BruceS suggested that I start a thread on my ideas about human cognition. I’m not sure how this will work out, but let’s try. And, I’ll note that I have an earlier thread that is vaguely related.
The title of this thread is one of my non-traditional ideas about cognition. And if I am correct, as I believe I am, then our relation to the world is very different from what is usually assumed.
The traditional view is that we pick up facts, and most of cognition has to do with reasoning about these facts. If I am correct, then there are no facts to pick up. So the core of cognition has to be engaged in solving the problem of having useful facts about the world.
Chicago Coordinates
I’ll start with a simple example. I typed “Chicago Coordinates” into Google, and the top of the page returned showed:
41.8819° N, 87.6278° W
That’s an example of what we would take to be a fact. Yet, without the activity of humans, it could not exist as a fact. In order for that to be a fact, we had to first invent a geographic coordinate system (roughly, the latitude/longitude system). And that coordinate system in turn depends on some human conventions. For example, the meridian through Greenwich was established as the origin for the longitudes.
That fact also depends on the naming convention, which designates “Chicago” as the name of a particular town. And, it depends on a convention specifying a particular location within Chicago (probably the old post office, though I’m not sure of that).
I won’t go through a lot of examples. I think the one is sufficient to illustrate the point. Everything that we call a fact depends, in some way, on human conventions. So facts are artifacts, in the sense that we must first develop the conventions necessary for us to have the possibility of their being facts.
Acquiring information
A number of years ago, I made a usenet post in comp.ai.philosophy. I couldn’t find it in a google search. The idea of the thought experiment was that someone (an airplane pilot) dropped me off in the middle of the Nullarbor plain (in Southern Australia), with a lunch pack, pencil and note paper. I was to record as much information as I could about that location, before I was picked up in the evening.
The thing about the Nullarbor plain, is that it is desert. But it is not sandy desert like the Sahara. There are many plants — desert scrub — that grow in the occasional rain, then dry out and look dead most of the time. So perhaps I could record information about the plants, such as their density. But, how could I do that. Everything looked the same in every direction.
So I used the soda can from the lunch pack as a marker. And I used a couple of other items as markers. That enabled me to fix a particular region where I could start counting, in order to be able to write down some information. The markers broke up the sameness, and allowed me to have a sense of direction. In effect, those markers established conventions that I would use in counting the number of plants.
As I recall, others in the usenet discussion did not like that post. They saw my use of the soda can as something akin to making an arbitrary choice (which it was). There appears to be some unwritten rule of philosophy, that anything depending on arbitrary choices must be wrong. (Oops, there goes that meridian of longitude, based on the arbitrary choice of Greenwich).
Knowledge
The traditional account, from epistemology, is that knowledge is justified true belief. Roughly speaking, your head is full of propositions that you are said to believe, and you are good at applying logic to those propositions.
You can be a highly knowledgeable solipsist that way. And, as a mathematician, I suppose that term “solipsist” fits some of what I know.
My sense is that acquiring knowledge is all about anchors. We must find ways of anchoring our propositions to reality. That’s roughly what the system of geographic coordinates does. That’s what the soda can did in my thought experiment. And that, anchoring ourselves to reality, is what I see our perceptual systems to be doing.
AI and autonomy
AI researchers often talk of autonomous agents. And that’s the core of my skepticism about AI. What makes us autonomous, is that each of us can autonomously anchor our thoughts to reality. The typical AI system uses propositions that are anchored to reality only by the auspices of the programmer. So the AI system has no real autonomy. And, when boiled down, that is really what Searle’s “Chinese Room” criticism of AI is about — Searle describes it as an intentionality problem.
I’ll stop at this point, to see if any discussion develops.
I’m puzzled that you think you are saying something that I might disagree with. And I’m puzzled that you think it has something to do with a “God’s eye view” when you are actually describing a human’s eye view.
keiths,
I’m not at all sure what point you think you are making.
Neil,
The point I think I’m making is the one elucidated by my comment. If you disagree with it or find it to be problematic, perhaps you could help the discussion along by explaining why.
I’m still not finding any point there.
Okay, I’ll spell it out for you.
Things that differ are distinct. If “the way the world is” differs from “the way science describes the world”, then the distinction is valid. Yet you claim it’s “bogus”.
Scientists used to describe the sun as orbiting the earth once per day. They no longer do. “The way science describes the world” has therefore changed.
In reality, the earth orbits the sun, and that did not change when science revised its view. In other words, “the way the world is” did not change with respect to this question.
If one thing changes when another thing doesn’t, the two are distinct. “The way science describes the world” is thus distinct from the “the way the world is”, since the former changed at a time when the latter did not.
The distinction is not bogus,. Your claim is incorrect.
The issue I think is whether the statements about electrons are talking about things that exist or are just ways of characterizing what we see in when we observe paths in bubble chambers.
But having reread his posts more closely and in the light of discussions, I don’t think that is Neil’s point.
Quite right. But this has nothing to do with an imagined “the way the world is.”
These are conventions that we use to establish a coordinate system. The mathematical transformation from geocentric coordinates to heliocentric coordinates is relatively simple. The choice between them is pragmatic. It’s a choice of which coordinate system is more useful. And, of course, we use both.
Bruce:
Neil:
I now understand you to be saying that
1. There is a world.
2. Maybe there are M-facts somehow associated with the world.
3. But anything we say cannot be an expression of an M-fact because any statement we make must make use of conventions/signposts/anchors that humans have established and hence that statement is about a P-fact. In particular, since science required human conventions, it speaks about P-facts.
4. M-facts would require conventionless expression which is impossible.
5. Hence we must remain silent on M-facts (to steal from Wittgenstein).
Is that closer to your point of view?
If so, do you think consider correctness to be meaningless because it is impossible to meaningfully talk of correctness with respect to something one cannot speak about?
That’s a fair way of putting it.
Roughly speaking, I see truth as something like the conformance to a standard. But there is no standard available that is applicable to your earlier use of “correctly”.
Neil,
You didn’t address my point, which is that this statement of yours appears to be incorrect:
I explained my reasoning here.
Also, you still haven’t identified the circularity you say you spotted in my argument.
BruceS, to Neil:
Neil:
Neil,
That can’t be right, because Bruce’s paraphrase of your position…
…doesn’t jibe with your earlier statement:
In Bruce’s paraphrase, the statement is about the P-fact. In your case, the statement is the P-fact.
Which of these is your actual view?
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
(My internet skills are not sufficient to get the above image to appear in the comment but if you right-click the icon and select “open in new tab” you should see it.)
At the risk of creating more fog of misunderstanding, what we might possibly know lies within past and future light cones from the Earth (I guess Voyager adds a little extra). What lies beyond is pure conjecture, unknowable. What lies inside is available for study, depending on our resources, abilities and inclination for research.
Could I ask if either Neil or Keith disagree? Or anyone else?
ETA Silly mistake. Of course Voyager makes no difference, it can’t escape the light cone of Earth or if it did, we could no longer receive information from it!
ETA take that, internet!
ETA attribution
Yes, I agree with that, at least on our current understanding.
Yes, I did address it. Apparently, you didn’t get it.
You presented two different ways that people have described the world. There’s no basis for saying that either of those is the way the world is.
That’s great, assuming your qualifier refers to the expanding (well, in most cases) database of collective human knowledge about the world.
I did not notice that. Now that you have pointed it out, I still don’t see any reason for concern. I never could get into that kind of word lawyering. Usage differs from person to person. I take it that what matters are the ideas conveyed, not the exact sequence of words.
Alan,
I agree, with the caveat that the size and shape of the light cone are affected not only by the speed of light but also by the expansion of space itself. (That’s why the radius of the observable universe is 46 billion light years, rather than the 13.7 billion that you would otherwise expect.)
Unknowable, yes. Pure conjecture? That seems a bit strong. For example, consider the hypothesis that the laws of physics are the same one foot outside the light cone as they are one foot inside. I wouldn’t call that “pure conjecture”, though it is true that we cannot confirm it by observation.
Yes, so all knowable P-facts concern events inside the light cone. Any P-fact referring to events outside the light cone cannot be confirmed.
