How Does Language Map onto the World?
I wonder if you can assist me to better understand the issue of how language does (or does not) map onto the world and what the significance of this matter might be for philosophy. I have done some modest reading in this space but am curious what others think.
If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?)
English philosopher Hilary Lawson makes the point that:
... metaphysical frameworks, such as idealism and panpsychism, which were derided as baseless nonsense by the positivists of the past, are back in new forms. But such claims cannot be taken as a true description of an ultimate reality for there is no credible realist theory of language that would make sense of such claims.
I'm not looking for a defence of realism, I'm more interested in the implications of this matter - do we need a theory of language that explains how any realist claim is possible in order to accept those claims?
If we do not employ a realist account of language (as per postmodern thinkers), what is it we can meaningfully say about this notion of 'reality' we are so fond of describing and seems to be a substitute for god?
Lawson holds that, Wittgenstein abandoned metaphysics as a direct consequence of his having concluded in the Tractatus that a realist theory of language was not possible because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself.
Is this problem insurmountable or overstated?
- Hilary Lawson
If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?)
English philosopher Hilary Lawson makes the point that:
... metaphysical frameworks, such as idealism and panpsychism, which were derided as baseless nonsense by the positivists of the past, are back in new forms. But such claims cannot be taken as a true description of an ultimate reality for there is no credible realist theory of language that would make sense of such claims.
I'm not looking for a defence of realism, I'm more interested in the implications of this matter - do we need a theory of language that explains how any realist claim is possible in order to accept those claims?
If we do not employ a realist account of language (as per postmodern thinkers), what is it we can meaningfully say about this notion of 'reality' we are so fond of describing and seems to be a substitute for god?
Lawson holds that, Wittgenstein abandoned metaphysics as a direct consequence of his having concluded in the Tractatus that a realist theory of language was not possible because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself.
Is this problem insurmountable or overstated?
While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible.
- Hilary Lawson
Comments (605)
I'm mostly interested in what a realist theory of language might be.
Does a word have to positively put you in mind of some definite thing? Or does it really operate by limiting your thoughts so you pretty much have no choice but to be thinking of something much like what I had in mind, for all practical purposes?
So realism aims to speak about what actually exists. But practically speaking, this is achieved by establishing it as the contrast to all else that could have been the case.
It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word cat and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.
There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like actual possibilities.
The trick is to understand how constraint does the heavy lifting here and not construction. Realism is not a construction of facts. It is a hierarchical nest of constraints. It is a pragmatic limitation of uncertainty made efficient by our willingness to go along with the game of taking utterances at face value.
Quoting apokrisis
That's a nice frame. How contested would this account be?
Does Lawson have a point about idealism and the necessity of a realist theory of language?
This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. The Philpapers survey says:
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%)
Peircean realism would be considered pretty idealistic by some. :razz:
But it leads to pansemiosis rather than Panpsychism or other Cartesian stories. So language as epistemic practice is also more generically the deep ontology of existence itself.
This cashes out in models of the real material world in terms of holistic systems of constraint rather than reductionist systems of construction.
This cashes out in self-reference being the feature rather than the bug.
When it comes to Wittgenstein, Cheryl Misak gives a good account of how Peirce was an unacknowleged influence in his eventual turn.
Interesting. I would have guessed idealists here might be 25%?
Quoting apokrisis
I'm pretty sure Lawson has argued this too, but I confess to not understanding it very well.
Ive not read Lawson. A quick squizz suggests he is rather lightweight. :grin:
The difference looks like being that jump from epistemology to ontology. Saying that our models of reality are an exercise in pragmatic self-interest is one thing. An everyday kind of point.
But showing that this organisational logic is indeed the way that the Cosmos reasons its way into existence is the big step that Peirce takes. This is the metaphysical shock that naive realism is still to confront.
One problem with this survey is that modern realism is itself an outgrowth of Kantian Transcendental Idealism.
Critique of pure Reason is the founding document of realism Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term realism. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality. (Dietmar Heidemann)
There are of course other forms of Idealism than Kants, so you might want to specify what you have in mind.
Yes, a 'popular philosopher.'
Quoting apokrisis
Sounds tantalizing as an idea but I've not read enough to contextualize it.
Quoting Joshs
The world of phenomena and human experience?
It seems to me that when I say there is a cat on the mat,
there is more that must be understood besides a fact of the matter; namely the sense of the matter itself. Is what I mean by cat and mat the same as what you understand them to mean? This is especially pertinent if you deny that there is a cat on the mat. We might have to investigate to what extent what I intend to convey is compatible with the way you are interpreting my utterance. In traditional logical conceptions of the meaning of words, when a person employs a concept they have simply embraced a set of objects and ignored all others, the way a dictionary does.
But this isnt how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used.
I would say that language doesnt simply represent, describe or map onto a pre-existing world, it maps out a way to go on. When we use a word , it forms a bridge between the memory of our previous usage and the new circumstance that it helps to create. To name something is to help bring it into existence as this freshly relevant event.
So the ideal gets manufactured by the othering of the real. They become equally "real" as two sides of the same coin. In our consciousness our semiotically-organised Umwelt or experiential state we find a self appearing in interaction with its world. We experience a world that has a selfhood as its sturdy centre, giving everything its meaning.
Reductionist metaphysics - which includes the dualised reductionism of Cartesianism and Panpsychism - makes a problem of this. The self is either everything or it is nothing. The self-referential natures of modelling is treated as a fundamental paradox an acid of contradiction that eats away at all philosophical certainty.
But a holistic metaphysics says the self-reference is how selves become real as actors or agents in the world. The mind's ability to close itself to learn to ignore the world in the quite concrete way now modelled by Bayesian Brain neuroscience is how a meaningful engagement with the world, the claimed essence of a "realist metaphysics", can in fact arise.
Of course actual closure picking up Lawson's principle theme leads to solipsism. We might as well be living the confusion of a fevered dream.
So pragmatism speaks to the dynamical balancing act of closure and openness. As epistemic systems, we want to become as closed as possible, but only so as to also be as open as possible in terms of what is actually then surprising, significant, or otherwise worth paying open-minded attention to.
Science is set up in this fashion. Make a prediction. Look for the exception. Beef up the model. Go around this knowledge ratcheting loop another time.
Brains do the same thing every moment of the day. The self sits on the side of well-managed predictability and reality the phenomenal is discovered by its degree of noumenal surprise. Harsh reality is what we least expected.
Again, reductionism wants to reduce the complexity of a dichotomous relation to the simplicity of monistic choice. Either the ideal or the real has to be the fundamental case. Pragmatism says instead that the closure in terms of the self-centred view of reality is the feature that makes possible any growth of knowledge about the "truth" of the real world.
Lawson goes off on the usual Romantic tangent of wanting to give art the role of exploring reality's openness. But that's a bit too Cartesian again.
Science is set up as the relentless machine for mining the "truth" of reality. Science's problem is not that it ain't sufficiently open to having its theories confounded by surprises. It's problem lies in its failure to be holistic and realise the extent to which knowledge is an exercise that is making the human self as much as comprehending the world.
Science by and large accepts the Cartesian division between itself and the humanities. It's understanding of causality is limited to material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are treated as being beyond its pay grade.
This lack of holism is why modern life seems a little shit. And any amount of art ain't going to fix it.
Of course I agree. We don't use words as reductionist units of meaning. We use them to weave the webs of constraint I mention.
We speak in sentences. We speak grammatically. Speech acts have the recursive organisation of the nested hierarchy.
If I just mention "cat", then the implication is that this is enough. I don't need to be more specific, nor more general. The dynamical balance in terms of hierarchical recursion is judged about right so that you will take my "true meaning". The least has been said in a way that the most has also been said.
You could still suspect that with my bad eyesight it is in fact a small dog. There is one in the house and the cat is in fact on your knee. Or the house may have three cats and you want to know exactly which one I mean.
But these small fine-tunings only emphasise just how much can be left out in terms of either the more global generalities or more local particulars.
If I had said there is an animal on the mat, that lack of specificity might have alarmed you. If I said there was a dead cat on the mat, that specificity might also alarm you.
So the deadly dullness of the "cat on the mat" account of a "state of affairs" is chosen by me quite deliberately as evidence for all that naive realism wants to leave out when applying its lumpen account of language pragmatics.
As a statement of facts, it sounds like the kind of thing no reasonable person could dream of disputing. The world just is all that is the case. And anyone with two eyes can see that without further debate.
But even the cat being on the mat is a claim dependent on an unspoken weight of context. It depends on linguistic holism and not logical atomism.
:up: Nice.
Quoting apokrisis
Indeed. He is member of the British progressive middle class, after all.
Quoting apokrisis
Is there a tentative solution to this? It seems to me that science does have a pay grade and the big questions we seem to like asking are outside its domain.
There are plenty of ecologically informed scientists who have fingered how we wound up in our current bind. The short answer is fossil fuels want to be entropified. Humans stumbled into that role of becoming dedicated to the mission. The industrial revolution was about reorganising society - its politics, economics, and other humanitarian subjects - around this new task.
But that is not a solution so much as the late in the picture diagnosis of a terminal condition. :confused:
Language usage orients language-users.
Yep. Read George Lakoff et al.
Nope. (Witty's 'nonsense', re: TLP)
This depends on the language-game you're engaged in which uses the term "reality".
No. Yes. Read Witty's PI as a contextual extension (rather than critical refutation or theoretical correction) of his TLP. The latter expresses only one possible language-game (re: logical atomism) out of innumerably many other language-games suggested in the former.
I think Hilary Lawson loses the plot the problem of the criterion (and its ilk) arises from confusing maps with territories and then complaining that 'maps =/= territories is an intractable paradox' when it's not: in practice, a map is made by abstracting features of interest from a given territory just as language is used to discursively make explicit (e.g. problematize) the invariant, ineluctable, conditions (i.e. "reality") of their circumstance. To avoid circle-jerking p0m0 / anti-realist nonsense, language must be shown (reflectively practiced) rather than said (theorized-via-language).
Quoting 180 Proof
Fair point.
Quoting 180 Proof
Right, that's good to know. I was wondering to what extent Lawson may have become fixated and how to stop the circle-jerking...
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I'm not seeing how that's a problem.
Kantian Transcendental Idealism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Do you think that people shouldn't outgrow Christianity?
Is 'the epistemic cut' avoidable, do you think? It seems a necessary condition of existence. Which would explain why the 'self-overcoming' or 'detachment' of traditional philosophy would provide a portal to understanding 'things as they truly are'.
They should. And realism should outgrow Kantian Idealism. But most forms of realism in fact havent outgrown it. Thats what the author I quoted meant when he said that Kant lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.
He goes on:
On the standard view, idealism and realism are incompatible philosophical theories. For Kant, however, they are not. He rather claims that transcendental idealism and empirical realism form a unity, i.e., only in combination they demonstrate that objects of external perception are real: Transcendental idealists hold that the objects as we represent them in space and time are appearances and not things-in-themselves. This, according to Kant, implies empirical realism, i.e., the view that the represented objects of our spatio-temporal system of experience are real beings outside us.
Relative to the OPs assertion that this forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is, I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize.
The cut in organisms separates the material dynamics that constitutes the physical world from the information or algorithms that are the regulating model of that world. So you have the chemistry, and you have the genome. You have the environment, and you have our self-centred, self-producing, neural model of it.
When it comes to philosophic detachment, this came about with the further levels of the epistemic cut represented by the codes of words and numbers. Mainly numbers. The Greek concept of logic and proof as the ultimate way of modelling an utterly abstract environment from the point of view of an utterly abstract selfhood.
We became causal thinkers existing in a causal cosmos. Rational and detached.
The pay off of such a modelling relation with the world was the technology that could regulate the realm we call the physical. Western natural philosophy took things to that level. It built a culture around that habit of thought - especially after the industrial revolution saw us hop on the entropic rocket of fossil fuel.
So the epistemic cut speaks to the modelling division that pays its way in the world. It is a necessary condition for life and mind. But we didnt have to get so technological in some inevitable sense. It was an accident of history that a Europe undergoing a minor post-Enlightenment agrarian revolution stumbled into a use for lumps of black burny stuff that appeared to come in unlimited supply.
Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances?
The only reality we describe is the reality of shared human experience and concern, as I see it. Saying that the map is not the territory is saying that the network of collective representations which constitute our real, shared world is the map, while our individual pre-linguistic experiences are the territory. The map is an abstracted generalization and sharing derived from a vast number of particular experiences. Of course, this is not to say that the maps do not feed back into and condition the experiences of individuals.
yes, I think thats right.
That is correct, because that what the underlying material of language - information - is: just differences. A photosensitive organism does not see 'the world as it is' - it just perceives that an area is different than another one. And our seeing is different only quantitatively, not qualitatively: we see more differences, but still nothing but differences. Our language, that is, our descriptions of what we perceive, reflects that. Any definition of a thing just describes is how that thing is not like other things. That is why no definition is finite: there still might be a thing that fits the description, but is somewhat different.
Agreed. A description or interpretation is open or vague in the way you describe as there is no value in being more precise than the occasion demands.
The line between lumping and splitting itself has to be drawn exactly at the critical point where neither the lumping nor the splitting adds value to the game. To split more hairs would subtract from the cohesive identity being claimed, while to go the other way would be to risk losing meaningful shades of distinction for a small gain in greater generality.
A good definition has to strike that tricky context-sensitive balance. Which is why atomistic definitions of words rarely seem very good.
Cool. Thank you.
They are the same thing.
In science phenomenon is just something we experience and then try and understand.
Language is also a nuanced term. If we are talking about how language is learned it is fair to say spacial and temporal position matters just as much as, if not more so, than categorising similar elements/ideas/experiences.Furthermore what we experience has emotional context always - be this through needs, wants or questions.
The World is essentially our language NOT some experience of The World. Consciousness is experience of, as in experience of some thing. Verbalising/labelling the thing (phenomenon) is another step. A table is a table because you understand it as such not because it is a table. A table to an ant is not maybe some creatures other tha humans grasp the purpose of a table BUT that said it is likely only a human item not a universal item as it serves a human function not a universal one.
Other items, such as trees, will likely be understood by other animals in roughly the same manner, but by something like an ant no way.
I found it hard to grasp how you would approach that question if you couldn't answer Banno as to what 'realism' might be.
Much languaging (as some describe the process of expression through language), especially spoken language, is about emotion, fellowship, cooperation, problem-solving. 'Reality' seems to me just a passing notion here. I've been struck by reports about the conversations between Lukashenko of Belarus and Prighozin the Wagner leader that seem to have forestalled an internal Russian conflict. They are old comrades, who apparently swore at each other in their first conversation during the crisis for 20 minutes, and eventually arrived at a way of resolving the situation. Such a debate is very like the debates we all have at work, or, to zoom in, with a loved one: the purported 'facts' matter, but it is not through reference to 'the real' or by coming to any agreement about 'facts' that we resolve the exchange, the issues that matter. Language flows through us, especially familiar language with familiars, and we find ways to move forwards.
Quoting Jabberwock
This notion of 'underlying material' seems to imply 'reality' lurking under there. To me language is amazingly rich, in and of itself. It can't be reduced, and there isn't something underlying it. Here I agree with apo, though I don't personally go for any kind of universalising theory. Hilary Lawson claims to have found a universalising theory, somehow, in going beyond Wittgenstein and Derrida to notions of openness and closure. That to me seems like just another shtick to build an institute on (and he founded an Institute on that basis). I'm OK with the prior situation: that Wittgenstein talked mostly a great deal of sense, including about the limits of sense, and that Derrida's analysis vanished into a spiral of clever-clever nonsense (though his homage to Levinas and thereby the relation of the I to the Other, I've personally found rewarding).
Ha! That's curious. Remember my question was this:
Quoting Tom Storm
My view of realism isn't really the subject at hand. And I don't have a view on this worth a pinch of shit. But I am asking about Lawson's view as expressed in the OP and what others think this says about ideas like idealism.
The point of participating on sites like this for me is to understand the range of potential questions and something of how philosophers might arrive at solutions. I'm not personally looking for answers - just the range of potential answers.
Quoting mcdoodle
How do words map to reality? Are they just a series of arbitrary signs and signifiers (as per the post structuralists) that make it impossible for us to express certain meaning and have any kind of real purchase on the world through language? That's at the heart of Lawson's notion, I think.
Richard Rorty, (an influence on Lawson), argued that language can't mirror the world or provide a direct access to knowledge of reality. Language is a human invention used as a tool to manage our environment and is shaped by our conventions, not independent reality. Does this, if true, interfere with our capacity to know things?
I don't know Lawson, but I also don't mind taking a stab at odd questions. Take my imaginative wonderings for what you will.
At the very least I gather that a realist theory of language somehow incorporates language into what is real. But language is a fascination for philosophers because it's the topic where maps and territories are contested. It's fairly easy to admit that in spite of the possibility of the Cartesian Demon in a logical sense you certainly don't believe in it and what you see is what you get. (sight being an important metaphor for the history of European-derived philosophy) -- but we relate our language, which is in the world under the realist notion, to the world. How is it possible to use something in the world to represent that world and at the same time refer to reality? Why can I pick up a few stones and arrange them in a tray to calculate something about the world? Is our understanding of the stone movements, and our bodies, a part of the world? But then how do we access the world?
The other side might acknowledge the illusion of language standing apart from the world we live in, but note that it has to be a part of that same world because they are, after all, related somehow. So the anti-realist will ask: How is all this meaning possible, then? How can we have a finite set of symbols which can produce an infinite set of meanings? What is this real relation between symbol and meaning?
That's an interesting way of looking at it. Richard Rorty says something like truth is what communities of shared understanding describe it to be. In other words, reality is a case of intersubjective agreement, not an external certainty.
Do you share some of the post-structuralist views on language and truth?
Yes, those seem to be the right questions.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I think so. But I wonder what all this really indicates about the limitations of human knowledge. We obviously do well in a range of domains without necessarily making contact with 'reality' - maths, science, literature, art.
We also know that no matter how contingent and 'impossible' meaning might be - it is pretty clear that a significant nuclear war would wipe out innumerable people and animals and irreversibly change civilisation. We can accept this as an objective potential reality, right? And if you chop off someone's head they die. Reality is all fun and games until someone loses their head...
Are you asking after what the point of philosophy is, given practical problems?
Maybe the thought is -- where does it stop? On which side? The realist or the anti-realist?
I think the response from the realist side would be "what is "ultimate" doing in your sentence?"
Is the adjective that important? If we can talk about reality, then the realist is right. Maybe with some modifications down the line to acknowledge things like our cognitive apparatus -- but even a pragmatic contingent reality is at least real.
But on the other side I'd say that this is to miss the point. The Cartesian Demon scenario isn't even being considered, but rather asking after, upon accepting realism, what is the relationships between the sign and meaning? Then finding that the relationship is itself meaningful, and hence, on the other side of reality. So language is anti-real. (though reality is, by definition, real -- of course)
Indeed. I guess the reason it is there is to emphasize the non contingent nature of a theorized reality as opposed to 'what is the capital of Australia' type constructions, or cats on mats, etc.
The search for reality seems to me to be sublimated search for god.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Are you saying we can encounter small "r" reality, but nothing which transcends this, hence language is anti-realism?
I'm stretching so I'm not sure what I'm saying, exactly. But yup! I'd add that if we're consistent then language, in all its forms, is nothing but ooks/eeks -- meaning isn't real, but our ooks/eeks which enable us to do human things are.
Quoting Tom Storm
Also, often true! In philosophy it's more explicit, even. The god of the philosophers, even if philosophy is only a type of literature, is a prominent figure in the literature.
I agree that reality, in the determinate sense, is what is agreed upon intersubjectively. So, reality cannot be anything more, or other, than empirical. What is intersubjectively agreed upon is what is in accordance with (most) everyone's experience.
The most immediate reality for each of us is our own lives; we experience what we experience (even if we cannot put it into words) and things seem to be as they seem to be. We don't experience objective reality; there is arguably no such thing other than what is intersubjectively agreed upon, and we don't experience that intersubjective reality, we experience concrete things in a concrete environment; whereas the (collective) reality is the abstracted commonality of that experience.
I don't much like the post-structuralist notions that everything is text, or that words don't map onto the world. For me words do map onto the world insofar as the world is not something we experience but a collective generalized abstraction.
We do know by example what it is for a group to agree upon a convention, either explicitly through negotiation, or implicitly through action.
Do we know what it is for everything to be a convention? Does that include the people engaged in the instituting the convention? Does it include the fact of their agreeing to the convention? Hard to see how they could agree to agree without already agreeing, and without already existing.
You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional.
Or you could say the point is not about what is real, but about how we talk and think about what is real, how we use words like "real" and "reality", and it's the use of these words and our ways of thinking and talking about reality that are conventions. The conventions at stake are conventions of our behavior.
But what's that supposed to mean? Are we granting that we are in fact organisms, entities of which it is permissible to posit behavior? If this too is only a matter of convention, then that's to say it's only a matter of our behavior (how we think and talk) that we are organisms that engage in a certain sort of behavior. How could such behavior be ours, how could it be behavior?
I'm not yet convinced there's a coherent way to make the claim you're making. I get the impulse, I think, and I even sympathize to a degree. But I can't help thinking this is an analogy that's been pushed to the breaking point.
To talk of intersubjectivity in relation to reality is kind of a contradiction if one understands the intent of phenomenology.
Intentionality (phenomenological) is not concerned with objectivity in any measured sense.
There seems to be a common theme hitting the threads recently around the idea of knowns and unknowns. I find it hard to stomach reading someone talk of objective and intersubjective as if they are synonymous if they are why use both?
Arguing with bracketing out in the first place is probably where the bootstrapping would make sense. Seems to be a lot of crossovers here in terminology that are clouding my understanding of what is being said.
The notion that 'what people think of as objective is really just a construct of intersubjective agreement' is pretty common and certainly was (one of the frames) taught at my university. Richard Rorty puts it like this - 'In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.' Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).
The questions as to whether this is useful or accurate are separate matters.
That's the post-modern argument (as per Rorty's quote). There is no objectivity. It's a contrivance. What we think of as objective is actually a shared subjectivity held by communities of agreement - whether we are talking the Amish, politics or quantum mechanics. Which is why for some thinkers, objectivity and intersubjectivity amount to the same thing, function in the same way, as Rorty says. You may not agree but many do.
Well, I had a listen to the Lawson - Searle - Dawson podcast. Searle went over the usual observations concerning realism, Dawson did not seem to have much of significance to say, preferring to firmly assert his position than to argue his case, while Searle pointed out the obvious problems, using the arguments I've borrowed and used hereabouts many times. Neither seemed to have much to say that was novel. there's more on Dawson's web site, but it is paywalled, and presumably in his books, but the reviews are mixed. From this material I haven't gained a strong inclination to pursue his writing.
Dawson was interesting, apparently looking for some middle ground. I don't think there is a middle ground, since I agree with Searle that realism pretty much inevitable - and by that I mean simply that there are true sentences. An unfashionable view, to be sure, but who gives a fuck.
Lawson strikes me as bit like Feyerabend, in wanting to make the world better by showing that there is no "ultimate truth" to be discovered. For Feyerabend the enemy was Big Science, the Moto "anything goes". In the end the come back was that "Anything goes" becomes not a motto for reform or revolution but for conservatism: if anything goes, why change anything? "Anything goes means that everything stays the same". If Dawson's target is more political and social than methodological, then the outcome is Putin and Trump and Johnson, and in Australia Scotty from Marketing and Mr Potato Head. In denying that there is any truth, he gives such turds permission to say and do whatever they like.
I don't think everything is a convention, but I do think that everything we know is conventional. The reality we know is conventional, and yet I think we can reasonably believe that what gives rise to all that is not.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So, the way I think about it is that the fact that we are organisms is a conventional fact, but that there is also an underlying sense in which organisms are not conventional; a sense which we cannot articulate without turning it into a conventional fact. "That whereof we cannot speak"...?
And yet, as Kant pointed out, we cannot help ourselves speaking about it. I can also see the sense in which this is not a very satisfying answer.
Quoting Tom Storm
"Map"?
Language does not always map on to the world.
In addition to statements and assertions, there are questions and commands and exhibitions. In addition to narratives there are policies and instructions and poems and nonsense. This by way of noting that "mapping on to the world" is only part of what we can do with words.
But sometimes we say things that are true. To call that a "mapping" might be to adopt too referential a theory of the way language works - the credulous, overly simple view that all words are analysable as nouns.
Sometimes we say things that are true. That's pretty much what realism claims. Denying that sometimes we say things that are true strikes me as a verbal form of self-evisceration.
You'll need to back that assertion up with some argument or textual citations. In any case the term 'intersubjectivity' is not owned by phenomenology of whatever stripe you might have in mind, and I was not referencing phenomenology anyway, but just explaining my own understanding of the human epistemic situation.
Yes, good points. I think there's a lot of complexity in such denials. What be a university professor? Why write books?
Quoting Banno
I hear you and thanks for your responses. Lawson definitely argues there are better and worse positions to take in terms of social policy and government. He is committed to reducing suffering. But like a number of post-modern thinkers, he seems to be straddling a fine line. Rorty too argued that truth was chimera and yet he affirmed very strong reformist left politics. I think there's a thread of its own on how they do this. In Rorty's words, certain approaches are better for certain purposes. I am interested in his foundational justification for this and haven't read enough to know how it works. How can a criterion of value emerge from all pervasive devaluation?
Well, on what I have read Lawson asserts this, but without argument. Have you seen something with a bit more substance?
In the podcast, Lawson blatantly defines "lies" as when someone assert something that is not true. Searle jumped on the irony. Lawson appears inconsistent. But I guess that if there is no truth, that's not an issue.
I'm not impressed.
Yes, he says we don't have to abandon criteria of value (these are 'closures' which can be of great use to us), we just need to recognise their contingency and that they are there to achieve a shared purpose - ie, morality. He often seems to say (paraphrasing) 'Things don't need to be objectively true in order to be extremely useful.' And I think you and I both have the same follow up questions to this.
I have read a number of interviews and papers on line and I am pretty sure he raises this point in a couple of YouTube lectures.
The reason I highlighted Lawson is precisely because he is a 'lightweight' or more accessible thinker and somewhat derivative of Rorty and other more complex thinkers. It is instructive to see how some of these ideas look without the decorative filagree of more impenetrable scholarship. I'm sure the university types resent his work and popular appeal. I have no real commitment to Lawson, I'm just curious about the argument he presented in the OP.
Lawson is basically a pragmatist, as I read him. Truth can be defined as "what works best". Those who dislike uncertainty or ambiguity will not be satisfied with this.
So, I see no contradiction in a pragmatist promoting positions of social policy or government on the grounds that some arguably work better than others at, for example, reducing suffering.
I had a scratch around, but haven't found much. Do I have to watch youtube videos? Can you point me to some text that has a bit of substance?
Sure, 'Things don't need to be objectively true in order to be extremely useful', but as Searle repeatedly points out, it does not follow that there are no truths. Quite the opposite.
I don't see the attraction.
Looks like the emperor has new cloths - again.
Yep. The first should be "Useful for whom?" - and the realisation that it's the afore mentioned turds.
I would appreciate it if you would point out aspects of the phenomenological approach that you find valuable.
Pragmatism roots itself in the logical consistency of the dichotomy. We could either believe or doubt. Each extreme is logically rooted in its other. Together they simplify your options by excluding all other less polarised options.
So pragmatism is about getting past Cartesian doubt by accepting the challenge of hazarding belief. We form a hypothesis and work to find cause to doubt it. To the degree we fail, we have strong grounds for acting on what looks to be working.
Calling this acting on convention is a negative way to frame it. Habits are thoughts that have proved their long-run worth. Logic itself is conventional. It relies on the habit of dichotomising to uncover polar alternatives that are the most informational. They divide the vagueness or ambiguity of possibility into the counterfactual definiteness of self-complementary extremes.
Pragmatism fixed epistemology by recognising this is logically what works. And ontically, even the Cosmos had no choice but to employ the same symmetry-breaking principle. So when it comes to grounds, how could this foundation for analysis come with better authority?
A more useful question would be "useful for what?". For example, we all already know who capitalism is useful for; the salient question is whether it could be made to be useful for diminishing human suffering, or more or less useful for that than other viable political systems.
balls.
What? You have none?
Are you advocating such a view?
No, "Balls" as in that's the answer to your "What?", which can only be subsidiary to my "Who?".
But since there is no truth, no argument is needed. Capitalism is a comforting narrative used to excuse those with the balls. I assert it, hence it is so.
Down with the patriarchy! and all that.
Balls!....none of us have...
Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty? :cool:
I expect I will proceed to realize that I don't know unless/until I see evidence providing me with a reason to think otherwise. Perhaps I will ask questions from time to time, in hopes of acquiring such evidence. I'm fine with being uncertain about all sorts of things.
We can probably rule out that I failed to state the position publicly. What reason makes you think I dont in fact support it?
Why are you avoiding answering my question?
I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure. I used the word "convention" because there was all this talk of what we agree on, and that's a pretty specific model I'm not sure can take in what it was trying to take in here.
He very much is, yes.
I think it's insurmountable. What you can do is methodological metaphysics.
Pragmatism is not about individual belief but about a community of mind. It is truth at the level of the social organism. What it needs to believe to live - to sustain an existence - in its world.
Language and culture are the genetic information system that organises humans as functional systems of belief. Words are how we feed mouths, not just noises mouths make.
As educated individuals, we can then use the tools of verbal coordination and rational argument in all sorts of other personally-motivated activities. But what society cares about as a whole is keeping its evolved show going by pragmatically modelling the world in which it must thrive.
Why are you asking a loaded question?
I'm not pretending I don't understand. I simply don't tend to see things in such black and white terms as it seems you advocate. In fact, if I recognised that I was thinking in such black and white terms I would hope that I would seriously consider the possibility that I was looking at things much too simplistically.
On your actual argument, the simple reply is think more carefully about what I said. Black and white are useful to the degree they bound all the possibilities that constitute grey.
As absolute values connected by a reciprocal relation, they would in fact make all shades of grey measurable as specified mixtures.
So science is founded on this analytical move. It is how the dynamics of nature can be measured in terms of precisely articulated theories.
This is how we map language and reason onto the world!
Seems like a rather fatalistic view to think we can't know anything about reality independent of agreement with other people. Not to mention a little silly in light of the history of humans learning things, that we can to some degree look back and see.
I have, however, learned somewhat about your perspective in the time I've been reading the forum with regularity. What I have learned led me to the question about how black and white your thinking is.
And sonny, I don't think that you are in much of a position to try to teach me about "how the dynamics of nature can be measured". I've been heavily involved in the design of hardware, firmware, and software of a device that NIST and other national metrology institutes pass back and forth in order to compare the primary reference standards of different nations against each other. Just to give you a chance to avoid making yourself look silly. I'll bet you really really hate that.
If we are talking about mapping out the world, with language or vice versa, then doing away with the world (bracketing it out) allows us to examine the mechanisms/items/aspects/moments (for want of a better term) of conscious experience.
How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions? In other words, truth and falsity are relative to our constructed schemes, not some scheme-independent reality.
Thanks.
That sounds like denying there is a territory being mapped by our minds/brains, and to me it would seem a little silly to believe there is no territory being mapped, and yet also believe that you are something other than a figment of my imagination.
There are two versions: the strong (linguistic determinism) and the weak version (linguistic relativity).
The strong version posits that language determines thought entirely and that we can only perceive and understand things that we have words for in our language. In other words, without specific words or linguistic structures for certain concepts, those concepts cannot be fully grasped or expressed by speakers of that language.
The weak version more modestly suggests that language influences thought and cognition but doesn't entirely determine it. It acknowledges that language plays a significant role in shaping our perceptions and understanding of the world, but also recognizes the influence of other factors such as culture, social context, and individual experiences. More here.
Fair enough. I'll just add, in case of any misundertsnding, that I don't think it is due to convention that we agree as to what is real, even though the agreement itself is a matter of convention. I'm not sure if that will ease your mind and soften your view, but there it is.
That sounds ridiculous to the extreme. There are instances of people without language that are able to form thoughts, plan ahead and act out. Animals also exhibit this behaviour.
Feral children, if too far gone, are unable to grasp some aspects of language simply because they have not developed in a world like ours and so struggle to understand things like tables and chairs because they are creatures of forests, mountains and hills. If switched around we would fail to appreciate a number of their subtle behaviours in the wild because we are not wild animals.
A set world view (cosmological view) dictates the items we communicate and to suggest that it can or could be the other way around appears utterly preposterous to me given what I know about humans. I do understand that some people struggle to think in anything but words. Some people even state they cannot conjure up mental images.
To be generous here I guess it is possible for some people that struggle to conjure up mental pictures to fall further towards the belief that language is needed to create concepts. Also, it depends a lot on how language is being defined. Such definitions used by some can leave gaps in their explanations. Wittgensteins use of language was one such instance where premise is the conclusion that is not to say that his exploration is not fascinating though!
Thanks, I have, but I didn't know this name or source. Is this not Wittgenstein's understanding too, as in, The limit of my language is the limit of my world."
How would you know? Any examples you could mention? Do you mean, deaf-mute people?
Life is sweet. My position is Peircean semiosis and pragmatism. Peirce, among other things, was the founder of serious US metrology.
So all credit to your heavy involvement in instrument manufacturing. But . :kiss:
Sure. There's just no way to prove they're "of the same reality.". People just do it without any evidence or sturdy reasoning. That is worth pondering.
Quoting wonderer1
It is denying that knowing is direct correspondence , representing or mirroring between knower and world. Scientific and other forms of knowing, far from being the epistemological representing of a reality independent of the knower, is the evolving construction of a niche. We are worldmakers rather than world-mirrorers, whose constructions are performances that pragmatically intervene in the world that we co-invent , changing it in ways that then talk back to us in a language responsive to how we have formulated our questions. This discursive account accords with the postmodern philosophy of science that Joseph Rouse espouses:
There is plenty of evidence. Its just that some people refuse to believe their lying eyes.
You're dreaming. Prove me wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
If instead of defining language narrowly in terms of formal verbal concepts, we understand its basis in construing , and define construing as an ordinally organized system of discriminations we make on the basis of similarity and difference, then we can include basic perception along with conceptual thought as language-based. Then instead of claiming that it is only verbal langauge that shapes our understanding, we can recognize that the functionally integrated system of construals that acts to channel our ways of anticipating events is what shapes our expectations, and those of other animals , and that what verbal language adds is merely a more complex and condensed field of discriminations.
Im awake.
Right. There is no territory being mapped by our brains. Theres no out there that begins where our skin and eyes end. There are things happening, there are sensations present, and a whole lot of interpreting. Most of which is completely unconscious and transparent.
Throw out the subject/object and correspondence stuff and you start getting closer to whats real, in my view.
All you can do is assert it. You have no proof.
I have no proof that you just posted that. But evidently you did.
One assumes someone posted it. Maybe it was Floyd.
Give me your number. I can call you and you can confirm whether Im awake or dreaming.
We're aiming for the philosophical 17th Century. Somehow we keep missing it. :blush:
The twisty journey that all must take from lumpen realism, to the body shock of idealism, to the eventual resolution of enactivism and pragmatism.
In any case, since we all (or most of us) agree about how we do divide the world up (whatever the explanation for that might be) then of course there are truths relative to that common division.
Quoting Janus
Im not familiar with Lawson but I am familiar with anti-realist positions ( Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Rorty). Do they believe the way we divide up the world is arbitrary and entirely dependent on us? Well, they believe that there are better and worse, more or less valid ways to carve up the world, but the arbiter of validity is itself a construction. Put differently, the world speaks back to us in the language in which we couch our questions, so truth is the product of a ceaseless conversation between personal and interpersonal construction , and events. Not a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other. We may agree about how we divide up the world within the bounds of a particular cultural episteme, but epistemes change historically, neither arbitrarily nor rationally, and with them our truths.
There is no theory of language that will answer your question (this question: "...do we need a theory of language that explains how any realist claim is possible in order to accept those claims?") because the theory itself will fall victim to the same questions. Wittgenstein tried answering this question in the Tractatus through the use of names and objects, it's a kind of mapping of reality, viz., the correspondence of names to objects. We know of his rejection of this theory (much of it that is) and we know of what replaced it (language-games). What W. doesn't reject is the notion that language can reach beyond the world, into the world of metaphysics. He still held onto this notion, although it's a bit modified.
If it's true that the meanings of our words come down to how we use the words, then much of what we believe is a matter of what language-game you believe best describes reality. What do we mean by reality? There is no one answer to this question, there are just answers that fit within the context of a particular language-game. If you're an idealist or realist depends on what language-game you believe best describes reality, or best maps reality. If you're religious, then you accept those views of reality as interpreted by a certain view of metaphysics. If you're not religious you'll latch onto views that have another view of metaphysics. If you hold to a third view, as I do, then you'll hold to another view of metaphysics.
I believe there are answers, I'm not saying there aren't answers. However, you were looking for the implications, the implications are that we have a multitude of beliefs that are very difficult to sort through. As I've always said, language is a very confusing tool, but it's the only tool we have to describe reality. Apart from language, all we have is our subjective consciousness that reaches out to reality through sensory experience.
Quoting Sam26
Thanks Sam. I have sympathy for this view.
Quoting Joshs
It's hard for me not to agree. I wonder what the best arguments against this might be?
How do they determine what is a better or worse way - a type of pragmatism - useful for certain purposes? How is that determined?
One question I have is, how much nuance is allowed from this point of view? I mean sure, to believe in some sort of perfect correspondence between our perceptions and things as they are in reality would be quite naive. However, is there a good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Does it make sense to you, that although we can't have perfect correspondence we can pick out salient aspects of the way things are in an external reality? If not, what is this "world" that you speak of?
The step from real worlds to possible worlds. But then that also requires the same inherent criteria of being worlds from a point of view. Worlds dichotomised in terms of their objective vs subjective poles.
You can find all this within language as a semiotic tool. The motif repeats at the lower level of neurobiology and higher level of scientific inquiry.
The secrets of existence - the answer to why anything? - is to be found in the immanence of semiosis, not some transcendent manoeuvre, whether this be the transcendence of the lumpen realist or deluded idealist.
Semiosis is what Peirce could see as the immanent wellspring of reality whether we talk epistemology or ontology.
This makes a tool like language neither arbitrary nor necessary, neither PoMo subjective nor AP objective, but just an expression of the pragmatic dynamic that organises a state of persisting being.
Language does not need external grounding. Worlds and selves co-arise as complementary poles of being. Or initial conditions and boundary conditions if we are drilling down (and up) in terms of pansemiotic cosmic generality.
Don't you think that might be a tad bit grandiose?
I agree, but the construction is based on the obvious commonality of human experience, which cannot be entirely explained by human construction. We cannot be conscious of the processes of perception, but we know that we all (most of us) perceive the same things, at the same times in the same places, which suggests that there is something about the structures of the world that give rise to that situation.
That is only part of the story. We are affected pre-consciously, pre-linguistically, and if it was not for the pre-linguistic commonality of human experience, language could never have gotten started in the first place.
The world we can talk about is obviously in part dependent on our ways of talking, but we have no control over the way the world is really; go out and stand on the expressway if you don't believe me.
The basic truths, which are countless, like you will die if you try to swim across the Pacific Ocean, jump off Mt Everest or try to fight a tiger bare-handed don't change.
It's funny how truth only seems to take something closer to solid form when death is the accompaniment.
Again the rustling of lolly papers from the cheap seats. If you want to join in, make a counter argument. Otherwise :yawn:
For me I use this triad:
1. Thought/perceptions do not equal language.
2. Language does not equal what is observed (reality) .
3. What is observed (reality) does not equal thought/perception.
They're modes of communication. But all communication is imperfect - filtered, interpreted, altered in some way by the very act of interaction/being communicated in the first place.
The mind cannot comprehend reality in a raw form. It synthesises a comprehisble filtered and reduced version that's digestible. It organises the raw data into structures (dimensions). Disrupting this process with say... Hallucinogens, allows us to witness things unfiltered and unstructured but impairs our ability to memorise them well because memory requires executive tasking/structuring of info.
Language cannot impart the full scope of inner experience from one person to another. Words fail us to describe especially the most profound of emotions and experiences.
Finally, language and reality are only tied by a thin, frail yet pragmatic thread. This can be demonstrated in the fact that we have numerous languages (modes) to describe the same things. "Apple" has not only hundreds of other names but hundreds of descriptors and their respective meanings - from the literal, to the pragmatic/functional to the symbolic/metaphorical and figurative.
As well as the fact that words very frequently become obsolete or are formed anew. Languages evolve and with them we lose or gain new ways to describe. But never is language the reality we use it to describe.
:lol: Yes, death or injury I guess. But still there are countless truths that deal with the natural constraints of a physical world: I can't walk through or see through walls, I can't fly, I can't even entertain two thoughts simultaneously, I cannot increase or decrease my size, weight or strength instantly, I can't know things I haven't learned, I can't change my appearance without resorting to disguise or plastic surgery...the list is huge...
The world affects us pre-perceptually in ways we cannot become conscious of, and it seems unarguable that its pre-perceptual effects, which give rise to, among other things, perception, do not constrain how we divide the world up in our perception and understanding of it. If the postmodernist says all is text, and we construct the world through and through, they go far too far, in my opinion.
Yes, but all the names of the apple are names of the apple, not of anything else. I don't think our language has a tenuous grasp on the shared world of common experience and understanding at all, it grasps that world just fine, but at the same time it has no grasp at all on the world of pre-perceptual affects that is prior to all our models, analyses and judgements.
No question about that.
Quoting Janus
I've never quite known if they go as far as the critics suggest. :wink: I think they are probably an easy target... relativism this... relativism that... blah, blah blah. Like Chomsky I find them too complex to formulate a clear understanding, and I've never had the time. But I have to say, what I do know I find fascinating.
When I read Rorty, I am sometimes stuck by the romanticism underpinning the thinking - 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.'
Maps have legends, that explain the meaning of the symbols. Cliff, river, bridge, hostelry. Things important to the traveller from afar. The legend informs those unfamiliar with the map, about scale and so on, but tells them nothing about the territory. The map does that.
And so it surely is with language. One needs to know the legend, and one needs to read the arrangement of the words, and one needs the right map according to where one is.
Here are a couple of arrangements to compare:
1. Don't eat the yellow snow.
2. Eat the yellow snow.
I leave the interested reader to work out by practical experiment which arrangement provides the best guidance to travellers in Northern climes.
(Those who have read the later work of Philip K Dick may be aware that there is a tradition of feeding reindeer with amanita muscaria and drinking their urine to enjoy the psycho-active benefits of the mushrooms without the upset stomach that one gets from direct ingestion of them. This is a legend.)
I have a book on fungi from the good old days when men were men and women were grateful, that has infallible advice for telling poisonous from edible mushrooms: "Eat them, if you get sick or die, they are poisonous, and if not they are edible." They don't make books like that any more. This is a true story.
Quoting Janus
Gather 10 people in a room, and include persons from all corners of that world and all eras of human history. Ask them to paint the same vase of flowers as accurately as possible. Compare the results and try and find any aspect of their paintings which exactly match each other. The wide variety of differences shows us how we actually interact with each other on the basis of supposedly shared experience. You might argue that even while our interpretations of the flowers vary, the physical world is sending the same data into all our heads. But the same problem crops up when we inquire into our shared understanding of the nature of the empirical data, its scientific structure. 10 physicists making use of the same mathematical calculations based on the same qualitative variables to prove the same physical world for us all come up with varying pictures, which fortunately goes unnoticed in most mundane situations of applying empirical knowledge. Its when we shift our social activities away from the highly abstractive and conventionalized vocabulary of mathematics or natural science to political and ethical domains of engagement that we discover the implications of our varying pictures.
On this terrain of opinion, assuming there is a same world ends up forcing us into a moralism of blame and culpability, based on the seeming failure of persons to believe correctly.
Polarized political communities, believing the other side is absorbing the same basic facts as they are from the same empirical world out there, has no recourse but to cast aspersions on the other sides intentions. This results is accusations of deception, greed, evil intent, brainwashing, motivated stupidity.
Quoting Banno
Let me first comment on Lawson. I just read a chunk of his book, Closure, and my conclusion is that his approach fits comfortably into the New Materialist wing of realism, in spite of his claim to be anti-realist. Karen Barad gives a flavor for the nature of the opposition between this group and poststructuralist anti-realists like Foucault:
Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every thingeven materialityis turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on matter do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the
extent to which matters of fact (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.
If the subject were a still life with flowers, vases, glasses and fruit, for example, and the instruction to represent every item, I have no doubt that most people would do that, which shows that people see the same things.
I think that's right. Painting is likely to depart from realism when the deliberate stylization (expressionist, impressionist, etc) result in aesthetic variation. But this isn't because the artists see the flowers differently, it's because they depict them using a particular style.
@Joshs seems to be arguing that we paint differently, therefore there are no truths.
Hu?
They've just been deflated till they're flat as pancakes.
I've deleted that exchange. Kindly desist.
The postmodernist who best represents the obscurity I have in mind is Derrida; his idea of the endless deference of meaning I find unconvincing and his writing generally impenetrable on account of the ambiguity and arcane references. When his philosophy is boiled down to its central ideas, it seems neither groundbreaking nor insightful.
So, I would say " too obscure" rather than "too complex", and I doubt it is possible to formulate "a clear understanding", and even if it were I doubt it would be worth the effort, since it seems to be mostly sophistry. I know what you mean by "finding it fascinating"; it does have a kind of poetic fascination in its eccentric wordplay, and perhaps the language can be enjoyed just for its own sake.
From the little I have read of their work; I find Foucault and Deleuze are much more philosophically interesting. I am yet to read Rorty; I have had Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature on my shelves for years and am yet to get around to reading it.
I like the utopic vision expressed in the quote; probably a pipe dream, but a nice one, nonetheless.
:up:
Quoting Banno
Yes, or that we don't see the same things, which I guess amounts to the same thing.
I noticed that some of the innate characteristics of English carry philosophical or perhaps meta-linguistic implications which are barely noticed by speakers, as it's woven into their way of speaking.
One example arises from the propositional structure of the language which differs from the inflected languages like Latin, where the declensions of verbs are given in the verb suffix rather than distinct particles 'I', 'we', 'they' etc. The effect of this is seen, for example, in the expression 'it is raining', which suggest 'an object which rains'. (This is something I remember Alan Watts commenting on.) What is the 'it' that rains? Really there is no such object, there is simply 'raining' but the structure of our language is such that it has to be expressed in those terms. This underlying structure tends to make English a rather transactional language, comprising objects, subjects and activities, which reflects a somewhat 'atomised' conception of reality, rather than imparting a sense of flow or union which is suggested in other languages.
In a more general sense, I often reflect on the paucity of current English for dealing with what I consider some essential philosophical ideas and distinctions, particularly in the area of metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Indeed, both those are nowadays 'boo words' which carry a lot of historical baggage and provoke the associated responses. Another such word is 'spiritual', which is used in a very broad sense to denote a kind of non-specific religious sensibility. But I know from Buddhist studies that there's actually no word corresponding to 'spiritual' in Buddhism, and likewise that many of the key words in the Buddhist lexicon (dharma, dukkha, sa?s?ra, vijnana, many others) have no single-word equivalent in English. Instead they are mapped against what are thought to be their equivalents, often derived from the Christian lexicon, against which they're really not a good fit.
The way I have come to understand it is that there are domains of discourse within which words derive their meaning. I don't know if there is anything like a universal language in that sense (although maths and physics would come close, but they're not languages in the sense being discussed.) Hence the significance of hermeneutics, which is mainly aimed at understanding language within its particular domain of discourse.
Well, no; they all looked at the same vase, but it looked different to each of them.
Have you seen how 15th century Japanese, Chinese or Indian artists conveyed photographic reality? You might say they preferred not to render the world with photo realism, but then what about early Western art? Such inventions as perspective , unifying a scene via a single light source , the understanding of the interaction of color, human proportionality( not rendering children to look like miniature adults) were not incorporated in older periods of art. You might say that artists came to understand how to convey the real world more accurately over time, whereas Id say that their pictorial constructions of the world changed not by better approximating it but by shifting their worldview to accord with changing purposes.
Where do we have an example of same , of identity, to draw from in coming to that conclusion? What is the origin of this understanding of sameness?
Quoting Joshs
I'd say that people came to understand the principles of perspective and to explore image-making in accordance with these newfound principles, and then later came to deliberately represent things in ways that contravene those principles. Photographs do not contravene the principles of perspective, though, and those principles do best formulate how we normally see things.
If we want to discover whether people see the same things and features of things all we have to do is ask. It is a commonplace fact that people do see the same things including relatively insignificant features of things, and this can easily be proven if they are asked to look closely and report what they see.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's obvious; the sky rains.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're leaving out half of the picture: it's not just domains of discourse, but the domains of experience which give the domains of discourse sense. You cannot have a language game without the commonality of experience that provides something to talk about.
Quoting Joshs
Simply the bit where you specified in your own example that they looked at the same vase:Quoting Joshs
We do this sort of thing all the time, without problem. You read the same post I wrote. You are on the same forum as I am. You seem to think it problematic, and hence the scare quotes. But in doing that, you are presuposing the problem you think you are arguing for.
The it = It is the case that it is raining? :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
That's an interesting example worth noting.
Quoting Wayfarer
This echoes what Richard Rorty says about truth as being the product of a domain of discourse rather than attached to 'reality'. Which potentially brings us back to Lawson's point about language not being connected in a discernable way to reality.
Which may lead one to thinking this (Rorty this time):
But we also need a boiling kettle.
Try Heidegger then.
I believe that, indeed, as was said in the 1980 Cerisy conference, there is a point at which between what I am attempting and what Heidegger did, there is no difference in terms of content. One can very well retranslate the entirety-I'm speaking hypothetically here-one can retranslate the entirety of the thinking of the trace or of writing into the thinking of being. One can do this translation. At that point, only one difference will remain, which some may deem extrinsic, namely, a difference in style, tone, gesture, manner, pathos. But from the point of view of content, if it could be isolated, one can translate one into the other, and so reduce everything I'm doing to one paragraph in Heidegger's work... This gesture would consist, obviously, would presuppose the erasure of questions of tone, language, posture, gesture, as secondary questions. Ok. And of idiom! Of linguistic idiom, as well.. Which I, for one, would not be ready to do so easily (Derrida on Heidegger)
Quoting Janus
Its not sophistry, its highly rigorous philosophy. Im sorry you dont understand him but dont blame the messenger for your failure to understand the message.
Yes, that's another way of looking at it. But it remains true that when it is raining it is the sky or the cloud, if you like, that is raining.
Quoting Tom Storm
He is thinking only of truth or falsity as attributes of propositions or sentences. There is a more ancient understanding of truth as actuality or "alethia". Heidegger revives this idea. Also, there is the idea of truth as "hitting the mark" and in that sense our perceptions can be true or not.
Do they? I thought they were more crafty. I thought they were more likely to accept that there is empirical justification for holding that (in this example) something is happening, subject to a contingent activities and discourse. A kettle and boiling would work in English and pragmatically if you are steaming a hat or making tea, etc. But what do I know?
Psychologists have tools for this , such as Rorschach tests. They reveal how striking different one persons sense of the relevant meaning of a thing is from another persons. Dont confuse conventional language, which is designed to hide these differences, from the differences themselves.
Nah. A deflationary account of truth is compatible with either realism or anti-realism.
Quoting Joshs
Right, I already know that is your opinion. It's not mine. Is there a fact of the matter as to whether Derrida's work is "highly rigorous philosophy"? If he is, then you should be able to explain in clear language just what he is saying in that passage you quoted.
I have no problem with ambiguity in poetry; in fact, I would say it is a hallmark of good or interesting poetry. I don't think the same way about philosophy. I have no trouble understanding (early) Heidegger, Kant or Hegel, Husserl, Foucault, Deleuze, Wittgenstein or Merleau Ponty, but Derrida is a different beast. Even Foucault said (in a conversation with Searle) that much of what Derrida writes is gobbledygook.
I'll take my previous comment in this post back, seeing as how we don't really need another pissing competition, and just say that I find the antirealist arguments difficult to follow.
It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do.
Whether she sees them in just the same way you do, and if not, how does it differ is another question altogether: and one for which there can be no definitive answer, since comparison is obviously impossible. Since you and she are different organisms, we can safely assume that there will be differences, even if we cannot say what they are.
Derrida is saying, at a minimum, that "tone, language, posture, gesture," are philosophically important -- else he wouldn't have written what he wrote, since Heidegger already wrote it.
But also that provides a clue into reading his philosophy: start with Heidegger, and then try and read what's different.
On the surface, at least, they both seem to share a certain suspicion of categorization. The present-at-hand and presence perform similar roles in that they have a non-visual complement -- the ready-to-hand and absence, which are meant to show how our phenomenology and language rely upon not just the metaphysics of presence, but this other unexamined side as well.
The tone, though! What a difference! Heidegger the joyless and serious spiritual questor for a Truth long forgotten, vs. the joyful and playful linguist. And in a way this makes sense with the above because tone, language, posture, and gesture are the absent components of writing in looking at language from the perspective of the metaphysics of presence.
When I hear the word same I read it as similar. I find
Husserls phenomenological analyses of the construction of empirical objects helpful here. According to Husserl, in my perceptual experience of the world, my empathetic connection with an intersubjective community in the form of apperception of alter egos leads to an objective social space in which each individual believes himself to be living in the same world, in which his own perceptions are mere appearances of the identical things that everyone else experiences. But this sense of my own perception as mere appearance of what is factually the same for everyone is the appearance for me of what can never be actually identical. The ways in which I apperceptively fuse others perceptual contributions to the constitution of objects with my own perceptual adumbrations will always provide me with constituted appearances of things which are unique to my own construing, even as I calls these personally construed appearances a mere representation of the true world, identical for everyone.
Quoting Janus
Is there a fact of the matter about anything? I can explain Derrida in clear language but that doesnt mean youll understand it. Clarity follows conceptual apprehension rather than preceding it. Look, if you tell me you dont get Derrida because his style of writing is too aleatory or digressive or whatnot, I can respect that. I also think his style is too aleatory and digressive, and that he has less to say than Heidegger. But at least add a qualifier if youre going to claim he is just a sophist with nothing substantive to say, something like I worry that his work may be not more than sophistry.
You say you have no trouble understanding early Heidegger. Heres your chance to prove it. Have you read Derridas deconstruction of Heidegger in Heidegger and the Question? He lays out a clear series of points of disagreement with Heidegger, on Animality, questioning and oppositional thinking. These critical remarks have had quite an influence on Heidegger scholarship. Do they amount to just sophistry? Heidegger may have been the more original thinker, but I do think Derrida went beyond him. And since I think Heidegger was the greatest 20th century philosopher, that says a lot.
But this doesn't go beyond the realm of speculation. Notice that you're giving an account of the nature of reality, but you don't have the transcendent vantage point implied by the narrative.
Why arent you talking about relevant meanings? Is there such a thing as a neutral meaning, divorced from relevance? This is crucial to understanding how we construct sense and language. Heideggers thesis in Being and Time centers around the fact that how things matter to us is not separable from what they are in themselves. Extracting a neutral fact of the matter is an artificially worked up act.
Quoting frank
Its a phenomenological analysis based on what actually appears to me, using the method of the epoche, or bracketing, of presuppositions concerning the empirically factual world. From a naive vantage, I see empirical objects existing in the same world as others,but from a more rigorous vantage, after having bracketed what is contingent and relative in my experience of the world, what remains for me are synthesizing processes that correlate never-repeating elements of experience based on patterns of perceived similarities.
Sure. And that kind of data can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. There's no way to determine which is correct. It's fun to work on philosophical projects, but that fun is as far as it goes.
Quoting Joshs
And that doesn't get you to a transcendent vantage point. When phenomenology pretends to become ontology, it's language on holiday.
Rather than transcendence or correctness, such a method can bring us to an awareness of what appears to remain invariant throughout the changes in experience. If through this process we repeatedly discover that all specific contents are relative and contingent, then what remains invariant may be empty formal structures such as the synthetic relation between past, present and future. At the same time, such an awareness doesnt render conventional views of empiricism, objective truth and faith in a same world for everyone as incorrect. It simply allows us to enrich such concepts by revealing a basis for them that they are not explicitly aware of. In other words, by dropping the focus on truth as correct match between subject and world in favor of truth as the invariant features of our constructions of experience, we enrich concepts like material reality with the dimensions of self-reflexivity and interactive reciprocity.
So, when you read the word 'same' you hear it as 'different'? Is that possible without some notion of 'same' that maintains the distinction between 'same' and 'similar'?
That would require a transcendent vantage point which is unavailable. There's no basis for perception being revealed, but just a parade of myths, metaphors, and speculations, which is fine. It's just not ontology.
Quoting Joshs
We should have long since dropped "truth as a correct match between subject and world." That's correspondence theory. It has a infinite regress at its sprouting point. If you're looking for something rigorous, look into the ways logician's have demolished correspondence as the measure of truth, and the same rigor would do away with any other theory, including that truth is the invariant features of our constructions of experience.
This is what I'm saying, you've arrived at the crossroads of AP and continental philosophy. What do you do next?
There is also the sense of true as straight. Carpentry uses the term in this way. Related to this is 'orthodoxy' - straight opinion, and 'orthodontry' - straight teeth. There is also the distinction in the Hebrew Bible between those whose ways and words are straight or crooked. The root of the word 'crook'.
Quoting Fooloso4
As you know, similar is a species of difference, as is disparate, homologous, analogous, synonymous, opposite. Identity and same are also species of difference. Unlike similar, people tend to use the concepts of identity and same in circumstances (A=A) where difference goes unnoticed even when it implicitly forms the basis of the comparison. This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth.
Do you think your emotions determine what is true?
It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. Do I think such a mechanism determines what is true? No.
Conservatives like to say that facts don't care about our feelings. I think the arbiter of empirical validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world. Rather, empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment.
It raises the problem of what Aristotle called the indeterminate dyad .
The dyads include:
Limited and Unlimited
Same and Other
One and Many
Rest and Change
Eternity and Time
Good and Bad
Thinking and Being
Being and Non-being
Each side stands both together with and apart from the other. There is not one without the other.
Ultimately, there is neither this or that but this and that. The Whole is not reducible to One. The whole is indeterminate.
And yet we do separate this from that. Thinking and saying are dependent on making just such distinctions.
Well, there's your problem. "Same" and "similar" are not the same. Phenomenology will only add to such confusion.
You specified that multiple people were to draw the same vase. Not similar vases. Each will draw a different drawing, have a different perspective, give a different interpretation, of the same vase. This is not the same as each drawing a different vase.
Honestly, all this looks to be no more than vacillation on your part...
Quoting Joshs
Yes. That you are reading this, for example.
I have to say some of the nuances of philosophical thinking make me long for the simpler world of common sense delusions. I guess any idea can be picked apart using a given schema and will doubtlessly appear coherent to the acolyte. What I find most challenging is not knowing which way to go in matters like this. I suspect these rarified debates about the nature of reality and how language functions are primarily for the benefit of the cognoscenti, a bit like Star Trek lore or stamp collecting.
Quoting Banno
Same and similar are two of many species of difference.
Did you read this?
similar is a species of difference, as is disparate, homologous, analogous, synonymous, opposite. Identity and same are also species of difference. Unlike similar, people tend to use the concepts of identity and same in circumstances (A=A) where difference goes unnoticed even when it implicitly forms the basis of the comparison. This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth.
Not at all. Of course our cognition can be affected by emotions in a great many ways. The brain has a quite interconnected structure. Certainly my desire to understand the weirdness of my brain played a huge role in me studying relevant science, resulting in me being quite confident that I have a more up to date perspective on the subject than you do.
Do you think there is any significance to whether a person has looked into the relevant science or not?
Interesting. But I find that a distinction can be made between necessary dyads and unnecessary dyads (however it would be best to lignuistically distinguish them). As an example of this distinction:
Left and right form what I've termed a necessary dyad. It is impossible in all cases and at all times to have one devoid of the other's occurrence (same with up and down and many other dyads).
On the other hand, love and hate give an example of what I've tentatively termed "an unnecessary dyad": yes, they stand in direct opposition to each other as a dichotomy and therefore comprise one set, but: while one cannot ever hate in manners fully devoid of love - namely, of love for that which is valued, typically one's own self - a person can potentially experience love in manners fully devoid of hate for anything (at least transiently). So, unlike left and right, while hate necessitates love in all cases, love will not likewise necessitate hate.
Quoting Fooloso4
Getting back into cosmology :razz: , in cosmological models wherein [s]some[/s] the absolute state of being is equated to pure (cosmic) love - maybe such as the Neo-platonic notion of "the One"? - the unnecessary dyad of love-hate terminates in manners where only love remains at the expense of all hate. So that the Whole here can be theoretically reducible to One - this due to not all dyads being a matter of "this and that" (some in fact being "this or that"). [Other possible cases of unnecessary dyads might also be potentially discerned.]
p.s., yes, deep down, I'm sincerely philosophically minded about this issue of opposites. Though I'm not sure that if fits in with the thread's theme.
I hope that, that you are reading this, now, is not something of which you need philosophical reassurance.
So apparently the idea is that @Josh takes a group of folk into a room with one vase, asking them to draw the vase, and supposedly the differences between the drawings show that there never was only one vase, but instead a multitude of vase-phenomena.
And to back that up, we must be told that
Quoting Joshs
...as if Joshs did not really mean there to be only one vase in the room.
Seems to me that there is a clear sense in which two folk can each draw a different picture of the same vase. Joshs seems to deny this. To me, that reeks of sophistry.
No, that much I don't find problematic.
Quoting Banno
I don't take @Joshs for a sophist and perhaps that's not what you meant. I think he has a very particular and complex frame of reference for these matters, which are not necessarily intuitive or easy to describe (outside of a domain of discourse). Or compatible with other ways of describing the world (for want of a better phrase). I think he is saying in essence that reality is co-created and that we can't take any particular account for granted. What we see is partly, or largely, based on our suppositions and the very words we use. I don't think he is saying there is no truth but that there are contingent truths that they are not all compatible and generally align with particular worldviews or 'value systems'. Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity?
Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.
Quoting Tom Storm
Seems to me that if one were to follow antirealist ideas into ethics, one would be setting aside any such ethical truths, just as for ontology. Putin, not Christ, is the consequent.
OK, I got the idea, but I want to know why and how they are philosophically important. If all he did was paraphrase Heidegger in even more obscure language, why would I bother to read him instead of Heidegger, since the latter would afford the same insights with less effort on my part?
Quoting Moliere
If you've made the effort to penetrate Derrida's philosophy, and Heidegger's, to the point where you can understand both sufficiently to be able to see the difference between the two, then I can only take my hat off to you.
Quoting Moliere
I understand the difference between vorhandenheit und zuhandenheit, and I think that is a valuable phenomenological insight, but it is also an example of categorization.
Although I should point out that my understanding is that the former is a reflective presence, while the latter is not so much an absence as it is a transparence. The hammer becomes "invisible" when I use it, but it is there nonetheless. This is also foreshadowed by the ideas of the conscious and the unconscious, or the explicit and the implicit. I am not consciously or explicitly aware of the hammer as I use it, but its presence in my hand is unconscious and implicit.
Now, I can talk about these ideas in plain language, but I cannot think of any of Derrida's ideas that I could do the same with, unless they come to seem trivial. Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong. Logocentrism was foreshadowed by Klages, and the irony is that there is no philosopher more logocentric (or logorrheic) than Derrida. Are there any other of Derrida's ideas that can be explained in plain language, while remaining insighful and not becoming trivial? This is a genuine question since I have never penetrated far into the Derrida landscape, and so cannot claim to know that there could not be anything there that I've missed.
Quoting Moliere
If you find Derrida joyful to read, then that's great: it's always good to find something joyful to read. I've tried to read him and don't find it joyful at all.
Quoting Joshs
I see no reason to think that if you could explain Derrida in clear language that I would be unable to understand it. Give it a go and we'll see.
Quoting Joshs
I was arguing that people seeing the same vase, when they paint it, and in support of that I made the point that people will agree on small and precise features of objects if questioned. You have not addressed that argument but have instead changed the subject.
Right, I think it is obvious that reality, if we mean what is experienceable (which we should, since we cannot talk about what is not experienceable, except to make groundless speculations about what we imagine might be the case), is "co-created". Although we do know from experience that we cannot make the process by which we are affected such as to experience the world of phenomena, from which we infer a shared empirical world, so there is a sense in which we have no say in the creation of the phenomena we experience.
The co-creation part comes in with the socially., culturally and linguistically mediated interpretations that produce the model we call "the external world". But let us not forget the more primordial biologically and semiotically mediated dimensions, which we have in common with other organisms. Shall we say that other organisms also co-create their Umwelts?
It seems there is a lot of co-creation going onperhaps it is co-creation all the way down. :wink:
No, it was a provocation about the relativistic dimensions of postmodern thinking. But your point is interesting.
Quoting Banno
And given Putin' s war is blessed by the church, they are perhaps not so far apart in some people's worldviews. But that's a separate problem. I agree that foundational thinking (of which morality must be a form) is impossible in the land of the dead metanarrative.
Quoting Banno
Yes. It's easy to throw out babies with bathwater. The other (and similar) position is to argue that since truth can't be taken for granted or even identified (whether it exists or not) why worry about it?
Quoting Janus
Nicely done. Agree. Reality, such as it, is is embodied cognition.
Quoting Janus
The other option is confusions all the way down. That seems fairly popular too. On a separate note, I did hear a philosopher (I forget who ) in a guided discussion on truth saying, 'What's wrong with endless recursion, anyway?' Not a notion we hear very often. I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source.
Confusion all the way down...I like that!
I'm not so keen on Rorty's relativism, or at least I think it only applies to the relatively minor moral values, like the age of sexual consent, general social etiquette, the ethics of taking mind-altering substances and so on. When it comes to the really significant moral valuescondemnation of murder, rape, torture, theft and so onI think they do find their source in social pragmatics. On that connection though, we have to also acknowledge that we are not yet a global village, and maybe never will be.
It is just plain wrong , and it is not what Derrida is saying. First of all, differerance doesnt just refer to words, it refers to all forms of experience. Second , Derrida isnt arguing that the chain of referential meanings of words leads to an infinite regress. Youre just offering a confused mishmash of Saussurian linguistic structuralism here. For Derrida, performing a deconstructive analysis of a culture milieu reveals intricate, stable patterns and themes.
Quoting Janus
The differences in how each painted vase looks gives more insight into how individuals are interpreting it than their verbal agreement on small and precise details. One can agree with others on small and precise details because those small and precise details are couched in abstractive linguistic terms that cover over all sorts of subtle differences in the sense of what those small and precise terms mean to each person. This flattening of individual difference is what language is designed to do, in order to foster communication. Thats why we have to employ more intricate means of determining exactly how someone means their use of a small and precise term. Heidegger never said that in using a hammer, the hammer itself as a present to hand object can be extracted and separated from the sense of how it is used. The difference in the appearance of the vase in each persons rendering of it reveals the intricate differences in how those agreed upon small and precise terms are being used. ( You still think I was changing the subject, or do you now see the connection?)
[
Quoting Tom Storm
Thats a cartoon version of relativism that Rorty often made fun of , and which is why he rejected the label of relativist.
Within a given cultural , ethical or scientific milieu, there is a certain dynamic stability of shared values which makes possible agreement on matters of common concern. This is why scientists are able to reach consensus, technologists are able to build machines, there can be agreement on legal matters.
Wasn't meant to be a cartoon, it's simply what I hear when I read him put it like this:
- Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
It's not my intention to misrepresent him.
Quoting Joshs
I'm happy to hear it.
If that is so, then provide a textual reference which unlike the one you did provide is not a mere apologetic, lacking any argument for why we should not think that his work is as I said it is. Also explain how differance could refer to experience, and cite where Derrida says this.
It's easy enough for a relativist to simply claim, without actually backing it up with an argument, that they are not a relativist, even though their works as interpreted certainly seem to fit the bill.
Here's where my in-between-ness will be a handicap more than a help. I started on Derrida a long time ago before I was really able to comprehend him, and I still struggle. I wanted to understand what the fuss was all about given these two impressions of Derrida I had. At this point I think I've read enough to be able to say that I'm persuaded he's got a good philosophical point, but I don't feel enough confidence to say "And you should bother to read him too", because I'm still a bit shaky on some of the concepts. He's a pretty hard philosopher in the same way Nietzsche is hard because they don't come right out and say their point. Even Heidegger, in his circuitous way, was clearer than both.
Further, I know with certainty there's others who are better at Heidegger than I. I have a reading on B&T, but that's about it.
So it could very well be that Heidegger says the exact same thing in a different way, but I'm just picking up some of the bits from Derrida and some of the bits from Heidegger.
On the whole Heidegger's political orientation at least makes me interested in a re-expression of his philosophical ideas. I think there's something there, but I also think that Heidegger's romanticism is the bad kind of romanticism. Derrida, while playful, doesn't seem dressed up in the romantic gestures of Heidegger towards a forgotten past where only a God can save us from ourselves as much as he's looking towards a future. But that's just a seeming on my part, and not what you're asking after.
Quoting Janus
True -- but it's a category meant to disrupt the old categories of being-as-presence, as if presence is the whole of metaphysics. This act of revealing/creating categories which our present categories are reliant upon is the similar connection I see between the two thinkers. For Heidegger the question of being, and for Derrida the same -- only Derrida continues this move to other categories within other texts because he believes that Heidegger trips across something which he, as a lecturer on the history of philosophy for his day job, sees occuring throughout texts within the canon. Rather than a phenomenological reflection, though, he turns this into a reflection upon texts to attempt to demonstrate this pattern of the super-transcendental, in a way -- categories without name. And since there's this idea going on that categories don't capture being, but rather set it out in a certain way, and since we only have categorization to utilize within philosophy to set this out, this is the reason for the difficulty in the writing of Derrida -- he's trying to say what normally cannot be said and becomes yet another part of the super-transcendental.
At least that's where my thoughts go about. As I said in my opening I'm not at the level of saying "And this is why you should read him", only at the level of being persuaded there's something worth studying there.
I think that question a step too high for me. I'd have to read more to make the point definitive. I can justify my interest, but I'm not so certain I can justify everyone else's interest. There's a lot of philosophy out there, after all, and only one life to live.
So you might wonder how we get from this relativistic web to anything that can be considered to evolve or improve, much less to anything that can offer any stable grounds for making distinctions. The answer is that, just as what we consider a solid object is actually a web of such relations on the quantum level, so are larger social and empirical understandings. But just like our use of the fiction we call a solid object, our use of cultural and empirical knowledge allows us to anticipate changes in the world around us in reasonably stable way.
It also allows us to see the revolutionary paradigm shifts from one era of science to the next as an improvement. This is how Rorty puts it in What Do You Do When They Call You a 'Relativist'?
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Try this. Its only 6 pages:
What Do You Do When They
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Empedocles claimed that Love and Strife are active principles of the universe. In the Metaphysics Aristotle says:
In the same section of the Metaphysics Aristotle says:
The dyads are not simply concepts about the world, they are regarded as principles of the world.
Quoting javra
With regard to 'necessity', Plato's Timaeus identifies two kinds of cause, intelligence and necessity, nous and ananke (???????). Necessity covers such things as physical processes, contingency, chance, motion, power, and the chora. What is by necessity is without nous or intellect. It is called the wandering cause (48a). It can act contrary to nous.
Aristotle says:
With regard to the theme of the thread, the sensible world, the world of becoming, is neither regulated by intellect nor fully intelligible. Thus there can be no map of the world.
Relativism appears to be built into thought itself, as we mentioned earlier wrt science.
:up:
Perhaps I can find middle ground between you and @Joshs --- though I do embrace the notion of the vase, worldly and social and objective.
To me language is primordially (automatically, inescapably) worldly and social, so that there must be the the vase. But the vase for Alice Vanity and the vase for Mr. Flowers are both also different objects in the world. We can talk about them, include them in our reasoning, relating them perhaps to an 'actual' vase.
One crucial difference between the the vase and the the vase for me is the differing role of both objects in inferences. For instance, I am not held to the same standards for supporting assertions about the vase-for-me, since I am (usually tacitly) understood to have a kind of incorrigible access to that vase.
More generally, I think a giant chunk of philosophical debate/confusion comes from our oddly stereoscopic situation. Our language has evolved to be more 'we' than 'me,' but it's still the individual nervous system through which the linguistically public world is accessed. One is tempted to say (absurdly) that the world is a dream thrown up by the nervous system (which has now become homeless.)
To me it seems that philosophy is science is a high but not unpopular sense. Its loss of status seems to be an effect of our worship of technology. Moloch doesn't give us much choice, and perhaps we should confess that we have shown, as a species, a greater regard for engineering than we have for science.
In other words, logical norms are legitimate, but the 'rhetoric' of power is overwhelming. I can't afford to not use a money-making war-winning algorithm, even if I don't understand it. In our complex economy, we are constantly forced to specialists on topics we don't have time to learn about ourselves. As @apokrisis mentioned elsewhere, it costs energy to ask questions.
So maybe philosophers are a mostly ignored priesthood, who might as well be stampcollectors in the context of the way we live now. IMO, politicians are junkfood 'applied' philosophers who are nevertheless effective precisely through easily understood oversimplifications.
Quoting Tom Storm
Dont believe it. As someone who works in the field of mental health, you may appreciate the fact that every major shift in approach to psychotherapy is directly linked to the outcome of these rarified debates. For instance, Freudian psychoanalysis is grounded in a certain form of realist materialism . Client -centered approaches rebelled against the authoritarianism this thinking authorized by tapping into existentialist strains of philosophy. Beck and Elliss cognitive therapies relied on a form of realism by deeming emotional distress to be the product of irrational thinking. Enactive cogntivism dumps this language of correspondence with one of adaptivity, due in large part to the influence of Pragmatist and phenomenological influences from philosophy.
Cool. Thanks for the essay.
Yes, I do appreciate this and I understand something of the source material. We know our ideas can be tracked back to other ideas. What I am referring to however is that most of us don't have the inclination to 'look under the hood and tinker with the engine.' :wink:
Yes, I think I see this and agree. As I said earlier, most of us probably recognize we are tied to a world of ideas and platforms built by our ancestors. But we take this as a given and move on. We don't have the disposition for exploration, nor the foundational knowledge to be of any use in unpicking those ideas and imagining alternatives. Except perhaps is a strictly transactional way through incremental improvements in politics and how we conduct our businesses. Or something like that.
I dont think youre missing much. Philosophy was an acquired taste for me. And to this day my favorite thinker is not an academic philosopher but a psychotherapist and personality theorist, George Kelly. Sure, one could translate his ideas into a full-fledged philosophical treatise, but thats just dressing up the language and tying it with a bow.
I've in mind something along the lines of the analysis of simples in Philosophical Investigations, §48 and thereabouts. You have some understanding of Wittgenstein. Hilary Lawson seems not to have moved past the Tractatus.
I do not wish to conclude that there is a vase, since that there is exactly one vase is taken as granted in @Joshs' story. I am just pointing to the error in concluding either that there are only vase-phenomena or that there are no true sentences about the vase.
But folk hereabouts pay little heed to the logical consequences of their positions, preferring to "double down" and keep painting false pictures. Making shit up instead of thinking things through.
OK, I'll take a look.
Thank you for this, but I'm not sure I follow. What are you saying this tells us about language? That its relationship with the world is one of an irreducible dyad? Can you expand this point a little?
There is just the ordinary worldly vase, at least at first, for then one can contemplate the vase-for-Alice as a private-internal object. Our public language allows for private objects which are nevertheless understood to be in one and the same world. (My dream of a purple bear is in your world, even if you don't access in the same way I do. It's caught up in the same inferential system.)
I gather you are familiar with the private language argument?
Your purple bear is no longer private.
:up:
I agree, though a few do have the obsessive disposition for inquiries into foundations. So there's a trickle of what I'd call genuine science that is mostly not respected, perhaps not even called science. I don't want to be a sentimentalist here. I also mostly want to the tool that will scratch my back, even if I also enjoy Husserl, say, more than most.
Yes, I know the PLA and find it convincing, etc. Also, I lean toward direct realism.
The private object is just the object of representationalism. Maybe it's like phlogiston or ether (a bad posit), but it has a role in the philosophical language game. I lean toward an inferentialist semantics.
A less philosophical example would be a dream or a toothache. We might speculate that a performance of Heartbreak Hotel was subpar because Elvis had a toothache at the time.
Well, that at least might be a different approach. How would it work?
I was just trying to speak from within the indirect realist perspective. So none of this will be new to you. It'll just be us finding words in common.
For them, the private object is the given, the most undeniably real and present. Then the public world is a hypothetical construction from all of these streams of experience. 'The' vase with the red flower is a useful abstraction, perhaps a fiction, used to organize a plurality of red-flower-experiences.
This view is problematic for a number of reasons, but it's the official philosophical cliche.
A neat summation of a basic flaw that is rampant hereabouts. Do you see it in @Joshs story?
I wouldn't say it is a hypothetical construction; it is rather a logical entailment; if we can all agree on the minutest details about objects, then it follows that the objects must have some kind of independent existence, either just brutely existent, or on account of our minds being conjoined in some way we have no awareness of. In either case the objects do not depend on any particular mind, and so are mind independent in at least that sense.
I tend to agree with Josh in spirit, but on this issue he may not give the world enough attention. We experience the [ same ] red flower differently (in a series of adumbrations perhaps).
The world exist through/for different individual nervous systems (which are themselves in and of that world.) It's a bit like a Möbius strip. I don't think it can be reduced in either direction. Hence the 'lifeworld' as (if we need one) the realest or most basic world.
Even here it's something that one argues for. One takes the arguing self and its voice as given and only then reasons, from that foundation, to a shared world.
But for me the logical norms and a meaningful language (two aspects of the same phenomenon) used to prove the world are both implicitly self-transcending and already worldly, already assume the world.
To me the self is no more given than the world. They come together even. A meaningful language 'is' a world.
I agree with you that logic and language are both self and world transcending and yet worldly, because without prior sensory experience no logic or language would be possible. This is captured nicely in Kant's idea of the synthetic a priori; it is synthetic in that it is synthesized from experience and yet is transcendentally prior in that, once synthesized, it needs no longer to be checked against the world.
There is a sense in which I would agree that a meaningful language is a world: as I often say I think the world is a collective representation. We don't actually experience a world; it is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience. I think animals also synthesize their Umwelts in the same kind of way, and in that sense, they have their own circumscribed worlds, so I don't see it as being wholly dependent on language, except in the reflexive phase. Without that ability to synthesize an Umwelt, language would not be possible in the first [place.
Quite a few folk say that. What is it you are agreeing with? Searle explicitly agrees with Hilary Lawson that our language is a construct, but points out the error of concluding that therefore the world is a construct. @Joshs seems to repeat that error.
I don't see how to make this right. Things are generally not dependent on one's nervous system for their existence.
The Greek term logos gives us a better sense of the problem then 'language'. What is at issue is the logic of saying, a logos of logos. The ability to give a comprehensive account. It is addressed in Plato's Sophist:
To count rest, change, and being as three would be mistaken. Being is a higher order than rest and change. It is not a third thing to be counted alongside them.
The Stranger identifies five Kinds. In addition to change, rest, and being, there is sameness and difference (Sophist 254c)
Sameness and difference is the most comprehensive indeterminate dyad.
Contrary to Parmenides, the Stranger says that it is not possible to give an account of being without introducing non-being. Non-being is understood as otherness or difference.
There can be no comprehensive account of being without a comprehensive account of non-being. But what is other is without limit and cannot be comprehended. On the one hand this means that there can never be a comprehensive account of the whole, but on the other, it encourages an openness to what might be; beyond our limits of comprehension.
The world (for us) is experienced through or with or by the human body. This body is of course encompassed by the world it knows. The lifeworld is the everyday world of people with jobs and parents and promises and jokes. The scientific image exists within this world (along with labs and grants and journals), a mere fragment, along with outlandish metaphysical theories.
While we are alive within functioning bodies and a functioning sedimented culture, we can contemplate mathematical models that point before our own arrival and beyond our likely extinction. I'll grant that this is weird. The individual nervous system is obviously not important for holding the world together unless it happens to be my own. So far as I know, the world that can be talked about is always for a body (seen through a particular pair of eyes, smelled with a particular nose, etc.) It is still the world, our world -- as our language inexorably insists.
I understand why one would say this, but I'd counter that impressions and sounds and so on only make sense within a tacitly accepted framework on an animal in an environment.
Quoting Janus
I agree. I'd also note here that 'sensorily' takes the sense organs existing in an environment for granted. What I call the constructive approach seems to want to take an interior as given and construct the exterior from this interior --but this conception of an interior seems to quietly depend on common sense.
As you note, the concept of the self co-arises with the concept of others and the shared world. As Sellars might put it, there's no such thing as understanding a single concepts. Meaning lives largely in the relationships between concepts (for instance, in their inferential relationships.)
Quoting Janus
I agree with you. I've been on a Husserl jag, and it's made me appreciate the 'hardware' of the individual body. Language as tribal software is something like a collectively accumulated set of reasoning skills. The historically sedimented tribe as a whole thinks through my individual brain, though not without addition and modification. But the body has to be enculturated, through its senseorgans,etc. Language depends on these bodies, but our knowing this is the case depends on both language and these bodies in nature.
I take this synthetic apriori as the generation of hypotheses from experience. But I'd say such knowledge is fallible. We may act on it without checking (and surely we do), but it could turn out to be wrong. Math might be an exception, but that gets us into the weeds of the philosophy of mathematics.
Quoting Banno
Roughly, I think the continental philosophers are brilliant but sometimes indulge themselves and go too far in their language. Perhaps the essence of self-consciousness is becoming more and more aware of the subjects contribution or even construction of reality. But one can't forget the raw material entirely, or overlook the fact that language is fundamentally worldly and social.
For instance, I mostly agree with:
Quoting Joshs
But I'd also emphasize our having been thrown into something more or less given. We reason from what is more or less taken for granted by the community toward something nonobvious or even counterintuitive. More practically, reality is not infinitely malleable. Our interpretations (our worldmaking techniques ) are constrained. Without calories and oxygen, we die. Our environment rewards some techniques and ignores or punishes others. For this reason, I wouldn't call the environment constructed but only partially constructed. There's something like a deep layer that we are forced to deal with, though we can and will endlessly debate the details of stubborn giveness, at least while bloodsugar continues to flow through our brain, the famous glucose hog.
Or at least dependent on how much of the science of organism-and-environment has become common knowledge. (Phenomenalism as a philosophical approach being subtly dependent on knowing that the eye registers 2D images, that sort of thing.)
One way constructivism is right but misrepresents itself is in presenting the individual as constructing the world all by themselves, kinda from scratch, the mind as a perfect little scientist. It's true, of course, that each individual organism needs to construct their own, in some sense 'private', model of the world (and themselves in it), because that's what brain development just is, but it's not true that each organism constructs the framework they will use to construct the world from scratch. There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others.
That gives a pretty clear way of allowing that the world is a construction -- because there are just so many ways in which it obviously is -- but accounting for agreement among people of the same species, the same culture, and so on.
Ontogeny gets to recapitulate phylogeny rapidly because what used to be endlessly branching little pathways are now high-speed rails. As Hume put it, there are questions Nature has deemed too important to leave to our own fallible and imperfect reason.
How does each individual respond to their culture inheritance? Do they simply introject and internalize it? Does the culture enforce conformity on us through this inheritance? Or is it the case that even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture?
As George Kelly wrote:
Quoting plaque flag
Well, theres certainly SOMETHING that constrains our constructions, but arent biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible?
Why claim on the one hand that constructive processes ground and alter social phenomena, but that something called material nature is protected from such contestation?
Why not say that the material constraints are themselves species of discursive constraints?
This basically answers the question. Quick summary, we create language, then test it against reality. If reality does not contradict that language, then it is rational to hold it for as long as it does so.
I think your characterization is pretty good. It's obviously just false that people are locked into the culture, religion, morality, language, they are born into.
I don't know much of anything about what mechanisms psychologists hypothesize for cultural uptake. What I mean is, we can count on evolution leaving in place dispositions that generate a more or less predictable world model given a particular environment -- can't quite say niche with us because we are very adaptable and there appears to have been considerable selection pressure for adaptability and even evolvability. We generate the models we do because we're designed to generate them given the right sort of input, roughly. Evolution has some ideas about what sort of environment an organism needs to thrive in.
So how does something like that carry over to culture? Are the mechanisms of cultural uptake a repurposing of our basic model-building gear? I really have no idea.
Even evolution seems to leave us with only something like very strong tendencies. It makes it easy (both efficient and effective) to build the usual thing because here are the tools you need and the instructions. And obviously culture's hold on us is considerably weaker, and our interaction with it considerably richer, the way we reshape and extend our partial inheritance as we go.
Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture.
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Let me see if I can clarify what is at issue in the notion of same vase or same world for all. In my reading, the later Wittgenstein and post-Husserlian phenomenology complement each other in re-thinking the idea of a private experience. Witts focus on the emergence of meaning from discursive interaction locates linguistic sense in situated, contextual interpersonal responsive performances, while phenomenology turns perception into a discursive interaction between subjective and objective poles of an event of sense.
If one wants to argue, then, against the idea of sense as private, I am in agreement with Witt and phenomenology that discourse must by considered primary and grounding. That being the case, it seems to me that the idea of a same world for everyone is precisely the sort of thinking that the above philosophical perspectives put into question as relying on the assumption of a private sense. In order for such a notion to be coherent , we must be able to extract from particular vantages something not only common to them all but identically in common. That which is composed of identical parts is a kind of deistic entity, purely enclosed in itself as self-affecting. As Merleau-Ponty argues,
Now lets see how Philosophical Investigations discusses the relation between same, rule, agreement and identity.
Witt reveals same as the expression of a rule. The question then becomes what is involved in learning and obeying a rule that dictates something as the same.
According to Rouses reading of Witt, No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.On could say, then, that the rule for the use of the word same is instantiated in performances that are bound together by family resemblance, which means that they have no one thing in common.
And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from?
[quote=Kelly]The cultural control we see is one which is within the persons own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and persons manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.[/quote]
Didn't really respond to this. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure what "limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal" means. It sounds kinda like cultural determinism through the back door. Maybe it's just put a little too strongly here for my liking, but the focus on validation is itself interesting, since he's making the supposedly neutral pole of worldview construction (evidence, facts) the locus of something like cultural bias.
And in some sense that has to be right if you define a culture as what nobody contests, what everyone takes for granted -- that means, in effect, what counts as fact for that culture whether they conceptualize it that way or not. Interesting.
Quoting Fooloso4
I got you. Thanks.
Witt or Quine? Quine is famous for demonstrating that the ability to apply a rule in new circumstances has to be innate. You can't learn it.
What you are perhaps ignoring here is that the putting of a perspective into question already assumes a situation that one can be more or less right about. Discussion toward truth is discussion toward a shared reality. Equiprimordiality of self, others, world, language. Language is geared around worldly objects, the red flower.
As I started to argue here here, the minimal version of the world, for philosophers anyway, is that which we can be right or wrong about.
The philosopher Apel seems to have focused on the hyper-social nature of language. I found his ideas in Zahavi's work on Husserl.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
Yes. So the something is slippery. We might talk of a vast blanket of interdependent concepts and practices. It seems to me that we largely 'are' this blanket. We have no choice but take most of this world-navigating conceptuality for granted as world itself. We can put this or that piece of the mesh into question, but only by taking most of the mesh for granted.
:up:
Yes, this is basically my view. The hardware is inherited from Darwinian evolution (one kind of history). The software is inherited mostly from cultural (another kind of history.) Saussure thought in terms of language being somehow imprinted on individual brains (never exactly in the same way, but close enough.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:up:
I think Hegel saw cultural education the same way. What took the first explores a long time can be streamlined and summarized. So later individuals are like vampires, the true ancients -- fortunate heirs of thousands of years of timebinding (millions if you count the hardware.)
Note that this statement is aimed at the public concept of the rule for the use of the word 'same.'
The family resemblance point is well made, so maybe what they have in common is reference norm. The same word is used in many ways -- and will be used in ways that cannot be predicted.
FWIW, I grant some kind of radical open-endedness, a sort of frontier. For all our inheritance, there is always danger and novelty.
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, but I'd argue that such frameworks are inferentially synthesized by animals, including humans, from out of an initial "buzzing, blooming confusion", in their infancy. The framework just is the Unwelt or empirical world in the case of humans.
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Do you think that Kant's synthetic a priori derivation of the "pure forms of intuition" and categories of judgement could be mistaken (bearing in mind that they are only presented as being relevant to the context of human experience and judgement)?
Nothing so far supports the idea that we cannot say true things about the world.
Quoting Janus
As if we never actually taste the oyster; instead what we taste is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience.
No. That "synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience" is the taste of oysters.
The problem is set up by an excessive emphasis on "internal" and "external", and appears to be inherent in the phenomenological approach itself, from it's emphasis on direct experience.
You are attacking a strawman: I said we don't actually experience a world; I didn't say we don't actually experience oysters.
We do experience the world, one oyster at a time.
I understand that, on the contrary, Wittgenstein took use, not just discourse, as "primary and grounding". Not what we say, but what we do, is what makes the difference between following and running counter to a rule.
See the lines immediately after what you have quoted:
Indeed, that whole discussion follows on from §201, which I have been at pains to point to:
The difference is fundamental. There is more to this stuff than just narrative - there is the form of life, the fact of being embedded in the world, and so to our being both acted upon and acting upon it. Not just talking about it.
Hence use, not discourse.
Which takes us back to your use of "same".
What does not follow here is the never stated but only hinted reductio, that therefore, there was never a vase in the first place. But this reductio is what is needed if the story is to support some unspecified form of antirealism.
It remains that there may be one vase, which different folk see and report differently.
Hence the argument does not support your rejection of 's point, a repetition of Davidson's observation that we overwhelmingly agree as to what is the case.
And this in turn fits with Wittgenstein's analysis of doubt, in On Certainty. To doubt, we must hold some things as indubitable. A view not too far from Quine.
This is something we agree about. Discourse, or narrative, rules only in the arcane world of philosophy. Use, or doing, is the source of all narrative and discourse; much of the latter being post hoc.
So again, to the point Searle makes, that it does not follow that we cannot say anything true about the vase. We do not need antirealism.
We ought take care to avoid the problem identified by @Isaac and I, in which the model constructed by a neural network is confused with the world around us. Our neural nets do construct what is called a "model" of the world, consisting in various weightings of neural pathways or some such. But this is not what we experience.
So there is a view, more often implied that expressed, that what we perceive are such neural models. But that is mistaken; indeed, it is an iteration of the homunculus, this time with the little man looking at it's own neural pathways. Rather, those neural models constitute our perceiving.
That is, the folk looking at the vase see the vase, not each their own neural net.
So, these things, animals and plants stand out for us. They stand out for us by being different than their surroundings (and because they are pragmatically important to us in other ways). Their appearances and characteristics are as they are and cannot be altered by us. Animals have to deal with this inability to alter what is perceived just as we do. We, and the other animals can alter things to varying degrees by acting upon them.
Although we can access the existences of things only via the senses, we naturally infer that they exist independently of our senses in that they, in the case of plants, are always found where we last left them, or in the case of animals, their movements are consistent with what we observe of them. For example, they may leave tracks or other signs of their movements. So, the whole is a coherent realist story. Science is just an amplification of this kind of everyday experience and observation, and it has become a vast and mostly consistent story.
What we experience, though, are our representations that have resulted from the process, of which we cannot be conscious, of being sensorially affected. This does not contradict the idea that we experience animals and plants, because the animals and plants are, in one sense, the representations of which we are conscious, and in another sense are part of the process of what affected us sensorially to produce those representations, a process of which we cannot become conscious pre-representationally.
So, in one sense we can rightly say that we experience plants and animals, and in another sense, we can rightly say that we experience representations of plants and animals. These are just two different ways of parsing what we experience. It's too easy for us to become confused by language because of the inherent ambiguity of terms.
So this
Quoting Banno
I would say is right, or consistent, with one perspective, but wrong, or inconsistent with another. We can say that we see our representations, or we can say that our representations are our seeing. There is an ambiguity of language use in this connection that allows for the apparent contradiction. I don't think homunculi (they are tiny strawmen or red herrings) have anything to do with this basic problem of gaining a clear conceptual grasp of our experience.
Quoting Banno
I see this as obviously true, but I would not say that our neural nets are our representations, since we can be conscious of the latter, but not of the former.
Oooo almost. Following Austin, I have to say not that "we experience representations of plants and animals", but that our experiencing is a representing of... plants and animals. It's still the plants and animals that are being experienced, not their representations.
The cat is sitting on the arm of my chair. I'm experiencing the cat, not my representations of the cat.
Like the oysters.
And this should be understood not as a piece of neuroscience, but a clarification of how to use words like "experience" and "representation".
I would say that both ways of framing it are consistent with common usages. How do we establish which is correct? Whatever way we choose, I think it remains unarguable that we know plants and animals only as they are represented. The primordial process of presentation (which includes, but is not limited to, neural nets) cannot be made conscious.
I suppose that's connected to the philosophy of math issue. I'm open to the mathematical-logical synthetic apriori. It seems defensible anyway, and it goes with intuitionism perhaps. Apriori physics is of course hard to accept.
Perhaps we say, in retrospect, that Kant was doing phenomenology ? I lean toward saying that such things are checked and negotiated in conversation. In math, the semantics are likewise a bit mysterious. What is accepted as proof is public, but what it all means is a bit more elusive.
I agree. We experience the world, not our experience of the world, and not our experience of our experience of the world, and not our ...
For me the way to avoid the oyster problem is to contrast the oyster-for-me with the oyster-for-anyone. Objectivity is just the lack of bias, lack of individual rather than species distortion. It might not make much sense for humans to worry about species or human distortion.
Or, I can't make sense of the idea of a private oyster, beyond one consumed without company. I'm not keen on qualia.
Quoting plaque flag
Worthy of Monty Python. Have you a view as to the sense of "we experience representations of plants and animals"? Seems much like experiencing our experiences...
More generally, think of a juror listening to testimony. Everyday we try to see reality through the people we talk with. That thread about media bias is relevant here. The 'objective' truth is something like the balanced end of inquiry or the way a human ought to describe the situation. This would include reports on the quality of the oysters at a restaurant. Maybe Bobby has always hated seafood or resents the owner of the joint for dating his exwife.
It's not a perfect distinction, but there's no need to treat it badly for all that. I studied math, and it's relatively analytic/syntactical. As with so many distinctions, we mostly need to simply remember they are historically evolving and imperfect tools.
I'm puzzled by folk differentiating 'objective' truths from truths. Prefixing "subjective' or 'objective' to truth seems to me to do no more than muddle the nature of truth. Neither "the balanced end of an enquiry" nor "how someone ought describe a situation" lead inevitably to truth. So, a balanced enquiry might well reach a false conclusion, and sometimes one ought describe the situation untruthfully (Kant's murderer at the door...)
I agree with you that we just experience the plants. I think 'representation' works best in an interpersonal situation. Like a cop quoting a witness. 'Buy you said [re-presented (what had happened) ] that Joey threw the first punch. ]
People sometimes like to talk as if they could see around human cognition (but of course necessarily with it.) So somehow the lifeworld gets reduced to a representation of the scientific image (Sellars) which is paradoxically a mere part of that lifeworld.
I agree. The truth is the truth. Claims can be more or less objective, more or less biased. Private toothaches can function in the inferential nexus, as explanations for being rude, etc. They are still in the world at large, the lifeworld. What-it-was-like-for-Sally is not meaningless, has a role in the always public language. But 'subjective truth' is misleading. Claims about Sally's experience can be more or less true, but that's different, because Sally's experience is a piece of the world.
All roads seem to lead back to the co-given-ness or logical interdependence of self-world-others-language.
This is as a good a thing as any to quote because it's the opposite of something you seem to suggest now and then that bothers me a little, roughly that we "piece together" the world out of our various bits or sorts of experience.
I think the whole ought to have some priority -- even the blooming, buzzing confusion is a whole, within which we make distinctions and so forth.
My thinking is that when it comes to oysters, say, it's not a matter of acquiring the oyster concept by having the oyster experience, as if that could be perfectly sui generis and then you stick a name on it and add to a list of things that are part of the world. Rather I'm thinking that you'll experience oysters as like and unlike other things, in various ways, and make a place for them within the distinctions you already know, but also -- and this is the main point I want to get to -- modifying your total conception of the world by making room for oysters. To find out there is something on the taste gradient between fish and -- I don't know, doesn't matter -- crab or whatever, that alone might be a surprise and change your conception of what else oysters relate to in your experience, because now fish are also on the oysters gradient, and all the others that criss-cross there, texture and smell and look and origin and presentation and how they pair with beverages and which condiments are best and worst, all that foody crap.
So I want to say you're always remaking the whole world while you acquire new experiences that don't come to you in neat packages, just being exactly what they are, but experienced from the beginning as like and unlike things that already belong to your world. I think you're always working on the individual concept and the whole battery it belongs to, the system it's part of.
Obviously there should be similar dynamics with the accrual of facts rather than concepts, although the structures at issue will look more narrative.
On the great big other hand, how all this happens is clearly a matter for proper research, and there's been plenty of neat work done on concept acquisition, so my preference for a decidedly holistic take only counts for so much. Some of what it counts for might be that the piecemeal assembly of the world ought to turn out to be incoherent, and Sellars strolls around this territory sometimes, like a good Kantian. It's batteries and clusters and systems and hierarchies of concepts, never just one at a time, that we deal with, and so some of the back and forth here that treats the experience of oysters as this perfectly self-contained sui generis qualia-in-waiting strikes me as misguided. Unless I'm completely wrong.
Not, by the way, ascribing the view attacked here to you, but you've said a few things a little like that so I'm just highlighting the issue.
I agree. No guarantees. But we do trust some reports more than others. 'Objective' has a use. I myself strive to be objective. It's a key philosophical virtue, right ?
A distinction antirealists (and pragmatists) have lost.
