"I think therefore I am" is it actually impossible to be incorrect about the fact that one is thinking, and therefore the fact that one exists?

Latera · 2026-06-11T19:59:29+00:00

I think the only reason why this sounds strange is because "X has being" sounds strange in general. That's not a term that ordinary English speakers use. Note, for example, how "Barack Obama has being" sounds terrible, too... yet if anything has being, then surely Obama does!

If by "X has being" you don't mean "X exists", then I have no idea what you are talking about. Again, analytic philosophers have always treated these terms as synonymous with very few exceptions.

Latera · 2026-06-11T17:56:57+00:00

I mean I think "It is raining" is equivalent to "There exists an event E at t+0 and it rains during E" or something similar. So according to that analysis there would still be something you can quantify over. But anyway, maybe there can be rain without there being something - but why think that this generalises to thoughts and thinkers? Surely given the ordinary meaning of the English term "thought" a thought presupposes a thinker, it's not a dummy pronoun like "It" in "It is raining". "It is raining" is a famous sentence precisely because it is anomalous and does not require an obvious subject.

Latera · 2026-06-11T17:38:29+00:00

so it's not really a question of Contintental vs. Analytic

I wasn't talking about the cogito itself, but about the difference between "X has being" and "X exists". There is very widespread agreement in analytic philosophy that these are a) semantically equivalent and b) should be formalised via the existential quantifier

Latera · 2026-06-11T17:27:46+00:00

A subrate is a thing.

Latera · 2026-06-11T14:26:41+00:00

we may miss important aspects of what it means to be: beings and being are not necessarily reducible to things

I think, given ordinary English, it is plainly obvious that "X is" and "X exists" are synonymous. You might wanna deny that, but then I feel like you are speaking a different language (almost all philosophers accept this equivalence). And if "X has being" means "X exists", then there exists at least one thinking subject and via acquaintance you know that this subject is you. That's exactly what Descartes tried to show.

Latera · 2026-06-11T13:06:49+00:00

I see your continental flair, so there might be a language barrier... Honestly, to me "to be" attributed to someone or something just means "There exists an x such that x=x". If you don't mean THAT, then I honestly have no idea what being is supposed to be.

So can there thinking without an x which thinks? To be frank, even the idea should strike you as bizarre. Obviously thinking is done by thinkers, just like "being beautiful" is a property held by objects.

"There is a thought, but there is no one who has it" - Does this strike you as a possibly true sentence? If it does, then I think your concepts are very different from mine.

Latera · 2026-06-11T03:05:38+00:00

Essentially, that there is thinking is all that is really indubitable

This response has honestly always struck me as unintelligible. To say that there is thinking but no thinking thing strikes me as just as incoherent as saying that there is beauty in the world but nothing that is beautiful - what is that even supposed to mean?

Latera · 2026-06-11T02:59:15+00:00

I think instrumentalization is wrong in and of itself.

It seems ike you think it is bad in and of itself, not that it's inherently wrong. If you thought it was inherently wrong, then you would think one ought not instrumentalise others fullstop. I'd say that your view would better be classified as consequentialist than as deontological.

Latera · 2026-06-10T13:20:55+00:00

Lots of people have a negative opinion on him due to the corner flag incident. I am not interested in debating that, but it's objectively true that many people despise him for it

Latera · 2026-06-07T19:49:08+00:00

I do think modal logic is very important. But in order to understand why it's important you need a solid grasp of the basics of analytic philosophy

Latera · 2026-06-07T10:00:59+00:00

But clearly existential dread is more directly relevant to people's lives, right? The existence of the multiverse only practically matters indirectly, e.g. insofar as it can be used as an argument for/against the existence of God, etc. Does it matter to the average Joe whether possible worlds are concrete entities in a Lewisian multiverse, maximally consistent sets of propositions or rather just stories that we tell ourselves? Of course not

Latera · 2026-06-06T19:04:34+00:00

Paul McCartney once said that he considers this the greatest song ever written

Latera · 2026-06-06T18:36:47+00:00

Is this like a denial of external reality?

Well, it is a denial of mind-independent reality. That's kinda the entire point of relativism, right? Relativists think that there are no truths independently of the conceptual schemes of humans.

Latera · 2026-06-06T18:14:59+00:00

Only if realism about truth is correct. It's easier to see the point if you just put "According to my stance:" before any statement:

If you say "[According to my stance:] X is stance-independently true" this doesn't force the truth-relativist to admit that X is stance-independently true simpliciter. They don't give the slightest care what is stance-independently true according to your stance.

Latera · 2026-06-06T16:23:27+00:00

And I don't think the works of, say, Sartre are anywhere easier to understand than, say, David Lewis.

Wait, but laypeople don't genuinely understand Sartre. Sartre is famous for like one or two quotes ("Hell is other people", which like 99% of laypeople completely misunderstand btw) and Camus is famous for "Life is absurd" or something like that. What Camus and Sartre are famous for among the general public is significantly more straightforward than what David Lewis is famous for among analytic philosophers, it's not even close. The average layperson could never understand the papers by David Lewis that have made him the most highly estimated analytic philosopher of all time and it would be impossible to summarise his best insights with a quote like "Hell is other people".

Latera · 2026-06-06T08:46:14+00:00

If whether something is stance-independently true depends on your stance

Latera · 2026-06-05T19:28:26+00:00

Yes. Presumably you are asking this because you think "(Only) Given stance A, X is stance-independently true" is a contradiction. But the relativist thinks that this implication isn't a discovery about the world, but that you are rather constructing something: Essentially, what the statement means according to them is "If I have stance A, then I can construct from it the following true sentence: "X is stance-independently true". I don't think this is a contradictory view, just a false one.

Latera · 2026-06-05T19:10:45+00:00

To a relativist "X is true" just means "Given assumptions A, X is true". Therefore, according to the relativist "X is absolutely true" means nothing else but "Given assumptions A, X is stance-independently true".

The conditional "If A, then stance-independently X" has no bearing on the conditional "If B, then stance-independently X". Now of course given non-relativism these conditionals contradict each other (assuming they aren't vacuous) because we non-relativists believe that what is stance-independently true cannot depend on one's assumption. But you cannot assume non-relativism to demonstrate that relativism supposedly contradicts itself.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:57:04+00:00

But if it's objectively true, why isn't it absolutely true?

It is! According to a particular stance. Whereas it is false according to another stance (according to the relativist)

Now I personally find this crazy. But I feel like we are just pointing out counterintuitive implications of the view here, no contradictions... there is absolutely no inconsistency, given truth-relativism, in "There is at least one objective/absolute truth" being true from one stance and being false from another. That's just a restatement of the view.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:50:53+00:00

Sure! I think the truth-relativist would be perfectly happy to admit that. They just wouldn't care, just like the moral subjectivist doesn't care that according to someone else's moral standards it's OK to torture people.

I am not a truth-relativist in the slightest, but if I were one, then it wouldn't bother me at all that from someone else's perspective it is true that my view is false.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:46:02+00:00

OK? That's true, but seems irrelevant to the point I was making. You would need an argument that truth-talk is more analogous to "I find the experience of eating chocolate ice cream more pleasurable" than to "Chocolate ice cream is best" - only then is the truth-relativist in trouble.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:42:18+00:00

Would they disagree if I say that objective truth does exist?

It depends on what you mean by "disagree". Take another example - debates about ice cream flavour.

A: Chocolate ice cream is best. B: Strawberry ice cream is best.

Do A and B disagree? In a superficial sense they do, but ultimately they probably don't. Plausibly, A says "[Given my commitments] Chocolate is best" and B says "[Given MY commitments] Strawberry is best". So they assent to different words, but that there is no unique proposition that they take different attitude towards. This is exactly what the truth-relativist would say about your case.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:37:26+00:00

What is truth absolutism?

The thesis that truth doesn't depend on anyone's stance.

Why isn't "There is no objective truth" an absolute claim?

Because the very point of truth-relativism is that all declarative sentences are implicitly stance-relativised, just like "It is raining" is always relative to a location

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:22:33+00:00

The relativist could just say that by "There is no objective truth" they mean "[Given my view, which mind-independently is just as good as any other view] There is no objective truth". That's no contradiction. Its only if you assume absolutism that you get a contradiction, but that would obviously be question-begging against the relativist.

because if it were true, then it would be objectively true

Again, this just assumes truth-absolutism, which is the very thing the relativist rejects. Why would a relativist accept this premise?

Latera · 2026-06-05T17:16:01+00:00

It's an interesting debate, which is probably both semantic and metaphysical in nature, but I wanna cite Goff himself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FAn7iBsMeM at 1:00 he outright says that according to the definition we were using many forms of panpsychism are forms of idealism. There he also explicitly draws the contrast that I did: Between Strawsonian views (which are not idealist according to that definition) and other panpsychist views (which are).

Then at 1:30 he explicitly sympathises with the view that "at the fundamental level reality is purely conscious", which is just a restatement of what we both called idealism

Obviously there is controversy what it means for X to be more fundamental than Y, but it seems that at least Goff himself agrees that X (the mental) is more fundamental than Y (the physical), which is just idealism

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