Note that this does not mean that it isn’t a P-fact. Neil defined P-facts as “true statements”, and that includes both knowable and unknowable true statements.
Thanks, Keith and Neil for your responses. I’m not seeing much substantive disagreement.
PS @ Keith, wouldn’t inflationary expansion put things further out of reach for us?
keiths:
Neil:
The distinction between “a statement about S” and “a statement S” is crucial. I’m surprised that you, as a mathematician and computer scientist, would be so cavalier about this.
Ordinary language use is neither mathematics nor logic.
That’s really a rather different point from what was being discussed.
What I am arguing is, in effect, that the only notion of “truth” that we can have is our own. This is different from the question of accessibility.
Alan,
The effect actually runs in the opposite direction. Neglecting the transparency issue, inflationary expansion would actually bring more things within reach for us. In other words, the light cone gets very wide very fast if you move back in time into and through the inflationary era.
If it weren’t for the transparency issue, the observable universe would be infinite under general relativity, since it began with a singularity.
Neil,
We’re having a philosophical discussion. Precision is warranted.
Neil wrote:
Neil,
You truncated my comment mid-sentence, à la Salvador. Restoring the words you cut out, I wrote:
Do you stand by your statement, or do you agree that it is wrong?
Also, you still haven’t pointed out the circularity you claim to have spotted.
OK
I was just simplistically assuming that allowing for an inflationary period that resulted in a visible universe even larger than that than can be traversed by light since the beginning of time would rule out any possibility of establishing any facts about objects, say 40 billion light years away (other than what can be gleaned vie Hubble etc). I accept as a thought-argument that we have no reason to think something extremely bizarre happens beyond the limit of the visible universe, more of the same seems a very reasonable conjecture. We just have no way of knowing.
Alan,
Here’s an analogy to help explain why inflation would actually bring more events within reach, rather than the reverse.
Imagine a magic marker (is that what you Brits call them?) moving at a constant speed of one inch per second over the surface of a balloon. If the balloon is neither expanding nor contracting, then after 10 seconds the line produced by the marker will be 10 inches long.
Now imagine instead that the balloon is inflating rapidly while the marker moves at the same constant speed of one inch per second. After 10 seconds, the line will be quite a big longer than 10 inches.
Just as the length of the line will be longer if the balloon inflates while the marker is moving across its surface, the distance between an object emitting photons and an object receiving them will be longer if space is inflating.
No, I see that Keith.
I just can’t break free from the concept that if something is far away, it will take a long time to get there
I’m reminded of another attempt at explaining a difficult concept.
Faux precision is, or ought to be, the bane of philosophy.
I’ve never understood that complaint.
There was a link to the full message that I was replying to. A small quote is enough to provide context.
As for the other point — you gave an example where people have disagreed about how to describe the world. That has nothing to do with “the way the world is” as far as I can tell.
That’s a distinction I missed.
In one of KN’s posts, he said that P-facts were about the map, not the territory. So I would understand the distinction to be whether P-facts were something separate from the map or whether the map is nothing but the list of P-facts.
But neither case gets you closer to M-facts from what I can see.
Neil,
Not when the words you omit contain the very point I’m making (and which you refuse to address).
You made the following statement:
I believe that your statement is incorrect, and I have explained why. Do you stand by your statement, or do you agree with me that it is mistaken?
I’m on the side of a version of scientific realism called “convergent realism”, although Jay Rosenberg’s “Comparing the incommensurable: Another look at convergent realism” is the only paper on the subject I’ve read carefully.
Roughly, his conclusion is that we have good reasons to hold that a historical succession of quantitative scientific theories asymptotically converges on how things are, meaning that each theory is a better approximation than the previous theories. (Interestingly, Rosenberg explicitly identifies this as a pragmatist view, and appeals to Peirce and to Sellars for that designation.) I can say something about his argument for this if there’s interest, but I’d start another thread for that.
In Neil’s terms, the P-facts are specified relative to a theory or conceptual framework, and the M-facts are a placeholder-term for “whatever is really the case”. So we can say that there are theory-independent M-facts, even though we cannot say what they are, and even though the only specifiable facts are the theory-dependent P-facts.
The hard question for scientific realists is, what entitles us to even posit a standard when we have no epistemic access to that standard? (That is, no “God’s-eye view”.) Rosenberg’s answer is that we posit the standard internally, from within the succession of theories. So even those of us who think that there’s no epistemic access to the God’s-eye view, and that the organism’s-eye view is the only view that we have, are still be entitled to be scientific realists.
The important thing, I think, is to pay careful attention to the details of the different theories under consideration, and not allow casual use of terms like “absolute,” “relative”, “objective,” and “subjective” distract us from those details.
Let me try to take language out of the picture for now by considering other species. Then I’ll come back to M-facts.
I want to use brain maps as part of my thoughts. From your reply to KN’s original response, I think you are OK with brain map causing behaviour.
Start with Bees. As I understand it, bees can locate pollen using the distance form the hive and the angle to the sun. Sun-angle and hive-distance are the conventions bees use to encode Bee-P-facts about pollen location in brain maps. When they dance to other bees, the audience uses the same conventions (distance from hive and angle to sun) and can form equivalent brain maps.
Now bees are limited to the same conventions, hard-coded by evolution. But we can use other conventions, like longitude and latitude, to find the pollen. And we see that bees can do the same thing we do but with different conventions. Given two species using different conventions are successful in the world, does that mean we don’t need a conventionless language to talk about M-facts? I’ll come back to that.
First, consider a mother raccoon that has learned the location of my garbage can relative to her nest. But she has not learned a path that takes her there directly; rather, she travels an indirect path using a tree as a landmark. So there is a triangle with vertices at her nest, the tree, and my garbage can. She is using that tree as one of the anchors in her raccoon-P-fact about where my garbage can is. Now when a cub follows the mother, it would learn the location of the garbage can as well. But it may have noticed a different tree near the one the mother used by which it can form an equally effective map. It is using a different convention. The mother and cub have used different triangle with a different anchor, but both are equally effective.
We can see the reason for this: they both capture the common base of the triangle which is the direct route from the nest to my garbage can. So does that allow us to conclude that since they have captured the same structure with different landmarks, that structure is somehow not dependent on the landmark?
One problem with that conclusion could be that the structure is only implicit in how we describe what they are doing. And we need to use our own conventions to describe the structure. So we are not using a conventionless language.
But I think there is a counter-argument analogous to the no-miracles argument for scientific realism. Consider the mathematics used to express the propositions of physics. It implies a mathematical structure for the world. Because physics is so successful in predicting outcomes of experiments, and so useful in building technology, it would be a miracle if that mathematical structure was not the same as a structure in the world, which would be an M-fact. (This is basically the “structural realism” approach to scientific realism, I think).
I suspect you would reply that mathematics is a human invention and so any statements that uses it are P-facts (or about P-facts). And I can see the merit in that. But I also see the merit in the no miracles argument saying the the mathematical structures of a successful physics are structures in the world; even though we need to use our conventions to express them, they are still M-facts.
In other words, the no-miracles argument seems to me to provide a way to argue against the premise that we must use conventionless language to draw valid conclusions about M-facts.
Neil,
If you think that it’s “faux precision” in philosophy to distinguish “a statement about S” from “a statement S”, then you clearly haven’t done much philosophical thinking.
Another way of putting the point, using the map-territory metaphor, is that, although we cannot compare any map with the territory directly, we can compare different maps with each other — more specifically, we can look at the size of the difference between Map 1, Map 2, and Map 3. If there’s a smaller difference between Map 2 and Map 3 than there is between Map 1 and Map 2, then we are entitled to believe that the sequence — Map 1, Map 2, Map 3 — approximates a limit, which is the territory (“reality”)
Hence, our confidence that we are asymptotically converging on the territory is justified by our comparisons between the maps, even though there’s no direct access to the territory all by itself, which is what we would need to directly compare our maps with the territory.
An additional striking feature of Rosenberg’s defense of convergent realism is that it only works for highly constrained, quantitative scientific theories. It doesn’t work for “world-views”, religions, or even for the human sciences.