I don't hold a low opinion of phenomenology, as you apparently do, so I accept that we can reflect on experience or perception and identify its inherent characteristics. I said somewhere recently that the idea that space and time are the pure forms of intuition is an example of this. Once we come to think of it, the idea that any perception could be neither spatially or temporally given just seems wrong, incomprehensible. So we can say that the idea is synthesized from experience, but once realized, does not need to be checked against subsequent experiences to be confirmed.
I also said that it could be looked at another way; that analytically speaking anything that could count as an experience. must be spatially and/ or temporally given or it would not qualify. Again, an example of two different ways of thinking about the same thing. That said, it is not tautologically true that all experiences must be spatially and/ or temporally given; to say that there could be an experience which is not so given is not a purely logical contradiction.
Philosophers of mathematics argue as to whether it is analytic or synthetic; maybe there is no definite answer to that; it could be both or either, depending on how you think about it. We always seem to fall into thinking there is a fact of the matter with such questions.
:up:
I agree that it's about what's best to believe. But William James would probably agree with that.
I don't know if you'd count me as an antirealist. Probably? For me the Lifeworld is primary. Promises are as real as pebbles. Norms permeate human experience. I don't see how they can be boiled away, because logical norms are what give claims of reduction any authority they might have in the first place.
How external is reality supposed to be for the realist ? If it's external to the species, then I don't know how much sense that can make within a human inquiry (allowing for the weird glitch where our mathematical models point before our emergence. ) If it's external to individual agents, then that's fine. The world was here before me and will outlast me.
Speaking very roughly, just to get started, realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it; anti-realism, that it isn't.
"Stuff", because the content makes a difference. For instance, if the content is aesthetic, then anti-realism is the view that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; an aesthetic realist might hold that beauty and ugly are a part of whatever it is we are beholding; an anti-realist, that beauty and ugly are attitudes we adopt, or some such. An ethical realist might say god and bad are as much aspects of the world as matter and volume; and ethical anti-realist, that no observation of the world will reveal good or bad, because they are not 'out there' to be found.
While "realism" has a general use, it's ontology that is often of interest. Stealing blatantly from my Rutledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a realist may hold to things like that correspondence to the facts is what makes a statement true; that there may be truths we do not recognise as such, do not believe and do not know; that the Law of excluded middle holds for things in the world; and that the meaning of a sentence may be found by specifying it's truth-conditions. An anti-realist may in contrast hold that truth is to be understood in sophisticated epistemic terms, perhaps as what a "well-conducted investigation" might lead us to believe; that there can be no unknown truths; that we need include "unknown" as well as true and false in our logical systems; and that the meaning of a sentence is to be found in what it might assert.
I've usually characterised my own ontology as realist. I've argued against typical examples of anti-realism such as pragmatic theory, logical positivism, transcendental idealism and Berkeley's form of idealism. I have however also defended a constructivist view of mathematics, an anti-realist position; and sometimes off-handedly rejected realism in ethics and aesthetics, only to change my mind later.
Changing this to a linguistic argument, realism entails that there are true statements; while an anti-realist would not make that commitment.
So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to its being true. The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball.
There's a mission to Mercury by the ESA and JAXA. Part of the mission is to decide if there is water at the poles - something hinted at by previous observations. Both the realist and the anti-realist will agree that we do not know that there is water at the poles of Mercury. A realist will say that either there is water at the poles, or there isn't - that either the statement or its negation is true. An anti-realist may say that the statement "There is water at Mercury's poles" is neither true nor not true, until the observation is made. Which is the better approach?
I wonder also if Anscombe's direction of fit works here. It's the difference between the list you take with you to remind yourself of what you want to buy and the list the register produces listing the things you actually purchased. The intent of the first list is to collect the things listed; of the second, to list the things collected. The first seeks to make the world fit the list, the second, to make the list to fit the world. Is it that anti-realism applies to ethics and aesthetics because we seek to make the world as we say, while realism applies to ontology and epistemology because we seek to make what we say fit the world?
We (note the plural) talk in terms of mass and balls and so on. The direction of fit here is that we intend these words to be about whatever it is that is "out there". And when we do this we find that we can construct coherent and useful accounts of what happens. It's not luck, it's a process of eradicating versions that are dysfunctional. A language community in part imposes its language on the world. We talk in terms of balls and stuff that is not balls. Like Anscombe's shopping list, we use the words to pick out things in the world, or we use it to to list the things we have. Both are equally legitimate, and each relies on the other.
How many planets are in our solar system? The number of planets is both an observation and an imposition.
Reality is such that it can be divided up into tables and not-tables. As Davidson (and others ) suggested, the world is always, already interpreted. I would add that the interpretation is put in place by our use of language. We need to put aside the notion of an uninterpreted reality - there is no alternative to imposing an interpretation. In admitting this we deny the dualism of framework versus reality. There are no alternate frameworks. That's a direct consequence of our living in the same world. What look like an alternate frameworks needs must be interpreted in such a way as to merge.
So the world is not what we experience, it is what is the case. That's a difference that few here seem to have picked up on.
Consider Fitch's paradox. Anti-realism holds that stuff is dependent in some way on us, that thinking makes it so. That is, some statement p is true only if it is believed or known to be true. For anti-realism, something's being true is the same as it's being known to be true. Now a direct implication of this is that if something is true, then it is known - that we know everything. Anti-realism is apparently committed to omniscience. The problem does not occur in realism, which happily admits to there being unknown truths.
Consider Fitch's paradox in the case of aesthetics. The anti-realist claim is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - for all (a), (a) is beautiful if and only if (a) is thought beautiful. It follows, fairly innocuously, that everything that is beautiful is thought to be beautiful. In Ethics, ethical anti-realism holds that what is good is exactly what we know is good. It follows that we know everything that is good.
Consider mathematics. The anti-realist thesis is that for a mathematical proposition to be true is for it to have been proved. So it seems to follow that all true mathematical propositions have been proved. If p is a true mathematical proposition, p has been proved.
An alternate is to adopt a trinary logic. For mathematics, we might borrow from Kripke, and suppose that there are three truth-values for mathematical propositions - true, false and otherwise. We assign "true" to some set of tautologies, "False" to contradictions, and "other" to everything else. When a proof of a proposition is found - a deduction from other truths - we assign "true' to that proposition.
Only proven mathematical propositions get to be called "true" - the main point of constructivism. But I'm guessing the more mathematically literate will find fault with this proposal. The implication is that the conjecture that every prime greater that 2 is the sum of two primes is not true, and it is not false.
I'm amenable to giving consideration to a paraconsistent anti-realism. So I don't think the middle way is absurd. The question may be were it is appropriate to apply anti-realism rather than a blanket acceptance or denial. Realism is about there being stuff. Whether our statements about that stuff are true or false is incidental to realism. Whether we understand things about that stuff is also incidental to realism. A realist might well adopt a three-valued logic with regard to statements. Nothing in realism locks the realist into a particular logical system. That is, it seems what is loosely called semantic realism, the view that realism must make use of a correspondence theory of truth, is a bit of a straw man. Or if you prefer, antirealism is a theory about belief, and has little to do with truth.
So the argument usually portrayed as realism vs antirealism is perhaps better thought of as about whether we should best make use of a bivalent logic, or use some paraconsistent logic. And for my money the best way to talk about the various bits and pieces of our everyday use is with a bivalent logic.
That might not be the case in other specific circumstances, nor in ethics, aesthetics or mathematics.
That emphasis on internal/external is a derangement from phenomenology. In it's place I might put bivalent logic: there is ice on the poles of Mercury, or there isn't, and that both exhausts the possibilities and is independent of our propositional attitudes towards the presence of ice on the poles of Mercury.
That is to say, realists take the context of claims for granted, and pretend there isn't one, while everyone else admits that truth is relative to exactly the sort of framework you deny exists. Even Tarski is pretty clear that truth is truth within a given (formal) language under a given interpretation -- never just truth straight-up. (And when model-theoretic semantics is extended as possible-world semantics, you also get 'true at w'.)
It's going to be the same issue for facts, observations, what-have-you. You can follow Quine and plump for holism -- and that means some whole "framework" of some kind, however you make that palatable -- or you can explain how this atomistic approach to truth is at all defensible.
Who, me?
The sort of truth we are talking about here is that occasionally ascribed to statements. Of course these sit within a framework - the language and form of life. What is it you think I am denying? Be clear.
Thank you and very interesting. I shall mull over them.
Quoting Banno
Your change of mind here is worth noting. What brings you back to realism in ethics and aesthetics?
Quoting Banno
Useful. I don't think this is well understood. In other words, people may be making hasty judgements.
Quoting Banno
I suspect ethics and aesthetics (and possibly maths do function differently. I personally don't know how you could talk about aesthetic realism, the notion of beauty, say, unless you were a type of Platonist. I don't really understand the logic models you are referencing well enough to make comments on the first point.
Quoting Tom Storm
The relation between logical systems and antirealism? I gather that this is what produced the swell in antirealist theory in the 90's. Especially Kripke throwing his hat in the ring. Seems to have subdued over time - there is nothing recent in the Journals of the AAP.
Or that the difference between realism and anti-realism is more one of choice of grammar than profound ontology? But that is all philosophy is - wordplay.
Quoting Tom Storm
It just seems to me that certain ethical statements are true - that kicking puppies for entertainment is wrong, for example. And that this is not just an expression of my outrage, nor how things are, but simply and directly how they ought be.
I'm typing this while I'm liaising with the government about funding for the end of financial year acquittals. It's like shoveling dirt but not as much fun...
Quoting Banno
This. We jump to profound ontology rather quickly sometimes.
Quoting Banno
I'd like to agree and mostly do. What does it rest on other than the obvious?
That's a long twisty story that might be said to have begun with my being born a few months after JFK's moon speech. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an answer, or whether you really are looking for an answer.
So while I'm waiting for an explanation as to what you might consider a reasonable answer, I have another question for you. Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear?
What fun.
Quoting Tom Storm
Oh, yes.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm presently entertaining the view that the obvious will suffice. So, if we came across someone who thought it acceptable to kick puppies for fun, I suspect we would agree that there was something wrong with them, that they would make such an error.
Perhaps we jump to profound ethical foundations rather quickly sometimes, too.
As I see it, it's our statements about things that depend on us and the world out there. An awareness of the contingency of our frameworks can make one reluctant to insist that a statement must be true or false if it is meaningful. Meaningfulness is not trivial, either.
Apel adds to this perhaps.
Apel argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
Hegel summarized idealism as the emphasis of the unreality of the abstract. We can try to imagine the world stripped naked of all the things we say about it: an unreal abstraction, which may be useful. We imagine the planet before we got here, but we can do so only because we are here, etc. But also the self without a world to be in is an abstraction. A Turing machine with infinite memory, etc.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps you don't give phenomenology enough credit. Husserl alone is already great. Also the realism/antirealism seems like an echo, with realism favoring the external.
I suspect that most will agree that a binary approach makes more sense here. It's on that side of a continuum.
On the other side there's the issue of whether a given Turing machine will halt on a given input. Part of me wants very much to say of course ! But there's no upper bound on how long it could take to find out.
Am I an antirealist because I start to suspect there's no obvious answer here ? I find the realism/antirealism debate itself somewhat murky. Popper's realism appeals to me. But tentative hypotheses (held self-consciously fallibly) and instrumental hypotheses are practically the same.
You might be too hard on pragmatists. To me, anyway, the original spirit of pragmatism is about not wasting time on differences that make no difference. It's a reaction against a tendency to get bogged down.
I agree. In everyday life, the framework is relatively transparent and trustworthy.
I'd add metaphysics and epistemology to your list in the second sentence.
Great example. The criteria for membership in the planet category are contributed by us, though clearly within various constraints that we did not choose. So statements about planets depend for their truth on our own semantic and logical norms as well as upon a world that constrains us.
Quoting wonderer1
So asserting the Kuhnian proposition that empirical knowledge has a paradigmatic structure which makes Popperian progress incoherent is just a kind of temper tantrum designed to lay waste to every position? I gather Stephen Law is more sympathetic to Popperian realism than to Kuhnian relativism, but perhaps one can counter his Going Nuclear model with one that posits someone named Stephen who, in getting over their head in a philosophical discussion, decides to impugn or psychoanalyze the motives of their interlocutor rather than attempt to revise their own construction.
I don't see temper tantrums as particularly relevant. However, I do see what I infer to be your interpretation of Kuhn's and Popper's thinking to be a bit simplistic. Popper recognized the importance of falsification to recognizing faults in one's naive hypotheses/intuitions. Kuhn recognized the importance of new paradigms arising in the aftermath of naive hypotheses/intuitions being falsified.
Quoting Joshs
I don't know enough about Law's thinking to speculate on his interpretations of Popper and Kuhn, and I don't think it is particularly relevant. I do think there is value in recognizing the use of rhetorical tactics pointed out by Law, regardless of speculation as to what is motivating the use of such rhetorical tactics.
Given that the link I provided was an excerpted chapter from Law's book Believing Bullshit, I think Stephen's concern might have more to do with people believing and defending bullshit, than with analyzing people's motivations for believing and defending bullshit in any sort of comprehensive way. It can be way too easy to jump to wrong conclusions about people's motivations.
I can be more specific, at least, and we'll see whether it's any clearer. This is the end of what I quoted:
Quoting Banno
That's quite a dichotomy there, but the interesting bit is after the semicolon: what's the nature of that little "is" there?
My issue here is not the apparent use/mention violation. It's that "is" suggests there is a fact of the matter about what "the ball" refers to. You are, of course, extravagantly on record endorsing a Wittgensteinian "meaning is use" and everything Davidsonian, so you cannot possibly mean there is a fact of the matter about whether "the ball" is the ball.
Yet there it is, an emblem of the fundamental failing of anti-realists, that they don't understand such self-evident truths.
Honestly, I'm not interested in either of your options. The fact that you think there is a war between realism and anti-realism, and that one of them is true and the other false, well, that's just your realism working overtime, it's realism [I]about[/I] realism, as if there is a fact of the matter about realism. This is exactly the structure of debate Dummett was trying to clarify, that realists tend to put anti-realists on their back foot by forcing them to give yes/no answers to questions that suit the realist but not the anti-realist. It's why @Isaac -- though he considers himself a kind of realist -- considers words like "real" and "true" useful mainly for bullying your opponents.
:lol:
"But -- but -- isn't it true that there are true statements?!"
It can be hard to convince yourself -- hard even to see the possibility -- that the answer to that question does not matter.
Quoting wonderer1
Poppers concept of falsification assumes that the practices and methods of science that are involved in making the determination that a theory has been falsified are independent of the content of the theory in question.
Kuhn argues instead that the understanding of method , the determination of what counts as evidence, use of apparatus and norms of measurement and a host of other features that come into play in falsifying a theory change along with changes in paradigms. As a result, paradigms do not change via falsification, but through a re-envisioning of all of the above practices. This is why Kuhn said that paradigm shifts are more like transitions from one artistic movement to another than like a linear progress.
Just a few remarks ...
When you ask "How Does Language Map onto the World?" what kind of "world" you have in mind?
The world, in the sense of our external world, the physical universe, is independent of any language. It is there whether we exist or not. (Although there are theories that say that it is us who create it. I really can't see how, except if one assumes our own worlds, i.e. our own reality of the world.)
The world, in the sense of our internal world, our reality, is obviously much connected to our language. But also obviously not limited by our language, as Wittgenstein has said. (Which most probably has rejected later in his life as I have read, but not by himself and which, anyway, is something totally unimportant for me.)
So, I guess that your question of the topic refers to our own word, am I a right? In which case, the question of the topic would have more meaning as "How Does Our Language Map onto the Our World?", wouldn't it?
Now, you have said the you have made some modest reading about this subject. And you have selected the views of Hilary Lawson as most appealing to you. Yet, these views only lead to a kind of impasse making you wonder if the problem of creating a realist(ic) theory of language is insurmountable. How I see it is as if you have started to walk to a place you wanted to visit and you created obstacles in addition to what the road itself already has, with the result of creating your own dead end. So, I believe that you kind of "killed" your topic, a very interesting one indeed.
The subject of this topic belongs to the "philosophy of language", which is huge and its history begins from the antiquity. It is offered for so many paths to choose from, which could lead to a more pleasant travel and destination.
Because truth and an affirmation of realism are so basic to speech, thought, and action, even if you're in a dream.
I think for some, the emphasis on true statements is about smuggling in correspondence theory. If there are true statements, and truth is correspondence, then there must be a real world for our true statements to correspond to (even if it's a hologram.)
A realist doesn't need correspondence, though. I could adopt Davidson's approach to truth (if I could remember how it works) and just add realism on as an appendage. I wouldn't have an argument, though. Just sentiment.
You've proffered a few jokes, but nothing substantive.
Sure, pragmatism can be of use...
Each of us might think that they are the most popular writer on the forum. That may be useful in buoying us each up to write the next post, to advancing the standard of writing, or to keeping the forums interesting. But several thousand of us will be wrong.
Like all substantive theories of truth, pragmatism isn't wrong so much as insufficient. It does not tell us what "truth" is. But of course, no other theory does, either.
And of course my not giving phenomenology enough credit is mostly a rhetorical ploy to keep the discussion in an area in which I am both more comfortable and more interested. That's not something I am alone in doing. It is quite self-consciously done. None of which detracts from my criticism of phenomenology.
Quoting Banno
Couple things: that's a question, not a proposal; also, it's hard to know what the proposal implied would amount to, since you follow Davidson in claiming there are no alternative frameworks -- but if not an alternative framework, then what's the difference a different grammar makes? Style? Are you claiming that realism and anti-realism say the same thing in different ways? That doesn't sound like you. Or is it that we're all realists, but anti-realists don't admit it (perhaps not even to themselves)?
Quoting Banno
But that is all philosophy is - wordplay.
I disagree -- surprise! :D
I think the phenomenologists overcome internal/external, but it's very easy to read our Cartesian assumptions into their work. I don't think a proper phenomenology can have an "out there", though.
But I do read them from a materialist perspective, or a realist perspective. It's a reading, too.
Nice reflection on anti/realism, though. Reducing anti/realism to a choice in logic in a particular context is very interesting. Not sure I can respond or even critique just yet, but it's interesting!
It remains unclear what you mean by "framework", and so what the "alternatives" might be. Further, in looking for a framework one steps outside the discussion, diminishing it in the way focusing on the score detracts from enjoying the tune. But of course in the end, it's the performance that counts - the doing.
Which may be the question you are raising in your new discussion with @Wayfarer.
So maybe it would help if you tied all this back to the OP?
Thanks - I'm pleased that approach was understood.
Quoting Moliere
Then they overcome an obstacle they themselves put in their path - hardly a triumph.
Phenomenology would build an understanding from a foundation of personal, private, indubitable phenomenal experience. A better approach might be to begin with what is at hand, our being as embedded in a world that is by that very fact, already the subject of our manipulation. This latter seems to me the view Wittgenstein offers.
It is also the approach Heidegger offers, and in much more detail than Wittgenstein. That said, Heidegger himself later came to think that the attempt to explain the "background" or 'form of life' discursively is doomed to failure and he turned to a kind of obscure philosophical poetry in an attempt to invoke (show) rather than describe the human form of being.
It's also easier to read.
For some.
I have no world in mind. I am simply interested in what others think of this matter. If this means they need to describe a particular world before they talk about the mapping process, so much the better.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I chose Lawson because he put what he thought was a key problem for ontology in plain English - as per below -
Quoting Tom Storm
I am wondering what people who study philosophy think of this claim as it strikes me as an interesting argument and might breathe some new life into debates about idealism.
I have no commitments to Lawson - I think he is interesting because he comes at this after reading Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and others and he has put forth a non-realist metaphysics, which I happen to find intriguing. I am curious about phenomenology and post-modernism. On matters of philosophy, I am interested in what others think and why. This is not about me trying to formulate my own ontology.
As someone how holds imperfect knowledge in this realm (in all realms, actually), at this point in our history I find the quoted argument for the most part valid. Nevertheless, for those of use don't remove the objective idealism from out of Peirce's metaphysics of objective idealism (with his notion of Agapism, for example, very much included), his is one example of a description of reality which can - I so far think - at the very least facilitate a "a credible realist theory of language" that thereby makes sense of the very metaphysics addressed - one wherein the physical world is effete mind in relation to which propositions can either be true or false. But I grant that Peirce's writings (and I have not as of yet read all of them) are not amongst the most analytically stringent writings out there in terms of presenting a coherent whole. (My favorite in this regard was the pantheistic metaphysics of Spinoza's Ethics; agree or disagree with it, it was exceedingly transparent in its premises-conclusion format; but no, not a system of either idealism or panpsychism.)
Cool.
Quoting javra
I have no idea what any of this huge sentence means. Sorry.
no worries
:up:
That might fit some of early Husserl, but it's very much counter to the later Husserl and to all of Heidegger. The phenomenon for phenomenology is not what is was for Kant. Husserl is even a direct realist in his weird way (not just my opinion, but also Zahavi's.)
I just feel the need to stick up for the sophistication of the movement.
I appreciate the honesty, and indeed we are all personalities on a stage.
That's fair -- it was kind of a placeholder.
I started to type out my old answer, but on second thought I'll say this: your framework is a description of how you learn. That's how you update your understanding of yourself and your environment through behavior, even if only mental. Because we're highly social, that will include how we justify and validate beliefs for each other, but there's no reason to think that's a template for all the learning we do.
Quoting Banno
I would approach the issue in the OP by looking at how juveniles learn. For human juveniles, that includes learning language, and that's the focus of the OP, but you have to wonder if some of the learning mechanisms and strategies of our non-human relatives are still operative in us, so you have to look. A human infant does it all at once, so we would want to know if there are relatively independent subsystems that differ little from other animals, and if there are some that are colored, modified, reshaped from the beginning by the telos of language acquisition -- doing the same things with a different meaning because the system they are part of is different -- besides the ones that are unique to us and involve language.
How does language map onto the world? The obvious place to look is children, who have to learn how they work, how the world works, and how language works, and figure out how it all connects.
I've always thought it's interesting that language is usable from the earliest stages of acquisition: you can say "ball" before you can say "I would like the ball now, please," and that works. Languages are partial-able, as we use them. Now throw in that the child's understanding of themselves and of the world is also partial, and that has to work too. And these have to be linkable, in this partial state, and that has to work.
And that never actually changes. Language, world, self --- we never achieve full understanding of any of these, so we go on our entire lives in with this partial understanding, just as when we were infants. And it works.
No answer there to @Tom Storm's question, but that's where I'd start.
:up:
Just realized there's another way to put this: just as DNA is in some sense instructions for physical growth, I'm using "framework" to mean something like instructions for mental growth, what I was reaching for with the word "learning".
@Janus quoted Bateson the other day, from Mind and Nature, and in that book he talks about his little "how to tell this thing was once alive" test and it comes down to growth, living things have to have grown into the shape they have. So it is with an individual mind, a community, a culture, all things that grow and learn and adapt.
So as a general strategy for assimilation ? Ice-9, something that inspires a particular crystallization. That sounds good. I'd throw in a strong dose of metaphor myself. I find Lakoff's work persuasive I guess. To me metaphor is a profound concept beneath its familiarity.
I like that. I associate that insight with Hegel too, who seemed to think of the entire concept system as an organism. Vico too. Are you a fan of etymology ? I like thinking about how words are born, often as vivid metaphors that cool into a literality that has genuinely drifted from its source.
I don't think we need such a theory to accept those claims. If we had such a theory, I could then raise the issue of meaning. Must we have a final and perfect theory of meaning before we accept any claim, for we must know what we mean first, right ? The whole mess is fuzzy together and always will be.
On the reality issue, I think you already said something valuable -- that it tends to function religiously in certain contexts. IMO, examining the meanings of 'real' is great part of the greater examination of meaning. How do these power words function ? We could also talk about the meaning of 'God' or 'truth' or 'reference' -- endlessly. I started a thread about 'semantic finitude' on this topic, as you may recall, because I don't think we can escape the fog, get a perfect grip, only a better one, or at least a new one, so that we don't get bored.
https://iep.utm.edu/john-austin/#SH2a
Perhaps the answer to this question doesn't exist already, as if waiting for us to find it. I'm tempted to speak of a frontier calling for creativity. We can always find new ways to talk about our talking and argue that this or that way is the deepest and truest way ---and then someone else comes along with an equally impressive tale.
What is it to say ? This may get us in Heidegger territory. What is being ? What is meaning ? It's like trying to make darkness visible, but maybe it's just a ghost story. Are humans hilariously ignorant in all of their hubris about fundamental things ? Or are they high on the fumes of not-exactly-questions ? I don't know, but I lean toward some fundamental ignorance and vulnerability which it mostly pays to ignore (or doesn't pay to not ignore) (unless you were a existentialist who sold some books.)
Yes, good points. I tend to keep coming back to similar notions of 'semantic finitude' too.
Quoting plaque flag
This may well be the case, which either amuses me or makes me sad, depending on my mood.
Probably right, similar to @plaque flags take.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Agree, but I guess this is a pragmatic understanding of language, which doesn't address the question of realism. It seems to say, just get on with living and perhaps this takes us back to your statement above.
I can't believe you wrote about something w/o having anything in mind! :smile:
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, I know. This is why I talked about an impasse (no outlet, no solution),
Quoting Tom Storm
Oh, I din't know that. I'm not a student of or studying philosophy. So I cannot speak in that capacity.
I also see that you swtched the focus to idealism. I'm not so knowledgeable about that either.
So, I'm sorry to intervene.
Let me at least offer you a good reference on the subject: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-language-ontology/
Not at all, I enjoyed your contribution. We're all in this together.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I'm generally interested in philosophical ideas - these often have no bearing on what I believe. Nor should they. I'm simply interested in what ideas are out there.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I didn't really. It's in the original quote from Lawson in the OP. The reason this question about language is interesting (if I understand it properly) is in determining whether it is even possible to talk meaningfully about ontology.
Interesting. (As intellectual endeavor.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I know that. I meant the topic itself, i.e. the mapping of language onto the world.
Anyway, I might get closer to the "language-world" subject since ita has alreaded starte to work somehow in my mind --not that I miss subjects to explore :smile:-- and read the SEP article that I brought up, to get myself some useful ideas on the subject ...
Just to be clear, since I've been invoked, the distinction I'm articulating there is not the ultimate resting place for 'truth' (universe vs culture vs mind) but the declared nature of the barriers to its possession.
Whatever is between us and the truth is a power which can then be wielded politically.
What I meant by 'using those terms to bully' is that, in that particular instance, there is a certain class (let's call them liberal academics for want of a better term) who have a vested interest in promoting a location for 'truth' which is just within their grasp (from their hallowed halls) but just outside of the grasp of the great unwashed.
Literally the last thread on which I wrote was just such an example. The 'truth' regarding which political party it was best to vote for being conveniently just within the grasp of the moderately educated, but just outside of the reach of the working class, who must be educated out of their benighted ignorance.
Whatever the issue de jour, you'll find the same people who just so happen to hold an ever so convenient epistemology that places the truth just hard enough to access as to require their specific education, but not so hard as to render such an education worthless.
The hard-realists have it just right for sciencey types - truth is accessed by sufficiently complex empirical investigation.
The idealists have it just right for the humanities graduates. Truth is ever changing (the current version accessed, of course, via an up to date education - see 'are trans women women?')
The pragmatists are universally reviled for putting it out of everyone's reach like the exasperated parent finally putting the water pistol on the top shelf so that neither warring sibling can have it.
How does this relate to the OP? Not much maybe. My answer to the question of how language maps onto the world is that it doesn't. It's not what language is for and it never was. Language is a social tool to get stuff done, either cooperatively, or, increasingly these days, coercively, hence my somewhat rhetorical claim that truth is used mainly as a cudgel with which to beat one's opposition.
What's worse is that the direction of modern discourse is to make the truth even more pedestrian. In just a few years it's gone from the golden light at the end of the long tunnel of scientific enquiry to being easily accessed from the pages of the New York Times, or the lips of the government spokesman. Now we have 'disinformation experts' who's only truth-o-meter is to check what the government website says...
Anyway, I'm sure there's little stomach for political discussion in what's otherwise a nice bit of effete curiosity...
That was the idea, yes, but I'm not sure it excludes what we want out of realism. This is precisely a question about the cognitive capacities and behavior of language-users. One reason to focus on learning when faced with such an issue is to "catch it in the act." Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand.
Put another way, if you're going to see it anywhere, you'll see it there, so look at the research on language learning and if that's not what it looks like, then this mapping is a myth.
I can give a small example of what I have in mind -- I think I'm remembering this from Rosch's prototype theory of concept acquisition. If you imagine a bunch of concepts arranged along a scale of abstractness, something like cocker spaniel-dog-mammal, then children tend to come into that scale in the middle, learning dog before the more specific or the more general.
Now we can ask how this partial language maps onto a partial world. Dog applies to every breed, and adults are fine with that. But what about in the other direction? Indeed children will over-generalize their use of a concept while they lack the more general term, so, if dog is the first mammal concept they acquire, or the first four-legged mammal, they'll apply it as if it were what we use mammal for: cows are "doggies", cats are "doggies", and so on. (In Monsters, Inc Boo calls Sully "kitty" -- those guys at Pixar are smart.)
Realism finds its clearest expression in the model-theoretic description of language, where you have a complete, closed set of symbols and a complete, closed set of objects, and they are matched up to each other according to some scheme. (It might be more precise to talk about systems of differences among symbols and among objects.) But to talk about natural languages, you have to allow the collection of symbols to grow, and allow the collections of objects that satisfy those symbols to shift, because the satisfaction scheme shifts, most dramatically when the collection of symbols is still small, but growing rapidly, as it is with children.
This is just one approach I remember a bit of, and only a tiny start on confronting the issue of realism using this research. What do we say about the child seeing a field full of cows and excitedly announcing "doggie!" or "doggies!"? One thing is clear, that the child would not have been "trained" to say this, because that's not what adults say, so an account that passes by issues of categorization is missing something. Is it plausible to focus only on categorizing the communicative situation, and describe the child as thinking, this is an appropriate occasion for uttering "doggie"? There's still over-generalization, but it's different. --- And what happens when the child does acquire cow but still doesn't have mammal? Does that mean cows are, to them, a kind a of dog?
One thing is clear from trying to write about this: hard as it is, it's easier to talk about a partial language than a partial world, but I think we have to find a way to get at the latter as well. If you don't know anything about chess and watch a game, you see everything the players do, under one scheme of description, but I really want to say that "black's king is in check" is not a possible fact for that observer -- neither true nor false if you must -- and you could describe this as not being able to categorize positions by whether black's king is in check. We might say the observer's world is not partial in the sense that it has less stuff in it, but that it makes slightly less sense. But it's also true that the observer cannot see check, and so there is something in the world of the players that is not part of the observer's world. (I think James somewhere gives an example of a dog, seeing perfectly the interactions among humans but attaching necessarily different meaning to it.)
So there's some stuff about realism.
I think the beauty of Lawsons promise (which I still dont understand) is that if theres no realist theory of language then discussions about effete topics like idealism and panpsychism bite the dust for good. That would be an interesting development.
Yes. There is a huge amount which can be learned about ourselves, from observing infants and young children learning. When we are very young all of our learning is a matter of automated deep learning in our brains, resulting from our interactions with the the world. The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world.
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Truth, reality, God's will...
Quoting Isaac
Would you agree that the politics involved includes the interpersonal ? Not just forums like this, but friendships, marriages. Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things.
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FWIW, I connect this to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. We are nothingness trying to find a name for itself that will finally stick. To name truth or meaning or reality is also to name ourselves, define our project, who has authority, etc.
But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once.
It seems obvious that a lot of basic learning mechanisms are common to us and our non-human relatives, but it's also apparent there are mechanisms specific to acquiring language, and it's a question whether some of the basic mechanisms are a bit different since they're part of a system that is also acquiring language. Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able?
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Are you saying that overwhelming agreement on what is the case is a form of hinge proposition? I understand Witts notion of hinge propositions to concern pre-suppositions that function like Kuhnian paradigms. They make possible the determination of rational truth and falsity of propositions within their purview, but are not themselves rationally derived. As arational, they can neither be rationally doubted nor can belief in them be rationally generated. Thus, hinge commitments can not strictly be considered to be beliefs. I would add that, like paradigms, these commitments undergo continual, if gradual, transition.
How would overwhelming agreement function within a paradigmatic scientific community? Given that paradigms constantly change, wouldnt agreement require a reciprocal back and forth, and begin as partial and among a minority before it became overwhelmingly majoritarian? And wouldnt this near unanimity pass into a phase of overturning of the at-one-time overwhelming agreement?
Another way I've looked at that is that we use language in place of the grunts and calls and mating dances and dominance rituals and grooming and all that other communication non-linguistic animals engage in just because, well, we've got language and it's usable for that. Which is to say we engage in what amounts to non-linguistic use of language, and that muddies the waters if you're trying to figure out whether language is different and how.
