Is the self all that can be known to exist?

[bennyboy]

Solipsism. Let's discuss it.

It depends what you mean be "known" and "exist."

But yes, my position is that the self is known, and the rest is assumed or inferred.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Facts are independent of people. Truths, on the other hand, are very subjective.

Am I equivocating? Perhaps.

You're only equivocating if you accept my own premise

If you don't explicitly reject it when I've offered it I'll assume you've accepted it [emoji6]

Hence why my reaction in my head when debating with folks often is "If you haven't told me you have rejected my premise when I offered it... then what are you not getting? It's okay to tell me you don't accept it, folks. But we can't even get going until you accept or reject my premise. I've taken my side, what's yours? [emoji6]"

It's easy for folks to attack my conclusion when they haven't addressed my premise or offered their own

Telling me it's not a premise won't get them anywhere. It's my premise. If they reject it they only have to say, lol. How else will I know?

My point is that equating truths and facts is in itself an equivocation of sorts. The rest of the philosophy quite frankly gives me a headache.

[Edwardo Piet]

Can the self be known to exist? I don't think it is obvious.

It depends what you mean by "exist."  I take "self" as a label for qualia, and it's pretty apparent.

I have one sense of "existence" and two senses of "reality" in my metaphysics.

"Reality" can refer to non-imaginary as opposed to imaginary or to present as opposed to absent.
"Existence" can only refer to present as opposed to absent.

I distinguish between myself and my self. "Myself" just means me. "My self" means "my personality/ego/self-concept/self-image".

That's how I interpret the things that I refer to

[Aegon]

My senses have gotten me through half-a-century of life. I'm cool with them -- I haven't walked off'n a cliff or jumped out a building telling myself I can fly.

I find solipsism useless since there aren't any consequences to it. Even if I'm the only thing that's "real," everything else is so real to me that it wouldn't make a difference. But ignoring that, I don't actually find the idea frightening like many people do. What I find more frightening would be the idea that I'm just a very high-functioning simulation in somebody else's experience, and they're the only "real" one.

What's frightening about that? You're relieved of moral authority, and don't even have to own your own circumstances, being at the whim of an omnipotent (from your perspective) being.

I wouldn't want either of those to happen.

[Cato]

Imagining getting kicked in the nuts is a much different experience than actually getting kicked in the nuts; therefore, I think this reasonably demonstrates the existence of something other than self as a justified true belief; i.e., knowledge.

[Edwardo Piet]

But "actually getting kicked in the nuts" could be simply a more intense form of imagination within the dream world that we may live in [emoji6]

I think the fact that something is what it is regardless of whether we exist and the fact that we base "I think therefore I am" on "I think = I think" and "I am = I am" or, in other words, "A=A" rather demonstrates that identity is the fundamental knowledge we have whether it's our own self-identity or just the identity of whatever is, is.

I know that "I am myself" is true in this possible universe.

I know that "whatever is, is" is true in all possible universes.

[Edwardo Piet]

I'm generally opposed to anything being "true", to be honest.

The only things that are truly things are things truly.

So if anything it's the other way around. All things are true-things. A false-thing is a non-thing. Even something fake has to truly be fake. Again, when we say something is "not true" we mean that it is true to say that that very thing is not what it is said to be.

Again, "this statement is false" means "this statement is not true", but "not true" adds no meaning to "this statement is".

If I say "I am happy" it means the statement "I am happy" is true. If I say "I am not happy" it means the statement "I am not happy" is true.

By the same logic, if I say "this statement is" that would mean the statement "this statement is" is true, but that literally makes no sense. Again by the same logic, saying "this statement is not" would be saying the statement "this statement is not" is true. Which, again, literally makes no sense.

Continuing further by the same logic, to say "I am truly happy" is to say that the statement "it is true that I am happy" is true. Likewise, to say "I am not truly happy" is to say that the statement "It is not true that I am happy" is true.