(To quote from a discarded draft of a paper of mine, Rosenberg might be right in saving Peirce from Kuhn, but that’s consistent with Rorty’s emphasis that it is not possible to save Hegel from Nietzsche. Apologies for the name-dropping there — that’s only for the benefit of those who have studied some philosophy, and it’s not essential to understanding what I’m trying to say here.)
Exactly. And Rosenberg’s argument for convergent realism puts some real flesh on the bones of the no-miracles argument.
Putnam’s point — that only scientific realism makes scientific progress to be something other than a miracle — is vulnerable to the Rortyian objection that the very notion of “scientific progress” is just a compliment we pay to the latest scientific theory (and, indirectly, a compliment we pay to ourselves for accepting it). Whereas Rosenberg gives us a way of specifying what exactly we mean by “scientific progress” in anything more than the “hurray for antibiotics and GPS!” sense in which scientific innovations make human life less miserable and more comfortable.
I think that is what I was trying to say in my meandering post about bees and raccoons, but you put much more succinctly.
I think there might be an analogy to our discussion if I understand the eternal inflation approach to multiverses.
I understand it to say that there is a set of island universes in a sea of eternal inflation. Each of these island universes is still inflating into that sea meaning there are unobservable regions of its island universe for any inhabitant of a given island universe. But each island universe has the same physical laws.
So the analogy might be that we can say make statements about the unobservable parts of our island universe using our laws since if the science is right, then those unobservable regions will have the same laws (analogous to but not the same as P-facts telling us M-facts).
But all we can say about other island island universes if the science is right is that they exist. So that would be analogous to the statement that M-facts exist, but we can say nothing about them.
Clearly, you believe that. Nevertheless, you have not explained why. You have been addressing a different issue entirely.
Was BruceS making a very precise logically formulated statement? Or was he addressing ideas with a more casual use of language?
I took it to be the latter.
In mathematics (in point set topology), we do talk of convergent sequences. And, at times, we can see that a sequence converges even if we have not exactly determined what it converges to.
There are some requirements for this. Firstly we need some sort of measure of closeness of the elements in the sequence. With some philosophers of science asserting that there is no measure of progress in science, perhaps we do not have such a measure of closeness. Personally, I am more on the optimistic side of this issue.
The second problem is one of completeness. For example, if you take the first few terms in the infinite series expansion of sin x, then you have a sequence of polynomial approximations. They satisfy the closeness requirements for convergence. But they do not converge to any polynomial function. The completeness requirements here are that we must include more functions than polynomials. If we translate that to scientific theories, then you could have an apparently convergent sequence of theories, but with nothing that we would consider a theory as the limiting end point.
Overall, I think you have understood what I am saying pretty well, so perhaps you will consider this comment to be nit picking.
BruceS,
I’m not replying to any specifics. Overall, both you and KN reasonably understand what I am arguing.
Let’s suppose that there are M-facts. Let’s suppose that there is something like a specification language for M-facts.
Then it seems to me that the language for M-facts would require a vocabulary that is uncountably infinite. And if that is right, then M-facts are not at all like anything that we would consider a fact. I take facts, in the ordinary sense, to be very pragmatic things that we can use.
Such talk will turn my head.
I would conjecture that one of the most salient differences between rational cognitive systems and non-rational cognitive systems is that the former have the capacity to revise and modify their conceptual frameworks — we aren’t locked into a species-specific conceptual framework (as, e.g. racoons are).
For the past several hundred years we’ve been modifying our perceptual access to the world through technology that supplements or replaces our motor activity, but there’s the tantalizing prospect just on the horizon of being able to modify our cognitive access to the world through new kinds of computation, nanotechnology, and neurological modifications (whether genetic, chemical, or computational).
I’m not sure how capable we are of being disinterested Homo sapiens. Ego,self-interest and human perspective drives much of what we do.
However I agree that when talking about behaviour, sentience and consciousness, the ability to adapt behaviour according to new conditions is the element that differentiates between, say, Man and bees.
