become a real thing?"
The only real motive behind platonism and realism was the justification of the belief in the supernatural.
That entirely depends on what you mean by supernatural - Smartphones would have been supernatural to plato in his day, so if by supernatural you mean 'forces not yet fully understood by man' then Plato and his ilk were right
I meant any mystical, delusional or hallucinatory experiences. At the time, they were much more common than today. Today we know that they are sypmtoms of psychotic disorders or psychotic personality, but at that time they were considered "real".
t
#notificationsquad
NOTE SQUAD AHOY! imgur.com/a/p450l
Plato was a stoner
Philosophy is nothing more then a word salad of meaningless drivel.
Howard Dixon
Or maybe it does have a meaning you just don't understand it right now. Take some time to understand the meaning of the words before you judge their worth.
Orange Boy or maybe I do and i still believe its a bunch of nonsense.
Howard Dixon
Define nonsense
-It doesn't make any sense
-You don't see how it is useful
-Something else
I disagree - a salad is only a salad if it resembles a trope of leafiness, in my opinion, so fruit salad, potato hash, and philosophy don't count. /s
The claim that metaphysical claims are meaningless drivel is itself a metaphysical claim :[