Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 10:11 pm
All you said is correct Ashvin with respect to epistemology and science, and in philosophy the pragmatic constraint is called "the principle of parsimony", and it is exactly this principle that Bernardo used to defend idealism. But Bernardo never said that his parsimony argument serves as a proof for idealism, but only as a strong and practical argument. Notwithstanding any pragmatic arguments, believe or not, the parallel universe or matter or neutrally-monistic OP may actually exist, and in such case we would be fooling ourselves with pragmatic arguments to make ourselves believe that they do not exist.
But I'm all for the pragmatic arguments as the basis for weighting alternative ontologies based on their pragmatic merits. For example, even if single-person-solipsism would be ontologically true, I would still not choose it as my pragmatic worldview because of its practical deficiencies. But in such case my pragmatic worldview would actually contradict with the Ultimate Truth.
But if that's the case, we might better drop any ontology whatsoever. Who cares what the reality ontologically is if there is no way we can ever find it our anyway? What matters for us us the choice of the worldview that pragmatically works for us. And that is fine, but in such case we should not claim that our pragmatic worldview has anything to do with ontology, with what the reality actually IS ontologically.
So, the bottom-line: we can choose the pragmatic approach to truth, but in this case we should drop any ontological claims (because pragmatic theory of truth is not applicable to ontology). Or, in addition to pragmatic approach, we can still consider ontological statements, but in this case such statements would be unsupportable and unprovable by any pragmatic arguments and would be simply our beliefs of choice. And so we go back to what I said in the beginning: all ontological statements are purely beliefs/hypotheses and should be recognized as only beliefs/hypotheses and not as any sort of unquestionable Ultimate Truths, because we have no ground to ascertain any version of the Ultimate Truth with any pragmatic arguments.
You're still not getting it, Eugene. Pragmatic approach to truth is
not "the principle of parsimony". This has nothing to do with what can he held true for "practical convenience" vs. what "actually exists". The pragmatic approach says "
what actually exists must be that which is knowable in principle and holds practical significance for our experience of the World Content". It completely rejects the assertion that there can be "actually existing" 'things' which we could never know or experience. Of course this is the natural conclusion of idealism as well if it is consistently applied. Scott mentions this in his essay on "
How Idealism Simplifies Metaphysics":
Scott wrote:Then there is the reality/appearance distinction. With idealism, all appearances are real. End of story. Well, one might point out that when we look at water flowing down a river, that that appears to us as non-conscious activity. In response, I would say that it is not a false appearance, rather, it is a false belief about what appears. We are not cognizant that it is a dream river (according to one scenario) or that it is a representation of the thought of highly advanced spiritual beings (according to another). A simple way to grasp this is to imagine someone who has never seen or heard of writing of any sort, then presented with a scrap of paper with some writing on it. That person will not be cognizant that the words on the paper mean something -- it will just look like random marks.
Next up, the ontology/epistemology distinction. With idealism, to modify Berkeley, to be is to be known, and so a theory of knowledge is at the same time a theory of being. So no distinction.
Similarly, there is no ontology/logic distinction. Taking logic in a more general sense, as the study of patterns of thinking, and since thinking is conscious activity, the study of logic is again the study of being.
To summarize, pragmatic truth, especially within idealist framework, is epistemology
and ontology, both. The real question here is whether you hold to pragmatic ontology or rather to some correspodence theory of truth, which is standard among a lot of modern philosophies (mostly materialist-dualist ones). If the latter, which is what I suspect you hold to unknowingly, then a lot of PoF will seem just as you described it, "assuming there can be no universal limits to knowledge" instead of
concluding it. Yet PoF also contains the arguments for why correspondence theory of truth is simply untenable and self-defeating for any knowing inquiry.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trut ... spondence/
Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to, or with, a fact—a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.
The correspondence theory of truth is often associated with metaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, pragmatist, as well as coherentist, verificationist, and other epistemic theories of truth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, or relativism. In recent years, these traditional competitors have been virtually replaced (at least from publication-space) by deflationary theories of truth and, to a lesser extent, by the identity theory (note that these new competitors are typically not associated with anti-realism). Still more recently, two further approaches have received considerable attention. One is truthmaker theory: it is sometimes viewed as a competitor to, sometimes as a more liberal version of, the correspondence theory. The other is pluralism: it incorporates a correspondence account as one, but only one, ingredient of its overall account of truth.
PS - when I use "egoic", "intellect", etc. these are
transpersonal critiques of the modern age and central to my argument here and PoF and spiritual science in general. At first, when it's simply a matter of communicating ideas to people, then those considerations can be left out. But when the people involved clearly cannot understand the ideas and, further, cannot understand why they do not understand the ideas, evidenced by months of similar misunderstanings and misrepresentations, then these deeper realities must be addressed. That is why Jungian depth psychology is so critical to consider as well. Once we understand PoF, we see why Self-knowledge, in the most concrete experiential sense of surveying all desires, feelings, antipathies, naively held beliefs, etc., is actually the key to
every aspect of our spiritual experience and of our becoming into more consciously integrated and therefore free spiritual be-ings.
The only thing you can do about it is to have a belief/hypothesis that asserts or rejects the existence of a parallel universe.