Pebble wrote:

jamest wrote:As an analogy to explain my position, one might also say that Bugs Bunny eats carrots [is a self-evident truth] - but we all actually know that both Bugs Bunny and the carrots that 'he' appears to eat are reducible to an altogether different phenomenon, so that 'Bugs Bunny eats carrots' is not actually true.

That is cheating - you are using empirical evidence to show that sensory information is faulty - if reason is the only true medium - you must use reason alone to prove that bugs bunny does not eat carrots - remembering that relying on reason alone you do not have any experience of rabbits or carrots.

Cheating?

It's just an analogy, used to show that if a phenomenon/event is reducible to something else altogether, then any truth-claims about that phenomenon are essentially untrue. The reason why Bugs Bunny analogies are relevant to 'Parents have children', is because reason can show that an observed entity does not have a stand-alone existence, either, which means that observed parents and observed children are also reducible to ~something else~. Ultimately then, all such statements involving observed entities are similarly reducible - which means that they cannot be self-evident truths any more than the fact that 'Bugs Bunny eats carrots', is.

jamest wrote:

Pebble wrote:

jamest wrote:As an analogy to explain my position, one might also say that Bugs Bunny eats carrots [is a self-evident truth] - but we all actually know that both Bugs Bunny and the carrots that 'he' appears to eat are reducible to an altogether different phenomenon, so that 'Bugs Bunny eats carrots' is not actually true.

That is cheating - you are using empirical evidence to show that sensory information is faulty - if reason is the only true medium - you must use reason alone to prove that bugs bunny does not eat carrots - remembering that relying on reason alone you do not have any experience of rabbits or carrots.

Cheating?

No Pebble is correct. All of your analogies and other ideas are based on the very thing you then doubt. Bugs and Tom and Jerry and paintings and the sun, all of it is off limits to your arguments.

BTW. Reducible? As was shown to you by many that idea failed at it's start. Why do you and your side-kick Little Idiot, keep using refuted arguments as if those thousands of post didn't happen?

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:

Pebble wrote:

That is cheating - you are using empirical evidence to show that sensory information is faulty - if reason is the only true medium - you must use reason alone to prove that bugs bunny does not eat carrots - remembering that relying on reason alone you do not have any experience of rabbits or carrots.

Cheating?

No Pebble is correct. All of your analogies and other ideas are based on the very thing you then doubt. Bugs and Tom and Jerry and paintings and the sun, all of it is off limits to your arguments.

Pebble is not correct because he/she thinks that I'm using Bugs Bunny to prove that 'observed entities' are reducible. This is not the case - I'm merely using Bugs Bunny to highlight why reducible truths are not self-evident truths.

BTW. Reducible? As was shown to you by many that idea failed at it's start. Why do you and your side-kick Little Idiot, keep using refuted arguments as if those thousands of post didn't happen?

Refuted? Your observed refutations are illusions.

It is demonstrably true that an observed-entity cannot have a stand-alone existence. It's very basic philosophy, really. However, you seem unable to grasp it. Perhaps you should stick to pseudoscience - you're extremely good at that.

jamest wrote:
It is demonstrably true that an observed-entity cannot have a stand-alone existence. It's very basic philosophy, really. However, you seem unable to grasp it. Perhaps you should stick to pseudoscience - you're extremely good at that.

No james this is very ancient philosophy and has been beaten right to death.

The only place you will find this kind of shit is in forums of amateurs and in junior high.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:
It is demonstrably true that an observed-entity cannot have a stand-alone existence. It's very basic philosophy, really. However, you seem unable to grasp it. Perhaps you should stick to pseudoscience - you're extremely good at that.

No james this is very ancient philosophy and has been beaten right to death.

The only place you will find this kind of shit is in forums of amateurs and in junior high.

On the contrary, anyone who thinks that observed/experienced entities have a stand-alone existence can only be regarded as a very naive realist.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:
Cheating?

No Pebble is correct. All of your analogies and other ideas are based on the very thing you then doubt. Bugs and Tom and Jerry and paintings and the sun, all of it is off limits to your arguments.

Pebble is not correct because he/she thinks that I'm using Bugs Bunny to prove that 'observed entities' are reducible. This is not the case - I'm merely using Bugs Bunny to highlight why reducible truths are not self-evident truths.

Such a megamind! Now you know what I am thinking without any observation?

The issue is to prove by reason alone without any observation that observed information is inherently untrustworthy. This requires that one constructs an argument that is self validating without any fore-knowledge of the nature of observation. Importantly, you must now apply the same reasoning to reasoning itself, and show that that is different - i.e. not a form of internal observation.

i.e. it is not sufficient to state that observation is at best a reflection of reality, not reality itself.
First, because that does not prove it is untrustworthy
Second, because reason is not the thing itself, merely abstract concepts about possible reality

I can agree with this:

A proposition is self-evident when an adequate understanding, in itself, supplies sufficient reason for accepting the understanding as true.

In such a case, there is virtually no experiential difference between understanding and affirming the truth of what has been understood.

Can I doubt self-evident truths? Descartes, in his method of universal doubt, called self-evident truths into question in his effort to discover truths that cannot be doubted.

Upon reflection, it’s not that I can’t entertain doubts about the truth of self-evident propositions. But it feels like swimming upstream as though I were working in opposition to the natural operation of my own mind.

It seems that self-evident truths like all rational truth presupposes the validity of reason. If reason is valid, then some truths are self-evident.

archibald wrote:But surely, one can say that 'I think, therefore I am' does not require any reasoning nor understanding to be self-evidently true?

Indeed, Arch, a machine can say it. What we do in practice when we see people emitting language is to analyse what they say, and apply lexicographic authorities to establish that the words they use have mathematically exact semantics.

My mother died slowly of an Alzheimer's-related condition, and at the end of her language-using life, the only phrase she emitted was "Get me out of here." It was ambiguous whether she was saying she felt imprisoned, or if it was just a tape loop of some words she had once heard a cartoon character say, namely, her adolescent son. You can treat this as an anecdote, and only need think about it hypothetically.

archibald wrote:Yes, and perhaps I should not have started with 'one can say..'. Nevertheless, is there any possible loophole in the assertion that the thinking bit is self-evidence of something, as opposed to nothing? I can't see one. It's not even necessary to decide whether a machine which says it is thinking or not, because the saying of it is self-evidence of something else, in that case.

If anyone here in philosophy wants to seriously challenge the assertion for a spurious reason....I may have to lose heart again, gingerly returning to the forum as I am. :]

Axioms in logical systems are taken to be self-evident. All this means is that you agree not to try to prove them before you start in on the consequences of such axioms, which is really why logicians bother with anything. Philosophers do nothing but examine their axioms, and look where it gets them: To something like an axiom that signs do not necessarily have intrinsic significance.

I don't know why people try to backtrack into examining axioms analytically. Something else could be going on; UE looks to non-physical causality as axiomatic, and anyone who wants to examine the consequences of NPC starts with this axiom.

My anecdotal example is there to point out that we either assume that thinking and people are conjoint, or we look for evidence that someone is thinking. Is the external world a matter of faith? Some sentences look like questions, but aren't really questions. You could 'think of them' as meditations, as Marcus Aurelius would have done. He called them 'meditations'.

Here's another meditation: Is any 'thinking' done without language? Self-evident is like a one-to-one correspondence between a sentence and what it signifies, which is like calling a spade a spade, a sentence that signifies itself. The one-to-one is by prior agreement.

I think that—except for certain conditional statements such as "If I think, then I am" (*—true egocentric statements, i.e. ones in which the self-referential personal pronoun "I" functions as subject, are not to be counted among the self-evident truths (of pure reason), because what provides the evidence for their truth is my self-experience or self-perception. I know that I am thinking because I am experiencing myself as a thinker.

(* This can be regarded as an instance of the (apparently) self-evident metaphysical (synthetic a-priori) truth that if something/somebody has properties, then he/she/it exists.)

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:My anecdotal example is there to point out that we either assume that thinking and people are conjoint, or we look for evidence that someone is thinking.

Well yes, but I hope you noticed I was careful not to venture to guess what 'I' is in 'I think therefore....'. That, surely, is phase two, and moving away from purely self-evident.

And what else need it signify self-evidently except the entity that is saying "I think" or "I am"? That is what the computer example is about. When a computer does it, the sentence is not self-evidently absurd, unless you slather the first-person singular pronoun with special sauce. I wouldn't do that, especially if I were a structuralist.

Cito di Pense wrote:
And what else need it signify self-evidently except the entity that is saying "I think" or "I am"? That is what the computer example is about. When a computer does it, the sentence is not self-evidently absurd, unless you slather the first-person singular pronoun with special sauce. I wouldn't do that, especially if I were a structuralist.

The ability to utter the sentence "I am a thinker" doesn't entail the ability to think, because nonthinking computers, who aren't subjects of cognitive experience, are able to say or write that sentence.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:And what else need it signify self-evidently except the entity that is saying "I think" or "I am"?

Nothing. But you mentioned people.

Yes, I mentioned people in conjunction with the proposition that some people make in which 'thinking' is only something that 'people' do. See also, humanism.

Teuton wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:
And what else need it signify self-evidently except the entity that is saying "I think" or "I am"? That is what the computer example is about. When a computer does it, the sentence is not self-evidently absurd, unless you slather the first-person singular pronoun with special sauce. I wouldn't do that, especially if I were a structuralist.

The ability to utter the sentence "I am a thinker" doesn't entail the ability to think, because nonthinking computers, who aren't subjects of cognitive experience, are able to say or write that sentence.

Don't say, "It can't happen here." The phrase 'subject of cognitive experience' is unmemorable, here spoken like part of a liturgy, in this case, of 'cognitive philosophy'. It is supposed to be self-evident that subjects of cognitive experience are thinking, but it is just a tautology. Some cognitive philosophers would have us believe they are 'thinking' when they generate tautologies. But really, a computer could do as good a job. Getting tautologies from online dictionaries of philosophy is not a crime.

The statement "I exist" seems a bit hard to falsify. (I don't know that I would hire anyone who managed to falsify it as a childminder.) That might lead some people to say that, rather than being true, it is meaningless.

One point I would make regarding some of what has been discussed above: Kant did actually claim that there can be synthetic a priori knowledge.