I’d suggest there is a progression from chemotaxis (E coli ending up where it “wants to go” only by sampling where it has been, to innate behaviour, such as bee dancing (no language classes for bees). There does then seem quite a good correlation between available brain power and complexity of innate behaviour, with an increasing element of responding to feedback. It seems when parents nurture offspring for an extended period that learned behaviour becomes a possibility.
What perhaps is the element that sets us apart from most other species is our ability, not just to learn from others but to improvise and to try new things. (Open a window to let a fly out and it never grasps the concept of going round the window-frame to escape). Humans also seem unique in having this “wasteful” capacity for stuff that does not appear to contribute directly to their genes’ survival. Artistic (in the broadest sense) ability and appreciation (and humour, what’s that about?) maybe can be explained by invoking sexual selection (I think it is a persuasive argument) but it enriches our lives nonetheless.
Violent agreement again!
Neil is still bizarrely refusing to answer my questions (about the circularity he claims to have spotted, for example) or even to say whether he stands by his earlier statements (e.g. regarding the supposed “bogus distinction” between “the way the world is” and “the way science describes the world”).
It isn’t the first time he’s behaved this way.
Since further discussion with him is unlikely to be productive, I’ll address my comment to the other thread participants and onlookers.
Neil’s entire concept of “facts as human artifacts” is merely an exercise in redefinition. It’s already unversally accepted that humans make true statements. All Neil has done is to redefine “facts” to mean “true statements”. Thus, given Neil’s redefinition, it is true that humans make facts — they are human artifacts. An old and obvious idea has been repackaged in a way that makes it sound novel but doesn’t change the original meaning.
It leads to no new insights about cognition, and it clashes with the accepted meaning of the word “fact”. What’s the point?
Okay, fair enough.
So you have been missing the point entirely. You have completely misunderstood what I am arguing.
That’s the reason that you have not been satisfied by my responses.
Let me try to say it differently.
1: There was no temperature data anywhere on earth, before the thermometer was invented (I think that was invented by Galileo).
2: Before the invention of the thermometer, if philosophers were attempting to describe the kind of M-facts that they thought were lying around, nobody would have mentioned temperature M-facts.
3: Before the invention of the thermometer, if philosophers were talking about “states of affairs”, then they were not thinking about temperature as figuring into those states of affairs.
4: There was no necessity that the concept of temperature be formulated. The world could have been described adequately with different ways of conceptualizing it.
I could say something similar about time, length, etc. But it’s a bit more complex in those cases, because human use of those concepts is a lot older.
As best I can tell, both BruceS and KN understood that was my point. Somehow, you have failed to understand it. And, worse, you have taken my attempts to address your misunderstanding as evasions.
As to the relevance to cognition: I am, in effect, arguing that our interactive engagement with the world is far more intense and detailed than is usually assumed. We tend to not notice this, because the hard lifting is done by our perceptual systems.
A computer does not have perceptual experience, because it just receives data. We have experience because of all of the work that we, via our perceptual systems, do to get that data. The data is meaningless to the computer, because it is just numbers (or logic bits). For us, the meaning comes from the procedures that we (or our perceptual systems) are using to make it possible to have that data.
I disagree that Neil is merely “redefining” fact.
The identity of “facts” with “true statements” is implicit in pieces of ordinary-language such as “just the facts, ma’am” to mean “only make true statements, ma’am”.
I’m not crazy about the distinction between “P-facts” and “M-facts”, but for reasons the opposite of keiths — I want to put “facts” on the framework-dependent side of the distinction between what is framework-dependent and what is framework-independent. (However, I share keiths view that this is a distinction worth making, and that it is both meaningful and useful to talk about what is framework-independent.)
On the framework-independent side — not the claims, which are framework-dependent, but the claimables — what it is that true claims are about — I’m pretty happy to just talk about objects. So facts are about objects (and their properties and relations).
One might object that even talk about objects, properties, and relations is framework-dependent. (Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty both urge this line.) And if we pursue this line of thought, the framework-independent side of the line quickly becomes some undifferentiated world-stuff — a kind of cookie-dough that is “formless and void” until some perceptual and conceptual capacities divide it up into objects. (Kant is often read as having this view.)
