RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 6, 2016 at 10:07 am
(This post was last modified: April 6, 2016 at 10:09 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(April 6, 2016 at 4:13 am)robvalue Wrote: They are abstract concepts. They don't literally exist. Or at least, we have not observed them doing so. There is no manifested "number 7". So it's not "outside" reality; it's just not anywhere. There are groups of 7 real objects, which we model using the abstract "number 7". And obviously we use a symbol to represent the concept. And we can represent the concept in our brains...In an abstract logical system, you only need show that conclusions follow from the premises. You don't, however, have any guarantee that the conclusions will have any correlations with reality....
Anti-realism, such as you seem to advocate above, offers an incomplete account of abstraction and concept formation. It also tends to confuse the notions of "abstract" and "conceptual".
During abstraction a knowing subject perceives a sensible object to distinguish between its accidental and essential features to form a mental concept. Mental concepts are about essential features shared among sets of objects and are by extension objects of knowledge. The essential features must be in some sense real, otherwise the features could not be perceived and no objective concept could be formed. To perceive something that is not really there is a fantasy.
So for example, all sensible objects share the essential feature of numerability, otherwise they could not be counted. If numerablity is not a real feature shared among objects then it must be a fantasy. Concepts formed from fantasies have no relationship to external objects. As such, the world is not truly intelligible. Scientific knowledge is reduced to a story fabricated from the subjective phenomena of knowing subjects. Any claim to objectivity is mere pretense.
