RE: A question about Truth
May 4, 2014 at 10:00 pm
(This post was last modified: May 4, 2014 at 10:10 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
(May 4, 2014 at 6:39 pm)bennyboy Wrote: It is reconciled by realizing that our experience of things and the actual nature of those things are not the same. Solidity, uniform surfaces, and the other properties of objects as we perceive them exist only as ideas.
All of our ideas about the world are based upon sensory perception. All of our ideas about the world are ideas.
You're trying to describe and distinguish our understandings of the world from the world as it really is, but everything you're capable of describing falls into the former category. Nonetheless, our understandings of the world are presumably descriptions of the world as it really is, so they all fall into the latter category as well.
(May 4, 2014 at 6:39 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Solidity, uniform surfaces, and the other properties of objects as we perceive them exist only as ideas.
A "property" is actually a way of grouping things, but the instantiations of those properties (as individuals or as a group) really do exist, hence we're still talking about reality. Furthermore, the continuum of likeness upon which those things are being evaluated must be a continuum derived from some real principle or principles in order to have any usefulness.
(May 4, 2014 at 6:39 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Don't believe me? Describe what a plane is, in geometry, then describe what the surface of a desk looks like, close up. So where is the flatness of the desk? Its context is not defined by the collection of (possibly real) particles, but by the nature of human perception.
A plane is a flat two-dimensional surface.
The flatness of the desk is a feature of the border of the space defined by the particles that compose the desk. "Flatness" might not ever be absolute, but it still objectively true that some thigns are flatter than others.