Likewise, and finally, with the same logic:

To say "This statement is truly true" would just be a longer way of saying "this statement is true" which would be to say that the statement "this statement is true" is true, which would be to say that the statement "this statement is", is true. Which again, literally makes no sense. To say "This statement is not truly true" would just be a longer way of saying "this statement is not true", which would be to say that the statement "this statement is not true" is true, which would be to say that the statement "this statement is not", is true. Which again, literally makes no sense. It's an incomplete statement masked by "true" or "not true" or "false", which have no meanings when added to "this statement is". In fact the words "true" and "false" don't have any meaning beyond emphasising whether we are saying that something is or is not. "I am truly happy" or "I am not truly happy" or "It is true that I am happy" or "it is not true that I am happy" or "it is false that I am happy" are just all ways of saying either "I'm happy" or "I'm not happy".... so, you see, "this statement is true" or "this statement is false" doesn't mean anything more than "this statement is" or "this statement is not", it's an incomplete statement.

I really want my analysis to be appreciated.

So when you see "this statement is not true" you're basically looking at an incomplete statement, deciding whether to believe it or not before you even know what it means, and then you find yourself looking at the truth of a non-truth in isolation. This isn't really a mystery. The paradox develops because, as I have demonstrated, "not true" just means that it is true to say that something is "not true". There are no non-truths, only truths about something that represents reality and truths about something that doesn't represent reality. The paradox develops because we think we see a contradiction between a truth and a falsehood when really we're just looking at one truth.

This is also why you can't get an illogical contradiction. Even that which is contradictory to logic has to do it logically. There are no illogical things. When we say something is "Illogical" what we are saying is that it contradicts logic logically. "Illogical" is a funny word really. It's really just a short way of saying "logically contradictory." And then of course there's the entirely different meaning of it being unsound, unreasonable, against common sense, etc. But that's a completely different meaning of illogical, and once again, it would be an equivocation to say otherwise.

[Angrboda]

"This statement is false." and "This statement is not true." are not equivalent statements. The first may simply be neither false nor true, which is what you've been arguing, that the meaning is indeterminate. The latter statement, known as the strengthened liar is true even if the statement is incomplete, unless you are now arguing that incomplete statements have determinate meaning and are thus "true" which is opposite of everything you've claimed. If the latter statement is incomplete, then it's definitely "not true" despite your assertion of a deflationary theory of truth.

"This statement is not true." has the same structure as "This sentence has five words." One would not deny that the second sentence has meaning. The only reason you object to the first is because you can't make it fit cleanly in your scheme of things. That's an absurd reason to reject its meaning. You're all over the map, first with a deflationary theory of truth, then with a correspondence theory of truth, then some elements of Tarski thrown in for good measure. Logic is not existence. Nor is it a theory of language. You've asserted a great many things under multiple frameworks. What you haven't done is show good reason why your assumptions should be our assumptions. Logics are a lot like mathematical systems, what assumptions you accept in some sense determine where they will lead you. You haven't given us much if any reason to want to go where you're leading.

[Angrboda]

A primary motivation for paraconsistent logic is the conviction that it ought to be possible to reason with inconsistent information in a controlled and discriminating way. The principle of explosion precludes this, and so must be abandoned. In non-paraconsistent logics, there is only one inconsistent theory: the trivial theory that has every sentence as a theorem. Paraconsistent logic makes it possible to distinguish between inconsistent theories and to reason with them.

Research into paraconsistent logic has also led to the establishment of the philosophical school of dialetheism (most notably advocated by Graham Priest), which asserts that true contradictions exist in reality, for example groups of people holding opposing views on various moral issues.[4] Being a dialetheist rationally commits one to some form of paraconsistent logic, on pain of otherwise embracing trivialism, i.e. accepting that all contradictions (and equivalently all statements) are true.[5] However, the study of paraconsistent logics does not necessarily entail a dialetheist viewpoint. For example, one need not commit to either the existence of true theories or true contradictions, but would rather prefer a weaker standard like empirical adequacy, as proposed by Bas van Fraassen.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

[Neo-Scholastic]

The self is not what is known; but rather, it is the means by which we know.