The point I’m trying to express (and clearly failing at) isn’t conceptualism or solipsism, at least not in the way my own semantic modeling interprets them. As I interpret them, the idealism of, say, Berkeley, Buddhism et al amounts to a re-branding of reality from being “out there” to “in my mind” (or “God’s mind”). I mean it differently, but because I refer constantly to our mental models, I can see why my argument looks a lot like that.
That’s your objection to solipsism. What’s your objection to conceptualism?
And that our semantic models tend to fool us into assigning a power to language that it doesn’t have.
Who’s “us”? Some philosophers? All philosophers? Some laypeople? All laypeople?
Our theories of ontology and epistomology can’t coherently claim to refer to things beyond human language
Except that you just did. Well, you did in general. Theres a problem in referring to specific things behind our language. But who’s doing that? Kant isn’t. He keeps saying that the thing in itself is unknowable. So what’s the problem with Kantian conceptualism?
Whatever model of reality we have, it’s still a model.
Whatever reality is, it’s still reality. You still haven’t said how the two are related.
But all of that is itself manifestly a mental model.
A model of something real. “Is a model” doesn’t mean “is false”.
So if I then want to coherently claim a particular model is more than just a model, I have to create a larger model in which the first model is imagined to be so.
Does “more than a model” mean “true”?
But realism – the claim of a “reality” independent of ANY model—commits one to an infinite nesting of mental models, each trying to escape their nature as mental models.
I don’t see why. And if you reject realism, you have solipsism, which you also reject.
So if I want a particular unprovable statement to count as “true”, I need a larger meta-system that makes it so
You can do that with larger systems, adding the theorem as an axiom, but you can also do that with different systems.
But that’s all rather beside the point… minimally realism requires some things to be true, and truth to be something to do with the territory.
Personally I’m not a fan of Platonism, but it works as a philosophy of mathematics in so far as it passes the buck from formal to informal language
Theres no reason why meaning and truth in maths have to work like meaning and truth in not-maths, or vice versa.
To sum it all up with another metaphor: the semantic modeling behind the philosophy of realism overloads the word “reality” with more weight than the human language game can carry.
You need to notice the difference between truth and justifcation/proof. Truth, even realistic truth, is so easy to obtain that you can a certain amount by ransoming guessing. The tricky thing is knowing why it is true...justification.
That’s your objection to solipsism. What’s your objection to conceptualism?
Who’s “us”? Some philosophers? All philosophers? Some laypeople? All laypeople?
Except that you just did. Well, you did in general. Theres a problem in referring to specific things behind our language. But who’s doing that? Kant isn’t. He keeps saying that the thing in itself is unknowable. So what’s the problem with Kantian conceptualism?
Whatever reality is, it’s still reality. You still haven’t said how the two are related.
A model of something real. “Is a model” doesn’t mean “is false”.
Does “more than a model” mean “true”?
I don’t see why. And if you reject realism, you have solipsism, which you also reject.
You can do that with larger systems, adding the theorem as an axiom, but you can also do that with different systems.
But that’s all rather beside the point… minimally realism requires some things to be true, and truth to be something to do with the territory.
Theres no reason why meaning and truth in maths have to work like meaning and truth in not-maths, or vice versa.
You need to notice the difference between truth and justifcation/proof. Truth, even realistic truth, is so easy to obtain that you can a certain amount by ransoming guessing. The tricky thing is knowing why it is true...justification.