However, taking anti-realism this far has serious problems. One problem is that it renders incoherent the idea that there is something about how the world is which at least contributes to the truth or falsity of our claims about it. For if the world-in-itself is truly formless and void, then it doesn’t even have the minimal structure necessary for making some conceptual classifications right and others wrong. The world ends up having no voice at all in what we say about it. There’s no “friction” between judgments and objects, or more precisely, the “friction” between judgments and objects is put entirely on the framework-dependent side of the distinction.
If our epistemic goal of getting things right, or modeling the world accurately (even if without complete accuracy) makes any sense, then it cannot be the case that object/judgment distinction is completely on the framework-dependent side of the distinction. On the contrary, there must be objects (and their properties and relations) of some sort, to some minimally perceptible and conceptualizable degree, in order for there to be judgments — facts — at all.
KN,
Not really. “Just the facts, ma’am” means “express just the facts, ma’am.” We all agree that facts can be expressed, but the expression of a fact is not the fact itself. As I pointed out earlier, the phrase “a statement of fact” would be redundant if “fact” meant “true statement”: “a statement of a true statement”.
From dictionary.com:
Besides, even if you thought that “fact” included “true statement” as one of its meanings, it is certainly not the only meaning. Neil’s statement — “Facts are human artifacts” — is true only if you limit the definition of “facts” to mean “true statements” and nothing else. That amounts to a redefinition.
Third, even if you were to disagree with all of the above, it remains true that “humans make true statements” is uncontroversial and universally accepted. When Neil says “Facts are human artifacts”, he is only repeating “humans make true statements” in a misleading way. This doesn’t lead to any new insights about cognition. What’s the point?
Well, in fairness, Neil did try to capture this ambiguity in the word “fact” by distinguishing between “propositional facts” (true claims or judgments) and “metaphysical facts” (whatever it is that makes true claims truth — the truthmakers, whether regarded as objects, states of affairs, structures, etc.).
So I took Neil o be making a good-faith effort to disambiguate our uses of the word “fact”, and to argue that there is sense of fact — “P-facts” — in which facts are human artifacts — and another sense of fact — “M-facts” — in which they are not.
Where I disagree with Neil (as I understand his position) is the further claim that “M-facts” are a useless notion. The main issue over which Neil and I disagree is that Neil seems to accept some sort of anti-realism, and I urge a moderate or weak realism.
I hesitate to speak for Neil on this point, but I took him to making the distinction between P-facts and M-facts as a preliminary step towards emphasizing the ecological and evolutionary function of conceptual frameworks.
I’m puzzled that you think I’m an anti-realist. But perhaps I don’t really understand what anti-realism is supposed to be.
Yes, that’s roughly what I am trying to do.
I started this thread by listing the coordinates of Chicago. But now, suppose that I am on a boat at sea, far away from land. And suppose that there is no radio and no navigation equipment on the boat. Then, I cannot say where I am in terms of geographic coordinates. The best I can say is that I am near the bow or near the stern, or something of the sort. I can only give a position in terms of local coordinates relative to the boat.
That’s pretty much our position in the universe. A God’s eye view presumes that we can see as if from outside. But we can only see from inside. We have to make up our own local coordinate systems.
We measure length in metres. But maybe our metre is not a fixed unit of length. Maybe it just seems that way to us, but it could actually be changing all the time. Maybe the unit of time from the atomic clocks is not a fixed unit. Maybe the clocks are all slowing down, or are all speeding up. This is the limitation of relying on ad hoc locally constructed coordinate systems (or conceptual systems).
For us, it doesn’t really matter. We have to make do with what is available to us.
The important point is that we construct our own conceptual frameworks. And we later change them, if we find a better way of doing it. The God’s eye view is that the conceptual framework is laid out for us, and we just use data. That’s what cannot be true. Our relation to the world is different from what that God’s eye view says. Solving the problems that are thus posed to us, is what I see as the core of cognition.
Compare with AI. The AI systems, at least as we currently design them, just take our predefined framework. So the AI does not have to do any of the things that I see as the core of cognition. It’s no wonder that we don’t expect the AI system to be conscious.