But maybe language is just animal communication only moreso. Animal communication with better tech (recursive syntax and all that). It's of course true that people write sonnets to get laid -- or claim the mantle of "truth" to control others -- but you won't see anything else if you don't look for anything else. I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened.
Perhaps we should think of a big wet continuous blanket of interdependent concepts. Or we can think of the concept system as a restless goo. Popper foregrounds/invents one aspect of science. Kuhn foregrounds\invents another. Brandom's version of Hegel could maybe include both, and more, because Popper and Kuhn are now both themselves part of our inherited conceptual toolkit.
Popper saw that universals were everywhere in our talk. He respected metaphysics. Theoretical frameworks make observations possible in the first place. @Srap Tasmaner talked about watching a chess game above. Good analogy ! A theory brings the state of being in check into 'existence' --into the game of norm-governed responsible symbol trading. Our Lifeworld (largely lived 'inside' culture) gathers complexity as we bind time/experience symbolically.
[quote = Brandom]
Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained end of history as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
...
All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
[/quote]
I've also put on the goggles of seeing language as a complex system of grunts and squeaks and barks. I found it illuminating. I think you are right to do justice though to the power of our system, which got us to the moon somehow.
Brandom's inferentialism offered me my most recent insight into language. He makes interpersonal responsibility absolutely central to meaning. There's something down-to-earth about this that gets the animal origin right but also an awareness of an unlimited potential for self-referential consciousness. We can talk about our talk about our talk, which is maybe all the divinity we can hope for, or all divinity ever was.
One thing that's really tricky about the question of realism in language is that it's not just a question of theory; even if our best theory says that language does not map onto the world, the idea that it does is part of our practice. What looks like it could be a misconception, or an unreachable, unreached, or even un-aimed-for goal, is operative within our use of language, plays some kind of role.
For a quick illustration. Grice tells the story of a guy that some college at Oxford wanted to offer a fellowship, but he had a dog, and the rules forbade dogs, so the fellowship committee "deemed" his dog a cat.
Grice only comments that our use of language may involve quite a bit of deeming.
(And he himself proposed a theory based on infinitely deep chains of intensions and recognitions -- you recognize that I intend that you recognize that I intend that... And he admits that can't ever really be completed; hence you'll have to "deem" some level complete. In a very similar way, David Lewis concludes that probably no one ever really quite speaks a Tarski-style language, so he works a bit at how they might count an approximation or an equivalence class as success.)
Right. While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'd say that depends on who we include in "we". Certainly there are people with much less ability to participate in language than we tend to expect of people.
That said, as a species we have evolved to have a dependency on (and ability to benefit from) language to share our learnings with each other, in order to be adaptive. Our linguistic faculties are different from the intuitive faculties we share with other animals, with our linguistic faculties resting 'atop' our intuitive faculties but also playing an ongoing role in reshaping what our intuitions reveal.
I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. (For those of us with relatively functional linguistic faculties, anyway.)
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Edit: The ARHGAP11b mutation looks like it might have been a key happy accident that resulted in our brains evolving so much 'overkill'.
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That's related to what I try to gesture at with 'lifeworld.' The 'given' is our everyday cultureworld. Philosophers pretend they can peel back the symbolic layer, perhaps taking the scientific image as nude reality (paradoxical in my view.)
We live with promises and insinuations much as with puppies and asteroids and uncomputable numbers. We move through this world with a skill (linguistic) that surpasses in complexity any of our attempts to sketch its nature.
All of those attempts depend of course on the 'blind' or tacit skill they hope to explicate. I'm reminded more generally here of Socratic ignorance. Sincerely trying to make sense of our situation is valuable at least for the recognition of our ignorance and the difficult of the problem --a cure for humorless dogmatism. To me it's like ending up with a toolkit of theories that one knows are always imperfect but possibly helpful.
You don't have to have a theory of language to create a simulated reality.
The Klingon language is a constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race. (The Klingons, in the Star Trek universe.)
One can create any kind of language as well as any kind of world.
Our world is basically independent of any specific language. But language certainly enriches immensely our world.
I can have a pretty good idea of what is happening when I see two Dutch persons quarreling, without knowing a single word of their language. I would undestand much more of course what is happening and what they are quarreling about if someone translated to me what they are saying. And I would have a better reality if I knew Dutch myself, and esp. if I were a Dutchman. Languages enriches our world.
Language is basically a set of symbols, structures and rules used to describe or communicate something with the purpose of creating information. This information is then mapped onto developping of structures --patterns, schemes, models, etc. The assimilation and understanding of this information creates knowledge.
This is how a great part of our view of the world is created.
And this is how I view the relationship of our language with our world.
I know that most people in here will find all this an oversimplification of how things are and work.
Well, I know that there are much more that can be said about the subject. But would that change the essence of what is language and "How Does Language Map onto the World?"
That sounds right. I think another way to say this is: substance and subject are hopelessly entangled. Institution, historical semantic sediment. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. For us, anyway, as timebinding and timebound animals, 'thrown' into an ethnocentrism that we wrestle with but never leave behind. We 'are' our history in the mode of no longer being it. The lust for naked reality, hiding under the panties of cultural inheritance and everything human, is maybe related to the fantasy of waking up from the nightmare of history and the achievement of divine selfcreation and the elimination of all passivity. Or, more cynically-reductively, a token that gives authority and access to mates.
Cool. I don't anything about that stuff.
Honestly, I'm probably over-fitting by suggesting it was even a communication-related selection.
I've often found the gestural origin of language somewhat appealing because speech production is still gestural once it moves from hands to lips and tongue and vocal cords. Anything that gave us fine motor control might have jump-started the ability to make more variegated and precise sounds, so that could be part of the story.
Not the whole story though. Speech production is complicated, and I've always heard that children understand far more speech than they can produce, so it doesn't make sense here either to give people an ability they just layer language on top of.
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This sounds right. I like Lakoff's work on metaphor and embodied cognition. Our minds seem very 'incarnate.'
I haven't read the thread, I've not been on the forum for a while, just noticed a few 'mentions' yesterday. Glancing through now I see your OP develops the titular question in quite a specific direction. Yes, I mean as far as I'm concerned (very specific angle on this from a psychological perspective), idealist talk is inevitability unmoored insofar as one cannot carry out any investigation into the nature of some non-material entity where the specification of such an entity consists of nothing more than the meaning of the word. 'Consciousness' (in the philosophical sense) is one such example popular hereabouts. It refers to nothing but that which is agreed by a wink and a nod among those who wish to use the term a certain way. Such an ephemeral ontological object cannot really be the subject of any serious investigation since it's properties must, by definition, already be known - those being the only grounds on which the entity is delineated at all.
Language here rather forms the tools by which these entities are constructed rather than the tools by which they are labelled. But I see @apokrisis has already made that point, so I shan't repeat.
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There's also the issue of metaphor itself. What exactly is a metaphor ? If human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, it's an important question. Roughly I relate it to analogy. I sometimes try to open my front door (where I live) by pushing a button on my car keys. The mind exploits skill in one domain in a new domain. Something like that.
Yes. I meant politics in the broadest sense. The application of power. I'm simply making the point that the choice of theory as to how accessible 'the truth' is, immediately affects one's power in terms of access to it. I might benefit greatly from a theory which holds truths to be mostly psychological. A scientist gains power by holding truths to be accessible only through the instruments she has access to. A well-read philosopher likewise will profit by an epistemology which places emphasis on the history of ideas.
At the end of the day, 'true' is just a word, and like any other it can be used to cooperate with or coerce those listening, but rarely is it just a label.
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Insightful.
"Analogy" in this context is also a metaphor, but a valuable one. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest that metaphors are simplistic but epistemically pragmatic abstractions (EPAs) we use in lieu of knowledge of things in themselves which is beyond the capacity of our brains to acquire.
I personally frequently think of metaphors as things we use in considering emergent properties that supervene on reality in ways more complicated than we can grasp. As an electrical engineer I see transistors as such EPA metaphors. While I know that the physics subvenient to the behavior of a particular transistor could in principle be investigated in order to have a more complete and complex understanding of the thing in itself, I don't have a pragmatic need for such understanding and can leave it to other engineers and scientists to be cognizant of such things. In turn, I can design things which use transistors and then provide a computer programmer with a higher level metaphor which the programmer uses in determining how to have a microprocessor interact with what I designed. The higher level metaphor I provide to a programmer is another EPA with no need to discuss the subvenient transistors for the programmer's pragmatic purposes.
Of course what I've presented here is a rather narrow perspective on metaphors, but perhaps others may find it useful to their thinking.
I completely agree. My pet generalization is the triangle inequality. One person claims authority over another in terms of being closer to a sacred object (the laboratory, the guru, the celebrity, empirical science, taste, ...)
I'd associate this insight with various infamous masters of suspicion, but it goes back at least to the sophists. Thrasymachus comes to mind. I like Szasz well enough to get myself cancelled (without of course taking him as a final world.) Institutions, by their nature, can only pretend to assimilate critical thinking (it exists always within a golden cage, a conspicuous mascot.)
It's a conceptually simple realization, but it cost something emotionally. One wakes up to the world as largely a great stage of fools and pretenders. One is also endlessly suspicious of oneself, generating the Hamlet type ( I think Nietzsche is a pretty good example of a self-eating master of suspicion.)
Quoting Tom Storm
But also apparently materialism, all of which just amounts to this:
Quoting T Clark
But I'm a little confused why he cast this in terms of language and how the claims are made. Presumably because verification is off the table from the start? And the claim that there is something wrong with the very words in which idealism, say, is proposed -- that *is* the old logical positivist diagnosis, that you're not even really saying anything.
On the other hand, if you don't think of language as the home of claims about reality, there's no particular problem with metaphysics. If your endorsing panpsychism gets you a job or gets you laid, it's just another day at the office for language.
Of course language might also be useful for doing science. In which case we're back to
Quoting Isaac
Or to
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
(@Isaac likes it when I quote myself.)
It feels like a pragmatist take on language ought to fit better with science-engendering prejudices (or metaphysical assumptions) than with science-blocking ones, but it's beyond me at the moment.
I can totally relate to your 'layer' approach. I'm trained in math, and group theory (for instance) completely ignores everything about a group but its groupness, so that its results apply to every group. The real number system has various constructions, but they all satisfy a nice set of axioms, so it suffices for almost all purposes to leave the construction undefined.
I also have some training/experience in computer science, and abstraction dominates the field.
Perhaps what you are saying is roughly that metaphors are interfaces 'protecting' us from too much complexity. That sounds like part of the truth, a big part.
Quoting wonderer1
I prefer the notion of horizon or background to that of things-in-themselves, but it's not that important in this context. The idea is that we can zoom in on reality, that we have a sense of greater detail waiting for us in every direction, if making the effort becomes worthwhile. The lifeworld (the encompassing world in which and for which we make models) has 'depth' but (for me) no ultimate Reality 'behind' it.
I don't see a problem with a bit of effete musing along with one's morning coffee. Not dissimilar to doing a crossword or chess puzzle before setting off to solve the world's problems. Or in my case, move that soil to the back garden.
No. Hinge propositions need not be agreed on, nor need agreement depend on hinge propositions. They are distinct notions.
The remainder of what you say in that paragraph relies on the notion that beliefs must be "rational", whatever that is, apparently something like having a justification. But there is no reason to think this so. Indeed, the point of hinge propositions it that they are believed and yet need not be justified.
Odd, that Kuhn has made some sort of come-back. Davidson's point holds for Kuhn, that if you are going to make any comparison between paradigms, you will need to hold something constant between them. Hence the very idea of such conceptual schema is fraught.
Kuhn's theory of paradigms itself relies on overwhelming agreement. After all, those who read his book understood it.
Hence the point is not to understand language but to use it.
One that we might agree, at least after one finishes one's coffee.
The point of what?
Nice conclusion. Of course logical positivism is untenable based on this too. In the end what all this seems to amount to (as I read it) is that for a non-realist our conversations are doomed, regardless of all the facts and rationalism we seek to muster in favour of our particular fancies. Our language doesn't mirror reality, it is just a tool which humans use to communicate and while it has many useful applications to get things done - metaphysical truth isn't one of them.
Interesting that you raise getting laid - one could almost summarise this by saying - if naturalism and evolution are accurate, they highlight what it takes for a species to thrive. Truth doesn't play a key role in evolution - it's fitness and survival (as per Donald Hoffman's recent theories). This could take us to the venerable evolutionary argument against naturalism. But that's a digression. :wink:
Quoting Banno
Isn't this leading towards anti-realism? It also sounds a bit like 'shut up and calculate'. That said, this has generally been my utilitarian or pragmatic approach to language.
Isn't one understanding of later Wittgenstien that he was an anti-realist? I am no expert of course, but doesn't he seem to argue that language is social practice? This seems close to a constructivist understanding of how language works. No doubt there are debates amongst the cognoscenti.
Good point. I tend to think of metaphor as a kind of pattern matching process. Interestingly when people have object recognition deficiencies in dementia, they start to use remote controls as telephones and see the kitchen as the bathroom, etc. The metaphors begin to blur and yet you can often see the patterns which inform them. It makes me wonder just what it is that allows us to keep things straight. Someone with dementia can speak like a poet - 'Turn the sun down, my feelings are burning.' This means, switch off the light, it's too bright. (My dad said this at 97)
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I love that quote. It makes sense to me right away. I've been studying Finnegans Wake, which tries to catch the ambiguous blurrygoround of lifemeaning.
I'm personally quite impressed by this old movie based on the book : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V9USPiXXK8
I think it's been unjustly forgotten, though it may just happen to scratch my itch.
Honestly, probably not. Okay as a theory of communication or of social interaction -- I mean, still preposterously reductionist! -- but not an account of language at all.
That's the thing. Even if you take the kind of sociological view of language (and oppose the sort of representational view), you might still want to explain what kind of a thing language is that it can be used for communicating or other social functions (signaling of various kinds, etc).
On the other hand, even if language has features you don't find in other animal signaling systems -- and it does -- that could be only to say that our signaling is more complicated but not different in kind.
I guess my remark landed somewhere around there, but I couldn't guess whether that's right.
Well...
The distinction post-dates Wittgenstein, so any ascription will be mere supposition dependent on how he is interpreted. But.
Given his overall approach was to see such issues as problems of language use, I don't think his position would be too different to that I advocated; that the issue is more about which grammar to adopt, a bivalent logic or some other such.
Yep, shut up and calculate. That's another way of saying that we should look to use rather than meaning.
Quoting Tom Storm
How?
It would be wrong to think I am advocating realism. Rather, I'm arguing against the hegemony of antirealism. Your mate in the OP pretty much takes it as granted, rather than as a conclusion. The friends of discursive approaches to philosophy hereabouts will continue to change topic as soon as their narrative is brought into question.
Discursive, as in digressing from subject to subject. If you flick back through this thread you may see what I mean. Hardly a post follows on from the previous.
As opposed to critical, where a suggestion is held down to see if it can hold it's own.
The latter is far more difficult than the former.
This reminds me of a couple of points that may be relevant.
How could language mirror reality, at least if it's understood as words ? Words are a tiny piece of reality. So it must be meaning that mirrors reality, right ? But reality is, for humans who could raise the issue, always already meaningful. Only a metaphysician could think reality is hidden 'under' or 'behind' the blaring meaningfulness of human life with all its rules and roles.
The ordinary situation that inspires the mirroring metaphor is something like 'there's plums in the icebox' being confirmed when one goes to the icebox. Husserl wrote about this early on.
Roughly (or so I claim) the meaningful structure of reality is exactly the kind of meaning in language, so 'the world is all that is the case.' The (intelligible) structure of the world is the meaning of all true sentences, or something like that. There's a surplus in humans though, an ability to hypothesize, lie, and be mistaken.
As a matter
of fact, no,
there aren't.
Deal with it.
The flip-side of that is that there is a sense in which all claims are implicitly realist. How can language mirror reality? Only if the reality it mirrors is something created by, or at least co-created with, language. The idea that language cannot mirror reality posits a different kind of unknowable reality that is altogether beyond human experience and judgement. That said, I don't think language mirrors everyday pre-conceptual experience, unless you allow that it is a distorting mirror.
For everyday practical purposes, language mirrors what we see is going on well enough to be a practical tool for issuing instructions, passing along information, and so on. That much is obvious, and of course, that is not to say that is all language does, but whatever it does, it does by virtue of being, or at least seeming, intelligible. Could we ever find a way to tell the difference between seeming intelligible and being intelligible?
That is, again, the premise of this thread is wanting.
I've got some talent for math, but never developed a love of mathematics for its own sake. I remember one day, during my first semester of college calculus, the TA telling us that the homework assignment for that day was all story problems. The whole class seemed to groan, whereas my reaction was, "Thank goodness." I enjoy math much more when I can see how to apply it to solving problems I can visualize.
Quoting plaque flag
I like the notion of horizon in this context, but I don't know how to interpret that last sentence. I'd be inclined to say that the lifeworld is an aspect of reality, or at least the part of reality we have some epistemic access to. I don't know what it would mean to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld.
I think sure, we might be in a simulation or multiverse, so the simulation or universe exists in some context we don't have epistemic access to. However, I would still see the simulation or universe as being an aspect of reality.
Undoubtedly part of the context of that for me, is seeing people as varying in the extent that they are in touch with different aspects of the way things are in reality. So maybe you and I are too different in the way we think of "reality", for me to form a clear understanding of what you mean.
The premise, or rather question, in the OP is "how does language map onto the world?". It seems to me that the only possible answer is that language maps onto the world insofar as we understand it to do so.
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Nice!
What book? Does that sentence convey any actuality? If so, how would that not qualify as its having pictured a state of affairs?
Did the book in question convey anything about anything?
The bold part is where we agree. But some thinkers try to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld, as if our eyes and ears and concepts are in the way of reality as opposed to some of its ingredients.
Quoting wonderer1
Exactly. So it exists conceptually as possibility. Possibility is a huge part of human reality anyway. Or so I suggest. We swim in it.
Quoting wonderer1
It's probably just a different lingo from different influences. In the last few years, I've been very influenced by Heidegger and Husserl. In a strange way, both thinkers defend something akin to common sense. Marriages and promises are as real as electrons and quaternions. All of these entities have their meanings in relation to one another in a big holistic net. For instance, electrons are an output of laboratories and scientific institutions with histories and mathematical abstractions. There's an atomistic tendency to rip things out of context and pretend they can still function meaningfully. The lifeworld is the most encompassing 'unbroken' 'preabstracted' concept perhaps.
In case you find it interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld
[i]The 'lifeworld' is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the "ground" for all shared human experience.[6] Husserl's formulation of the lifeworld was also influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey's "life-nexus" (German Lebenszusammenhang) and Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-world[citation needed] (German In-der-Welt-Sein). The concept was further developed by students of Husserl such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Pato?ka, and Alfred Schütz. The lifeworld can be thought of as the horizon of all our experiences, in the sense that it is that background on which all things appear as themselves and meaningful. The lifeworld cannot, however, be understood in a purely static manner; it isn't an unchangeable background, but rather a dynamic horizon in which we live, and which "lives with us" in the sense that nothing can appear in our lifeworld except as lived.
The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted.[/i]
Yes, I see that. It's not cats on mats or plumbs in iceboxes that are the main problem, it's the very values we live by and for. When someone says, 'There is a God' - there is almost nothing that maps onto any reality I understand or is available to us the way cats or plumbs might be. What does 'there is' mean here? What does 'a God' mean or even 'God'. These four words are like a hall of mirrors.
Quoting Janus
Yes, and isn't it interesting that this is the best we seem to be able to do? Most of us posting here have come up with variations of this frame and often from different backgrounds. All roads lead to utility...
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Excellent points. The meaning of 'there is' is elusive indeed. Maybe akin to 'why is there a here ?'. Almost lyrical.
The God issue is a great one. The root concept is maybe still a father or a king, but of course it's gone through some vaporization since then. Maybe one starts with an ideal father (actual human) and removes all inessential (vulnerable, limiting) attributes ?
Maybe. But recall my stock in trade. The nature of people's 'effete musing', the processes therein, the methods they use, the objectives, their response to the conflicts arising... None of this happens in isolation, it's all at the very least connected to (if not entirely constituted of) our general habits of thought, and those are the same habits we'll apply to the world's problems as to the soil heap.
It's not that I think effete musing without political content is impossible (and as such wouldn't ever want to imply any given person was politically motivated), it's just that I find it rarely done. From earlier...
Quoting Banno
...you're not telling me that's not political...
This seems insightful to me, although I've never been very interested in philosophy of language, and I don't know much about it, beyond the idiosyncratic philosophy of language I've developed on my own.
In science, and at least some engineering, there is a need to be able to zoom your perspective in and out, and switch between different conceptual frameworks (and associated vocabulary) fairly fluidly. It seems to me that efficiency of conveying ideas often trumps the accuracy of statements, in face to face examples of such conversations. There is a trust that the person you are discussing things with can connect the dots, or let you know where you have been insufficiently clear.
So it seems to me, that at least in cases of collaborative or interdisciplinary, science and engineering, there is social reinforcement for speaking in a pragmatic way, and it is a matter of sinking or swimming in many such environments to develop techniques for, and facility with, treating language very pragmatically.
Another factor is a tacit recognition that some things aren't going to be effectively communicated linguistically, and some sort of visualization technique needs to be used. I doubt many scientists or engineers would put it this way, but I'd say that it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the [s]most effective[/s] only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties.
Quoting plaque flag
And yet, at the very end of his career, Husserl reaffirmed that the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego. Zahavi claims that for Husserl a radical implementation of the transcendental reduction leads with necessity to a disclosure of transcendental intersubjectivity. Husserl insists, however, that a radical reduction reveals the philosophical solitude of the absolute ego, which is prior to the constitutive accomplishment of transcendental intersubjectivity.
To me the true position of the final Husserl is indeed of interest, but it is neither easily determined nor (most importantly) authoritative.
I'm trying to find the simplest words for what I see as the issue.
The lifeworld is through or for a living individual's nervous system. We must do justice to this embodied, egocentric insight.
Yet this nervous system is only intelligible as embedded within an encompassing world. Sensation needs sense organs ! Also our language (the one you talk to me in, sure of a partial meeting therein) is 'primordially' social, world-directed, and self-transcending. It's a 'sediment' compressing centuries of timebinding R & D.
One can't eliminate either factor without absurdity. For then the sense organs end up as products of the sense organs. Or there's a self somehow without an other or a world, etc. Or (in the other direction) there's a Reality having nothing to do with color, smell, concept, shape, ... and even time or space -- as if such talk could have meaning for us.
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Your mathematics background shining through. :cool:
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Thanks!
I think I see what this aims at, basically at something nondual like pure being. But I see no reason to call it solitude, for that metaphor depends on 'I-the-man' in the background. Husserl can't have his cake and eat it too. Is it not like this?
Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:
In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.
I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone.
But there was always a valuable insight at the core of MS. The living body (the blazing brain) is not a bit player but the tragic hero on our stage. The living flesh is as primordial as language and world and tribe.
The deepest aspect of this problem being that our language is Cartesian through and through, our thinking utterly suffused with dualism.
Quoting plaque flag
:up: Yes, non-dual being cannot be solitude, for the latter is a dualistic idea, in that you can only be alone in relation to others.
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Quoting Janus
I agree, but I think it's a soft, flexible dualism. Following Ryle maybe, I think the problem only begins when a flexible inner/outer distinction hardens into an 'absolute' indirect realism -- where the sense organs become their own product.
Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking.
It seems to me poetry could have a much greater role to play in philosophy than it does or has. Some of the best poetry is and has been philosophical. A few of the more prominent examples that spring to mind being Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Eliot, Stevens, Merwin, Aamons and Ashberry. There are many others.
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I agree, though maybe poetry already 'secretly' rules philosophy from the center. Forums like this suggest to me that there's a variety of fundamental 'images' of the (ideal) philosophy -- varieties of cognitive heroism.
You mentioned some great poets (and whatever we want to call towering Shakespeare.) I'd add some philosophical novelists too: Hesse, Kundera, Sartre.
We probably agree that philosophy is 'bigger' than a specialty topic, as potentially as big as life itself.
I dont mean this in a boundary policing way but it seems obvious that poetry is from the oral level of human cultural organisation and philosophy is from the logical. Each might be the high art of its respective domain, but they speak in different codes and organise different levels of social metabolism - or ways of organising people in ways they can exist in their world systems.
Poetry was mythic tribal memory. A way to capture an identity narrative that made sense in the pre-literate age of foraging and early agriculture.
Then the step from verbal semiosis to technological semiosis took place - with literacy coming along with the ride. Philosophy was born out of numbers and logic, its version of words and rules. Although the Ancient Greeks still mostly used poetry as the form of expression. It was the familiar way to set out a case in memorable fashion.
But then philosophy left the oral tradition well and truely behind. And poetry as social practice had its own new turn with the Romantic reaction to the industrialising world organised by number and logic. It affirmed something in the face of something - even when now mass produced to be silently read from a book.
So how could poetry take philosophy somewhere new, somewhere further, than numbers and logic?
Does it point to feeling and value as that which the age of machinery has forgotten? And even if it is a call back to societys more basic level of oral order, is mechanistic reason not capable of delivering a point of view on feelings and values that is itself suitable for a world as it is currently being made?
So sure. More poetry. Why not?
But as an extension, a corrective, a natural progression, a necessary reclaiming?
Poetry has high status. But I would hesitate to say it has any greater role in philosophy just because of that. Pragmatically what is to be gained (except by a suppression of the pragmatic?).
I think poetry (understood as metaphor, analogy) still organizes the use of numbers and logic. We could also include drama and epic inasmuch as the history and prestige of personalities plays a role in a rhetoric that may take itself for logic. Philosophers have feelings about Derrida and Wittgenstein, etc. Blue team, red team, purple team, black team.
I lean toward Brandom's inferentialist semantics, which is to say that meaning and logic are melted together. We perform logic and semantics at the same time in the inferences we do and do not allow, and our logicsemantics evolves as we use it, always unstable, increasingly self-referential and metacognitive.
I grant that there are formal games that can be played too : symbolic logic, math from a formalist perspective. But we are still stuck at the higher strategic, analogical level when it comes to creating, using, and evaluating them. One can institute quantitative metrics, but this is a political process, involving rhetoric.
The other issue is whether philosophy is understood in terms of a quasi-scientific serious-objective metaphysics or as something like a self-critical conceptual response to existence, the working out of an identity perhaps. Should I pursue serious metaphysics (live a logocentric life) in the first place ?
This is a bit like the problem of the criterion. At the highest level there's no 'algorithmic' necessity, but maybe something more like a comparison of hero types.
Right, there is not one true image of philosophy. Personally, I favour the idea of it, not as a search for truth or correctness of locution, but as a generator of new concepts with which to look at things in more novel and creative ways, or alternatively, which may in some senses be the same thing, a philosophy as a set of ideas that fires the imagination in ways which could facilitate bringing about altered states of consciousness and personal transformation which enables living in better ways.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, you might say that, very broadly speaking, poetry deals with the allegorical, the mythical, the metaphorical concerns and philosophy deals with the logical concerns. I don't see a strict boundary though, and judging from your posts I doubt you do either.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not sure I completely agree with this: I can see it being applicable in the case of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, but would you say it is true of the Presocratics?
Quoting apokrisis
In the transformative ways I outlined in my response to @plaque flag. I think it is as important to stimulate the imagination and the emotions as it is to satisfy the intellectual desire for rigorous understandings.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see why mechanistic reason could not deliver a point of view on feelings and values that is suitable for modern life. I guess it depends on individual needs and interests though. As I have no doubt you know I have great respect for science and I believe that metaphysical speculation is "pouring from the empty into the void" if it does not take account of the latest science.
But I am also drawn by the arts, by the idea of creating one's own life (in the sense that Foucault advocates) and I think for that we may need to let go of some of the rigour and mechanistic thinking and allow ourselves to mythologize (while also being careful not to take myths too seriously or literally). This is only for the exercise of the imagination and when such myth-making is taken to be literal truth, then the whole benefit of allegory and metaphor is lost.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not sure it enjoys as high a status today as it did at other times, speaking generally of course.
Aren't metaphors and analogies about communicating structure of relations? "This is like a version of that in terms of its essential form or organisation."
Poetry might make use of them for the same reason, but in the hope of communicating psychological parallels rather than philosophical or scientific.
Quoting plaque flag
Sure. Humans play human games in anything they do. But science has the claim of a method that transcends these games in the long run. I would also want my philosophy to aim at the same goal and yet not take away the fun of also playing the social games in appropriately ironic fashion.
It's an attention economy out there. We have no choice but to dance to the beat if we want to be part of it.
Quoting plaque flag
I was checking that out only the other week. But its completely gone out of my head again. That's the second time now. I'll have to have a third go I guess.
Quoting plaque flag
I would say I am riding Peircean semiotics to a much more general destination where politics becomes just another aspect of an organism and its metabolism.
Societies have political structures that are triadic once they become fully connected and self-stabilising as in the particular case of British parliamentary democracy. You need the three elements of a state machinery (the mediating system of law), the transcendent ideal that symbolises the wholeness of the organism (the position given to a "divine" monarch as titular head of state), and the feedback from the ground floor in terms of a democratic say (the material degrees of freedom that are the mug public).
So politics becomes yet another thing that is made explicable in Peircean terms. That just is the way systems must organise to stabilise instability, to have a metabolism that digests its world.
I am a structuralist. Or in these times, a post-post structuralist. :grin:
Quoting plaque flag
That is a big issue. But pragmatism gives its answer. If the problem is that your philosophy feels like it leads to passive representation, then that is a little Cartesian. It should lead to practical action.
The caveat which is something I'm currently defining more carefully with this focus on metabolism as the deep structure of an organism is that a lot of what we might get caught up in intellectually has less and less to do with the metabolism of our society. It is indeed off the point and uninvolved. A proper model of the metabolism (its political and economic structure) would tell you exactly when and when it wasn't the case.
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I relate to all of this. The metaphor is something like (creative) expansion, exploration, invention. It reminds me of Rorty, who'd call it philosophy's inheritance from the Romantics.
Personally I find myself fascinated by truth-telling inscription, but I know that this is just one possible path. I really don't know if other tempting paths are better or worse (or even that better/worse makes much sense here). My path is absorbing or rewarding or addictive or whateverish enough to keep me on it. I guess I'm even happy, despite/because my grim view of the world.
Quoting Janus
Indeed. Poetry now inhabits a cultural backwater, like bocce or folk dancing - there's a cognoscenti for it, but it's only a shadow of what used to be.
Quoting Janus
Indeed and (this is only a minor point) I find it interesting how often pejorative language (like 'mechanistic') is employed to describe reason or science. It seems to me that a form of romanticism still has us (perhaps postmodernism is a type of romanticism too) and it seeks to elevate the personal, the emotional, the relationship, the experience, as contrasted with the mechanical, the impersonal, the rational, the transactional, the disenchanted. But I suspect we don't have to use these words to characterize any way of seeing. It depends upon the individual seer.
Looks like we were heading in the same direction. :wink:
I think so. 'Analogy is the core of cognition.' If one thinks of poetry as a mere literary genre, then I probably agree with you. But if it's the basic metaphorical creativity of the mind, I think it is indeed core. (Of course core is a metaphor.)
Quoting apokrisis
I lean toward agreement, but I consider that technology wins and is valued, as if scientific norms shine by reflected light. We'd worship clouds if that's what made it rain. (Which would be scientific, I guess.) Hypothesis non fingo. Will this bomb win the war ? I don't mean to come off as sentimental here either. Maybe I'm channelling Judge Holden from Blood Meridean or Herclitus, but it's as if war, father of all things, is the true Logic. This war-is-logic is like a demonic version of pragmatism. 'Shut up and exterminate.'
Quoting apokrisis
Right. I mentioned the Moloch concept to you not long ago. Game theory looks to be at the heart of reality. Adapt or vanish. Hence the logic of war/competition. Cooperation is of course and advantage for the group of humans or group of organs. But there's always an outside, right ? Life 'is' exploitation. I say this amorally, trying to think that basic boundary.
Quoting apokrisis
Excellent analysis, thanks!
Let me come at it another way. In our differentiated society, we expect people to develop in all sorts of ways. I'd say that our society is so complex that no single finite mind can hope to contain more than a tiny piece of the structure.
A certain kind of philosopher will aim at a view from the top of the mountain, integrating science into something more satisfyingly holistic and metaphysical (as I understand you to do.) But should Coltrane have spent his life on metaphysics ? Should Joyce have written a book more like Vico's than his own?
To me it's not obvious that the best view is the conceptual view from the mountain, which I say as someone attracted to some Shakespearean-existential version of that view.
Another approach: is it better to be Homer or Achilles ? Can one be sure without impossibly taking both paths ?
