Hard Truth said:
1. I disagree. If you have a group of people and ask ¨Does everyone agree that there is a wall here? Do we agree that it is white? The thermometer says it is 70 degrees in here, does that seem about right?¨ etc. The group would agree on most of the readily perceiveable aspects of the environment.
I don't think this answers the point. I didn't say there is literally nothing upon which people would agree. Only that there isn't very much (an ill-defined term, I am aware). Your example is fairly sterile and doesn't reflect most common experience. But even in this example, presumably there are all kinds of propositions about the wall that one person of the group might believe, but which others do not.
If we think of a world as being described by a set of propositions, we could say that a world is supposed (on views like yours) to be described comprehensively by a maximal set of consistent propositions. That is to say, we could describe the wall perfectly by adducing a very large number of logically consistent propositions about the wall.
But, I would argue that, of those propositions, out of all candidate propositions for describing the wall, people are going to agree on a vanishingly small number. And this is true in (again) a sterile environment in which observation is taking place at maximal advantage to your view. When we start talking about how experience usually works in day-to-day life, this becomes a lot more dicey.
Now, you may be thinking something like this: wait a damn minute! It's surely the case that we basically agree on things like "there's a tree over there" or "the sky is usually blue during a cloudless daytime" or "the river has water in it," etc. Right?
Well, I don't deny this point. However, I don't think this is enough to establish even a loose approximation of a consistent world. A consistent world would be such that there was a great deal of agreement about the vast majority of the propositions that described it, however fine-grained those might be.
What is established, instead, is that there is a world that has a sufficient level of consistency to do two things. First, it allows us to communicate somewhat well (but certainly not really well). Second, it convinces us that it's consistent upon cursory examination. Nothing more.
Hard Truth said:
I don´t understand how you can disagree. It is a definition that works for most people´s understanding of the word.
Really? This seems to be almost obviously false. For example, there was general intersubjective agreement during the middle ages in Europe that the devil lived at the center of the earth and God was somewhere above the clouds. Did this make that setup
real, at least at that time?
Hard Truth said:
It isn´t saying that nothing else exists, but that those other things aren´t reality as we know it.
Well, now this is much more subtlety than I usually see on these boards, and I commend you for taking such a line. I agree. If you're going for an etymologically determined definition of "reality" then I am likely more sympathetic to your view.
