Language and Reality (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, April 29, 2011, 11:13 (4753 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I have argued that the non-presence of such things as light, colour, food, a loved one, is as real to us as their presence.-TONY: You hit the proverbial nail on the head. Darkness is a state of absence, the absence of light. Darkness as a state, I do not disagree with. Darkness as a thing, object, piece of existence, I disagree with. The unfortunate side effect that I mentioned is the confusion that we experience even trying to differentiate between a state, and an object.-TONY: "Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it." That is precisely what I have been trying to say the entire time. It is a measurement assigned an arbitrary, agreed upon value.-I'm combining these two observations, because they both illustrate the same problem, though I'll also deal with time separately on the other thread. Everything we express through language can be called an "arbitrary agreed upon value", since language is a man-made system of symbols that attempts to capture whatever we think is real. It only makes sense if we have some kind of consensus (= agreed upon values). You have made several statements to the effect that time, darkness etc. are not in themselves realities ... e.g. '"Nothing', much like 'Time', 'Darkness', and the 'color black', is an intellectual construct that has no place in reality other than as an abstract to help us understand 'something'." This is the sole point at issue between us. WHAT DO YOU UNDERSTAND BY "REALITY"? Your (still undefined) concept seems to imply that in these contexts we use language to create something that is not real, whereas I argue that we use language to describe something that is real to us. And so I don't think the problem lies in distinguishing between a state and an object; it's whether you do or do not accept that a state can be real ... in other words, distinguishing between different understandings of the word "reality". If you mean that which exists independently of our observation or measurement, then we have absolutely no way of knowing that ANYTHING is real. That is the philosophical approach which I accept, but which leads us nowhere. The commonsense concept incorporates all those phenomena which we observe or experience and believe to exist ... including the absence of light, substance etc., as well as the passage from future to present to past (regardless of the systems we use for measurement) which is real to us every moment of our lives.
 
However, although these discussions generally seem to go round in circles, your posts have reminded me that there is a third, very important option, which is the materialist approach. This argues that only things or objects are "real", i.e. whatever can be observed, measured, tested by science. This concept would therefore either deny "reality" or, alternatively, attribute a solely material cause to every phenomenon, emotion and experience that does not have known physical substance (including God).
 
Three possible approaches, then ... the philosophical (nothing can be known to be real), the materialist (only the physical world is real), or the common-sense as I tried to define it in earlier posts. May I ask which of these three concepts of reality you subscribe to?