Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Atla]

Let me offer a couple of points (there was a third but I lost my post and then forgot the third):

1. You seem to have moved from a rather strong anti-realism to a rather strong realism in the matter of a few posts. For example, above you claimed:

"The world has no such "givenness", what we experience is mostly just the "givenness" of our own individual human mind. For example the world isn't brimming with meaning, our minds are, the qualia of meaning may objectively exist and it may be abundant in the human mind, yet that has no real implications for the rest of the world."

This is much different from what you say now. You went from claiming that the phenomena of the mind "has no real implications for the rest of the world" to saying that "the phenomena of the mind seem to represent the outside world very accurately." Of course insofar as you abandon and move away from that earlier anti-realism, you will be able to undertake the sort of inquiry that presupposes some form of realism, e.g. science.

I'd say realism vs anti-realism is a crude dichotomy that's not even wrong, I don't think you can put me in either of those categories. Why people still take it seriously I don't know.
In the first quote I was criticizing how phenomenology seems to misattribute human mental things to the rest of the world. (And on a deeper level, all meta-givenness/isness is illusory anyway, doesn't matter whether phenomenology or science does it.)
In the second quote I was talking about representation. I don't understand your argument, we don't know what the world is out there actually like because we are limited to our consciousness, but we can test the contents of our consciousness for example by walking into a wall that's appearing in our consciousness, and see what happens. That's how ALL science is done too, even if those scientists mistakenly believe in a strong realism.

2. Science does not say that the givenness of the world is matter, protons, etc. Science rather says that the givenness of the world includes matter, protons, etc. If you are an anti-realist with respect to matter you can't do science, because science really does presuppose matter. It could be called a "treatment" of the world, but it is also an interpretation of the world that the scientist must in reality affirm. The hegemony of science is absurd because science has no basis for excluding things outside of its domain of inquiry.

Of course science works all the same without the idea of matter, after we've reinterpreted everything accordingly. It just becomes more difficult to communicate without a well-established empty concept such as matter.

As far as I am concerned, if you think you can reliably and accurately infer an outside reality from the phenomena you experience, then you are committed to some form of indirect or mediated realism, which is the most common kind. Science surely does presuppose such a thing.

Again, it doesn't have to be "realism", but yes human consciousness is representational, that's more like a fact not just a commitment.

[Leontiskos]

I am going to go ahead and leave off here, letting my last post stand. Thanks for the conversation.