We don’t seem to be disagreeing about anything factual. You just want grounding to be in “the fundamental ontology”, while I’m content with them being grounded in the set of everything we could observe. If you like, I’m using Occam or simplicity priors on ontologies; if there are real objects behind the ones we can observe but we never know about them, I’d still count our symbols as grounded. (that’s why I’d count virtual Napoleon’s symbols as being grounded in virtual Waterloo, incidentally)
Being relatively liberal about symbol grounding makes it easier to answer Searle, but harder to answer other people, such as people who think germs or atoms are just social constructs.
Exactly the sane....that is the point of predictive accuracy being orthogonal to ontological accuracy...you can vary the latter without affecting the firmer,
“just social constructs” is (almost always) not a purely ontological statement, though. And those who think that it’s a social construct, but that the predictions of germ theories are still accurate… well, it doesn’t really matter what they think, they just seem to have different labels to the rest of us for the same things.
As the author of the phrase, I meant “just social constructs” to be an ontological statement.
Are you saying they are actually realists about germs and atoms, and are stating their position dishonetly? Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what your argument is. For instance, were the matrices of matrix mechanics quantum physics “real”? Were the waves of the wave formulation of QM “real”? The two formulations are equivalent, and it doesn’t seem useful to debate the reality of their individual idiosyncratic components this way.
We don’t seem to be disagreeing about anything factual. You just want grounding to be in “the fundamental ontology”, while I’m content with them being grounded in the set of everything we could observe. If you like, I’m using Occam or simplicity priors on ontologies; if there are real objects behind the ones we can observe but we never know about them, I’d still count our symbols as grounded. (that’s why I’d count virtual Napoleon’s symbols as being grounded in virtual Waterloo, incidentally)
Being relatively liberal about symbol grounding makes it easier to answer Searle, but harder to answer other people, such as people who think germs or atoms are just social constructs.
What predictions do they make when looking into microscopes or treating infectious diseases?
Exactly the sane....that is the point of predictive accuracy being orthogonal to ontological accuracy...you can vary the latter without affecting the firmer,
“just social constructs” is (almost always) not a purely ontological statement, though. And those who think that it’s a social construct, but that the predictions of germ theories are still accurate… well, it doesn’t really matter what they think, they just seem to have different labels to the rest of us for the same things.
As the author of the phrase, I meant “just social constructs” to be an ontological statement.
Are you saying they are actually realists about germs and atoms, and are stating their position dishonetly? Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what your argument is. For instance, were the matrices of matrix mechanics quantum physics “real”? Were the waves of the wave formulation of QM “real”? The two formulations are equivalent, and it doesn’t seem useful to debate the reality of their individual idiosyncratic components this way.