ANSWER TO OBSCUREDBYWIND: FIRST PART

dear Obscured by something or somebody, let me answer each of your points separately as I am busy and I cannot answer all of the 3 points now, I start with point 1 : Let’s start with the point where you make the most naïve philosophical mistakes ; you agree that one of the possible options is that the mind captures via language something about reality, i/e something that is out there but the outcome is a distorsion of what it really is. You call language a tool, simple tool at our disposal ( to utter or write inanities). which is a very ignorant claim on the light of what we know about language but I am not going to discuss this point here; suffice to say that language is an object of science and a very difficult one indeed and more mysterious and intriguing than many others you have in mind as a paradigm of scientific thought. Ok you seem to credit the idea that the reality we see must not be necessarily what it is. Good step ahead ! Now you know (or you should know) that the relation between mind and reality via language, the messenger, is characterized by a set of relation and I am going to mention only three of them : meaning, reference and truth. Now we need to know what these relations are and how they are born. Is meaning learned after sufficient exposure to a portion of reality that contain the object a certain linguistic term refers to? You have learned the term ‘dog’ after having seen several dogs in you childhood and now you correctly apply the term to each new dog you encounter. This claim presupposes a lot : 1)there are species or classes of objects out there that are dogs even if each of them differs a little or a lot from others, 2) you know, by now, enough to correctly apply the term to all and each dog. 3) you possess a mechanism to generalize that is certainly not rooted in reality ( you see the sun rising every morning and in none of those events there is anything that tells you that tomorrow the sun will arise again, although you believe that it will, even if you do not know the physical scientific reasons why, this is called induction and it is mental in nature see: david hume). What do you know about dogs at this point? Ask yourself questions like: how come blind people learn the language such that they can speak knowledgably about dogs except under circumstances where sight is required? How did they learn the term? Is their almost exclusively mental knowledge of dogs based on some kind of logico-semantical space in which they have placed the word ‘dog’? Is this space something that we all share in addition to perception? For some schools of psychology this is the way we all learn a language. Now in your mind you have a category, a class, a species ‘dogs’ that is coupled by a term ‘dog’. You recognize a dog by recognizing certain properties of the dog, it barks, attacks strangers etc. So one side you have the object, the dog, a general idea on the other you know the properties that allow you to correctly apply the term under the right circumstances. Now suppose that a group of biologists succeed in mating a dog and a cat : this new animal looks like a dog, attacks like a dog but when it tries to burk it meahow like a cat. Now you test its DNA and see that it has some Dna sequences of a dog and some of a cat. Is it a cat or a dog? The answer is not as simple as you believe. The conceptual framework set before says that there are categories on one side and properties on the other. But now you are faced with the problem of reducing even the entire class to a property in order to explain the new animal. Dogs and cats as species have disappeared from your ontology as categories to reappear as properties. Do you see the plasticity and the arbitrariness of our ontology? In the new setting the category have disappeared , you are left only with properties. You can apply this argument to any category that you believe firmer and the ontology will become empty, you will be left only with properties and properties are mental entities, abstractions. One example only ( I am busy this morning) you don’t’ find in reality the color white, you find things colored white. You don’t find length or other dimensions by themselves you find thing that have those properties. How can you reconcile this new mental setting with what you know about reality? reference I know water and you know water, we both point at some water and agree ‘it is water’ But I know water is a conglomerate of molecules of H2O and you don’t’ . are we referring to the same thing? What makes our miraculous finger pointing at water capable of abstracting water from what surrounds it? We both agree that London is a beautiful city and you and I have been there separately. And yet I may have been only in places where you have not and vice versa, but we are talking about the same thing. And London will remain London even if it is destroyed by an atomic bomb and reconstructed maybe 100 miles north of now. Are we referring to the same, what? truth Any assertion about reality is either true or false. What is truth? A correspondence between language and reality, an internal coherence of our beliefs, or truth is a simple predicate to be applied to assertions that works? Technology depends on science and science in turn depends on an ontology of objects their internal properties and their relation. But it may well happen that ontology is a construction of the mind that for some obscure reasons is irrelevant to truth, and conventionalism is correct. Take two events A and B, connected by a relation of causality, such that every time A is the case B is the case temporally following A . Suppose that this is not a coeteris paribus law of nature ( which means there are no exceptions,- even in physics, they argue, there are exceptions) – what prevents us or an alien to claim that A and B are one event only and the relation of causation is an analytic mental way to discover that internal relation? I have just listed a few problems that should make you ponder on the symmetry between mind and reality, this old isomorphism between mind and reality is arbitrary, it was born with Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and then Aristotle, it is also called logical atomism by some scholars and against it and a good alternative is methodological solipsism, the thesis according to which reality is an internal affair, because even evidence in the end is an internal affair. Now just one last little thing to prepare the terrain fro further considerations: do you see the similarity between our cat-dog case and the quantum mechanics duality of things that are both particles and waves? the new thing has both the property of a particle and of a wave. Substances, objects, things, have become properties ...Think about it Second point will follow