[lit-ideas] Re: Geary on Unreal Temperature
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:35:15 -0400
The point?
Why not the edge? The plane?....The tesseract or n-manifold?
John
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:09 AM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> And the point is?
>
> --- On Tue, 27/7/10, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> ------ "Austin", "Sense and Sensibilia"
>
> The Oxbridge cleverness of the punnish title is surely the best thing about
> this work [exposing people like A.J. Ayer as even more hidebound in a dying
> tradition hardly makes a masterpiece].
>
> The appearance-reality distinction runs through philosophy from its infancy
> but the following may be said:-
>
> 1. There is no Archimedian vantage-point [as Kant perhaps best showed, by
> emphasising that we cannot ever step out of the world-as-it-appears-to-us so
> as to evaluate how that relates to the world-as-it-is] from which we can
> conclusively tell to what extent what appears to us corresponds to an
> external reality. We can only guess, or meta-guess, the degree of
> correspondence.
>
> 2. The absence of any such vantage-point does not provide an argument
> against there being an external reality or any kind of correspondence. We
> can only guess, or meta-guess, the existence of an external reality and the
> degree of correspondence - or the truth of their negations.
>
> 3. Nevertheless the arguments in favour of the ['realist'] view that there
> is an external reality, and that there is some correspondence between the
> world-as-it-appears-to-us and the world-as-it-is, better the arguments
> against.* Most of the arguments 'against' arise from the mistaken assumption
> that, because the arguments in favour of the ['realist'] view are logically
> inconclusive or undemonstrable, this favours an anti-realist position: it
> does not, because arguments in favour of such a position are _at least as,
> if not more_ logically inconclusive or undemonstrable.
>
> 4. Science can help illuminate how our senses and other aspects of
> cognition may or may not "correspond" to some external reality - more than
> pondering on the fact a stick appears to change shape in water without any
> scientific theories being used to explain this 'appearance'.
>
> 5. The world-as-it-appears-to-us is itself an aspect of reality that
> invites explanation and that explanation takes us beyond simply the
> world-as-it-appears-to-us: the alternative is simply to say the
> world-as-it-appears-to-us _just is_ and that is no explanation at all.
>
> Donal
> * May come back to this later
> England
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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