You're not saying that extramental phenomena do not exist, so you're not forwarding ontological idealism, but you are forwarding epistemological idealism. I'm not an idealist. I don't at all agree that we're merely proposing extramental phenomena.Steve3007 wrote: ↑January 29th, 2020, 6:03 am My take: Extramental phenomena are those things which we (usually implicitly) propose to exist whenever we make an objective proposition. They're the things which make the proposition objective. They're the proposed causes of the patterns in the indefinitely large set of potential and actual observations which are (often implicitly) referenced in the proposition. Note: at no point here do I say anything of the form "extramental phenomena do not exist".
Also there's a connotation of "proposing," namely where it's something merely suggested or "offered for consideration" that's not a conventional connotation of the philosophical usage of "proposition."
We do state propositions about extramental phenomena, of course, but as I noted above, this is an issue of what the proposition is about, what it's making a claim about. That doesn't give the proposition a property of being extramental.
It's just like a proposition about an animal's fur doesn't make the proposition furry--in other words, the proposition doesn't have the property of being furry, even though the proposition is about fur.
The confusion here is a type of use/mention confusion. Things that are about something else do not automatically have the properties of what they're about conferred upon them. A film showing aliens in the Andromeda galaxy, so that it's about that, does not have the property conferred upon it of being located in the Andromeda galaxy. The film has the property of being located on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy.
When I say that propositions are subjective, I'm talking about properties of the proposition, not what the proposition is about.
Since you're an epistemological idealist--on your view we can only know (In the acquaintance sense, at least) our own mind, then sure, you're agreeing with my view on this, that propositions do not acquire the relationship in question extramentally, even though you might use different terminology.Independently of anyone thinking about it and making a judgement, it doesn't obtain. The proposition "the cat is on the mat" is a useful model for explaining the patterns in various observations.