Reply #13: "Leap of faith" vs. "Tiny step of practicality"

[Silent3]

You might say "We all work under the auspices of some form of metaphysics", but the "metaphysics" of positivism consists of simply setting aside unprovable (unprovably true or false) ideas like solipsism and getting down to business figuring things out, starting with the physical world that we all seem to share, a world in which we can find a lot of common agreement with our fellow humans.

Regardless of whether you could theoretically be just a figment of my imagination (or vice versa), we talk to each other as if the other person is a real being and not an hallucination. We can both refer to things like water or thunder or the moon and know what the other person is talking about, and we speak of these things as if they have an independent existence apart from ourselves.

Without going on at length like some dry philosophical tome than drones on for ten long chapters in order to fully establish what the author means by a word like "self", let me cut to the chase and say I think a good case can be made that the tenants of positivism can be found to be inherent in the act of bothering to communicate as if communication can actually achieve something meaningful apart from an imaginary game in your own mind. There is an implicit assumption in the act of communication of tangible external referents which have a consistency and permanence which is objective, which can be ascertained in more or less the same way by all.

While such a concept of objective reality is an assumption, it's not just any old assumption. It's practically inescapable. Even people who might argue against objective reality, who would like to individualize reality and make personal perception the highest reality, act and interact in many ways just as if there is a shared objective reality, regardless of any words of protest against that concept. If I borrow a thousand dollars from a man who claims there is no objective reality, and when the time comes for that man to get his money back, if I say that in my reality I never borrowed anything, his first thought is going to be that I'm mistaken or lying, not that reality can really be so different for two different people.

It would be a very odd universe, not to mention one the was almost impossible to function within, if things which are actually pretty trivial on a cosmic scale, like who owes whom a few dollars, are the things of absolutely dependable objective consistency, while the existence of spirits and deities and psychic abilities and afterlives are merely personal and subjective "truths".