I guess I'm getting at the finitude of the individual.
I suspect it's because (for many) physics is still the prototype of the concept (in Lakoff's sense of something like a central semi-conscious association.) But biology for instance...
Quoting Tom Storm
Agree :100:
Quoting Tom Storm
:up: I agree and I've often said to Wayfarer that I don't believe a materialist metaphysic has any necessary bearing on spiritual or ethical practice; it always depends on the individual as to how they are variously affected by such ideas.
Yes. Thales brought back geometry from Egypt, Anaximander was his pupil, then a teenage Pythagoras is said to have travelled to Miletus to learn from them.
Before the presocratics, ancient thought was mythic. It was comfortable with casual explanations that mixed up personal and impersonal ways of thought. The gods were both real people and animistic forces in a way that made a narrative sense, but not a logical sense.
Anaximander in particular changed this. He say the Comos as a natural evolutionary system, closed for causality and thus driven by its own self-organising dialectic. There was one universalised cause. And it was a symmetry breaking of the Apeiron, a state of Peircean logical vagueness. You could wind back from the world as it is today to discover how it had to evolve from the first symmetric breaking of the hot and the cold separating out and causing the Apeiron to start to be materially structured.
So Anaximander had already nailed the general cosmic story in terms of a Big Bang symmetry breaking. He had made the leap to thinking of nature as a single developing system with an internal organising logic. The Pythagorean move to mathematical proof of geometric necessities was in a way a reductionist step backwards to the holism and dynamism of Anaximander, as was the metaphysics of the atomists.
So the story zigs and zags. But assuming a logic of rational development - a Cosmic causality - was the big presocratic step.
Of course modern reductionism sees them as fumbling about for a story of the fundamental substance, not the fundamental dynamics. Was it air, water, earth or fire that got things going? Anaximander instead gave a reason why all four emerged as a set of mutually-defining contrasts. Each the logical quantification of its other.
Quoting Janus
Is intellectual desire an emotion? Is rigour not partner to the imagination in being the constraint on its degrees of freedom?
Imagination is our Bayesian ability to forward model the real world. It has its evolved and naturally constrained purpose were it comes to thought as a process.
Generally i would argue you are using confused psychology here. It is the Romantic fiction of how brains should work rather than the pragmatic and validated model of how they actually work. And so this cant be a recipe for how to do thinking better.
Can you teach imagination and creativity? Not very well if you try to apply Romanticism as the psychological theory.
So sure, who could argue with stimulating the emotions and imagination as opposed to constraining and stifling those things. But that framing isnt itself true to the psychology of rational inquiry.
Quoting Janus
That is a much more moderate statement and much harder to disagree with.
It is indeed part of the modern political and economic dialectic that we are required to construct our own uniqueness to have value in the ruthless social marketplace.
What does art school teach but how to cultivate a personal mystique by learning how to distill down a viewpoint that resonates with some generic cultural concern. It is the manufacture of provocative artefacts marketed by social networking.
Another interesting thread in all this is how humans can only escape the dominance-submission game that keep social animals in their place by collectively becoming submissive to an abstract or transcendent principle.
Fukuyama massive three book review of political structure makes this clear. Societies depended on granting legitimacy to a god, a king, eventually just rational principle so as to accept being ruled for the collective good. The divine was a necessary belief just to close the human system as a collaborative rather than competitive space.
So there is a genuine pragmatism in art in that it serves this political function. We agree to a collective awe which makes us all equal under the force of some higher power. We need a god equivalent even if we might - as greenies - call it nature,
Human psychology is a fascinating but explicable thing.
Quoting Janus
Probably true. I was thinking also about its other of essay writing. I dont hear much celebration of that these days. And you can tell I found that the highest art when it come to language use.
Well yep. And is that then pattern recognition, generalisation, abstraction? It is an interesting question to ask how really to pigeonhole this fluidity of thought that can spot the telling sameness behind the arbitrary differences.
Poetry may be training for that. But not for me at least.
Quoting plaque flag
That is my argument. Technology wins and science or poetry is valued only to the degree it pragmatically contributes to that fossil fuel-based current project.
So I start by accepting this as the organismic reality. It is where society and its economic metabolism is at. From this harsh truth we could start asking but what else instead?.
There are rational answers rather than poetic ones. We could price environmental capital and social capital into the current economic equation. We could properly evolve towards being a technological organism by closing ourselves for materials - recycling - like a real organism, and living within the limits of the planets ability to transfer waste heat to deep space. Boring but pragmatic stuff like that.
Quoting plaque flag
Biology gives more hope. Bacteria managed to close the planet in terms of its atmospheric gas balance. They evolved a circular economy where photosynthesis eats the CO2 and respiration eats the O2. Everyone can then settle down and live together in mutualism, riding the daily rising and setting of the Sun.
It bacteria can learn to stabilise the planet to their liking in Gaian feedback fashion, why not us?
All social structure is based on the mutualism of competition-cooperation. Humans are fighters but also traders. It is the combo that has produced civilisation. The problem is that the shift to global governance is a project moving too slow while the rate of global entropification is motoring too fast.
Quoting plaque flag
Yep, the division of labour principle of Adam Smith and his pin makers. It is indeed the core principle of systems thinking and hierarchy theory. Self-organisation involves the mutualism of integration and differentiation. Each grounds the other. So we absolutely know why this works and is essential to any structure that grows.
Quoting plaque flag
I see it different in that my approach is that you cant see the grand integrative sweep unless you make a matching effort to drill down into the concrete details. The process of inquiry is based on going to both these extremes.
Taking both paths is a necessity. Big ideas need to be checked out in every small way possible. The practical question is how to put yourself in that position as a paying proposition.
Quoting plaque flag
The above quote is from page 110 in my edition of The Crisis. I imagine the we-subjectivity of a world for all is closer to your thinking than Husserls talk of a solitary ego constituting this world-for-all as a world-for-all from ones own vantage. But keep in mind that the primal I of the epoche which he discusses is on page 182 of Crisis. He uses the space between page 110 and 182 to demonstrate why your quote represents an incomplete understanding of the basis of we-subjectivity. The point for Husserl isnt about which modes of givenness we construct the world from (dream, imagination, memory, sensation), but how we manage to constitute from the movement among all of these modes more and more complexly interwoven strata of correlations.
I appreciate the detailed response about Husserl, but the larger issue is whether the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego.
You and @Wayfarer both seem to want to emphasize the primacy of the subject and make the world as mere spectacle for or ex nihilo creation of some kind of constituting transcendental subject.
But serious objections to this claim are (it seems to me) simply ignored. For instance:
I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves ?
Fair enough, I was thinking more along the lines of mathematical understanding itself being a directly motivating influence
.Quoting apokrisis
Right, but there are different degrees of appropriate constraint in different contexts.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, it depends on what kind of thinking you want to do. Different tools for different jobs and all that.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, rational enquiry is one thing, though, and poetry and the arts in general another, not to mention personal transformation. These things don't have to be "rationally correct" they just have to be something alive.
Quoting apokrisis
To me this view seems too simplistic. Artists may also create novel cultural concerns. Everything human is culturally mediated, to be sure, but it is not culture exhaustively and all the way down as I see it.
Quoting apokrisis
I think I can agree with this, I am all for seeing nature as sacred, rather than some unknowable transcendence. I think it is healthy for humans to maintain a sense of the sacredness of life, of being itself, even if only to dispel the tedium of the commonplace for a while.
I agree with you in the abstract, but in practice there is just too much detail for the finite individual to master. The world has too much richness, too much depth.
Even though I see a construction of a grand metaphysics as still possible and worthwhile, such a construction has to be a severe lossy compression of the world. It's not obvious whether it's better to be a Hegel, a Coltrane, a Chappelle, a Napoleon, or just a person who puts their parental role before all else, etc.
What I'm looking at is how the metaphysics might model its own creator and how it accounts for its own role. For instance, does the correct metaphysics accelerate the heat death ? I like to see how theories account for their own engendering.
See my reply in the Schopenhauer thread.
I know Husserl is tagged with the charge of solipsism and idealism, but Merleau-Ponty knew better. Husserls genius was in the recognition that the being of meaning is in the in-between, the interaction between a subjective and objective pole, rather than in the acts of a pre-constituted transcendental subject. Husserls transcendental ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity. What is central is the synthetic constituting activity that remakes both the subject and object poles. If Husserl didnt make clear enough the importance of the in-between, the baton was taken up not only by Merleau-Ponty but also Heidegger and Derrida. I think in relation to this synthetic structure, the biggest problem from your point of view isnt just Husserls treatment of the subject, but what he has in common with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and has led to the charge of linguistic idealism against post-structuralists leveled by the realist-materialist crowd. What this alleged linguistic idealism has in common with Husserls synthetic subject-object acts is the dependence of world as well as subjectivity on a reciprocity that leaves no room for the coherence of any material aspect of world independent of this reciprocal interaffecting.
...for whom any suggestion that objectivity can be less than absolute is a surrender to anarchy...
I thought that was philosophising. But if you are arguing that philosophy ought to be radically open to all comers, then I would agree. No problem with there being a competition of methods as pragmatism will in the end win out. :smile:
I would accept that I am talking about metaphysicalling or even natural philosophising in terms of the kinds of thinking that are effective.
The mouth of the funnel can be as wide as you want to imagine. It is all going to narrow down to the method of pragmatic reason - the semiotic modelling relation - in my view.
Quoting Janus
Sure. But what I am stressing is that art is not a solitary enterprise. It doesnt exist unless it is shared. The novelty - as in the informationally surprising and revealing - is to be found in the paradigm shift that the wider social system might undertake.
Anyone can splash paint at a canvas to create an accident of pattern. It takes the shock of an audience to give the work its meaning. It becomes art because it is a sign that can be read as expressing some socially-contexted message like the modern socially approved trope of the artist saying look at me, find me in this canvas by the characteristic violence and randomness of my dripped trails of paint.
Doesnt this abstract expressionism truly assert the artist as its central presence by simultaneously removing their presence from the work of art? This has to be the ultimate self-portraying. That will be $50 million thanks. Ker-Ching!
So it is the conspiracy between the artist and the audience which is the space in which salience can arise. The artist comes up with novel signs that audiences are then encouraged to read in terms of established cultural habits.
Do most works art really challenge society or simply conform it in its habits of throught? The degree of actual novelty is very low. In modern art, isnt it largely just a story of needing ever more extreme was to assert the Western values of romantic individualism.
Look at me, Im different and new! And isnt this novelty what we collectively most value? Ker-Ching. Another artwork sold.
Im only stressing the social game that constructs our hierarchies of cultural value. And questioning who really produces the socially meaningful novelty in this life of ours.
Art is probably more part of the conformity creation I would argue. Hence poetrys role in mythologising the human condition, making the historical facts fit the self-affirming narratives. Empires build monuments that speak of their transcendent right to power. Art galleries likewise enshrine the social ideas that matter - history told as dialectical story of progress from the pagan to the religious to the aristocratic to the romantic to the bare existential.
Technology, as logic paired with fossil fuel, is what has actually put human society on its exponential path of becoming the global planetary organism. The domestication of the Earth with a metabolism of concrete, cows and corn.
Philosophy barely talks about this with any insight. Economics and sociology are only waking up to it.
It has been the topic of conversation in ecology since the 1970s. But only recently have even the biologists understood why the industrial revolution was again nauture doing its biosemiotic thing. Colonising entropy gradients with metabolic technology.
There is a metaphysics here where biology > physics.
Now that is what counts as a paradigm shift and a social surprise. But also one that aligns with mind > matter if you squint just right and understand this in terms of Peircean immanence rather than Cartesian transcendence.
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I'm 100% down with that (or can find one interpretation of it that I like). I call it Ye Olde Lifeworld. [It's just the world, but I'm trying to talk around certain biases.] The scientific image is just a piece of it, encompassed by and dependent upon it.
As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. 'No finite [disconnected, bounded] thing has genuine being.' Or (in a metaphysical-speculative fuck-practicality register) the ab-stract (the out-yanked) is ideal (a mere image, fantasy, fiction). [So the objects of that catalogue above and in general are interdependent for their meaningfulness --- have their being in relationship with one another. ]
In other word : holism.
Now I'm surprised you would say so, because I'm basically coming from a Heideggarian place in my criticism of a Cartesian foundation. I love Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Had to buy a copy for the shelf. So I shouldn't be confused with someone trying to eliminate the 'subject.'
I'm trying to find a plausible 'big' story (grasp of how it all hangs together) that doesn't lapse into contradiction or absurdity or blind faith as so many such stories so easily do.
I take flesh in even a metaphysical sense. The body (of the one who sees and speaks, for that one ) is not just one object among others. It is the sun.
Amen brother Flag!
But you seem to understand the "in practice" in terms of Cartesian representationalism rather than Peircean semiosis. You want every pixel lit up, every information point displayed. Only by "all the bits" is the whole properly understood.
But I say the opposite. The effort is not to master every detail. It is to learn to be able to ignore as much detail as possible.
That is the principle of reality modelling, of pragmatism, of Bayesian Brains, of the Batesonian difference that makes a difference ... of consciousness as the focal attentional/intentional view of the world as it has been rendered by a host of habits acting from their ingrained "self-centred" perspective.
Think of the game of 20 questions. Bivalent inquiry is logarithmic in its progress because it can throw out half the total information on each well judged guess.
In 20 steps, you can turn a million possibilities into 1 certainty measured against a backdrop of 999,999 bits of ignorable noise. Information is meaningful as signal to the degree that information has been discarded. Treated as random backdrop "whatever-ness".
So in practice, it is the ability to discount reality in advance that allows you to control it to your advantage in the present. Wisdom is knowing how not be bothered. Your global habits have already assimilated all possible surprises the world might have.
You can't tell genius from crackpot until you have built up skill at discarding the crackpot with automatic ease. Get to that and the genius pops out, catches your attention, with similar practiced skill.
Quoting plaque flag
Exactly. Except lossy is the feature and not the bug when progressing from analytical intelligence to synthetic wisdom. That is how you can climb the ladder of abstraction and see the wealth of deterministic-seeming detail turn into a simpler statistical array of the accidental. A local blur of baseline fluctuation.
And why also frame this as what kind of historical individual would you like to be? Knowledge is collective. Peirce defined truth as the limits of a community of rational inquiry. And the more complex the world is as a state of emergent hierarchical order, the more the top of the tree ought to be inhabited by synthesisers than analysers. Contributing to the putting together is more impactful than contributing to the breaking apart.
But the systems view is both are needed. They are mutually complementary roles rather than mutually exclusive. This is what allows a system to be a scalefree dynamical balancing act a system with an inbuilt ratchet of growth and repair.
So do you want to be famous to history or a great dad? I would reply a good life is going to understand that these ought to be complementary goals, and that we should start by being satisfied by striking the right dynamical balance. And if one is the limit on its other, that's fine. It is how it should be if they are actually dialectical oppositions that need to be resolved for the win-win outcome.
Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?
Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history.
So there isn't such a strong excuse for being a bad parent because you had more important stuff to do unless that stuff fed back to improve parenting as a general social skill. That thought ought to focus your question more sharply on the actual point of what is good for "the rationalising system" which is all about its accumulating habits and feedback loops.
Quoting plaque flag
I've talked endlessly about this. Anaximander and his Apeiron. Peirce and his cosmic growth of reasonableness. The Big Bang as a symmetry-breaking of an "everythingness".
In the beginning is a vagueness. The nothingness of an everythingness. But everythingness includes all its contradictions. And much of it must cancel because it is "too symmetric".
If you can move a foot to the left, you can move a foot to your right, and you are back right where you started. Everything has changed and nothing has happened.
But that then sets you up for an emergent residue of what can't be cancelled away as it dichotomous or asymmetric. It is a difference that makes a difference. You can grow or you can shrink. Once you start heading in those kinds of opposite directions, it tends to become more a permanent symmetry breaking. It takes much more time and energy to cancel out the move you might have made.
So a simple translation or rotation can just as immediately self cancel. That is what we say virtual particles do in the quantum vacuum.
But then growth and shrinking are complex symmetry breakings which are moves towards complementary global and local limits on being. You can go a long way from your "other" and so make it a long way to get back.
Again this is quantum field theory and its path integral or sum over histories story, understood in terms of the thermal decoherence created by a universe that cools and expands. With global growth and local energy dissipation baked into its fabric, the universe creates conditions where particles that start off as left-right coin flips the symmetry of particles and anti-particles get pulled far enough apart from each other in terms of distance and energy that they simply fall out of the entropic flow.
The virtual vacuum fluctuations crystallise as fundamental real particles. Quark, electrons and neutrinos. They become the dust of localised matter that can no longer stream at lightspeed and so are frozen into one or other of their original symmetric states. Asymmetry of scale has stranded them.
Only at the end of time will the Universe complete the cycle by in fact giving all this matter dust the time to find its way back to a state of virtual existence as the information content of cosmological horizons. Symmetry from the particle fluctuation sense will be restored. But that is now baked into the asymmetry of a de Sitter heat death void where the Universe as a thing is now the heat sink without its heat source rather than the Big Bang's story of the heat source without yet its heat sink.
So "time" is the energy difference that is used to set up this thermo-spatial asymmetry. The Planck scale measures its "smallness" at the start and "largeness" at the end. Reality exists because everythingness contained its further possibilities in terms of symmetries that could very quickly be discarded and thus in Darwinian fashion discover the symmetries that couldn't so easily be self-cancelled to universalised nothingness quite so fast.
There were the global dimensional asymmetries that explain the existence of spacetime extent and energy density content as the general gig of the Universe as an "existing by persisting as an expanding~cooling system" story. And there were the local or gauge asymmetries that could cause isolated particles to condense out of the radiation flow and become negentropic dust that made an atomistic mess of the otherwise pretty clean void until eventually enough time past for this dust to catch up and self-erase.
So metaphysics since its recorded dawn has offered this kind of self-organising tale based on a logic of vagueness, the dichotomies that then can break the symmetry of a vagueness by their asymmetric structure, and the complex hierarchies of negentropic eddies that can form on top of the general downward turbulent entropic flow.
Metaphysics got there early. Physics is catching up fast.
:up:
I see this and completely agree, but what I'm getting at is instead the necessary tradeoff involved in having any finite personality. Lossy compression is one thing, but a lack of data is another. I can't explore every path and get all the 'data' in the first place. To be what I am is to also to not be what someone else is.
But that is how you could even construct a grounding sense of selfhood. The existential crisis in life is not finitude but vagueness. Our job semiotically is to conjure up meaning in a fruitful dialectic between the self and its world - the world it is pragmatically producing. What you say is finitude is what I call the complementary limits on possibility that make being - as dynamical balance - something crisply measurable.
What we want to escape is vagueness. Where we want to arrive is in a realm of crisply expressed possibility.
Finitude doesnt even exist. Although we may be bounded by asymptotic approach to a horizon.
Quoting plaque flag
I dont get this. You cant be something definitely different unless that is a contrast to how you are generally the same.
You are saying the existential crisis is realising you can only live the one life, follow the one path. Or perhaps nearer the bone, you can only be exceptional by sacrificing all else to one thing.
Im just not seeing the logic of that. But I think maybe there is here a buried dichotomy of whether your one life is largely a matter of accident or choice, Does it lack meaning even to be exceptional when it was just a matter of chance, a win in the generic or cultural lottery? Does It only count if we are self-made creations?
If we understand ourselves as natural beings - the product of evo-devo balancing acts - then the hope is to become pragmatically adapted to our environments. You seem to have more Nietzschean aims in mind. You would have to clarify why finitude is a bug rather than a feature from a pragmatist point of view.
Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all?
What on earth can anyone do that would count as a "material difference in the unfolding of larger human history"? If Fulton hadn't invented the steam engine, someone else would have, or they wouldn't, and humanity would hurtle toward the end a little slower or a little faster or about the same, depending on what happened instead.
To say something this weird about any individual, let alone an individual whose life work is meaningful to a great many people, you have to take a perspective from which nothing matters but the cold, hard truth that we're all doomed in the long run. Not going to argue with that.
I just don't understand what "material difference" means in this context. There's no difference that makes a difference to the Big Sky.
[hide="Reveal"]
I didnt say it did. I was taking @plaque flag at face value for the sake of his argument.
From the point of view of the Cosmos, what matters is that we humans work to accelerate the entropification of its realm. And even that doesnt matter in any strong sense. It just has the tellic force of inveterate habit. Being effete matter and all.
Got it. I guess in the long run, it also won't matter that I said "Robert Fulton" instead of "James Watt".
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Sometimes I find myself in a discussion with someone and I can't for the life of me remember the point we were exploring.
I agree that knowledge is collective. An 'existentialist' tries to articulate the way the world exists through or for individual personalities who have to figure out their role, which includes deciding what knowledge 'really' is. This is just to tell the whole truth. [Kierkegaard raised similar issues about Hegel.]
The Conversation is adversarially cooperative.* I think we agree. What master does it sereve ? To what goal does it hasten ?
Answers to such questions are expressions of personality, adoptions of criteria, the getting on of escalators for a continuation (after the initial choice) that may be algorithmic. Beginnings are therefore mightiest.
Can one personality contain and reduce all the others ?
*Coherence norms individually may mirror the reality constraints on a tribe. A leader's incoherence leads to a nonadaptive cacophonous practice in an unforgiving world, so nature 'insists' on unified egos (on the memetic evolution of the universal adoption of identity as the norm of logical consistently and coherence in a being held responsible for explaining its actions). Brandom is great on this stuff.
Well, yes. But there's a personality type that tries to ingest everything essential and worthwhile about all other types. Hegel is famously associated with the swelling blob that harmonizes errors (all other partial-finite personalities) into a grand and complete self-consciousness.
So we get a finite personality that wants to be its own other -- no longer finite. One's opponent always has about the same number of 'bits' of complexity, right ? Ye shall know them by their windmill / shadow / projection. To cast no shadow, to miss out on nothing essential. But we can discuss this attempt from the outside. Can the creeping fire of irony be put out ?
It's hard for me to believe in a free lunch. As Kojeve or someone noted, if we were immortal we could eventually get around to everything. But mortals are haunted by opportunity cost, to name just one ghost. Is it better to be Beethoven or Kant ? Who's to say with authority, having somehow been both ? And who's to say that what is 'said' in defense of Beethoven isn't the music itself ? Who's to say, with authority, that Kant told us more than Beethoven ? I live in concepts largely myself, but I can use concepts to contemplate the possible limits of their range and authority.
Kojeve's book on Hegel makes explicit this 'getting on' the escalator by assuming that a certain kind of conceptuality is the king's highway. Given that first step, the rest follows. But that first step is 'irrational.'
Thanks ! I love preaching the word of Zod (who is great fun in Superman 2).
You definitely address the issue in general. But I have trouble (might be my problem) making sense of the subject or place of enunciation. Presumably we are stuck in/behind the human nervous, with human goals. Does that constrain your theory ? Can your theory serve the heat death directly (to put it playfully), or must it serve the replication of your genes ? Or ?
I swear I'm not trying to be difficult. I really want to clarify the issue.
Interesting point. In the finite amount of time and brief attention span of my life, I've never considered pursuing an intellectual or cultural project of consequence. It's more likely: do I sleep in or do I do the shopping? And I suspect that no matter how many years most of us are given to live, we are never going to be Beethoven or Kant. I doubt talent like this is just waiting for time to unleash it. And I suspect that's a blessing. Maybe being Peter the electrician, or Mary the accountant is a finer and more rewarding experience in the living of it (certainly compared to Beethoven). Even as a half-baked romantic, I think I would much prefer an 'enjoyable' life to an influential, or prodigious one. The question of a realist theory of language and all that this might imply may well be a decadent and nugatory pursuit. :wink:
First steps are abductive. Rationally constrained to be that which could scale in general fashion as a causal account.
So I disagree. It is the deduction of the consequences that follow that needs to have its conclusions baked in by logic. And then from there, we are back into the real world of inductive confirmation. The evidence either inclines us towards our hypothesis or it doesnt. We learn and move on.
If that magisterial view of rational inquiry seems a bit sweeping, well it works. So believe it until a better method comes along.
Interesting to hear because it's been so different for me, though as I got older I realized it didn't really matter.
Quoting Tom Storm
Very true. But when I was in a band we sometimes felt greatness in the moment, pouring out something from the center of us, whether or not it was relevant to others. Creative friendship is like a love affair.
Quoting Tom Storm
I hear you. Ties into the above for me. Relationships are central. Art can be a great part of that. At this point in history, given the surfeit of great stuff already out there, it's hard to want to play some belatedly recognized lonely genius or even some famous person too afflicted to enjoy the success.
I'm willing to consider that me doing philosophy is like my cat grooming herself or sharpening her claws on this cardboard triangle we bought her.
Just to be clear, I don't mind sweeping. Is Shakespeare a better philosopher than Peirce ? Why or why not ? Different forms of sweepingness. I like grand theories.
If you have a particular goal in mind that will constrain your thinking, narrow it down. The semiotic modeling relation would be one conceptual constraint, which I have to say I'm wary of universalizing.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems too narrow a view of art to me. Art may be a solitary enterprise or it may not be. No one escapes from being influenced by some aspects of culture, even if only by being inducted into a linguistic community. But the social dimension is by no means the whole of the story as i see it. I paint and draw and I also write poetry; when asked why I do these things I say in regard to the first "to discover how I see, and how I feel and understand beauty and aliveness in terms of tone, colour, intensity and calm in terms of visual composition".
I have painted for more than fifty years and only recently bothered to pursue showing any of my work. Similarly, I write to see how I think. I'm not much concerned about publishing my work; because that's not why I do it. If I published it ans someone could relate to itl got something out of it, then great. If no one related to it it wouldn't matter to me because I know what it means to me.
Quoting apokrisis
This I totally agree with. :up:
Quoting apokrisis
And this! I have no truck with transcendence because I think it is incoherent and irrelevant; but that's just me. I have no objection to others entertaining such ideas (or believing that they are in fact entertaining ideas :wink:)
I have no desire to disabuse anyone of anything unless they ask for it by arguing for, or simply asserting, whatever, as being the one truth or true path to the truth.
Rationality is a collective enterprise, but it is a method not a set of conclusions; conclusions are matters for individuals. A valid argument is only as good as its premises (which are themselves not justified by the argument, but in some other way, with its own set of presuppositions). In other words, at least in relation to metaphysics, soundness is in the eye of the beholder.
Think of it this way. Imagine a lake damned up behind dirt mounds. The second law describes how it wants to run down to a more general equilibrium but cant right now. You with a digger can hasten this project. And the second law doesnt mind if you stick a turbine generator in the flow. More energy is going to be lost than you can extract, even if turbines can be approaching 90z efficient. Besides anything you extract will be used or lost in transmission pretty soon.
So organisms can strike a bargain and dip their ratcheting machinery in the entropy flows they can unlock.
The Universe is more of problem to explain in entropy accounting as in fact the total entropy does not change if you count the negentropy of the ever growing spatial expansion that cancels out the entropy of the ever cooling material contents.
Hence the idea of the free lunch, the quantum fluctuation out of nothing. And hence justification for the deeper vagueness-based story Im telling when it comes to the Cosmos itself rather than the parasitic colonisation of convenience entropy flows by the machinations of living and mindful organisms.
What would Shakespeare have said? What would Peirce have said? From their points of view, what do you suspect would be the answer and why?
We can use a word like philosopher widely or narrowly. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to not employ it confusingly and thus render our utterances vague.
That'd be something like the Shakespearian approach to the question. I'd be articulating my models of two different personalities. For Shakespeare, the 'existential' plane is perhaps the worthiest focus, but he'd have to explore the other attitude to model Peirce -- have to end up undecided and undecidable. Cosmic irony.
Quoting apokrisis
A conception of philosophy looks to be an 'existential' (at base 'irrational') specification of the cognitive hero. A group forms around an implicit 'image' of this hero, the shadow or antipode of Hegel perhaps, and fits it in a robe of explicit principles -- a 'rationalization' of an identification that runs deeper than concept. But I can't experiment with such claims as if from a neutral vantage. This perspective is subject to its own corrosive analysis.
But I can say I play sport and climb mountains for that same reason. Not so much with a focus on visual composition but for the intensity of the experiencing.
Is that art. Well I dont mind terms being stretched in useful ways as well as being narrowed in useful ways. Im not here to die in the ditch for a definition. I will just point out that your talk of solitary art does acknowledge the social context which can justify your painting and drawing as that kind of thing rather than some weird scratching and smearing at a surface which might make you a rather suspect character in out tight little community.
Quoting Janus
No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. But then no one likes seeing the sausage getting made. :razz:
Quoting Janus
So you assert. But I find Peirces theory of truth a more useful view. Conclusions are more about what we could all agree. Truth is the limit of a community of inquiry. So no beetles in boxes allowed.
Is human philosophy 'constrained' to serve the particular groups of humans who cocreate it on some group level or some genetic level ? Is there a necessary philosophy ?
Is your own theory 'only' a tool evolved by and for humans ? Do humans have a purpose ? What if anything needs to be added to a Dawkins-like vision of moist robots?
One of the complexities here is that the human nervous system models in some sense the human nervous system.
I want to say there's a famous holograph of Balzac, page with the title of the new book at the top, and the rest of the page is full of calculations of how much money he'll make from it, which debts he'll pay off, and so on.
I cant tell if you mean this ironically. Our positions are poles apart if I am emphasising the socially constructed and communal nature of rational inquiry, and you are pushing the Romantic image of the individual genius.
No. Neuroscience does that. The view of the neural level of world-making from a verbal and mathematical level of world-making.
The form of the complexity is well specified. The semiosis is hierarchical. Each level of organismic order arises with a more abstracted code and a more abstracted world.
Yes, of course I acknowledge the social dimension of art, the history of art; 'art' here denoting all the arts. Where art differs from mountain climbing is that it is an adventure which yields tangible results that others may or may not relate to and value.
When Jackson Pollock produced the first drip paintings many people claimed a monkey could have produced them. To me this is nonsense, no one since Pollock has produced drip paintings that remotely compare to his. But of course, not everyone sees this, and it is not something you can convincingly argue for. People either see it or they don't. And there is no way of definitively establishing that seeing such aesthetic qualities is illusory or not, other than the individual being the judge of their own experience, and that experience, no matter how profound or intense, is not something that can be evidence for others. In other words, art is simply not science or logic.
It's like when you tramp in the mountains; some may see and feel the sublime beauty there and others not. Individual experiences cannot be compared, so in that sense they "drop out of the conversation" as @Banno likes to say.
But the fact that we have these incomparable experiences does not drop out of the conversation, because many people do enjoy them, and it is arguable that they can recognize the marks of such experiences in art works and in the reports of others.
Quoting apokrisis
That the visual arts, particularly painting, is also a business or trade, and for some an extremely lucrative one cannot be denied. I know a successful artist who sells his paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But everyone wants his paintings which are of a particular subject he arrived at early on, so he cannot explore his creative ideas to his satisfaction but must keep producing the product others want, and he says this is frustrating although necessary since he has to make a million dollars a year just to service the mortgages on his houses in Australia, France and London. So for creative outlet he plays in a jazz band.
By contrast, no one makes any money out of being a poet.
Quoting apokrisis
And yet there is so little general agreement today. I'm currently reading a book by John Hands, in which he talks about all the objections to the standard model of the Big Bang in cosmology and how proponents of alternative models find difficulty in getting their work published on account of the almost religious dogmatism with which the BB model is considered to be just simply fact.
So, it has little to do with "beetles in boxes". If you read my posts you will see that I am often disagreeing with @Wayfarer that traditional metaphysics is a discursively viable subject of discussion if the aim is arriving at the truth; I say it isn't because there is no clearly decidable way of establishing the truth of such metaphysical propositions as God, transcendence, eternal life, free will and so on, or whether materialism or idealism are closer to the truth about the absolute nature of things, or even whether such ideas are coherent or whether we know what we are talking about when we try to address such issues.
We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. That said, it's not always easy to establish just what the truest current findings in the sciences even are, or to have confidence that anything we think today will hold up for another hundred years. Hopefully the cream rises to the top over time, but we have no way of being sure of that outcome.
As a person with math background you might ask this question of that discipline as well. Every day about 80 articles are submitted to ArXiv.org . There are probably tens of thousands of articles published that are read by less than five people and have not garnered enough support to move the needle of mathematical desire.
To this extent most mathematics and philosophy have little to no effect on the twists and turns of civilization. But there is a kind of satisfaction to the individual producing their product.
Quoting Janus
What about non-traditional metaphysics , or metaphysics period? If analysis of the origin and nature of the paradigmatic structures and worldviews that make empirical facts and truths intelligible do not produce clearly decidable ways of establishing their truths or coherence, what do you think it is that makes empirical facts and truth decidable and coherent? Perhaps your answer is in the next quote:
Quoting Janus
So the findings of the sciences are what makes a metaphysics plausible? I would say you have that exactly backwards. How can the results of a methodology whose central concept, observed evidence, is only intelligible within an overarching paradigmatic framework be used to validate that overarching framework?
Such an analysis is a matter for phenomenology or epistemology. Those structures and worldviews do not make intelligibility possible; on the contrary they would be impossible without intelligibility. Our understanding of our own epistemic structures and worldviews is a reflective understanding of ourselves, our culture and our language, and that is not metaphysics.
One thing that is often forgotten by those who hold that the empirical environment we experience and understand is constructed * as opposed to, in the human case, merely mediated) by language and culture is that the environment is also intelligible for animals, which is evidenced by the ways in which they can successfully navigate around and survive in the natural environment (and generally better in fact than we can, if we leave behind all our civilized accoutrements).
Science deals with the empirical world considered as it appears to us, without trying to take account of factors extraneous to the phenomena themselves, since to try to incorporate the subject into the picture would only create confusion. How would you incorporate the experiencing subject into the understanding of plate Techtonics, for example?
Quoting Joshs
A metaphysics which is in accordance with how the world is, as we experience and understand it scientifically, is at least more plausible than a metaphysics produced by speculating about reified concepts which are based on linguistic and cultural associations, that is all I meant to say. I didn't mean to say that any metaphysics can ever be proven (or disproven).
Quoting Janus
Of course thats metaphysics. Metaphysics pertains to the fact that language, culture and how the world appears to us empirically are inextricably bound together as a unified web.
Quoting Janus
What does it mean for a paradigm to be in accord with how the world is? What happens to how the world appears to us when we turn a worldview on its head? That world doesnt become more or less true, but we observe it differently. What used to count as evidence no longer does, and what was previously not considered as evidence, or not even visible to us, now becomes fact. This openness of the world to potentially endless alternative constructions is the result of the entanglement of culture, language and perception.
That's just a fancy way of saying that language and culture influence to some degree the way we see things. I have never disputed that. Dispassionate scientific observation is the closest we can come to seeing things without bias. We do that by leaving ourselves out of the picture.
It is a methodological Epoché which is kind of like the mirror image of the phenomenological Epoché that brackets the question of the existence of an external world. I notice you haven't attempted to address the issue for your comprehensively constructivist view that the obvious intelligibility for animals of their environments poses.
Quoting Joshs
Worldviews do not much affect how people experience and basically understand the everyday world of natural and human events. As to paradigm shifts regarding how phenomena are understood, can you think of a major one which wasn't scientific, or else a transition from a previous worldview we would not count as being scientific, to one that we would count as scientific?
The change from a classical physical worldview to a quantum physical worldview has not made cars, animals, trees, chairs, houses, roads, mountains, rivers, oceans, planets, stars and galaxies seem any less real or material, or appear any different visually.
So art produces artefacts which are indeed the concrete signs of ideas. I agree. Mountain climbing is definitely the more personal pursuit and less social pursuit. Art is literally a way of speaking to others about ideas and feelings of a certain kind. It is intrinsically the communal thing - the social organism thing - of forming a generalised and shared worldview.
Moving the body has neurobiological meaning. It has its signs - like sweat and endorphins. But art is part of the human social construction game. It is about the representation of conceptions at the level of our collective social consciousness.
And I would agree that art has moved from dealing in representational artefacts to conceptual artefacts. So rather than just capturing perceptual likenesses of socially meaningful people and occasions, it claims to challenge our ideas about social identity itself. You could say that is stepping into philosophical territory by presenting society with art works in a gallery and demanding we show our seriousness in terms of putting a hard number in terms of dollars on the dose of useful philosophising thus delivered.
What? You want personal enlightenment for free? Go climb a mountain! :grin:
Quoting Janus
Experts certainly like to think they would immediately recognise his unmistakable signature and couldnt be fooled when some lost work suddenly appears on the art market.
Not for them the lab tests to check out the canvas and pigments for their authenticity. No need but to stand back and see the mark of genius imprinted on the flecks and splatter.
Quoting Janus
A convenient inconvenience for Romanticism? Or what a system metaphysics predicts when it talks of the duality of constraints shaping degrees of freedom?
The more there is a shaping social order, the more individualistic we must become. Paradoxical or instead how complexity evolves?
Quoting Janus
Yes. The social function of romanticism was to point to the sublime. It was the other half of this dichotomistic move towards greater systems complexity. We should all learn this trick of being not just individual, but incomparably individual.
Hey kids! its 1974! Everyone must wear flares! Put away the Kerouac, get hip to Castaneda. Been there, laughed at that.
The Enlightenment was pushing the same metaphysics. Adam Smiths rational economics was about mass consumption via individualised labour specialisation.
It all comes back to the same recipe for complexity. Differentiate so as to integrate. The greater the variety, the more general must be the laws that bind it.
That is the social value of art as self expression. It is another way of getting humans to think and act like individuals so that what they collectively produce is an ever-enlarging space of cultural meme.
Prove that you can stand out as a social influencer because of your incomparable individuality? Ker-Ching! Social media will rain you with dollars.
Quoting Janus
I know the dynamic well. That is how a system works. It needs to impose stability on what it finds useful. It is another reason that individuality - as something apart from its social context - is a dangerous and angst-generating fiction.
Audience building is what pays the bills. Every influencer know that.
Quoting Janus
But a lyricist? Even I would pay more for a song with good lyrics.
Why do poets get a bum deal then? A Tennyson could make a fortune in Victorian book publishing days. Pam Ayers managed to sell in more recent times.
Quoting Janus
Always the splitters complaining about the lumpers, and the lumpers complaining about the splitters. I wouldnt take too much notice. The worry would be if all the voices fell silent. Instead there is a vigorous debate going on and big things keep getting discovered.
Quoting Janus
Metaphysics makes the guesses. Science checks them out. So yep.
The only thing that could derail this natural philosophy enterprise is Descartes demon. And so far, so good, pragmatically speaking. If we are someones computer simulation, we havent stumbled upon any glitches in the matrix that I can think of.
Art is a way of speaking about feelings and experiences which cannot be rendered in generalized explanatory terms. My experience is that you may start with a kind of vision or intimation which is worked towards, and at some point abandoned rather than finished, when you feel satisfied that it has culminated in being a apt expression of that vision or those intimations, I can't be any clearer than that.
I don't think art is about forming a generalized and shared worldview (well, I mean it could be in some cases) as it is about finding expression for one's own experiences and feelings. If others relate
then great, if not, then too bad.
Quoting apokrisis
On the face of it, drip paintings should be the easiest to forge. I'm not aware of any attempts to forge a Pollock except for something that happened here in Sydney when I was at art school in the early seventies. I heard that there was an exhibition of previously undiscovered works by Pollock in one of the rooms in the campus. When I looked at them, I could see straight away that they we amateurish with none of the nuance, understanding of tonal or colour relationships or strength of composition of a Pollock. It was immediately obvious to me, and by his reports, the friend I was with, that it was a hoax.
That said I don't deny that a very talented forger could produce a work that might fool the experts simply because such a work would have the same colour, tone and composition strengths, and the same kind of allusiveness and power of vision as a genuine Pollock.
Quoting apokrisis
A debate which would be all the more vigorous if humans did not have such a tendency to dogmatize knowledge, and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy.
Quoting apokrisis
Even if we were, there would still have to be a real world in which our simulation was being run. Not an idea to be taken seriously.
Just like philosophy PhDs are sold as a route to Wall Street critical thinkers able to break out of the box! so fine arts is sold because so many employers must want the socially savvy graduate who can tickle the zeitgeist for a few dollars more.
Quoting Janus
I had to wait a nanosecond, but Google coughed up....
And so on until spectroscopy identifies the acrylic binders not available until the 1960s and other giveaway details about the artefact itself, nothing about how no one would misjudge this as an actual Pollock just because his genius is unmistakable.
Quoting Janus
I don't recognise this caricature from what I have seen inside the said institutions of learning. This is wishful thinking.
A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery. I hadn't realized there have been so many Pollock fakes, but then I didn't search it, and was merely speaking from what I have encountered.
I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain; aesthetic quality in general is inexplicable, or at least all explanations are under-determined. I have found that people generally either get it or they don't; perhaps it cannot be taught at all.
Quoting apokrisis
If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on.
If it can. So far the Measurement Problem and String theory are left dangling in a scientific void. My take is that metaphysics in this regard is more scientific speculation.
Quoting apokrisis
bingChat could not find evidence to support the notion that Wall street in fact hires philosophy PhDs. Maybe they do.
Quoting apokrisis
Not at $36,000 for being hauled up Mt Everest. The less expensive climbs take their tolls in different ways. My back and shoulders testify to that.
Quoting Janus
I spent many years in such institutions and did not observe this institutional trait. But I was not in the humanities where the lines between fictional and real may be blurred.
Where is measuring a practical problem? Decoherence tacks statistical mechanics onto quantum mechanics and recovers a world that is close enough classical at most physical scales of practical interest.
You can do engineering fine without worrying about the quantum if your world is human scale in terms of time, distance and energy.
String theory is measurable if we could instead engineer a collider powerful enough to recreate a quantum scale of time, distance and energy. So there is a neat inverse connection here. We are stuck in our classical realm for all intents and purposes. Which is lucky for both us and our engineering projects.
And computational science can say a lot about limit-state physics by simulation. If it is good enough for mathematical proof, why not for maths' less rigorous kid brother?
There are other ways to skin the cat.
Quoting jgill
Google's first hit brings up the annedotes....
The second hit was.....
So seems legit.
Quoting jgill
Mt Everest is evidence of all that could be wrong about the Romanticism that gets turned into Commercialisation.
My "birth" mountain behind the ex-family sheep station has become internet famous. For decades, I could climb it alone. Last time, I had to scoot past about 400 people. There was no room even to stand near the top. And this was me starting early in the off season to beat the crowds.
Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware. Timebinding symbolic technique depends still on mortal brains, for now.
Finding refuge in the Gettier problem? Sly dog. Quoting Janus
I agree. I couldn't see the fuss about Picasso when I was just looking at the pix in the book. But then there was the big exhibition in Aussie and in real life the paintings really worked. So there is something that lifts an artist above the crowd.
But you can also analyse what it is like the way it works when seen from both near and afar. It's not a little flat image but something that seems to lift off the canvas because the details are not overworked. From a distance, it seems precise. From close up, it becomes the opposite.
My daughter is an artist (as was my mother) so we are looking both at the paintings and why they succeed.
Quoting Janus
But you were talking about the "dogmatic" institutions you know, the places that can house so many contradictory dogmas.
Have you spent any time in science departments or at science conferences? Or even had to work at the coalface of ideas?
If you are talking sociology, there is this curious - but explicable - dynamic where the greatest hatred is reserved for those just beyond your circle. Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies.
The real world is more like Turing's reaction~diffusion systems if you want to get technical.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif#/media/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif
Computional analogies are certainly the rough cut. But even so, why does that make a difference except in being a lossy compression of what I said?
I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside. What we are doing now is something like conversational research, which is maybe also a negotiation/invention of a common language (of semantic and logical norms.)
I think you defended philosophy above, so we are maybe on the same page here to some degree. 'Shakespeare' is a symbol for the symbolic sociality involved, which engulfs us as finite individuals, or perhaps ought to (we ought to seek out that danger/opportunity).
Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language.
Biology speaks of metabolism. I would show how political and economic structure is simply metabolism scaled up. There is a literal identity and not just a metaphorical one. As structure, they are the same.
So maybe you could have the goal of exploring all the ways individuals could be different. I am accounting for the fact that all natural structures must be essentially the same.
The bonus is that structuralism also explains why difference grows unboundedly as the constraints of sameness become increasingly general or abstracted.
So structural holism contains thesis and antithesis. A world that is just constructed of the atomic individual fails even to account for the local degrees of freedom that compose it.
Quoting apokrisis
Where is metaphysics making the guesses here? Was it metaphysics that presented string theory? Or perhaps simply a result of scientific speculation? Metaphysics seems to have entered the arena of speculative thought with various interpretations of quantum theory. Oh wait, those were actual physicists. Science hasn't done a very good job of checking them out IMO.
Just to be clear, I am not emphasizing the Romantic image of the genius. I don't think you are quite seeing where I'm coming from. I've been trying to find different aspects of it to bridge the gap.
Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? Of course Shakespeare is just an example. Pick your favorite 20 novelists.
I suggest that some kind of valuable knowledge is communicated in fiction, however indirectly or even ambiguously.
Granted that a person primarily wants to understand reality, what case can be made for the superiority of one path over another ?
Can either path really encompass the other, given human finitude ? Or is there a kind of blindness in each position to the richness of the other ?
Even this isn't a defense of the novelist, but an attempt to show that the existential aspect of reality 'ought' to be covered simply because it's there and plays a key role (not for sentimental reasons.)
You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. He may well have crystallised views of history and customs from an English perspective that informed the notion of what it was to be a member of that society. He was an influencer pushing the zeitgeist to its sharper focus. And that sense of identity was important as Europe was changing from feudalism to nation states. Larger identities were needed to bind the local fiefdoms into mobilised kingdoms.
So at the level of words, he was helping the reorganisation of a nation as it made a major upgrade to its metabolic basis by becoming centralised in its politics and moving towards the trade that which would alllow it to grow its population with imported food by beginning to export manufactured goods.
Did Shakespeare understand this or did he just pocket the proceeds from being nifty with a quill and rhyme? Was he brilliant at capturing the currents of his time, but didnt actually claim to be standing right outside of the system to see it as indeed a system?
We can tell Anaximander and Aristotle were doing that. Metaphysics is different. It isnt holding up a mirror to a time and place in the way that is of everyday human interest. It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of being is being contemplated.
:up: .
This is sort of funny in the context of language, given that Russell's theory requires propositions to exist as relevant explanatory entities that exist outside space and time, and yet which we somehow "grasp."
This question seems to be phrased in a leading way though. Most popular forms of idealism do not deny the existence of an external world or express skepticism towards its existence. Even if I bought into something like Absolute Idealism, or Kastrup's idealism, I think I'd still have to pick the top choice.
That said, I agree that idealism seems more popular here than in philosophy at large.
Excellent point. And the reason this works with spoken/written language so well is because we recognize that, when someone speaks to us or writes to us, they are trying to communicate. So, we don't have the problem of some sort of latent infinity of possible meanings existing within finite beings. Rather, we have the recipients' recognition of "the source of this incoming stimuli is an attempt to communicate, what could they want to specify?" and language allows us to rapidly narrow down the possibilities.
Thus, possibilities are "out there." This can be true even as respects our own thoughts, internal monologue, etc. because the mind works by communicating to itself, neurons are constantly communicating as much as computing.
Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too. Just going of cognitive science research into the topic, it seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language. When asked to visualize something, the same system used for processing sight gets used; when asked to imagine hearing something, we use a different system. These systems work in parallel and what makes it to conscious awareness is regulated by both unconscious processes, which seek to prioritize certain signals, and executive function - i.e. what we are paying attention to.
It's quite possible to listen to someone just enough to get by in terms of "playing a language game," to respond in ways that don't give any offense, while barely gleaning any meaning from what you hear. On the flip side you have guided visualization, where we are intentionally meditating on another's words. The levels of meaning that seemingly unfold can vary. We can read the same passage twice and get different levels of understanding from it, both because we are paying closer attention to it, or because we have new relevant knowledge/experiences that help us interpret the message. So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table."
IMO, philosophy of language has been badly hampered by foundationalism. Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of things. Sometimes it is referring to real objects in the world, sometimes it is used in a social game, sometimes it is expressing propositions (whatever the nature of propositions). Obviously names have causal histories, obviously language is established by social norms, etc. I don't understand why attempts work so hard to try to reduce it to just one of these things.
I pretty much agree with this, but Shakespeare is celebrated largely because of his insight into human nature. Being (some would claim) always exist for and through a particular human personality. Many personalities are motivated to present their own conceptual map as superior to other, in terms of criteria like completeness, consistency, and relevance.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby.
The psychoanalyst shrinks the head of the commie who does a reductive class analysis of that reductive headshrinker. Indra's net. Clashing personalities/ideologies tend to model, place, and reduce their rivals. My 'ism' is always the 'highest' according, naturally, to the very criterion it offers in the first place.
Yes indeed! I remember having complicated feelings as I realized that economically I was and am primarily a teacher of low-level math to students who are required to take this or that class for their degree. Turns out that I like what is largely a social role and seem to be pretty good at it, at least in certain scholastic contexts (small classrooms among students who are chasing a particular future job have been best, in my experience.)
At the moment I'm more invested in philosophical/literary creativity, but I have at times been obsessed with mathematical creativity (constructions of the real numbers, cryptosystems, etc.) For me it's more about creation than discovery, at least once I got a sufficient sense of the space. I was playing sculptor in a material stronger than steel. I really like (when in that mood) building cryptosystems with a focus on beauty and strangeness rather than on what the economy needs (contraptions with [ metaphorically speaking ] spinning wheels, clever clockwork.) But I haven't had much luck doing math with others.
My systems science view expects upward acting construction as the other to downward acting constraint. So construction comes as part of the holistic equation in some form.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention.
So if your focus is on interpreting an utterance, that suppresses activity across the brain so that all your many perceptual habits - visual, gustatory, object recognition, spatial orientation, whatever - are turned to the task of responding in their learnt habitual way. The words will be decoded in terms of their suitable associations and anticipatory imagery will form.
Stick a persons head in a scanner and the word hammer will light up the motor cortex areas which know what it feels like to initiate the physical act to banging down a nail. Say wombat and the visual recognition paths will light up with a suitable state of expectancy for what you might indeed turn your head and see within your visual field.
So understanding is the brain being holistically constrained by attentional focusing to have some narrowed state of sensory and motor priming that puts you in mind of the right kind of anticipatory imagery and readiness to act accordingly.
The call of Kentucky Fried or pizza might even get you drooling in preparation for what you expect is about to arrive on the diner table. Responses that would be more appropriate to hammer and wombat will also now be equally much suppressed.
Those constructive habits of action are still part of the fabric of your brain, but they will be inhibited rather than excited. The meaning of words is understood in what you now dont expect or prepare for as much in what you do.
That is why we wouldnt describe interpretation as simply representational or constructive. It needs a holistic act of focusing that fruitfully limits the brain by suppressing the vast number of inappropriate reactions as much as it appears to stimulate the few right ones.
You can see this happening in real-time with EEG recordings. There is a characteristic P300 positive wave of inhibition that sweeps across the brain 300 milliseconds after some surprise stimulus to narrow focus to the task of interpreting just whatever it is. Then a N400 negative swing of excitation as the suitable pattern-match gets made and the right state of sensory and motor priming is evoked.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep. The brain isnt a computer. It is very flexible and organic. It can cut short the time it spends letting a state of deep understanding emerge. Or it can linger until you really start to feel what it would be like to really have a wombat rummaging about at your feet, probably stinking like a wombat and grunting how you might imagine a wombat would, That level of vividness takes about 500ms to conjure up, and so occupies your brain that it blinds you to everything else for half a second too.
Or you can do the quicker thing of just responding subconsciously. Almost as you hear the word, you have made enough of a connection - OK, that Australian marsupial thing - to just skip on and keep going with the sentence. You can get the gist and always come back to let the word expand in your consciousness if you need to double check that wombat could really make sense in the context of what was said after that.
Think about thinking. That is our learnt habit of using speech on ourselves - the inner voice. But we often believe we think wordlessly because we can cut short the full act of uttering in our heads - waiting long enough for the full auditory image to arrive - as it is enough to begin shaping the motor intent to the point we could have actually said the words to ourselves, then skip on. We short-circuit to save time as the attention constraining effect of narrowing our state of thought has already been achieved by our getting ready to verbalise some point of view.
The effect is compounded by the fact that we are mostly always going to say the kinds of things we usually would say to ourselves anyway. There is even less need to linger. We can even think on automatic pilot. Just let the routines run.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And what is missed is that language is used as the trick that structures our own thoughts as much as it communicates our state of mind to another. To be able to speak its to have the ability to self-constrain in ways that are like being spoken to by your society, your culture, your peers, your tribe.
We did not evolve as thinking selves that then needed to tack on speech to express a headful of clever private thoughts. We evolved as animals whose behaviour could be organised from an emergent higher level of socially constructed meaning. We evolved to be listeners of what we were meant to be doing so as to function in a communal fashion. Once we got into that habit of constantly reminding ourselves through a self-regulating inner voice, then we started to find ourselves with a headful of clever private thinking.
Any time there was some socially approved course of action, that would automatically bring to mind its other of what we thus shouldnt be doing, or even thinking as a possibility. But of course, that then raises the very possibility of going against the group mind and doing something for selfish and private reasons.
The voice of conscience will be ringing in your guilty head. Very loudly if you have a strict upbringing where you were always being told by parents, teachers and priests. Yet the very fact of being socialised as a general constraint on your thought and behaviour will shape up matching degrees of freedom in your thought and behaviour. In being strongly focused on what not to do, you become strongly focused on what you might indeed do. And so the private self emerges as other to the public self.
Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.
That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even.
The sciences that think they study the human mind think they need to study the human individual. You have to get into sociology, anthropology and child development to hear about how the human mind is in fact linguistically constructed.
Still not sure what goal you are reaching for here. You seem to be arguing that these things are mutually exclusive rather than necessarily complementary. That one most win and thus the other lose - the zero sum game - instead of there being the win-win that comes with a useful division of labour.
The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast.
And isnt that why you would celebrate a historical figure like Shakespeare. He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think.
The tightness of listening to a single lonely voice, heard and agreed to by the largest imagined crowd, indeed echoing on down the ages, is the kind of high contrast state that eliminates the most ambiguity. We have even the artefact - the canonical work of a play - to cement the lonely utterance in the collective memory. We can refer back at any moment to a spoken truth and interpret it afresh - stage Macbeth in the setting of a modern corporate office or whatever.
So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response.
The question then is who moved more people down the ages. Is Newton greater than Shakespeare? At least in theory we could quantify this in terms of how much movement - cultural or physical - was created by a bunch of plays vs the Principia.
You seem to want to ask how to measure genius, I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newtons third law of motion. And then less clearly, the kind of thing lm sure Shakespeare also gestured at in all his words I never actually bothered to read. :smile:
Quoting apokrisis
Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology.
Quoting apokrisis
Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it?
Not getting the reference.
Quoting apokrisis
I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard.
.
Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I dont see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated.
Yet right when Vygotsky/social constructionism was finally filling two shelves at UCLs Waterstones, along comes the genecentric/cognitive module bandwagon of evolutionary psychology and rolls right over it. Back to the future we go.
Enactivism really took its time showing up too. I had long given up waiting. The Cartesian grip on the Anglo imagination is strong. The enactivists came in swinging as if they were offering the world something unthunk and brand new.
Quoting Joshs
Not sure that this question coheres well enough for me to give a matchingly snappy answer.
But Im inclined to sure. It is all a pliable and fused kind of story once social construction and neurodevelopment have been co-habiting a brain for 20 or 30 years.
Oh we agree on that. That's good thinking in general, right?
Quoting apokrisis
What I'm getting at is that personality is the yardstick. My choice of criterion is my choice of heroic costume for the world in pursuit of mates and mangos. Maybe a forgotten politician Smith who lived in comfort and safety and cranked out many healthy children with a pneumatically admirable wife counts himself wiser and brighter than either Shakespeare or Newton, both contemporaries. Maybe he's right. Let's say that he was a master of the handshake and getting himself trusted --demonstrating intense worldly knowhow. He even kept in the shadows because it was more pleasant, less subject to envy, whatever. He didn't care about cultural legacy, knew he couldn't enjoy it as a corpse.
To me that's not obvious. Outlandish, but let's imagine a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, though only he ever hears the music. Socially he is nil, but his individual nervous system, running on software downloaded before the connection was broken, is swimming in meaning. Or so he might insist. We might also imagine a mathematician who proves a great theorem but never gets to share it. The hardware can run alone for a number of years, making progress, forging spores that are potentially meaningful to others (the strange nature of script, like a virus). Whether it matters that anything survives the nervous system that enjoys it while alive is up for debate. Maybe I'd rather be happy and forgotten than miserable but remembered, etc.
But you were claiming that inside the institutions as well as outside. And I replied that the institutions institutionalise the competitive space in which the different theories are heard. It would be a problem if they were bad at serving this function. We would know they were bad as nothing was ever allowed to change. They would be museums and not places of quite frantic intellectual competition.
What in fact makes it difficult to be heard is everyone is shouting at once these days. Anyone can shove a pet Theory of Everything on Arxiv. Then belly-ache if everyone else doesnt immediately drop their own pet theory.
Academia used to be so much smaller. You could immediately ignore anything said by a polytech, or which came out of the colonies.
Im not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing.
A certain kind of inquiring intelligence?
I think we can safely limit ourselves to 'cognitive heroes' for the purposes of this discussion, yes.
Oh I know of one Smith who not only thought of himself that way, but also convinced enough people to start a religion.
Though he had wives.
Smith focused on mastering social knowhow, having decided it was the best kind of knowledge. I'd count him in the pragmatist camp, tho not in your subcamp.
Nice ! Bring 'em young !
Sorry. I couldn't help myself with the "Smith" name.
:up:
I knew you meant the first, but it reminded me of that Joyce joke.
No worries. I think a little comic relief is a nice lubricant.
Better yet, lets imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.
We agree that they must produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius?
Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. Deal with Borges Library of Babel.
This is where someone like Husserl comes in. The world exists through particular 'meaning-bestowing' nervous systems. Those nervous systems are in the very world that they disclose. Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader.
I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. It's one thing to transcend any particular subject. It's another to transcend embodiment and the existential situation in general altogether.
I say that one cannot remove either the world or the individual nervous system. I'm arguing against rampant subjectivism in another thread.
I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. As Hegel put it, the ideality (fantasy status) of the abstract is the core of idealism --which is of course a realistic holism, calling out the limits of abstraction (finite, disconnected pieces of an actually unbreakable continuum).
I think we agree very much that knowledge is primarily social. Language is tribal software. The individual nervous system 'runs' and updates the software of the tribe. But the hardware is not some fantasy of the software. We are stuck to some degree in this Flesh < truly a key metaphysical concept when it's our flesh , my flesh > , seeing through/with these human sense organs, speaking from a single mouth in an adversarially cooperative conversation -- a person that's not only generic tribesman but also a genuine experiment -- a tender tentacle the tribe uses to explore possible strategies. (This helps us make sense of individual coherence norms, because inconsistent leaders lead the tribe to ruin in the context of unforgiving nature.)
Fair enough. I can't argue with you about it because I have not been involved with cosmology at the institutional level; I can only go on what Hands describes.
I think this is a properly balanced view. It's not either all social construction or the sovereign individual, but somewhere in between.
Thanks! I also see it that way. Scylla and Charybdis, right ?
I think there is truth in this, but perhaps the genius and richness of Shakespeare is precisely his seemingly inexhaustible undecidability. I don't see the place of true 'infinite' irony in your system, tho I think you have a healthy sense of gallowshumor given your grim-to-many views.
Kierkegaard said that if Hegel had called his Logic a mere thought experiment, it would have been a greater work. This is not (I don't think) about the sentimental appreciation of humility but a metaphysical point --- Hegel's implicit theoretical acknowledgement of a world beyond his personality, which would have been Hegel's transcending of his own system. Holding it in suspension as a mere possibility implies a much richer world.
Hegel's resistance to the Irony of his Romantic literary peers looks like an 'irrational' existential commitment, a tonal preference, a non-autonomous foundation.
G H Mead was also an important source for constructionist thought, as was George Kelly (b. 1905) and Jerome Bruner, but Pragmatism, constructivism and constructionism, gestalt theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics all had to wait decades till behaviorism and cognitivisms stranglehold on mainstream psychology weakened.
That is how a computationist would look at it. Biology and neuroscience show that computationalism is simply wrong. Life and mind start from the first meaningful action. The first shifting of an atom for a reason.
Scripts don't write themselves. And they need to be being read from the start of their writing.
Quoting plaque flag
Or you are not following what I've been saying.
So let's get focused on what you say your are here to discuss despite it being a wandering of the thread. You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit?
I am saying this would simply be a bad question arising from a bad metaphysics. And I've made that reply accordingly.
I've tried to argue using concrete examples which you brush away in your haste to just keep moving on in aimless-feeling fashion.
So again, focus. If we have Shakespeare and Newton as our candidate for intellectual hero of the English millennial, how do we decide who wins, who is runner up?
A metric I might toss into the mix is what we are willing to ignore about their personalities if personalities is indeed key to your putative model.
So Newton was a historical genius in turning physics into maths. He was brave or reckless enough to use dramatically lossy data compression. He even was willing to chuck out the very materialistic metaphysics he just had substantiated with his Laws of Motion to take the opposite tack "action at a distance" in his Law of Gravitation.
We all applaud that kind of relentless genius that can use and abuse metaphysics as he willed. The maths is what mattered. The metaphysics got backfilled to fit. A project going on for both his mathematical triumphs. And even the maths was of foundational importance and is keeping folk busy trying to back fill its metaphysics too. The ghost of departed quantities, and all that.
No wonder Newton is a turning point just in terms of social attitude. He personified something that really did change intellectual history. Where would Kant and the rest be without Newton as that central challenge? The guy had strut.
But what does polite intellectual society then say about his religiosity? Well, it seems excusable for a person of his time if not his genius.
What about his difficult personality? Again, excusable to be impatient with dullards and jealous of those claiming any part of his personal glory. That's just people being people. Maybe he was neurodiverse and so really can't be blamed.
Did did you know he was made Master of the Royal Mint? And he was twice an MP? Oh yeah. A man of the world, a man of action too. That adds to his genius personality index. But wait. That was about social influence and good money. Erm, it seems he was trading up to be a big cog in the Imperial British enterprise. He lost a good chunk of change plunging into a slave-trading venture. Um, move on.
Now let's socially evaluate his career as an alchemist, his occult studies. Oh no. Let's not. Erase that from the collective memory and fix on the bit of the scientist that was the mathematical genius. We don't have to judge the genius personality in terms of his personality after all perhaps.
Now run the same ruler over Shakespeare. Could his peccadilloes even detract from his reputation? Wouldn't he be judged more leniently on that social score because the social realm was itself the one he was addressing where Newton was addressing something intellectually more demanding than that?
Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better.
I'm just illustrating here the reality that it is audiences that rate genius. And they do so in regard to their institutionalised interests. It might then take certain personality traits to succeed in this competitive game. But it is still the audience that takes the view on what it might treat as the proper measure, even just on the "type of person" the genius was.
If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. :naughty:
Quoting plaque flag
The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.
Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.
But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand.
Quoting plaque flag
Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand.
Life and mind science need to be built on the foundation of dissipative physics. As I argued, even the modern industrial world with its particular economic and political structures are comprehensible as "metabolism".
Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve.
And you can't say that about a computer. Well, not until they start telling ChatGTP to go find its own wall socket to plug itself into after the power company cancels over the mounting unpaid bills. Hey computer, go figure it out for yourself. If you are so smart, provide your own metabolic foundation.
Vygotsky and Luria are more interesting to me. They combined the psychology and the neurobiology. They experimented. They seemed to have a receptive audience as social constructionism ought to be "on brand" following a Marxist revolution. But then shit happened. Along came Stalin. The suppression of the books. The academic seizing on Jewishness and Vygotsky's failure to actually adhere literally to Marxist theology. And tuberculosis.
As a stirring that again failed, it was bigger and thus more tragic.
There is a social history here that goes back to Aristotle at least. And it doesn't feel as if there has been a true paradigm shift yet.
I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place.
The self has a social aspect (language centered around semantic-logical coherence norms) and a biological basis, a body guided by its own brain that can live alone for decades in the woods, writing poetry, because it carries its own version of the tribal software with it (including its use of 'I' and its performed self-referentially symbolic identity). 'Language speaks' and 'the subject is a function of language,' yes, but individual living brains are necessary for this social game. This isn't Descartes. It's just sanity.
An actual organism models the world, yes ? It seems to me that the idea of the model depends on the commonsense notion of animals in the world -- a world that is really there, but not (for me anyway) some obscure unknowable (Kantian) Reality -- instead just a 'lifeworld' (the world of a nonreductive holist) with depth and about which we can be wrong. A pure indirect realism falls apart because (for instance) it makes the sense organs their own product.
'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. For instance, the linguistic-conceptual idea of the self is part of our heritage. Children are trained into it, but they can also modify it, before they are replaced as 'carriers' or 'thin clients' or torchbearers in the relay race.
Quoting apokrisis
But then that might deflate your ego and we cant have that. :grimace:
Quoting apokrisis
I think the psychological and ethical insights of your approach are limited by conformity to assumptions about the way things are. I respect your world but I wouldnt want to live in it. Its too rooted in past certainties and not sensitive enough to future possibilities. A principle of constructive alternativism should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy.
