Ontological Undecidability, Note 1


It may be objected that no philosophical realist really believes that things are "just as we see them"; but the point here will be to start with the naive origins of all realism. The qualifications common to any sensible philosophical realism are responses to observations which result in different kinds of realism and which, taken far enough, actually may lead to anti-realism or phenomenalism. Here all that counts is what originally and ultimately all the realisms have in common.

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Ontological Undecidability, Note 2


cf. D.M. Amstrong, Belief Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge 1973), pp. 152-161 "The Infinite Regress of Reasons." The "externalist" resolution of the regress, prefered by Armstrong, attempts to justify knowledge with something (causality) that is not even a cognitive relation. The Friesian solution is that the ground of non-inferential justification is simply not a belief, which puts the matter outside Armstrong's frame-of-reference altogether, although he looks for something like that with his externalism.

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Ontological Undecidability, Note 3


The basis in the sense that the argument "from the possibility of experience" for synthetic a priori knowledge (through the categories) depends on this unity (the object) being a necessary condition of experience, while the function of synthesis is a necessary condition of the unity, while the categories are a necessary condition of synthesis. The "unity which the object makes necessary" does not depend on the (hidden) object, but on the activity of the mind in synthesis.

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Copyright (c) 1996 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved