True. However my concern would be that we can also be in the dark about formal structures.

You say: “we can understand the formal structure of the world and the formal structure of the Real as regulative ideals implicit within the normative structure of inquiry itself”.

What bothers me about this is that there are probably an infinity of worlds that could be created by formal structures. Gravity is a good example of how formal structures can exceed reality: Riemann had discovered the basic mathematical underpinning of the theory of gravity long before Einstein but Riemann’s work was just a mathematical curiosity until it had a physical realisation. However, there are many potential Riemannian universes that do not occur so the formal structures did not provide truth, they merely hinted at possibilities. In view of this any formal structures would need to contain a formal structure that limits or constrains the form of theories so that they conform to reality. As far as I know the only formal structure that fulfills this role is the structured experiment.

How would you prevent inferences from a formal structure from exceeding the constraints of reality?

John: There are of course problems encountered in the process of inquiry. Indeed, I happen to think that the process of inquiry is never ending, and that we’ll never reach anything like a complete set of truths objective or not. Nonetheless, we can understand the formal structure of the world and the formal structure of the Real as regulative ideals implicit within the normative structure of inquiry itself. It is only through these ideals that we can get a purchase upon what metaphysics is (as the attempt to describe the fundamental structure of the world, or the real structure of the Real).

There can be a notion of the Real because concepts are not about symbols but the norms for manipulating symbols in relation to one another, in the context of discourse. This makes it perfectly possible to grasp regulative notions, and notions which are further constructed out of them (such as ‘the real Real’).

Your distinction between the “world” and the “real” seems to be a distinction between symbols and physical phenomena. Harry Potter being a wizard is a relationship between symbols as is the Newtonian formula f=ma but neither are real physical phenomena.

You say: “The formal notion of the world is just that of the totality of truths. The formal notion of the Real is just that of the totality of objective truths. And the real notion of the Real is the world as it is in-itself, or the real world. ” I would put this as: the formal notion of the world and the formal notion of the Real are relations between symbols governed by computational rules that vary according to what is being described, the rules for a assessing the “truth” of a formal notion of the Real being broadly those laid down for conducting scientific experiments.

Can there be a “notion” of the Real? Surely a “notion” is composed of symbols.

Sorry for not responding sooner. That’s an extremely good question, and one I probably should have already addressed.

I’m well aware of the difference between talking about relations between things and talking about relations between the concepts that pick out those things. The reason I’ve slipped from describing sense-dependency relations between the concepts of THOUGHT and WORLD to talking about sense-dependency relation between thought and world is simply that it makes a better contrast with the debate between classical realism and classical idealism, wherein the issue is whether thought and world are ontologically dependent upon one another. This ontological dependence could also be phrased as a matter of reference-dependence between the concepts of THOUGHT and WORLD, but I feel that to do so is slightly alien to the classical approach.

However, in doing this, I don’t think I’ve fallen into anything like the trap that Lindquist diagnosed Jon as falling into. I certainly haven’t made any claims to the effect that the world somehow shares properties with thought. I’ve simply gone from saying that WORLD is sense-dependent upon THOUGHT, to saying that one cannot understand world without understanding thought. This was just a more convenient way of describing it at the time. I don’t think that the relation of ‘being unable to understand x without understanding y’ is any more problematic than the relation of ‘being unable to understand the concept of x without understanding the concept of y’. These things only become problematic if one is committed to interpreting knowledge and understanding in metaphysical terms.

Does that help?

I need to do some work on the question of large scale veridicality. I do have a certain sympathy for Davidson’s ideas about the necessity of most of our beliefs being true, just in order that there can be falsity, but I have a feeling that it needs to be expressed differently. I think it might be better to say that we have to agree about the majority of things in order for there to be any meaningful disagreement, or that we have to take it that much of what we think is true in order for the assessment of truth and falsity to get off the ground.

The reason I think I’d shy away from the specific Davidsonian formulation is that I’m tempted by Brandom’s claim (motivated by a semantic holism that I share with him) that we’re always going to be in a position to revise not just our claims about the world, but the content of the concepts that are deployed in those claims. This kind of position, that he gets out of Hegel, seems to imply that there’s a good sense in which all of our claims are false in some sense, which doesn’t mix well with the Davidsonian version of the former insight.

However, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick when you say this:-

“If this were the case, however, then an analysis of the structure of thought would fail to inform us about the structure of the world, insofar as our thoughts have largely failed to track true propositions.”

You’ve got the structure and the content of thought mixed up here. It doesn’t matter which propositions we take to be true, the structure of thought just provides the formal characteristics of us taking any such propositions to be true in a systematic way. Regardless of *what* we think, we’d still be thinking in the same way. So, the objection you pose can’t get any traction.

If you want to know about my thoughts on the relation between science and metaphysics and the role of perception, I’m going to have to refer you to the TR essay, as I’ve dealt with that stuff in a decent bit of detail in there. I haven’t actually said much about what metaphysics consists in here, but I do elaborate this further there.

As for the relation between excess and attitude-independence, I don’t use the terms to talk about the same thing. All it is to claim that the Real is attitude-independent is to say that we could all be wrong about it all the time. The claim of excess is to say that there is some fundamental sense in which we will always be wrong about it. This corresponds to the Brandomian-Hegelian claim I parsed above very briefly. If you’re interested in this further, there’s a good paper by Brandom called something like ‘Sketch of a Program for a Reading of Hegel’ which does a good job of explaining it, that’s available on his website. Email me if you’d like a link.

How do you think the picture presented here relates to Heidegger? How, if at all, does the concept of world put forward here relate to Heidegger’s? In what ways is it superior to Heidegger’s conception?

Hope you can find some time to answer these in the not too distant future. (-:>

Cheers.

(1) Does your conception of the relation between the structure of thought and the structure of the world assume the large-scale veridicality of our thoughts about the world?

To elaborate: You identify the world as the correlate of the totality of true propositions. In your response to Bryant, you emphasise that this is logically distinct from the totality of propositions held true by any existing thinkers. Given this distinction, it seems that the totality of true propositions might be massively divergent from the totality of held-true propositions.

If this were the case, however, then an analysis of the structure of thought would fail to inform us about the structure of the world, insofar as our thoughts have largely failed to track true propositions.

Given that you take the investigation of the structure of thought to be informative regarding the structure of the world (and thus of the Real), do you have some sort of argument against large-scale divergence between the totality of propositions held true and the totality of true propositions? (Perhaps something like Davidson’s transcendental argument against massive-scale doxastic error?)

(2) Having identified the question of Being, that is, the task of metaphysics, where are we methodologically speaking? That is to say, having specified the question metaphysics is to answer, how are we to go about legitimately offering answers to it?

There are a couple of sub-questions here:

(a) I’m pretty sure you’ve posted on this before, but I can’t find it so I’ll ask you to explain again: What role do you envisage scientific inquiry playing in informing us about the real structure of the Real?

(b) If metaphysics is to be an empirically informed task, then how does perception relate to thought?

(3) Previously (unless I’ve misremembered, which is eminently plausible), you’ve talked about the difference between the world and the Real in terms of ‘excess’. But here, ‘attitude-independence’ seems to be doing the job. To what extent is this a substantive shift, or is this just a better way of cashing out the same thing?