No. I never mentioned quantity. I'd say maybe reread some of what I wrote. I think you are casting me incorrectly as a subjectivist or Romantic. But my interest in the existential is better understood as part of a goal to leave nothing out. Someone like Karl-Otto Apel seems to get the massive sociality of language right, correcting the typical subjectivistic tendencies. But someone like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty includes the vital account of how the world is revealed through or by individual human bodies.
My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. But the world for us is always through (embedded) individual sense organs and individual brains.* As Apel emphasized, language is ferociously subjective -- no private language, but doves can't fly in a vacuum and a language is truly dead without bodies that trade in it. We may model the movement of bodies in the world, but this modelling must be done by actual bodies in the world or 'model' loses its sense.
*The world apart from all human cognition might be round square (nonsense, for a human), but the world is independent of the cognition of particular humans. The lifeworld is implicitly a human lifeworld, symbolically rich.
:up:
I think we agree on the necessity of embodiment, at least in the abstract....
It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated (Bloom's The Invention of the Human.) The 'personality' layer of reality is one possibly focus of knowledge that aims at comprehensiveness.
I was trained to be one, but I'm mostly infected with the need to play at philosophy.
Im OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book.
Quoting plaque flag
But which comes first? A biologist could reasonably argue that ultrasociality first arose in ants and termites speaking the language of pheromones to act like a distributed brain.
The individual ant is more like an individual neuron than an individual brain in this story of chemical messages jumping synapses.
So if we are to generalise successfully to the wider biological frame, of course there must be the suitable parts. But it is the collective whole which defines what could be meant as suitable.
Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later.
That Og invented the wheel is a modern joke - the first entrepreneur. The history of isolated small human populations - like the Tasmanian aboriginal people - show how the quickly forget much that they once knew. Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.
The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that.
Yep. The shift to real people rather than social tokens. Less moralising and more nuance. All part of the social construction of the modern citizen upon which the next chapter of social and economic development was based.
Quoting plaque flag
And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the we that has an actual body.
Probably you want to leave that way framing things behind. I believe I have provided as many pointers as I can to what I view as the right path.
Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice?
If you want to PM me a link to your book, I'm curious. Or link it publicly, whatever you prefer.
That may be, but it looks like our collective habit is the potential for intense individuality (differentiation, specialization, invention.)
:up:
I agree, at least if we are thinking about history. But this doesn't cancel the (fleeting) reality of the music of that castaway composer. We don't have to think in terms of history. That to me is a tempting but still optional framework/criterion.
In case it's helpful, I agree with the following:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
Another view, similar.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
I interpret this in terms of inherited logical-semantic norms ( bound time) being applied in individual nervous systems. My thinking is largely not mine except that I host some of the timebinding self-referential conversation. I work on my little piece of the blockchain.
One of the points I was making earlier is that there's too much bound time or 'knowledge' for a single nervous system to contain. Yes we can and do compress, but there are mortal limits, and I'm not sure that we can be sure that we are in the 'best' part of the blockchain. It might be in the interest of the tribe that we all have the feeling that we are, so that we broadcast our results effectively.
In the same spirit of making ontic commitments explicit so they can be debated rather than derided, I would point out that I follow the biosemiotic hierarchy on the material cause half of the hylomorphic systems science dichotomy.
So the material half of the equation would run from the most general to the least specified subsumptive order of....
"quantum indeterminacy" > dissipative structure > thermodynamics > mechanics > matter
That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order.
You can then restrict this larger view to that of regular "gone to equilibrium" thermodynamics where the flows can encounter their final heat death. And then restrict the ontology even further to extract the regular classical view of dead matter following Platonic trajectories. And still further to arrive at simple matter imagined as a substance we could rub between our fingers or fling across the room.
So you can appreciate that to say physics really starts with the openness and self-organisation of dissipative structure theory is still a bold metaphysical move even today. But particle physics is there with topological order, QFT, condensed matter physics, etc.
And biosemiosis also now argues this is the "right kind" of material cause to use in its models as it is matter at its most dynamic and lifelike already. That leaves the semiosis so much less to have to do to then play its own causal part in whipping up organisms that exhibit the structure we call life and mind.
This covers with how the material half of the Aristotelean equation is dealt with. But what about the form in hylomorphic form, I hear you ask? :wink:
Well dissipative structure is a triadic ontology. It is the hierarchical story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom. What exists is then the dynamical balance that results. So it already includes global form and purpose to quite a large degree.
Again that is the feature not the bug. It leaves feeble life and mind less to have to organise as dissipative structure is "order out of chaos". It provides so much order just for free. But it is confusing as every move towards a suitably complex view of reality always winds up in trichotomies. It can seem as Peirce was accused that one just suffers from some trichotomania.
Anyway, form. From the biosemiotic point of view, there is a hierarchy of increasingly more general sign or code that runs... genes < neurons < words < numbers
Now there is clearly something different here. Genes are pretty arbitrary seeming. The whole of biology seems rather accidental more than metaphysically fundamental.
Well in fact there are new arguments for how the Comos couldn't have used anything else but carbon backbones, proton pumps or redox reactions. The space of possibility was far more restricted than might be thought. Yet also, the Cosmos wasn't too fussed seeming about their being any biology. And genes look to have a large dose of contingency about them until we get a proper autopsy on those aliens they found.
Neurons are likewise a perhaps contingent bit of semiotic kit. Words - as puffs of air again could have been something else. But puffs of air are very low cost, and a vocal tract forces the symbols into serial order. There is the general thing of being cheap to produce and also dimensionally constrained in ways that build in the necessity of articulate choice. Word order is inevitable and so grammar is also inevitable.
Then we get to number. Would any kind of alien have to count? Arguably yes if they get around in flying saucers and generally do engineering. And as the Ancient Greeks felt they discovered, maths speaks with Platonic necessity. You can't just pick and choose the structures that follow rules. Form at that level is more discovered than invented. So we seem to arrive at some kind of matching metaphysical limit, even if it remains a highly debated one.
As you can see, I defend a fairly elaborate but systematic metaphysics. Laugh if you like. Or engage.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Ive been fascinated by my recent engagement with the agential realist approach of physicist-philosopher Karen Barad. I think their reworking of causality exemplifies the spirit of constructive alternativism , the mutual responsiveness not only of human subject and material nature, but between the non-human and itself. The differences with your summary are instructive.
All fine up until the conclusion. Why wont our theoretical frames do if they can do work in terms of our enactive interests?
Barad to me is saying nothing further than we indeed form Umwelts as models of our world with our selves also to found in them. This self-world modelling might just be Bayesian technology. But its what weve got and so the question is how do we proceed from there having realised there is this technology and it can always be improved.
Is that what you mean by constructive alternativism? The difference of course may be that I would see that as a Darwinian competition for best model - according to some optimising metric that would be the debatable bit - and alternativism is philosophical cover for anything goes pluralism?
Was anything decided?
Barand's theory is interesting to me, as is the idea of merging epistemology and ontology. I had a similar idea re: a relational ontology, although it seems Carlo Rovelli beat both of us on applying it to quantum mechanics by 10+ years, and as he points out in his book, John Wheeler led him to the idea, and Lu-Trub N?g?rjuna beat us all to this sort of relational conception by 1,800+ years ("there is nothing new under the sun," after all.)
But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines?
I take it that agents ? individuals (at least not exclusively) given her comments on how the subjective/objective distinction goes wrong by placing us outside the world. Could agents be higher level emergent social structures as well, e.g. states, corporations, etc.?
This is key for me because in many situations it seems that we are more akin to the individual ants in the any hive or lymphocytes in the immune system, while our institutions play the role of the larger, active system. That is, in some respects we are not agents, but parts of a greater agent that supervenes on us.
Could her theory accommodate this? Do agents necessarily have first person perspective?
I couldn't figure this out. I read several reviews and criticisms and didn't see an answer. Then I downloaded the book and went to the main chapter on Agential Realism and that didn't help either (although I didn't give it a particularly close read).
So my main problem was: how are we to make this epistontology of inter-action performative vis-á-vis our interactions with technoscience and naturalcultural phenomena if we can't figure out what the theory is because it's buried behind an avalanche of continental-speak?
This isn't so much a dig at Barand, she's writing for her audience, and got me genuinely interested. It is more a dig at some areas of continental philosophy for making itself so opaque as to have become transparent for the average person (transparent because no one sees it...)
But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting.
That's fine, but then presumably, sometimes, they later interact with something again. Now if relations can spring out of existence like this, what causes them to be one type of relation instead of another? This is the old John Edwards "Cosmological Argument," which I don't think non-eternal cosmologies have ever adequately addressed, except now it pops up everywhere.
[Reply="apokrisis;822223"]
This isn't the first time I've read one of your posts and been very intrigued. You wouldn't happen to have a helpful reading list around, would you?
I was mostly interested by:
I.e., the idea of the universe as self-organizing. I found Jantsch's "Self-Organizing Universe," online, and it generally had good reviews, but it's also 43 years old and my fear was that it might be a bit dated. (Plus the opening was pretty polemical, which I generally don't like).
Then I was reading Basarab Nicolescu's book on Jacob Boheme's cosmology of self-organization, but this was too esoteric and mystical for what I was looking for, although I might return to it.
Biosemiotics interests me too, but I've found it pretty hit or miss. I have really enjoyed some of Terrance Deacon's papers.
I don't think so. We seem to employ language to communicate fairly well on many matters - that's as deep as I'm going.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is some of what Barad says about agency:
So what does all this verbiage mean? If I were to take a stab at a one-sentence definition, I would say agency is the power to affect and reconfigure. This is more like an intention than a cause, but does not originate in a constituted subject. Agency doesnt make sense outside of Barads concept of apparatus. Unlike for Bohr, one of her heroes, an apparatus is not a set-up that pre-exists and remains unchanged by the activities it organizes. Rather, an apparatus is a material configuration of entangled agential elements that produces a normative organization. For instance, interacting bits of space dust or dirty socks i. our washing machine are already interacting with us such that a certain apparatus of organization configured what is going on in a certain way. Our recognition of the washing machine and the socks, as well as the context of cleaning clothes are organizing apparatuses for our determination of what is going on. Entangled with this is the patterns created by the interacting socks ( of course there would be no patterns for us to see if we didnt already recognize the socks as objects).
A nice supplement to Barads work is that of Joseph Rouse, whose main foils are post-analytic writers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Brandom, Putnam and Rorty. Rouse has heaped praise on Barad , and their ideas have much in common as an antidote to models that separate the human-cultural-linguistic from the material-natural-empirical.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this really anything new? Its not that patterns, norms , regularities cease to exist as the nature of configurations shift. It is only the specific identity of elements which cease to exist in their previous role.
So the initial OP stated the following problem:
Yes, it was Hilary Lawson writing this, but Lawson is incidental, it's the point I'm curious about.
I was initially wondering if all our conversations about idealism, etc, can cease if we accept this point. It seemed like a cute idea worth investigating.
What is clear is that there is a diversity of opinion on the nature of language and reality. As someone with no expertise in this area, I can't comment other than to say language appears to be a useful tool that affords us extraordinary power.
A realist might argue that there is a clear and fixed correspondence between language and the objects, events, and concepts in the real world. I am not so sure what 'real world' means. It seems to me there are a series of real worlds, subject to experience and context. Julian Assange, for instance, surely cannot doubt that he has had his freedom taken away.
Can we meaningfully talk about idealism without a theory of language that explains how realist claims are possible?
I accept that the social constructivists are right when they argue that language is socially constructed and that meaning arises from shared agreements and conventions within a particular community. The meaning of words and expressions can vary depending on cultural and social contexts.
I also accept that cognitive linguists are right when they argue that language is closely connected to human cognition and conceptual systems. Meaning is seen as being shaped by cognitive processes, metaphors, and mental structures.
Language and its ability to generate meaning seems a kind of conjuring trick of metaphor, or a type of game where contingent rules or customs rather that 'reality' determine meaning.
You're steeped in philosophical tradition - ordinary language philosophy - what is your take home message?
I think this is right.
Quoting Janus
Yes
Quoting Janus
So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?
I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world.
They agree that there is someone who did certain things on the internet and that as a result folk found out a lot of stuff which other folk thought they should not have. They agree on the overwhelming picture of a world with people, cities, computers, networks, nations and all the other paraphernalia within which this drama can take place. And I suppose most folk would agree that Assange's ability to move from place to place has been somewhat curtailed over the last few years.
Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements.
So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions, and that these descriptions can be translated or interpreted, one into the other.
Now realism sometimes holds that the reason for this agreement is simply that there is a world in which we are embedded and to which our talk "corresponds". So the reason that we agree the cat is on the mat is simply that the cat is indeed on the mat. On the other hand idealism sometimes points out that sentences such as "the cat is on the mat" are social constructs, that we might have used other sentences, or not even have posited cats and mats at all. That there are cats and mats is a result of shared agreement, or some such.
What might be worth considering is if these two views are actually incompatible. After all, not just any sentence will do. If the cat is on the mat, yet someone insists that the cat is not on the mat, then there are a few possibilities. They may be using "cat" or "mat " in some alternate way; or they may just be wrong. What we can say about the world is in some way restricted by the world - that is, there is a difference between true statements and false ones.
If there were only language, independent of what we do with it in our everyday dealings, one might countenance some form of idealism. But there is a difference between those statements that are true and those that are not. Hence, one way or anther, there is a shared world that underpins that difference.
So rounding back, Assange is not in a different world.
Add this to what I have already said; that the difference between idealism and realism is a choice of ways of speaking, and that mapping the world is something we can do with language, when we talk truthfully.
Yep. Something many of us lose site of.
Quoting Banno
Sure - I was using it metaphorically for this kind of distinction.
Quoting Banno
Nice - yes this seems critical.
Quoting Banno
Don't disagree but the phrase 'one way or another' here might be said to hide a multitude of sins, from Kant to phenomenology. But I hear you.
Thanks.
Suppose we agree that the sentence The cup has a handle is true. Put the cup in a cupboard. Does it still have a handle? A realist might say that it either does or it doesnt, and perhaps add that since we have no reason to suppose otherwise, the unobserved cup on the cupboard still has a handle and the sentence is true. An idealists might in contrast say that the cup only has a handle in relation to some language construct, and that somehow as a result we cannot or at least ought not commit to the sentence being either true or false; instead it has some alter value, perhaps unknown or neutral or whatever.
The take home here is not which is the better description so much as to note that the difference is pretty inconsequential, an issue of the better way to talk about the cup.
For my money saying that the cup has a handle even when hidden in the cupboard looks the better approach. But if someone wants to instead insist that on opening the cupboard the cup would appear handle-ish, or some other obtuse locution, I dont tuning the cup cares.
And in other circumstances a non bivalent logic might be preferable.
So speaking broadly, the idealist/realist dichotomy is not so big an issue.
Yes, this example makes sense. And we can get marooned by talk about which things exit when no one is there to see or hear. To some extent where you land on this seems to depend on the frame you want to use or how you interpret language. I can already hear the phenomenological talk about a cup only existing as such if we share an intersubjective community of agreement involving some anticipatory relationship with the object we can understand contextually as a cup, subject to a specific purpose - or something like this...
Some of this might be rich territory, but as a minimalist, with only so many years left to live, I don't think I can use this type of understanding.
Food for thought.
I think you're rightlanguage is, in effect, like our phenomenal world, since our perceptions of the phenomenal world, and how much more so our judgements about it, are linguistically mediated.
What is not linguistically mediated is the primary pre-cognitive effects of the body/brain/world interaction processes, which we cannot become conscious of, and hence can have very little to say about. So, if we think of that precognitive body/brain/world interaction as "the world" then our language does not map onto the world at all, or at least we have no way of saying whether or how it does or doesn't.
The world our language does map onto is the cognitively, linguistically modeled intersubjectively shared world we refer to as "the everyday world" which includes everything we know, including science.
If we understand metaphysics to be confined by phenomenology, as Heidegger does, then there is no problem, but if we think of metaphysics as dealing with the precognitive "world", then I think it is a fact that we have no ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics.
So, we know what we mean when we say that the world we share is a physical world, because we all experience the tangibility and measurability of that world, the tangibility and measurability which just are the characteristics that our notion of physicality consists, and is grounded, in. It seems to me that we do not know what we mean if we claim that the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience.
Any talk or claim about the precognitive "world" is literally senseless.
:up:
Quoting Janus
Can you just clarify what you mean by 'confined by' here?
Quoting Janus
Hmmm...
Quoting Janus
I can see this.
Quoting Janus
This seems to be a rich source for further exploration. I like that you describe the physical world as a grounding characteristic that has meaning to us but is not necessarily the truth about a reality 'outside' of this experience.
The idea we do not know what we mean if we claim that - the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience - is interesting. Does this mean to you that we cannot effectively describe models of idealism because we have no way of doing so outside of, perhaps, some kind of mystical experience?
Doesnt our judgement that someone agrees with us on some matter depend on how well we can anticipate their verbal or behavioral response to our own actions or utterances? On that score, our anticipative efforts are quite successful in social situations that require only a superficial level of engagement, which pertains to most gatherings of strangers in public. We dont need to know very much about each other in order to share the highway with them.
But how effectively do we translate descriptions between individuals or groups in situations of severe political polarization, or in crises of trust between friends or lovers, or in daily examples of anger or righteous indignation toward people we encounter? What if we agree the cat is on the mat but cant agree on whether the cat should have been put on the mat, or whether the car is happy to be on the mat? Are these just subjective affective colorations that have nothing to do with the facts of the matter?
-Quoting Banno
Why was it decided in the first place that this was newsworthy, and who decided it? Isnt the perceived relevance of the story constructed into the very facts contained in it? Hard-core supporters of Assange will agree only on the most superficial concepts contained in the piece, and disagree about everything else, including much of what is alleged to be factual. So if we are to say that the things on which people are likely to agree in this news story overwhelm their disagreements, we would have to add that from the point of view of the purpose of the story, on those fact that MATTER to readers of different political persuasions there may be overwhelming disagreement, and translation of descriptions will fail to overcome this mutual unintelligibilty
That you read, understood and replied to my post puts the lie to our disagreement being overwhelming.
:up: I like that you say "not necessarily", as we don't know whether the physicality of things is or isn't a truth beyond our experience.
Also, I agree that we cannot really have any idea what we are talking about in making claims that the fundamental nature of things is mental or is consciousness. Are mystical experience not bodily experiences, consisting in powerful feelings of connection with everything that cannot be adequately articulated? Are our bodies not "of a piece" with things when we drop the egoic ideations of separation? If fundamental particles or fields are "immortal" then it is the body which consists of those which we could say is immortal, even though the bodily form itself is obviously not.
Quoting Janus
This is like trying to win a chess game by insisting that one cannot be certain that the Queen is a chess piece.
That seems to be a ridiculous analogy on the face of it; perhaps I'm not getting your point, or what seems more likely is you're not getting mine.
If you are not sure the cup is physical, then you are using the word "physical" in a very odd way.
Same as Quoting Banno
I have never said, nor implied, that I am not sure cups are physical. They are tangible, can be picked up, drunk from, moved around. measured, so of course they are physical.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, being physical is made-up pretendies, like the Queen being able to move in any direction. The cup might well cease to have a handle when "beyond our experience".
Best leave you to it.
Then how are we to apply "we don't know whether the physicality of things is or isn't a truth beyond our experience" to the cup, if not "we don't know whether the physicality of the cup is or isn't a truth beyond our experience"??
Why not just say that the cup, and other physical things, remain physical, observed or not?
I don't think it's me "talking gibberish"...
I take it as a given that the cup and handle still exist when we don't see them.
A bit of a challenge to @Banno's idea that agreement is overwhelming --
I don't even think about it after I put it in the cupboard. I go off and do other things. Them beliefs are long gone the moment I put it where I want it.
Have you heard any arguments for antirealism that you think are more persuasive than others?
Nice. I was about to put up something along these lines myself - about the semantic nature of this discussion and the scope of the word 'reality'.
My tentative conclusion is that there is a reality available to humans which we seem to share and actions taken in it may have significant consequences (war, climate change, death, etc). But we are unable to step outside this reality, even if there are reasons to believe that it is contingent and partial. (can you improve on this frame?)
I think @Banno might ask us do we have any good reason to posit a reality outside of our experience? Even using the word reality is problematic. I suspect 'lifeworld' is better but if one is not a fan of phenomenology this too might be problematic.
No, I can't improve on that; I think what you said expresses the pragmatic truth of our situation.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm guessing Banno would say the word 'reality' derives from a contrast between the things we can experience in common as features of the phenomenal world and imaginary things.
But we cannot help imagining that there is an absolute reality apart from the relative reality of human experience, conception and judgement, in fact it seems unthinkable that there would not be, even though we cannot give a coherent voice to that.
There is nothing to stop us conjecturing about an absolute reality but we have nothing to compare our conjectures with.
That repeated centering of "experience" is misleading. It gives the impression that one starts with oneself and works one's way "outwards" to the world. But that's not right. The world is already, from your first days, broken down for you into the bits and pieces we can manipulate with hands and with language, and so we are each already embedded in a shared world and a community.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's not enough to say that we don't know "what is outside of human experience". We each are constantly facing things which were previously outside our individual experience - opening a box, driving down a new road. Such things are easily spoken of. To talk of something outside of human experience in some collective way is dealt with in the same way - finding out that Greenland was ice free around 400,000 ago is not something outside of our comprehension. And if we were to consider something outside our comprehension, we would by that very fact not be able to say anything about it, not even that we don't know what it is.
Quoting Janus
Not really. I would not put such emphasis on experience.
We come to know things via experience, how else? Experience does not consist in "working outwards to the world" (whatever that little bit of nonsense could even mean) but rather precisely the opposite: the world working its way into us via the senses.
Quoting Banno
This is philosophy by caricature. I find it hard to believe that you didn't realize I was referring to what is beyond the possibility of human experience. Time to take off the blinkers, mate!
Quoting Banno
More caricature. When I put the cup in the cupboard I can be more or less confident (depending on how long ago I put it there) that it will be there when I open the cupboard. So, the answer I would give to the question about where the cup that I just put in the cupboard is, would be "I have no reason to doubt that it is in the cupboard, and if I open the cupboard, I expect to see the cup". That the cup has been there the whole time is the inference to the best explanation as to why I find the cup there when I open the cupboard.
Quoting Janus
I'd say satire rather than caricature.
Nothing I've said contradicts any of that.
Quoting Banno
I haven't forgotten any of that and yet I say it, and my saying it is not inconsistent with my not forgetting any of that either. If you think it is then please lay out your argument and show me the purported inconsistency.
Perhaps, but nor does it emphasis it.
The target here is not you, but the notion that what language is for is "mapping" the world. We do far more than just that. As if a map were the same as a bushwalk.
Maybe that's my fault for the tentative title of my OP. I wasn't sure at the time how else to put my question, which I guess amounts to trying to understand a little of what philosophy has posited about the relationship language has to the world. I didn't have a map in mind, that was just the word I typed when I posed the question.
Leaving aside all the other things language may do like commanding, promising, imploring, implying, coercing, coaxing, consoling, belittling, berating, alluding, evoking, invoking and so on, what is its propositional relation to our common experience?
Mapping, modelling, denoting, depicting, describing, representing, referring? What is it that is mapped, modeled, denoted, depicted, described, represented or referred to if not what is commonly experienced?
Experiencing is "mapping, modelling, denoting, depicting, describing, representing, referring", it is not subject of it.
Experiencing the world is to model it. That which is modelled therefore cannot be the experience.
Firstly I agree that experiencing is modeling, but I was referring to linguistic judgements which do map, model, denote etc what is experienced as well as what is considered to be experienceable. It's the difference between first order unconscious modeling and second order conscious modeling. And since we are talking about the relation between language and the world ('world' denoting what is experienced, as well as what can be experienced, but may or may not be) we are dealing with the latter.
Oh yes. Complete without any sort of fancy theory of re-interpretation which says "what you really mean is" or some such.
I'm uncertain about the justification coming from an overwhelming set of beliefs we agree upon. How many beliefs does one mind hold? That we can come up, in a conversation, with beliefs we agree upon doesn't indicate that we have overwhelming agreement. If there are few beliefs that a mind can hold then overwhelming agreement comes from us agreeing upon statements within a conversation -- here's the set of beliefs we agree upon. But then we do not have a basis for inferring that our beliefs overwhelmingly agree -- we've just agreed to a base for disagreement to take place, rather than compared how many beliefs we have and judge whether there is overwhelming agreement or not. Instead we've agreed to a set of beliefs that can serve as a background for disagreement.
I think I would say this: conscious beliefs of the sort we express by saying stuff aren't just sitting there waiting to be retrieved, but are produced as needed, on the fly. The whole time the cup was in the cupboard but I wasn't thinking about it, I had no need to express a belief so I didn't produce one. If asked, I check my model of the cup and find there was no update, so I go with what the model last 'recorded', but really what I'm doing is not retrieving a belief but inferring how I should answer the question.
If I have to give reasons for that expressed belief, I can, easy as pie, but those are justifications, not the reasons from which I inferred the belief I expressed. There probably aren't any of those. The model does its own thing, and I'm not privy to how it inferred what I should say about the cup.
Then I expressed myself poorly.
What I intended was to agree with Lewis Carroll (is that right?), that I'll know what I think when I see what I say.
Something produces what I say, and broadly that something is guiding my expectations and actions, but it needn't be any sort of representation of the world or of myself in it, not that kind of model. Saying "I check my model" was meant as a kind of transitional description, between thinking you call up a belief and recognizing that you aren't generally privy to what produces your candid speech.
But this is new territory for me, and I'm still getting a feel for it.
So the model is a black box. I think it is for neuroscience as well. It's just that some organisms behave as if there is a model, so science posits one and quests to find it.
What you're saying is that we don't really know how it works. We shouldn't assume we know what's going on before an organism acts, or in the case of a person, before speech.
A very good question, one that overlaps a conversation I am having with @Sam26 in PM. Beliefs are not discrete pieces of mental furniture, despite our tendency to treat them as such.
For the rest, that's a neat argument; I like it. So, that we do agree as to some things is insufficient to conclude that we agree on most things. Lovely!
But I will maintain that even given this problem, there is good reason to suppose that our points of agreement far outnumber our points of disagreement. Taking again the Assange case mentioned by @Tom Storm above, those who think his freedom has not been unreasonably curtailed will agree as to his role in Wikileaks and at least the outline of the events surrounding "collateral murder", and that there was a broader military engagement, that certain videos were shared, that Assange's organisation was involved, as were the Ecuadorian Embassy and so on - pretty much all the events listed int eh relevant Wiki pages.
And I think it reasonable to suppose that this case can be generalised, such that if in any conversation we were to list the points of agreement against the points of disagreement, it would be unusual to find the former to be shorter than the latter.
This is of course a simplification of Davidson's more rigorous argument concerning the incommensurability of conceptual schemes, from which I am convinced, contrary to the popular view, that talk of the map not being the territory mis-pictures what is going on; that in the case of language one cannot distinguish the map and the territory in this way.
And that's what I think is in error in the posing of the question in the title.
There are some patterns we can see, and we know something about the hardware, but yeah black box, and 'model' is kind of an approximation of what goes on. We are able to answer questions and we are able to look for and fetch teacups but we don't really know how we do any of that. 'Belief' is also a useful approximation, especially when predicting how other people are going to behave. *
* Should have said we probably 'model' ourselves in quite similar ways.
People used to think conscious divinities coursed through the world causing storms and crop failures. Schopenhauer focused on how that way of understanding the world is still built into language. So maybe "belief" is really an all purpose black box for why?.
Sellars has that cool story about how the uniformity of nature is derived from the predictability of people, if you imagine how the natural world was seen before it was depersonalized. Big River is an old man set in his ways, freezing and thawing about the same time every year, flooding fields when the snow melts, a predictable person.
I really think there's something to that. :grin: :up:
It's almost always interesting to flip the script, just to see what you get.
In this case the idea that our inferences about people might be the basis for our inferences about the inanimate world, so there's no ancient problem of 'other minds' only a process of noting how predictable some minds are, and eventually instead we say there's no mind there at all.
Right. It even extended to creativity. There was a god who gave humans paper, another god who invented iron smelting, as if the human psyche was turned inside out, broadcast over the cosmos.
Over centuries, we dehumanized the natural world and pulled all those psychic elements into individual minds, each one like an island floating in a dead, unconscious world. Now the problem of other minds is insurmountable. In philosophy, you can see the pendulum trying to swing back, like with the idea of the extended mind.
So that offers another way to answer the OP: a true statement, in the abstract, is what we think the world would say if it could talk.
Is it? :brow: It's not a problem for me... :yikes: I suspect not really for you either(aside from talking philosophy). Nor would I think that the overwhelming majority of people in the world have such an insurmountable problem...
I think that if there is such an insurmountable problem, it probably is a great indication that academia has went horribly wrong when it comes to what counts as a mind...
Yup. That's my guess.
...and it has, as evidenced by the sheer inability to provide a conception, notion, model, or accounting of minds that lends itself to and/or dovetails nicely with terms of evolutionary progression...
I've been referring to beliefs as states of mind reflected in our actions (linguistic and non-linguistic), but the one thing that I should also emphasize is the transient nature of these states. For example, when I open a door, that action is partly a reflection of my belief that a door is there, but it's fleeting.
This state of mind, reflected in our actions, is also a reflection of what it means to be conscious. However, the meaning of belief or the meaning of consciousness is not something contained in the mind, but something reflected in our actions (again linguistic and nonlinguistic actions). Hence, my agreement with you, that the meaning of a concept is not something we can point to in the mind, i.e., there is no mental thing that gives meaning to the concept.
I believe there is a confusion about mind/consciousness in relation to all of this. For e.g., the belief that some philosophers (and others) who deny consciousness or deny our subjective experiences as an illusion. I think this is a grave error.
One thing that interests me is how deeply embedded this is. When I find my misplaced cup of coffee, I might say, even to no one, "There it is," or I might say to the cup, "There you are."
I used to think about how readily we say things like, "The sign says they close at 8." A philosopher might insist this is metaphorical, or that it's short for "There is an inscription of the words a person would use to say that they close at 8." But either way, you'll be told "The sign doesn't *say* anything." I remember wondering what would happen if we reversed that, if we took words as saying things and instead said it was us borrowing that capacity, that we're the ones who don't literally *say* anything, only our words do.
My all time favorite quote about a writer is on the back of a collection of Boris Pasternak's poems. Might have been Tsetayeva, I don't remember, and it was something like "He wrote as someone might who had witnessed the creation of the world, a man who understood the voice of the mountains and of the rain." Now that's praise.
I think that Dennett has a very particular target that he's denying and calling an "illusion". For whatever that's worth.
He has a youtube video on the evolution of purpose(well, it's more like a video of his lecture)... Very interesting. I recommend watching it several times. It's about an hour long.
Edited to correct the title of Dennett's lecture...
Hi Sam! Hope you're well.
I'm doing fine Creative. How about yourself?
Yea, or maybe you're like a dark cloud that says it's going to rain. You're both up on the stage speaking, and in the audience listening to yourself, interpreting your own performance.
My art is that way. People ask me what it means and I just stare at it, realizing I'm in the same boat they are. I'll hazard a guess as to what it might mean based on what I remember thinking at the time I painted it. After I've spoken, I'm in the audience with everyone else. :razz:
:wink:
I am also doing well.
Wow. Mine is a quote from the back of a Somerset Maugham novel: "...an autobiographical novel in which fact and fiction are inextricably intertwined."
It's the "inextricable" that gets me.
It's just a logical problem. "I think, therefore I am you" as Feuerbach said.
Ya, and my disagreement is because of my strong metaphysical leanings. :grin:
This is a Grice thing, natural meaning vs non-natural meaning, which then splits into sentence meaning and speaker's meaning (what you mean by saying something rather than what it means). Most philosophers treat natural signs (it's always dark clouds) as a completely different sense of the word "means" but not Grice.
In any conversation -- I think that makes sense. We usually end conversations when there's too much disagreement or we're confused.
And truth be told, given the intuition I presented on beliefs -- that they evaporate rather quickly -- that'd be enough to counter my example.
I think you're right in the case of language. The closest thing to a map of language is something like the OED -- but they keep on adding things because we keep on coining new words. So you can't really go back to the map to figure out the meaning of a word -- you have to use it.
It looks like we agree. How would you determine that we really do think the same things? As opposed to just appearing to?
I think we assume truth and trust in communication until we have a reason not to trust. So insofar that there's no reason to disbelieve then you're probably close enough to count for "really agreeing" as opposed to "apparently agreeing".
Apparently there is reason to disbelieve:
Indeterminacy of translation
:D
ha
Given the indeterminacy of translation, how do we understand one another?
My answer is we're not translating. (there's also something about gavagai that's not right as an example -- it focuses too much on mereology and less on usage)
I guess Quine would have us deflate "understand."
Like this:
I think maybe Quine isn't your cuppa tea. :razz: