Quote: “Un-referenceable entities” is, after all, a reference.
Sortof. “Un-referenceable enitities” is a reference to something, but it’s specifically a reference to a class of entity, not a reference to an entity. Speaking politely, I’d consider this to be a borderline ‘weasel words’ strategy.
To be frank, your argument style and word choices are really terrible if you’re trying to get me to rethink reductionism/physicalism. (I am a strong reductionist.) Consider this sentence:
“Any idea, whether it’s God, Physics, or Objectivity, can disconnect from the human cognitive faculty that relates ideas to the world of experience, and remain as a mere signifier, which persists as a form of unfalsifiable control.”
This is a terrible sentence:
- Ideas are information. We have a lot of math for that.
- Ideas can’t disconnect from anything. What does “Any idea … can disconnect from” even mean?
- “The human cognitive faculty that relates ideas to the world of experience” We call this the act of modeling data in machine learning. There are huge quantities of literature on this. I see none of that referenced here.
- “An idea … remain as a mere signifier”? What is that supposed to mean? Taken one way, you could say that as information, ideas are strictly and only signifiers. This section of the sentence is incredibly sketchy.
- “which persists as a form of unfalsifiable control” Control against what? You haven’t defined anything to control against. And why is it unfalsifiable? You haven’t shown unfalsifiability, merely declared it. That is not sufficient.
Similarly in other places, you appear to be making extensive use of word mangling and creative word definitions. The map is not the territory; the label is not the thing. Being extremely strict about your labels, showing those labels map to something I care about, and crafting a strong, internally consistent set of arguments using those strictly defined labels is how you’re going to convince people like me. I don’t see that your posts so far do that.
Phrases like “the objective world” are typically taken to have meanings, where the meaning is as a kind of thing/entity that has properties, such as being physical. It would certainly be nonstandard to say that this isn’t a reference, as it is, literally, a noun phrase, that is taken to correspond with some entity having properties.
I agree that “un-referenceable entities” could be a reference to a class (like an adjective) rather than a particular. However if I say “there exists an un-referenceable entity, which has properties x, y, and z” then that really looks like a reference to a particular.
I also think my arguments about referenceability of particulars also apply to referenceability of classes. For a reference to a class to be meaningful to some agent, it must in some way be related to that agent, e.g. to their observations/actions.
I’m going to ignore criticism of the last paragraph since it’s not written to be compelling to people who don’t, by that point, agree with the post’s basic idea (which it seems you don’t).
“However if I say “there exists an un-referenceable entity, which has properties x, y, and z” then that really looks like a reference to a particular”—It’s a class that may only contain one if we choose the properties correctly
Quote: “Un-referenceable entities” is, after all, a reference.
Sortof. “Un-referenceable enitities” is a reference to something, but it’s specifically a reference to a class of entity, not a reference to an entity. Speaking politely, I’d consider this to be a borderline ‘weasel words’ strategy.
To be frank, your argument style and word choices are really terrible if you’re trying to get me to rethink reductionism/physicalism. (I am a strong reductionist.) Consider this sentence:
“Any idea, whether it’s God, Physics, or Objectivity, can disconnect from the human cognitive faculty that relates ideas to the world of experience, and remain as a mere signifier, which persists as a form of unfalsifiable control.”
This is a terrible sentence:
- Ideas are information. We have a lot of math for that.
- Ideas can’t disconnect from anything. What does “Any idea … can disconnect from” even mean?
- “The human cognitive faculty that relates ideas to the world of experience” We call this the act of modeling data in machine learning. There are huge quantities of literature on this. I see none of that referenced here.
- “An idea … remain as a mere signifier”? What is that supposed to mean? Taken one way, you could say that as information, ideas are strictly and only signifiers. This section of the sentence is incredibly sketchy.
- “which persists as a form of unfalsifiable control” Control against what? You haven’t defined anything to control against. And why is it unfalsifiable? You haven’t shown unfalsifiability, merely declared it. That is not sufficient.
Similarly in other places, you appear to be making extensive use of word mangling and creative word definitions. The map is not the territory; the label is not the thing. Being extremely strict about your labels, showing those labels map to something I care about, and crafting a strong, internally consistent set of arguments using those strictly defined labels is how you’re going to convince people like me. I don’t see that your posts so far do that.
Phrases like “the objective world” are typically taken to have meanings, where the meaning is as a kind of thing/entity that has properties, such as being physical. It would certainly be nonstandard to say that this isn’t a reference, as it is, literally, a noun phrase, that is taken to correspond with some entity having properties.
I agree that “un-referenceable entities” could be a reference to a class (like an adjective) rather than a particular. However if I say “there exists an un-referenceable entity, which has properties x, y, and z” then that really looks like a reference to a particular.
I also think my arguments about referenceability of particulars also apply to referenceability of classes. For a reference to a class to be meaningful to some agent, it must in some way be related to that agent, e.g. to their observations/actions.
I’m going to ignore criticism of the last paragraph since it’s not written to be compelling to people who don’t, by that point, agree with the post’s basic idea (which it seems you don’t).
“However if I say “there exists an un-referenceable entity, which has properties x, y, and z” then that really looks like a reference to a particular”—It’s a class that may only contain one if we choose the properties correctly
I find that pretty vague. It doesn’t have much meaning for this agent.
Then don’t. Or..why should that be a problem? Even Kant doesn’t make positive claims about noumena or things in themselves.