on the matter of epistemology and ontology
They are the same, I suspect, or mutually entailed. That is, it is impossible to affirm something about the being or existence or reality (I won't make an issue of these terms differences unless someone wants to) in the world without this reality being, well, affirmed, and this is an epistemic term. I take a hard look at what IS and I am always led to the justification of positing it. And the great flaw in the traditional analysis of knowledge has always been the assumption that P is true, that is, "S knows P iff S believes P, is justified in believing P and P is true" has no business simply assuming "P is true" without itself having justification, and this too would require justification, and it never ends. And so I see that "P is true" entails the existence of P in an way that is supposed to be independent of justification which is an altogether nonsensical assumption. Can't be done. And this is because existence is part and parcel of justification itself.
This is the REAL problem with those absurd Gettier problems.
This is the REAL problem with those absurd Gettier problems.
Comments (252)
For something to be true, there must be a reason why it is true aside from the few brute facts out there, if there are any. That is one of the replies to Gettier cases (Gettier wasn't the one to find out about them but whatever), you are justified in believing something only if there is a true causal connection between P and your justification: https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/#H11
Well, that is the rub, for causality is not an epistemic concept. If it were, then the world would be a very different place. Does the dent on my car fender "know" the offending guard rail? Granted, mental causality, if you will, is a lot more complicated, but how does complexity make for causal conditions that are epistemic? They don't. Never did. It's just something analytic philosophers assume because they were sick of Kantian idealism. But it is such a ridiculous assumption.
Objects in the world are, let's face it, transcendental in a physicalist or materialist description of things.
That does not look right.
A sentence's being true is very different to it being justified. A sentence might be true, yet unjustified.
Being true is different to being known to be true. There are unknown truths.
Quoting Astrophel
The "is true" in the JTB account simple rules out knowing things that are not true. It is distinct from the justification.
One cannot know things that are not true.
You did say the Gettier problems had their possible solution " only if there is a true causal connection between P and your justification." So how is it that causality makes for a connection that satisfies the conditions for knowledge? All one has to do is examine causality for what it is, and it becomes clear that causality doesn't deliver knowledge. Unless you have something in mind that shows it does.
No, not really. It is not as if there are conditions in the waiting for discovery that are true outside of discovery itself.
Quoting Banno
But ruling out thnigs that are not true presupposes what makes a thing true. To say truth is "distinct" from justification is question begging, for if I ask you how it is distinct, you will have to give an answer grounded in a justified propositional account in order to be "true," that is, doxastically compelling. There is NO way around this: truth is a property of propositions, and this brings the matter of truth right back to square one, with the condition of "P is true" entailing a requirement for justification. It is impossible to separate truth from the conditions that make thing true.
There are no unknown truths? Then I will bow to your omniscience, since you know everything that is true.
Quoting Astrophel
Indeed, but knowledge is a relation between a proposition and the knower, as is justification.
Consider any proposition "P"; At a bare minimum,
"P" is true if and only if P
That is, it may be true, or otherwise, regardless of any relation to an individual knowing it to be true.
You continue to confuse P being true with P being justified or being known.
Your antirealism betrays you.
It is to say that truth occurs in the proposition, and there are no propositions "out there". Discoveries are events of constructing a truth. It seems pretty clear that conditions in the world are really impossible to speak of outside of the grid of logic and language.
Quoting Banno
If it lies outside of any relation to an individual, then it lies outside of propositional possibilities.
Quoting Banno
Antirealism? I am a realist when it comes to conditions that are real, and this goes to the palpably real, the real In the apprehending object event. But no, I certainly am not a "physicalist metaphysician" kind of realist. Such an idea is instantly refutable.
Yep, that's common, or garden, antirealism. It follows from Fitch that you know everything that is true.
Quoting Astrophel
So you can't say anything without using words, and so you cannot say anything? Or is it just that you cannot say anything true? What would you have us conclude here?
It's not that there are no cows and trees over there next to the barn. But it is that when I acknowledge this as true, this true event is a logical construction that only comes into existence when in the acknowledging. To say the truth is over there IN the cows, or that it issues forth from the cows, and I am some alethic receiver is absurd, don't you think?
And it is certainly NOT that I don't think there are real things over there by the barn. They are, outside of the propositional structures that make affirmation possible, transcendental.
So are you saying that the cows are only over there when acknowledged? That gives a vast power to acknowledgement.
I suggest that the cows are over there, whether you say so or not; and that it is the sentence "The cows are over there" that is constructed. And further, we can use the term "...is true" in the following way:
"The cows are over there" is true if and only if the cows are over there.
Further, isn't it the case that the cows can be over there even if it is not the case that you, I or anyone else knows that they are over there, or has justification for claiming that they are over there.
I don't have any idea of what a transcendental cow might be. Nor of what a cow might be, apart from the things we calls "cows". Some might maintain that had we not been raised in a culture that does nto use the word "cow", we might not be able to identify the cows from the trees. That might be so, but even if the cows might thereby cease to be spoken about, the cows would not thereby cease to be.
No, no. You said, " the cows are only over there when acknowledged" and I said, "when I acknowledge this as true, this true event is a logical construction that only comes into existence when in the acknowledging."
Think about the difference.
And..?
My first thought as well...
Perhaps by "reason" he means truth conditions must be met?
Do you honestly believe that propositions are somehow IN the things we talk about? I don't know why this is not clear. There are no propositions over there where the cows are. A proposition is where the observer is. The truth is a property of a proposition. Therefore truth lies IN the observer, jnot to put too find a point on it. Just as sight, sound, and many other things belong to the observer.
It is a simple matter, really. You have trouble because you seem to insist that truth has a locality beyond its existence. The idea of a transcendental object is the best we can do when we leave the logical grid and try to talk about things.
I haven't claimed anything of the sort.
Again, "the cow is over there" is a construct. It's presumably used in a speech act making a statement.
But rarely will a statement be true simply because of the observer - if that is how "truth lies IN the observer" is to be understood. "The cows are over there" will be true entirely and only if the cows are indeed over there; and this will be so regardless of the status of the observer, be they convinced of the position of the cows or not.
Let's try to regroup. I was struck by this:
Quoting Astrophel
Everything you know is true. That's not an assumption. If you think you know something, but what you think you know is not true, then you are mistaken about your knowing it.
And also, a seperate point, in the JTB account, a statement's being true is quite distinct from it's being justified.
But having said that, there is indeed a close relation between epistemology and ontology. Statements being true or false is indeed dependent on what there is in the world.
This is a much contested theory. But what's the alternative? A logician can simply decide that "know" is primitive; but that's just abandoning the idea of defining it.
Quoting Astrophel
I take the point in the first sentence. I don't really understand the last sentence. Do you mean that only true statements can act as justification (where "p is false" is true iff p is false).
The hidden additional necessary justification for claiming that S knows that P is that S is competent to assess whether P - and being competent to assess whether P is not just a matter of knowing that certain propositions are true.
This is focuses on first-hand knowledge. But a great deal, even most, of what we know is known at second-hand. Yet first-hand knowledge needs to be the basis of second-hand knowledge. One could insist that only first-hand knowledge counts as knowledge, but that seems unduly strict, unless you are happy to develop a specialized philosophical dialect. This needs a good deal of disentangling.
Quoting Astrophel
Discovering something is revealing it, and makes perfect sense when applied to truths. One would need to explain what "constructing a truth" in a good more detail for it to make sense.
Quoting Banno
It seems to me rather like a ceteris paribus clause, requiring us to withdraw our claim to know that p if it turns out that p is false.
But it does have an important additional consequence. It means that I cannot pass on something that I have learnt from someone else without endorsing it. This makes knowledge quite different from belief.
In logic, we can simpy stipulate a definition, which means that someone else can stipulate a different definition and there is no basis for argument.
So I like to argue that "fallible knowledge" undermines the place of knowledge in the language-game. It becomes a fancy variety of belief. But it is useful to distinguish between what is established as true and what may be true, but is not fully established. The latter is the role of belief. (But I don't mean to apply some impossible-to-attain standard of proof here. We can always withdraw our claims if we need to.)
Quoting Banno
Yes, that's true. And, as your articulation of the point demonstrates, the possibility is built in to our language. Our language allows us - even requires us - to distinguish between language and the world,
Quoting Astrophel
That's true. But the grid of language (including logic and mathematics) does allow us to speak of conditions in the world. Truth would not be possible if it didn't. It is true that sometimes we need to develop or change the concepts that we apply to the world, and that seems difficult if you think of language as a grid - i.e. fixed and limited. But language is a hugely complex system which can be developed and changed - as is logic (as opposed to individual logical systems).
quote="Astrophel;886488"]The idea of a transcendental object is the best we can do when we leave the logical grid and try to talk about things.[/quote]
Can you explain this idea in a bit more detail? I don't quite get it.
Who would determine that the situation meets the criteria for being described with those words, if no one knows that the cows are over there? Are you arguing that the words automatically correspond with the scenario, without the requirement of having to be judged as corresponding? Isn't that hard core Platonism? Aren't you assuming that there is an independent idea signified by "the cows are over there", which the situation corresponds with in order for you to avoid the requirement of judgement?
If you are not assuming Platonism, how else do you conclude that such a statement could be true without a mind of some sort to determine the meaning of the words? Isn't it a requirement for "truth", that the words have a specific meaning which corresponds with the situation? If the requirement is simply words, and a situation, then any words could be true of any situation. So how could those specific words be true of that particular situation unless there is a meaning for the words? And if the meaning is not within a human mind who knows, or existing as an independent Platonic meaning, where is that meaning?
I think you get at a confusion that comes up with correspondence definitions of truth. We say a belief is true if it corresponds to reality. No problem here, beliefs can be true or false - same for statements.
The problem comes when we try to switch to an external frame, outside the realm of beliefs, perceptions, statements, etc. Now we need new things to be true or false - abstract propositions that exist outside of any person who can make/hold propositions, beliefs, statements, etc.
In virtue of what are such personless propositions true? In virtue of other abstract entities: facts, events, and states of affairs.
I am not sure if there is a problem with this view, but I can see why people have a problem with it. It seems that, in a hypothetical lifeless universe, there should be no possibility of falsehood, and so no meaning in "truth." Truth, like good and bad, seems like it should only arrive on the scene with [I]someone[/I] there.
The proliferation of abstract entities is eyebrow raising while claims that we should treat propositions like they were abstract entities, as a useful fiction, doesn't seem to resolve the frame problem. How are things true or false outside the subjective/intersubjective plane where beliefs, statements, etc. have their existence?
You might be interested in Husserl's zig-zag explanation of the emergence of correspondence truth in phenomenology.
In general though, I think you might be confusing "justification" with what makes something true. Justification is what makes some person think something is true. The "truth-maker" is supposed to be the externally existing state of affairs in virtue of which a proposition is true. If there are problems with placing us into such an abstract realm, it wouldn't seem to be one of justification though.
That notion plays a role in the causal account of justification.
Quoting Astrophel
It solves (presumably) the justification problem of Gettier and lets knowledge be JTB.
Quoting Astrophel
This doesn't make sense.
Not simply because of the observer in the sense that "I love haagen dazs." Objective in the sense that there is agreement in language and gesture and, as the scientific method tells us, repeatability. There is an event in what we call a brain where truth occurs. But to say what this event is "about" in reference and meaning, is limited to language possibilities.
Try not to "strawman" this argument by reconstruing what is said to say something it doesn't that is easily assailable. This is an informal logical fallacy.
Quoting Banno
Then you would have to explain how the cows over there make their way into the equation of the proposition. It is a pragmatic assumption made by science and our everyday handling of affairs that truth has this kind of objective status, but philosophy takes the matter beyond the mere assumption. This has to be shown to be accepted. But how does one demonstrate such epistemic connectivity?
This kind of thinking in no way at all undoes or second guesses our general knowledge claims. It simply says that when you look closely, you find this absurdity that knowledge claims REALLY are pragmatic functions dealing with the world. They are more than this, for such a statement does not speak about the qualitative nature of what is there, but they are essentially this.
So this should not be restated in another form. The onus is on you to explain this magical epistemic connectivity.
Quoting Banno
Everything I know is true is true enough. But what is truth? A grand philosophical question, but here presented in the most basic analytical sense: how is it that any of those cows twenty-five meters from this brain of mine being in an entirely separate spatial locality make their way into my truth statement? There is this "chasm of epistemic distance" that needs to explained. It is a radical distance, and by radical I mean it takes a very strong turn away from familiarity.
Quoting Banno
Yes, you are right about the JTB. My point is that the JTB is seriously question begging. Absurdly so. I know you would like to dismiss these concerns. Well, then you should say this.: it is impossible to demonstrate epistemic connectivity. All we have in the assumptions of truth bearing propositions is their being true and not false, but these conditions remain, in the physicalist's world, inexplicable because causality is simply not an epistemic concept. Not even remotely.
Epistemology and ontology are the joined at the hip because it is impossible to imagine the one without the other. Not difficult. Impossible, apriori true.
Quoting Astrophel
Perhaps the problem here is that were not understanding what you mean by simply assuming ?P is true. As I read JTB, no such assumption is made. The truth of P needs to be independently verified, yes, but by using the term justification for this (presumably perceptual or scientific) process, we get unnecessary confusion, as if the whole thing were somehow circular. But, as has been pointed out, truth-makers arent usually the same things as justifications. Truth-makers are states of affairs, not propositions. JTB states a hypothesis: If P is true, and S has justification for this belief that P, then S knows P. So, could you clarify where the assumption comes in?
The alternative is to do a philosophical examination of truth, and unpack the notion of justified true belief.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, disentangling is the right word. First hand knowing is what is under review. No need to complicate the matter yet, simply because complications rest on assumptions of a more basic kind, and this is the first step in disambiguating "P is true": isolating what makes something true from things that are incidental, like there being ten coins in the pocket of someone you make a knowledge claim about, you know, those Gettier problems. Gettier didn't bother to question this essential connectivity.
But the question is profound and foundational for basic epistemic connectivity is assumed in everything that is affirmed. If there is no possible way to make sense of this in familiar terms, like causality, then something unfamiliar is required. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
And there is massive philosophical literature on this "improbable." It is just difficult.
This is the place analytic philosophers fear to go!
Quoting Ludwig V
Ah, revealing it. This implies there is something revealed, of course. so all eyes are on this that is revealed, and for something to be revealed there are two parts, the revealing and the revealed. Now, if you thing the revealing is entirely unproblematic, then the revealed, those cows over there by the barn, make there way into the proposition in the most transparent way, that is, the receiving and revealing agency, me, is like an epistemic mirror, registering most accurately what is there, outside of the mirror's physicality. That is what mirrors do.
But then, really?? Does this metaphor really work.....at all? I cannot think of anything more opaque than a physical brain.
This is the way it goes when philosophy meets the simplicity it has been seeking all its life, so to speak. It goes into denial.
Quoting Ludwig V
So what is it to "speak conditions in the world"? One cannot just rocket by such a thing. Take the scientific method, a principle of, essentially, repeatability in experimentation. But how does this actually spell out in the defining of what a thing is, like, say, nitro glycerin? You provide a sufficient impact to this material and it explodes, speaking roughly. But not speaking so roughly, the scientist will quantify the hell out of this in varying event environments, and so we will get a "thick" definition of nitro.
But what does this say about truth and knowledge? It says these are pragmatic concepts. Forward looking toward anticipated results, and this is an event of recognition that is localized in the perceiving agency, you or me. The object over there, the cow, "outside" of this is entirely transcendental because outside in this context means removed from the anticipatory temporality of the event.
We bring into the world language and logic. Of course, there is a regularity in the way the scientific method reports about the world, but this certainly doesn't warrant knowledge claims about things being independent of the perceiver. Thick definitions (see above) require a "thick" account of perception, for language and logic is what WE do.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But there is nothing abstract about it. It might appear abstract based on the assumption that a pragmatic understanding vis a vis "a world" remains "about" something that is actually there and this abstracts from the real stand alone thing-in-the-world.
Husserl "brackets" the world of transcendent objects of the "naturalistic" attitude. He says this in Ideas 1 (which I am coincidentally reading):
What it comes to is this: we suffer all these perceptions, judgments, and so forth, but only on condition that they be regarded and described as the essentialities which they are in themselves; if anything in them or in relation to them is presented as self-evident, that we establish and fortify. But we allow no judgment that makes any use of the affirmation that posits a real thing or transcendent nature as a whole, or co-operates in setting up these positions. As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we do not place ourselves on their ground, do not co-operate with them, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.
Now Husserl is not trying to be all that clear on this. He obviously struggles, and this is as it should be because the issue itself is difficult. And he gets very detailed. But speaking generally, he sees phenomenology not as an idealism, rejecting what we encounter as being truly real like Kant, nor does he dismiss these "really reals" ("we do not for that reason cast them away"),but is being simply descriptively honest about what stands before one in an account that is reduced to its essential presences. This opens up a very wide range of issues and complications that have to treated as they arise. But here, I am just being faithful to the simplcity of it: Naturalists (like Quine) place physics at the top of explanatory efficacy, and physics, even in its vast extensions into theoretical concepts, has causality as its foundational principle in describing reality. And this makes epistemology impossible. Phenomenology recognizes this, and in order to make it right, one has to conceive much more fully of the agency of perception.
Yes it does. Just ask how a causal relation produces a knowledge claim. Can't be done, simply because there is nothing in the apodictic principle that an event in the world requires a cause that can deliver an "aboutness" in the mind TO an object. Knowledge is a relational issue and no model of causal relations demonstrates epistemic connectivity. You are welcome to try to conceive of this and let me know how you think it goes.
There is a lot in this. When you say no assumption is made, I disagree. It is implicit in the premise "P is true" that being true is of a certain kind. The question about what it means to be true AT ALL is not taken up and it is just assumed that if P is right there before your waking eyes, you can affirm that, say, my cat is right before my eyes, and this is unproblematically true. But it is only unproblematic if the problems are ignored.
The problem is basic and comprehensive to ALL possible affirmations in knowledge claims about the world. If the proposition "my cat is on the sofa" is true and justified by my witnessing the cat being there, three must be something that intimates the cat's presence on the sofa that warrants the proposition's truth. So one has to examine the basis for this intimation, that is, what IS it that makes the proposition true? And so there must be some connectivity between me and the cat, that makes the proposition "about" something "over there". Keep in mind that all those ridiculous attempts to address the Gettier problems, the severed hands and barn facsimiles, etc., try to reconnect S to P causally! As if causality just did the job. But it doesn't. Not even remotely, for there is nothing at all in a causal relation except causality. One will either have to redefine causality or look elsewhere to explain how it is that I "know" this about something.
"Truth-makers arent usually the same things as justifications." This is interesting. What does it mean? How is a state of affairs outside of the logical grid of language and logic possible to affirm since any affirmation itself is weighed within that very grid?
Quoting Astrophel
Otoh, a reciprocal , recursive, self-organizing model of causality can do the job that linear causality cannot. Reciprocal causality produces normative, goal-oriented sense-making consisting of anricipatory acting on and modifying a world that in turn feeds back to modify the cognizer, forming a loop of aboutness.
Truth is always about claims, which come in the form of propositions. I can claim that X is true with little to no justification, but it's not knowledge unless it conforms to one of the many methods we use to justify a claim. I'm a Wittgensteinian when it comes to justification, i.e., we use several methods in our language-games to justify a claimfor example, testimony, reason (logic), linguistic training, sensory experience, and others. Justification is much broader in its scope than many people realize.
I think there is an ontology behind the truth of our statements, and it's in the form of facts, the facts of reality.
What do you mean deliver aboutness in the mind to an object? Aboutness stays in the mind, it doesn't go anywhere. It is not necessary that something delivers information to us, yet we know it does all the time. Light shines on a red cloth, the red cloth reflects it towards my eyes, my nerves capture the stimulus and my brain produces information. We equate that with real world objects.
How about the converse: Is knowledge non-causal? If not, does it pop into existence randomly?
This doesn't seem to relate to the OP either way. You were talking about justified true belief and now you are talking about intentionality (aboutness) or solipsism? I don't know for sure, I didn't fully know what the OP was about either.
My original comment doesn't disagree with you, as a matter of fact; when you say "And this is because existence is part and parcel of justification itself", this sounds to me like a causal account of knowledge.
It's very hard to give an account of knowledge that transcends the nature/mind, subjective/objective divide. I would imagine this is why recourse to propositions, states of affairs, truth-maker, etc. remain significantly more popular, even though the view where these are actually existent, eternal abstract objects has declined a good deal.
This is a major concern of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," and the Logics. "The truth is the whole," being coming to know its self as self a broader view.
But "the fruit does not refute the bud nor the oak tree the acorn." I think it's asking too much of more conventional theories of truth to adapt themselves to the "speculative moment," i.e., that place where the mind/nature divide is transcended. Those theories are earlier moments.
They have a significant pragmatic value in the same way the formal logic retains its utility and internal validity in the face of the dialectical. I think the speculative moment probably requires leaving truth-makers behind, rather than trying to reform them.
So a project like:
...is simply working at different aims. Knowledge is simply no longer justified true belief, its a process being unfolding itself.
Quoting Astrophel
I don't understand this question re truth-makers. What does it mean for an affirmation to be "weighed"? Do you mean "judged true or false"? If so, one can only reply that there is a distinction between states of affairs, which would exist without any perceiver, and the statements we make about them, including judgments of truth and falsity. I suppose that is an assumption, if you like. We don't have to use the word "true" (or "false") at all if we really don't believe there are such things as statements that correspond (or don't) to reality in a Tarskian T-truth sort of way. And yes, it's very vexing that no account of how this works seems flawless. But to affirm P, and to have a justification for doing so, doesn't make P disappear into a vicious circle of linguistic/logical assumptions, unless you're a severe sort of Idealist . . . which is maybe what @Count Timothy von Icarus is getting at, above, with his Hegelian analysis.
Beliefs are stated as a relation between an agent and a proposition. This superficial structure serves to show that a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. It might be misleading as the proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. Adam believes that the cup has a handle.
So truth is a monadic predicate, while belief is dyadic.
A statement's being true is a different thing to its being believed.
"The cup has a handle" is true if and only if the cup has a handle.
A few things are important here.
First, the equivalence is truth-functional. It's "?", and you can look up the truth table in any basic logic text.
Second, the statement on the left is in quotes. It is understood as a reference to the utterance in question. If you like, the statement on the left is mentioned, the one on the right is used.
Pretty much all other analyses of truth bring problems. This is far and away the simplest, and pretty hard to deny. It sets out a bare minimum for any understanding of truth.
The statement on the left is about language. The statement on the right is about how things are. T-sentences show that truth concerns how language links to how things are.
I think the OP might argue, we are having a field day with language here. Statements are made and discerned by agents with beliefs and a point of view. Statements are like dividing by 0 or something like that. It is simply an impossible thing to extricate as if "facts" exist independent of observers. Thus it goes back to idealism versus realism debate, as usually the case.
From here, all we have is appeal to [blank] (usually incredulity). And thus philosophy ends and emotions begin. And being apes, it's some form of verbal poop throwing.
Idealism hangs on in the form of antirealsim.
But it seems that @Astrophel has not seen that he is advocating antirealism.
:up: Yeah, antirealism is probably the preferred nomenclature. Idealism has some baggage. Either way, just based on the OP it seems this is heading in the notion that "What is true" is always tied to some observer. But I will let @Astrophel answer if that is what he might have been implying.
I was just trying to provide a retort I can see, but that might have took a lot circling. I wanted to simply bring it up to the surface now, in case it was heading there anyways.
Which does not sound like aboutness at all to me. To conceive of a world such that the foundational epistemology is causal in nature will not be sustainable, it can be argued, because the affirmation of the world itself is constructed out of this very causality, notwithstanding the complexity of reflexivity. I believe the bottom line has to be the "bare phenomenon" which qualitatively reaches beyond the way one thing mere influences another. Michel Henry's sense of the pure, or the "raw" and fleshy" encounter must stand as its own presupposition, not reducible to anything else.
I see why belief is dyadic. But I don't see that truth is monadic. Surely truth has an (often suppressed) object - "true of" or "true to". A true right angle looks monadic, but is not typical.
Quoting Banno
These two sentences look contradictory to me.
Quoting Banno
But I agree with this.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why do we want to?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm afraid there is a big problem. What "correspond" means is completely unclear. Consequently, this theory - paradoxically - is the basis of some very strange ideas, such as the idea that reality is, in some mysterious way, beyond our ken.
Quoting Astrophel
Thanks for the explanation. I understand from what you say that the cow that I recognize exists independently of my recognition of it. Less exciting than I hoped.
How would you differentiate his notion of the pure encounter with that of Merleau-Ponty or Husserl? Merleau-Pontys notion of the flesh as corporeal intersubjectivity has been incorporated into the reciprocally causal models of embodied, enactivist approaches. Husserl, however, considers causality to be a product of the natural attitude. We have to bracket empirical causality to arrive at its primordial basis in intentional motivation.
truth has other senses, with other logics The individuals being considered here are propositions. This angle is not a proposition.
Quoting Ludwig V
Why? The point it simply to mark belief as a non-extensional context. That is, you cant substitute extensionally equivalent expressions. Louise Lane believes clark Kent wears glasses, but not Superman.
I have trouble with this notion of representation. If a proposition represents some state of affairs, then one has to say what it means for something to be a state of affairs, and this would itself be done cast in more propositions. Then the post modern madness hits the fan: if a statement is true, it mirrors a fact (as you say), but facts themselves are statements that are true. If your statement beongs to a certain language game, then the game is always already in play the moment recognition of the state of affairs comes about. And what are facts if not IN the game? Or ON the grid of language possibilities? None of these establishes a knowledge that can allow the world to be posited in this stand alone way.
I see that there is a lot of talk here about states of affairs and facts, as if once a fact is established, a knowledge claim thereby has its basis, and no knowledge claim can stand if there is no fact to correspond to. But surely you see the radical question begging in this: How does one establish a fact, a state of affairs, to be there at all save through a knowledge claim about facts and states of affairs? It may be a fact the the sun is bigger than the moon, but to call the sun "the sun" is a knowledge imposition on "something" that itself is not a construction of language at all. It may well be that language and its non- language counterpart, the "existence" of an actuality that "appears," cannot be separated, for they are a unity.
This is a major point of Heidegger, that language and the world are "of a piece." But there is always a "distance" between language and such actualities that cannot eliminated. To understand this is to see something really quite profound. I "know" that my cat's existence is "other" than the language I deploy to think what it is.
Yes, I understand your position. But asking "does it pop into existence randomly?" is not an argument. It is a deficit. If not causality, then what? Well, something, certainly. I am simply working through a quasi-physicalist model. Assume I am here, the sofa there. How would a physicist say a knowledge claim I have about the sofa works? Much like you said above. But then, the philosophical question: how does this causal sequence generate a knowledge between the two, the brain on the receiving end and the sofa on the other?
Perhaps we are monads in a preestablished world of epistemic harmony and my knowledge of the sofa is already IN my monadic constitution. One thing does not cause another by this, but events in some primordial telos. But I doubt it. It is not that I am offering an alternative to causality. I am simply observing that there is nothing in this simply principle that makes knowledge possible. Philosophy is mostly negative, putting doubt where there is thoughtless certainty. And this is pretty serious doubt brought about the apriori argument that causality as a principle sijmply has nothing epistemic in it. the proof? There you are, there is your lamp or coffee cup; so ask, "how does that get in my head at all so that I know it?" Light waves are not lamps. Nor is brain chemistry. This should be clear.
I think you're wasting your time with these people. They think that "a fact" is a statable state of affairs which is not necessarily stated. But you recognize how the proposition of an "unstated statement" is nonsensical, even self-contradicting. So I advise you to leave those people in their own world of nonsense, as there is no benefit for you to enter it.
I don't think the problem requires "severe idealism." Hegel's idealism is generally labeled "objective," because it affirms the existence of nature as nature, not as something reducible to mind.
So, to 's question, "why would we even want to get into this and bother attempting to transcend the mind/nature distinction," I will attempt a straightforward expression of Hegel's thesis, which I think is similar to what the OP is getting at.
I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on epistemology actually did a much better job at simplifying Hegel than most Hegel scholars (although they probably are one, come to think of it):
I think this is similar to what the OP is trying to communicate. , you let me know if I am totally misreading here.
I think modern mereological nihilism and indirect realism are instructive here. Some people deny that colors truly exist "out there" in the world. The mind creates them. Mereological nihilists go a step further, denying any whole/part relations exist outside the mind. So, there simply are no cats on mats to be the targets of propositions or fact relations. The ideas like "cats" and "mats" are constructed in the mind. They are constructed from nature, yes, but the essence of catness or any distinct boundary of any specific cat is mind-dependent.
But Hegel doesn't stop here. He points out that it doesn't make sense to present mind as some sort of totally separate, unique things, distinct from nature. Again, modern views are instructive here. There is no indication that causation works any different for bodies than it does outside of them. Information, mass, energy, and cause flow right across these boundaries, which is why mereological nihilists would deny the boundary "really" exists in the first place. There is just one world, one type of being. "Multiple types of being," is an incoherent notion; what would be a discrete type of being? All multiplicity only shows up on the mind side of the mind/nature divide.
So, this means that when we talk about propositions and their targets, their truth-makers, and related facts, we aren't actually stepping into some external frame outside of mind. "The cat is on the mat just in case the cat is actually on the mat," is just a statement of our own confusion. What does it mean to be a cat or a mat? We'll never get outside belief asking what it is these propositions actually mean and what their truth-makers would actually be.
But here, Hegel would depart radically from mereological nihilists. He says "wait a minute, mind exists, this is obvious, it isn't somehow 'less real.'" Thus, the relationship between some part of nature and a mind's experience of color, cats, or mats, isn't some sort of less real relationship, it's as real as any other. Actually, it's the only possible sort of relationship through which any knowledge could possibly be given, so it is in ways, more real because it is more self-determining in terms of what it essentially is (the influence of Plato shows up here).
This means there aren't "really no cats." Cats exist, and they don't simply exist in some sort of less real realm of mind. They exist in the Absolute, the category that wraps around the subjective/objective distinction, since both sides of that distinction really do exist and neither can be reduced to the other.
Essentially, the whole truth of "the cat is on the mat," requires an elucidation of how the related concepts evolve and unfold globally, and how the subject comes to know these things as well as their own process of knowing.
Truth then, knowledge of how it is that "the cat is on the mat," involves knowledge of how it is we have come to know that the cat is on the mat. The truth is the whole. Both mind and nature play a role in defining truth, and the attempt to abstract propositions into mindless statements of fact simply miss this.
Hegel's argument is more convincing if you get into his arguments vis-á-vis ontology as logic (the Logics) and his theory of universals, but those are too much to elaborate here. I think Pinkhard's "Hegel's Naturalism," does a good job at outlining this reformulation of knowledge and truth in clear, concise terms, but at the cost of some major simplifications and deflations. Houlgate's commentary on the Greater Logic and Harris' "Hegel's Ladder," clarifies this better, at the cost of significantly longer and denser projects, and in Harris's case, significant use of Hegelese.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The trouble as I see it lies exactly in the unfolding itself, as if unfolding were a cognitive discovery. Which it certainly is, and I have to affirm this because agency requires this, meaning I can't imagine any account of ontology or epistemology without a structured self, which is what a science based metaphysics is. So what is agency, being a self? It is a pragmatic structure, in terms of its knowledge claims, though, to remember Kierkegaard, there is this "qualitative movement" that lies in our midst, which is realized when we understand the foundational indeterminacy of our existence; that is, we realize quite literally that we exist (something K thought Hegel had forgotten). So THE grand question that faces philosophy emerges here: either one is ontologically committed to the unified totality of our finitude (Heidegger) which is "open" yet free of essentially divisive features of the Cartesian kind; or one holds that there is a foundationally divided world, like Kierkegaard, whose "spirit" manifests as an existential anxiety of, as Heidegger will later put it, not being at home, feeling alienated in the everydayness. For Kierkegaard, faith breaks anxiety's grip as one affirms God in faith in freedom, while for Heidegger freedom is an ability to look upon one's "potentiality of possibilities" to self create.
But there is a middle ground, which is the Husserl inspired French theological turn, so called. This is Levinas, Marion, Henry and others who invite us to look at the phenomenological reduction in the most radical way: not to bridge the gap between subject and object epistemically, ontologically and morally with intentionality, but to embrace the distance, so to speak. And this has a tradition in Eckhart, pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, and others. And yes, this means that the matter of the question between me, the perceiving agency and the cow near the barn and the knowledge claims that leap into play the moment I see it, whether these knowledge claims are mostly pragmatic (Heidegger) or otherwise, is "threshold mysticism".
But knowledge certainly is not what is sought in all this. It is value. All of these endless ruminations in philosophy end here, in the pursuit of what can be generally called value. Any utterance made by a human dasein (or a fish, cat or cow dasein) has its telos in value, and value is the ONLY, I claim, no reducible phenomenological dimension of the world's presence. The only absolute.
This is all arguable to the death. Heidegger was right calling it a feast for thought, this endless inquiry. One stops inquiring when one is happy enough, and no question (the question: the piety of thought!) intrudes.
I suppose what I have put out here is a response to your "process unfolding itself" and the idea being that such a process has context, and the context here is the human condition at the most basic level of inquiry. And here, one encounters the value we extend into the world as the highest epistemic/ontological priority. Value-in-Being, call it.
Just a thought.
Right. Lightwaves, brain chemistry etc set the causal conditions that satisfy seeing a lamp, which in turn is justification for the belief that there is a lamp.
Perceptions are different from beliefs. I can't detach my conscious awareness of there being a lamp in front of me when I see it. The belief, however, that there is a lamp can be maintained or rejected regardless of the whereabouts of the lamp.
If the quoted statement is true, what is the reason?
Isn't Reason itself the reason (I.e. the rule internal to Reason that there must be a cause)?
I think epistemology and metaphysics are entangled. We think about truth and know truth, and all of our conclusions thereof, because both are constructed within the same framework: our Minds, and for us, there are no metaphysical conclusions known without both knowing and concluding having first evolved as constructions.
For a physicalist, it is clear how it does. What is the problem exactly? Problem of consciousness? Rehash of the problems of mind-body dualism?
Quoting Astrophel
Ok, so intentionality. There are several different alternatives for that, none is preferred over the other, there might never be agreement.
Credit: Dr. Tomas Bogardus.
Quoting Lionino
"Something" here is not a proposition, but X in "it is the case that X". Things in the world have causes.
Quoting Banno
I was going to say that this is simply the deflationary view of truth, but it is not, it is simply a tautology.
Ok. Do you think there is a cause for Reason? Or are some things exempt from the need for cause? Or, back to the original question, is "cause and effect," itself, a "thing" caused?
What do you mean by the Real world? Physical things? Is Reason a thing outside the Real World? What things are real (not as in, accessible to our perception--but ultimately real) and not physical? And with respect to such--if you think they Really exist--whence their cause?
Why?
Because I'm suggesting Reason is constructed; knowledge is constructed. And truth for humans, the only species that cares about truth, is not known as in discovered, but rather, constructed. Epistemology and metaphysics are entangled: both so called Truth and how humans pursue/access Truth are constructed by the Minds busily doing so.
But one does not know a truth. Knowing IS the truth. My position is that knowledge, belief, truth, at the level of philosophical inquiry, which is the most basic, while obviously useful expressions in varying contexts, are events in the perceiving agency. In order to make a move to talk about something that is outside of this agency ( cat and cow agencies alike) would be a transcendental leap that is not demonstrable. NOT that there is nothing "over there"; this is absurd as well. But to say we have an avenue open to the thing over there FREE of the perceptual act would be like talking about moonlight as a astronomical phenomenon while altogether leaving out mention of sun light. As if the moon were a stand alone radiance of light. Things do not simply present themselves free of perceptual contribution. In fact, apart from G E Moore's hand being raised in defiance of the idealist's skepticism, and Moore does make a very good point in doing this, I am aware, there is NO explanatory basis for affirming anything about the "cow thing" over there that altogether overthrows Kant. Physicalist just have to admit that a brain-thing is massively complex, and the survival of the "thing out there" in the processes of brain chemistry is patently absurd.
This is perhaps the point of the OP. Moore's hand raised is a POWERFUL argument, as I see it. The hand IS there, notwithstanding the presence of synthetic apriori structures that are IN the hand's being there. So we are at this really impossible crossroads where at once we know something is there, over there, and not me but separate from me, a cat, a coffee table, etc., yet the only tool in the physicalist's basket is causality, and I don't mean at all physicists do is talk about one thing causing another...but this is implied in everything they say, obviously, and if you think unproblematic cases of causality, and there are zillions, you will find nothing that can make my thoughts about the cat really ABOUT the cat. They would be more about the physical systems of the brain...but wait, not even this. How, after all, would neuronal systems generate awareness, a knowledge claim, of themselves???
Such is the paradox of an uncompromised physicalism.
Quoting J
States of affairs existing without a perceiver is nonsense, unless you can say what this would be without "saying" what it would be. The moment you begin to speak: there is the history of your language and culture education and the structures of a remembered past informing the perceptual moment as to the what, the how of it, stabilizing the givenness into familiarity. Hegel gave us, in part, Heidegger, only Hegel thought that IN the moment of intimation of the things before me there was a metaphysical historical disclosure.
It is not that causality is not flawless. there is a difference between a paradigm that leads to others because it possesses possiblities for a new thesis. Rather, causality possesses nothing at all that, on the assumption of physicalism, or some variant thereof, that can deliver knowledge. The moment you say, well, the light radiates upon the cup, and the surface reflects or absorbs certain of its wavelengths, and those reflected reach the eye....and I stop you there where you haven't even entered the eye, and I ask: how is a wavelength of light anything like the object? And the same applies to all of the sensory data. How is a sound wave even remotely like the object? In the exhaustive analysis of sensory data, one will not find the object. This is the point. And once the brain actually get hold of these vibrations or light waves, forget it. A brain event is NOTHING at all like cup or cow.
This may sound simplistic to you, but it is this simplicity that is so remarkable. One is so conditioned by everyday talk and referencing that the philosophical question is entirely ignored. And again, philosophers in the science-friendly analytic vein are just tired of Kantian or neo Kantian thinking. This changes nothing about the radical deficit in explaining the simple knowledge claim.
Well, an agent judging a proposition is an agent of a propositional nature "it" self. Agency conceived apart from propositional possibilities is metaphysics. So it is really that beliefs are between beliefs and beliefs. I judge the cup to have a handle, but what makes for such a judgment if not the body of implicit propositional beliefs that are at the ready every time I encounter cups, handles and their possibilities. I am doxastically predisposed in any occurrent doxastic event.
So truth is a monadic predicate? But this just assumes truth to be some stand alone singularity in the world. Such a thing has never been, nor can it be, witnessed apart from belief.
Quoting Astrophel
Heideggers concept of being-in-the -world determines that language and world are precisely not at a distance from each other. On the contrary, language discloses self and world together, as our always already being thrown into worldly possibilities. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein make related points. The distance is not between language and the world, it is between our self and our self, due to the fact that, through language, we always come to ourselves from the world.
My cats existence is an existence for me, as a function of the relevance of the cat for my ongoing social practices. The discovery of this relevance through language both discloses the meaning of the cat anew and alters my previous sense of meaning of the cat for me. What would it even mean to refer to the cats existence apart from what I want to do with the cat in thinking about its existence?
Things outside one's mind, be it spirit or matter.
Quoting ENOAH
Quoting ENOAH
I will ask once again for you to specify which of the several meanings of "reason" you are using here. I specified mine.
Quoting ENOAH
God, soul, monad, if you believe in those.
Quoting ENOAH
By whom?
Thinking like this leads to a failure to understand the world. "How things are" is exactly where the issue begins.
Quoting Astrophel
Nietzsche certainly thought that the buck stops with value. To be more precise, with a value-positing will to power. So in truth , the irreducible is the endless self-overcoming of value. But I dont think thats the kind of value-thinking you have in mind.
Reason: (simplified) that set of Laws/Dynamics/Process/tools including such as Logic, cause, linear movement, justification used to arrive at and settle upon a belief which is adopted as true (as opposed to so arriving/settling/adopting by way of alternative means such as convention, or fantasy).
Do you really think God, soul, monad are Real I.e., not constructed by Minds over time?
And on that note, Reason is constructed by Mind through its "membership" over time. Like Language was so constructed. In this sense "evolved" . That is, not deliberately constructed. Or do you mean to suggest that both Reason and Language are Reality pre-existing, independent of humans; inherent to the Universe?
If it is the latter, then I can see how epistemology and metaphysics are separate, because knowing is the process of discovering Truth.
But if, as I suspect, it is the former, and both Reason and our truths are constructed, then epistemology and metaphysics are entangled as yet another process/outcome of such conditions.
Finally, as for "physical things," I accept prima facie that they are Real; albeit your periodic table is a human construction; an example not of physical things in Reality, but of how we construct that in human Mind.
That has nothing to do with my application of the word "reason", so I wonder why you even bring it up. It is not like I disagree with what you are saying, as far as I even understand it, it is just that it has no connection to what was being said.
Quoting ENOAH
Many people do.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with my addition to the ambiguous OP.
Quoting ENOAH
It is not a periodic table and it lists things which exist in the real world. Obviously the table doesn't exist as an object in the real world, unless we print it.
Thank you for clarifying. Apologies for any misinterpreting.
I'm not sure whether you are saying that the T-sentences resolve the problem or not. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein asking himself how he can possibly use language to get beyond language. Isn't that where he starts talking about saying and showing?
Quoting Astrophel
So perhaps the project of positing the world in a stand-alone way is a mistake?
Quoting Joshs
So there is a concept that resolves the problem how to establish a world without concepts?
A good paradox tempts us to find a resolution, but ensures that no solution can be found. This is a good paradox. The paradox is formulated in language. So it is itself included in the problem. So "language in itself" transcends our concept of language, the "world in itself" transcends our concept of the world and the relationship or link between the two will always transcend anything we can articulate in language.
Unless that link shows itself in our embodied existence in the world, that is, in human life and practices.
An agent is you or I, not a proposition. A judgement might be put in propositional terms, if that is what you mean.
Quoting Astrophel
I do not follow what this says. In so far as agency produces an effect, of course it can be put into propositional terms. I went to the fridge to get a beer. I gather that we agree that actions can be put into statements. That's not metaphysics.
Quoting Astrophel
Are you claiming not to have any beliefs about the way things are? About chairs and cups and trees and so on? Folk believe in chairs and cups and trees, and have beliefs about them, but have enough sense to realise that chairs and cups and trees are different to beliefs. If you think that somehow all there are, are beliefs about beliefs, then enjoy your solipsism, and I'll leave you to it.
Quoting Astrophel
Simply the cup's having a handle. Sure, that the cup has a handle is a human expression, but that does not imply that the cup is a belief, or that the cup has no handle.
You sometimes misjudge, perhaps believing the cup has a handle when it does not. But if all there are, are your beliefs, then such a situation could not even be framed.
Quoting Astrophel
The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs.
The world is what is the case, not what you believe to be the case.
Which is the point at which I entered the this thread.
Quoting Astrophel
A monadic predicate like "the cup has a handle". Which is a very different proposition to "Astrophel does not believe that the cup has a handle". You've segregated yourself from the world by poor logic.
Quoting Banno
Thats right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility.
I don't see it as absurd myself. To me it seems awfully sensible, to see knowledge claims as pragmatic functions dealing with the world.
In any case, since we are here, if reason is built by mind, what is the mind? Meaning, what is it made of?
More that it sets the issue out clearly. Yep, saying and showing and so on. It's not a complete answer, but not a denial
Quoting Ludwig V
Yep. It's as if their argument were "we only say how things are using language, therefore we cannot say how things are".
The following is a simplified reply owing to present time constraints and a reluctance to provide more info than you are after.
Mind is structured by images stored in memory, the "organic" function of which is to facilitate expedited responses to organic needs etc. Hearing roar, triggers flight for expedition. For humans, uniquely, these images evolved over time into a System of Signifiers operating autonomously and in accordance with its own Laws etc etc etc.
Out of these Signifiers, empty, fleeting, ontologically Fictional, every "thing" under the umbrella "human experience," is constructed, and such constructions trigger real organic response (see Clasdical conditioning) Not to say there are not Real human sensations, feelings and activities. But these constructions out of Signifiers, autonomously displace the human organism's Real "consciousness;" sensation with perception; feeling with emotion; inner feeling/image-ing with idea; drives and their corresponding actions with deliberation, choice, and so on, and so on.
To oversimplify some more: Language is not a mirror of our world. Rather the world (as we "see" it) is a mirror of our Language.
I am not sure if I get your meaning. In Hegel's view at least, this unfolding isn't the cognitive discovery of some agent. It's the movement of all of being, which occurs because of what being is. The dialectical is ontological. Collective, emergent Spirit, is the key element of "mind" involved, not individuals.
At least this is according to Hegel scholars who tend to gravitate more to the Logic and take Hegel's invocations of Jacob Boheme and Miester Eckhart more seriously. Others disagree about the extent to which logic becomes ontology in the "objective logic," that sits prior to the (more familiar) subjective logic.
Right. It'd be impossible to know anything without some sort of memory and something in perception linking moments together. If things are totally discrete then there is nothing to say, each moment is sui generis. This is why Hume's bundle of perceptions can't be [I]just[/I] that. Something has to link the moments together for there to be anything at all, which Kant recognized.
Although, returning to Hegel, it is the movement of Spirit, not individual selves, in which concepts develop, which makes perfect sense from a historical perspective since. I think Hegel has a bit of a problem when it comes to his political philosophy in this regard. The universal comes to overwhelm the particular. Plato has a similar problem. I have yet to find a thinker who really balances this well, who can take the intuition that institutions are substance in political life, individuals mere accidents, but then not lose sight of the importance of the person. Urs von Balthasar's theodrama concept is the best I've seen.
I don't think I followed this. What sort of value? Survival value? Good versus bad? Aesthetic value?
Each type of value seems to have an open-ended character. Moore talks about the open-ended question of goodness. We can always ask if something is "truly good." Even if a divine command theory frame, we can ask if what God wants is "actually good."
But this is true for truth as well. This is why radical skepticism is always possible. "Is this really true?" And it seems true for aesthetic judgements as well. Which is perhaps why the Good, the Beautiful, and the True end up as [I]the[/I] transcendentals, because they can always be pushed farther.
A God constructed by minds wouldn't qualify as a God for many people. God, as fully transcendent and without limit, would exist over all minds and anything else, "within everything but contained in nothing," as St. Augustine puts it. This would entail that direct, knowledge of God by finite beings is impossible, leading to apophatic theology. But, as Jesus says "with men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible."
While I am not prepared to state that my Truth is devoid of any relationship/connection/source to/with/from a Universal or Transcendant Truth, call that "God", I think, the nanosecond I define that in/to Consciousness (mine/other) I have brought such "Thing" out of "Its" "Transcendance" and into Human Mind, by constructing "It" with such definition. So even that definition quoted above, is a God constructed by minds.
And therefore, building from as you pointed out, that a constructed God cannot be God, is it not suggested:
1. The God we can speak about is not God,
Or
2. If we can speak about God, we cannot speak accurately (or know It) because it transcends us and is without limitation (how can something without limitation be defined...therefore, including, even as a "thing without limitation")
Or
3 Anything we (think we can) say and or know regarding God, is a human construction (which basically was implied in my question, "Do you really think God...is Real I.e., not constructed by Minds?)
My point, to reiterate, my Organic so called being, may or may not have a relationship to/with a Universal Reality. But any consideration of that, even the one encapsulated in the immediately preceding statement, is already not that relationship.
1.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If it is within those boundaries, it is new in an old sense, already catered for. The points where the boundaries break down or are transcended is where the world might be said to show itself. There is another, surprising, possibility. The rules of language may themselves lead to incomprehensible conclusions; irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, calculus &c. These are places when we don't know what to say. We may be driven to develop new ways to speak, or stretch the boundaries by means of metaphors or poetry or pictures - even, possibly, music and dancing.
Yes. Exactly. Isn't that exactly what eventually but (almost?) inevitably happens when there are gaps in the Language structures. Not, these "silent places" must present cracks where unspeakable Truth breaks through. Rather, these unspeakables are moments where what will be spoken has yet to be written; "places" where History is approaching a change (which didn't emerge in a vacuum, nor as a revelation or uncovering of Truth, but rather evolved out of all previous speech) in the Narrative and so the conventional structure (ie., that which is readily speakable) is not yet conventional. Novelty is built-in to the whole system/process of History; change, like Time, is a necessary mechanism for the Narrative(s) of Mind(s) to be "written" and correspondingly spoken.
Then if one accepts that there is such a thing as a moment which is unspeakable because it is Reality or Truth, rather than a shift in the Narrative, which is inexpressible, what is that like? Saying so will immediately rob it of that Truth. But, a fellow slave to speech, I'd say it is any so called moment or place where you, not the thinker/speaker, but the human organism are being. So, always, throughout your life. But that being--not must be, but--is silent. Truth is not unspeakable; Truth does not speak.
The matter goes as far as the reduction can take it. Husserl said the natural attitude pov understood the world and its objects as transcendental, and he meant that there was nothing in this thinking that made the essential connection and the object remained remote and inaccessible. But he never denied this about the phenomenon, that it was true that there was something beyond the "noematic sense" So there is an object "inherent to the sense" as well as the transcendent world that is put in parentheses. Husserl excludes "the real relation between perceiving and perceived." When he talks like this, he proves himself not to be an idealist, acknowledging what is there and actual, just suspended, and he does present the basis for following through on the promise of the reduction which is to establish the ultimate marriage between what is known, liked, disliked, approved, rejected, accepted and so forth, and what is "there," for the status of the noematic world is not to be deemed simply derivative or representational. This, to me, is the strength of Husserl, the perceiving AS perceived, the remembered AS remembered has no diminished ontological status, and is thereby admitted into evidence for a foundational thesis in philosophy. Now, as Henry tells us, we can give the affectivity discovered in our existence its due place, without the traditional prohibitions, what was called the "irrational" parts of our nature. Affectivity is now ontologically front and center, delivering us from, among other things, ethical nihilism (not that I've Husserl going on like this. HIs "spirit" talk in the European Crisis sounds like Heidegger nationalistic turn towards the nazis in the thirties).
Enactivism begs the very question at issue, which is, how do objects (of any kind) acquire their status as objects in the world? To speak at all of organisms interfacing with the environment, one has to first affirm that organisms would survive the reduction. They don't.
Yes, there is no outside. The idea is patently absurd, as if, as Rorty put it, the perceptual apparatus were a mirror of nature. But then, it is clear as a bell that the world is there, and it is not a representation at all, but is stand alone there, and by this I simply mean its existence as thereness possesses something that is, as Kierkegaard put it, its own presupposition. When we observe an object, the object becomes what it is in the observation, making it both a transcendental object, as the distance is never bridged, as well as an object of finitude, and this latter is what Heidegger holds. See how he talks about the art work:
[i]The artist is the origin of the work. The work
is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole
support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are
each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which
also gives artist and work of art their names art.
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.[/i]
To me, this is rather mesmerizing. In it lies the key to understanding knowledge claims implcit in the perceptual encounter. He captures the dynamic of hermeneutics, suggesting a dialectics of meaning making, only with Hegel there is this unfolding of divinity, which Kierkegaard argues against because Hegel ignores the dialectical tension in one's own existence. Hegel is too impersonal for Kierkegaard, and I think there is a good point made here: this encounter with the world is my encounter, and the historical dialectic is discovered within me. Knowledge may be wrought out of the ages, but its existential core is within the singularity of agency. And this core is radically affectively intense, this human dramatic unfolding.
Interesting the way Heidegger shows his Kierkegaardian influence. This talk about the "third thing" is derivative of Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. He writes
[i]A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite,
of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity,
in short, a synthesis.2 A synthesis is a relation between two.
Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self
In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a
negative unity,3 and the two relate to the relation and in the
relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the
psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical
is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this
relation is the positive third, and this is the self.4[/i]
He is likely mocking Hegel, but he is also serious, and you find this same idea in the Concept of Anxiety. This "third" thing that Heidegger is calling art is the synthesis in the dynamic interplay between artist and artwork. Art emerges in the tension, and I think this is the way to think about knowledge, which is that there is in the interface between perceiver and perceived a third thing, and this is meaning, tossed around casually and "reified by familiarity." I see a cow by the barn and if I am simply "going along" with normal affairs, there is created a matrix of meaning that is spontaneous, and this is, to keep with Heidegger, Rorty, others, essentially pragmatic, a forward looking event in time.
Of course, this analysis goes way back to Augustine in his Confessions. I was trying to read paul riquer's Time and Narrative, but found out I had to read more Aristotle for this, and so I quit, but the point I will make is that a truly important concept to have in mind in trying to understand what happens when I see and recognize the cow is the concept of time. Brentano, Kierkegaard, Husserl and of course Heidegger are very enlightening.
I'll read Pinkhard. Thanks. Unfold globally? You mean historically and throughout disparate cultures?
What is required is a perspective which transcends and therefore includes both subject and object, seer and seen, self and world - one of the fundamental themes of metaphysics since Parmenides. Hegel would probably be one who understands this better than most. But then as you point out there is a thread that connects the mystical tradition, and therefore neoplatonism, with the German idealists (Dermot Moran has written a book on that.)
And no one is denying that you see a lamp when you see a lamp. This is never brought into question. The question is, how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible? For this one has to do some digging, that is, think about how a person is "wired" to the world, and THIS is as sticky a wicket as can be. Again, non one questions there being a lamp, your seeing it there on a table, and so on. Rather, given that this is the case, what must also be the case that makes this so?
I don't think perceptions are different from beliefs. All perceptions are apperceptions. When you see a cup, you know what it is IN the seeing, that is, the cup is already known prior to the seeing, and seeing it is a confirmation about the conformity between what you see and the predelineated "cupness" that you come into the perceptual encounter with that allows you to spontaneously without question or analysis note that it is indeed a cup (See Kant's infamous transcendental deduction in his Critique of Pure Reason. He calls this the imagination, the way an event is constructed in a temporal unity, A tough read, though.)
If it's clear, please tell me, in a nut shell.
Quoting Lionino
No Lionino. None of these. The question posed here is presupposed by this physicalism, for it is more basic: prior to getting to the scientific perspective, one can inquire about the foundations of its perceptual knowledge claims. Consider something simple: your manifest cognitive abilities issue from a physical brain, but then, it is through these very cognitive abilities that one arrives at brains being there at all. All a brain can do to manufacture phenomenal experience, so the brain that is supposed to be responsible for this very experience is itself part and parcel of just this.
This is question begging of the worst kind. You would need a third pov outside the brain to posit the brain being there apart from a mere construct within the brain. But then, this, too, would need a perspective guaranteeing that this third pov is not itself just a brain manifestation rather than a "real" brain, and so on.
Quoting Lionino
:meh:
Quoting Astrophel
"How can I trust the brain to tell me I am a brain?" You can't trust the mind to tell you you are a brain either, that is the problem of solipsism and physicalism has nothing to do with it.
You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. This is my closing statement for this thread ?(¬ _ ¬)
Your question 'how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible' follows from the assumption that you never see the lamp, only something prior to the seeing, in your own seeing.
To ask how it is possible to know that you see the lamp under the assumption that you never see it is not only impossible to answer but confused. You can dig deeper than Kant, but the root problem arises from that assumption, which in turn is derived from a rejection of naive realism.
Assuming naive realism, then you do in fact see the lamp, not something else in your own seeing. Seeing it, and the fact that it is there and visible, makes it possible to know that you're seeing it.
Yes, historically and throughout disparate cultures and eras, and through all different minds. Hegel lived before Darwin. I think his ideas could make significant use of natural selection, and might have spread to "all minds."
If we were to one day meet ETs and exchange ideas with them, I think we'd be including them as well. Being coming to know itself as self happens everywhere there is subjectivity.
I think selection-like processes at work in the cosmos more generally and the sort of fractal recurrence we see at different scales would have really interested Hegel. Astronomy was in its infancy in his day though, I don't even think our galaxy was known as a thing back then, although Kant had proposed the nebular theory of solar system development by then.
Well, if you read Magee's book, Hegel's entire corpus is [I]primarily[/I] an exploration of mystical/esoteric, Hermetic ideas. IMO, the book suffers from the tendency of scholars to present maximalist theses for a sort of novelty factor. I think there is a difference between saying that Hegel was deeply influenced by folks like Eckhart, Cusa, and Boheme, and saying his natural philosophy and logic is 'based-on' alchemy or kabbalah. In many ways, it is deeply opposed to anything that relies on picture thinking and pure noetic intuition or a sort of extra rational gnosis.
But it's still a very interesting connection, especially since there is a dearth of scholarship on folks like Eckhart or Bonaventure as philosophers generally they are treated primarily as mystics and some of their more philosophical material gets sidelined.
Quoting jkop
Interesting. Phenomenology and poststructuraliam arrive at conclusions quite similar to this, except that they do it without assuming realism at all.
Quoting Ludwig V
We dont use a concept to establish a world without concepts, we find ourselves thrown into a world ( we are a self by continually transcending toward the world) and speak from amidst the beings ( things, concepts, uses) that are actualized from out of that world which projects itself. We can speak that world inauthentically in terms of extant things , symbols and concepts, or we can speak it authentically as a self-transcending happening (which concepts imply but conceal) , an occurrence. Then language is itself the transcending rather than a concept of itself.
Quoting Astrophel
For Heidegger, there is nothing but the outside, in the sense of the always already ahead of itself of temporalizing understanding.
Neither is the world stand-alone there. The world is the unified totality of relevance relations, possibly ways for Dasein to be. Heidegger also calls world beings as a whole.
The world temporalizes itself, which is to say, it continually projects itself anew as a whole. Dasein is continually thrown into a new world. The world worlds.
Your translations from Hegelese are excellent, thank you! And the bolded paragraph from the Encyc. Brit. does seem very close to the question at issue in the OP.
The Hegelian position here is that one cant step outside belief altogether. Every search must end with some belief about the results of the search. For Hegelians, this situation is an important and somewhat scandalous insight. For various versions of realism, its unsurprising and unproblematic.
Why would we expect stepping outside belief to be the criterion for knowing something about reality? What about the distinction between belief and justified true belief? A modest realism only asks that there be this difference, and that our epistemological search can end with JTB, rather than mere opinion. (JTB is not certainty, except possibly for analytic propositions, and thats why I call it a modest realism.) The opposing idea would seem to be that only an unmediated, unbelieved Reality with a capital R could be the proper goal of the search. Or perhaps the idea is that, unless we can make contact with such a reality, were in no position to judge whether a belief is a JTB.
Would such contact be the same thing as contacting what is given to the mind, direct apprehension, unmediated knowledge, etc., on this view? I suppose so, since it can be plausibly argued that we never do achieve such contact. But I dont see why the realist needs to concede this equivalence between direct apprehension and reality. They can say instead that a phrase like the experience of reality is always mediated by beliefs is either incoherent there is nothing to be experienced or that its perhaps true of givens or raw feels or some such, but that this is not what we mean by reality. The correspondence were looking for is not between propositions and unmediated reality, but rather between certain beliefs about states of affairs, and whether those beliefs are warranted.
Having said all this, I think the issue may be a classic instance of a kind of spade-turning difference in intuition about metaphysics. I dont expect a Hegelian to be swayed by what Im saying, and they probably dont expect me to be swayed either. Each of us thinks the other is arguing in a circle, in some important sense, or missing a basic insight about the possibilities of experience. Philosophy goes on, precisely because we dont really know what to say about these bedrock differences . . .
But Nietzsche had this weird love of the gladiatorial. Really? If one is going to make that "qualitative move" into making value-as-such (not that there is such a thing) the bottom line for providing the essence of ethics, then the question goes to the value of a value vis a vis other values. Bentham did something like this, but his hedonic calculator was, as I recall, a quantitative measure in order address practical choices. This is a hard issue to discuss, for how does one escape the cultural bias? Is a pig satisfied less than Socrates unsatisfied? Is a good mud fight less than a philosophical epiphany?
But then, how about Emerson's walk in a "bare common" and is glad to the brink of fear? Or Wordsworth's intimations of immortality? These have a dimension that raises the matter out of the mundane and into something else, the "awe and wonder" as Rudolf Otto put it of the world. Heidegger leans this way in some of his later writing (Discourse, on Thinking comes to mind. Bringing Care into the essence of dasein as he did was eye opening for me. His call for yielding, using the term gelasenheit, puts him on the threshold ), but what I have in mind here is along the lines of pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite and Eckhart.
It is not likely you take any of this seriously. Philosopher generally don't. But blood and guts Nietzsche? I don't think so.
Quoting Astrophel
Actually, I prefer what Foucault and Deleuze have done with
Nietzsche. They show what can be done with an ethics of contingent, relative becoming.
Thanks. I have practiced quite a bit because it's hard to place Hegel in dialogue with other ideas without breaking it out of its own weird way of speaking about the world.
It would seem to come down to the "true" in JTB. JTB is only JTB if the T is in play. In conventional correspondence theories, this is where we make the jump outside the realm of belief. "The cat is on the mat" is true just in case the cat is "actually" on the mat. "Actually" is generally taken to mean "out there," outside the realm of phenomenal experience, without reference to belief or perception. If we ask, "in virtue of what is the proposition true," the common correspondence answer will make reference to facts that obtain simpliciter, outside any reference to belief.
Right, but then what is this difference? What does it mean for "the cat to be on the mat," outside of the realm of mind? We can only answer this question with beliefs. Consider the critique of the mereological nihilists. Where is the evidence for the cat existing outside of mind? The target of the proposition might be said to be "processes of fundemental forces arranged cat-wise." What does "on" mean in the frame where the three dimensional nature of our universe is said to also be a product of mind, nature simpliciter being "holographic?" Given the "Problem of the Many," how many cats can be said to be on the mat, one or billions? i.e., one for each ensemble of particles that meets some minimum definition of "cat-wise arrangement?"
It turns out that deciding what this truth would entail just leads us through circles of belief.
Both views have been popular. I think there is a useful distinction here though.
There is the claim that "were in no position to judge whether a belief is a JTB" because we can't view reality as it is "in-itself," and then there is the view that we can't judge whether a belief is JTB under the simple correspondence definition of truth because we can't actually define what correspondence is without references to more beliefs. IMO, the first is arguably confused, positing the existence of things that are, in principle, unobservable and can never make a difference to any observer, and then using that as the measuring stick of the real and true.
The second view seems more damaging. "You say a belief is JTB just in case it is justified and true, but what do you mean by true?" Then "true" ends up being what "actually is, without reference to beliefs," but we then can only define the conditions under which this truth obtains in terms of beliefs.
This is pretty close to Hegel's view. St. Aquinas as well actually. Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they relate to nothing else, is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. Things only make a difference to other things in the world to the extent that they interact with them, and these interactions are both what we care about and what we can know. Further, the preferencing of mindless interactions over ones involving phenomenal experience is arbitrary, and the rationale for it confused.
I'm not sure what you mean here. This doesn't sound like a correspondence theory of truth, i.e., "Theseus is standing" is true just in case Theseus is standing. Correspondence is between beliefs, statements, and propositions on the one hand, and the world on the other, not between beliefs and being warranted/unwarranted.
I am not sure how the latter would work. In virtue of what is a belief warranted or unwarranted? If it's in virtue of evidence that it corresponds to the world, the "way things actually are," we're back to correspondence. If it's in virtue of a belief corresponding to other beliefs then that's a coherence theory of truth, of the sort that was developed in order to get around problems with correspondence.
But Hegel is generally taken as a realist, whereas definitions of truth that only make reference to other beliefs are generally the theories that are taken to be more anti-realist. For under those theories, there is no truth "out there" in the world, as with correspondence, and no truth transcending mind/nature as in Hegel, but truth rather exists strictly in mind, as a status that obtains between beliefs.
IDK, at times moments of Hegel get closer to coherence. For what moves the progression of concept evolution? Contradiction. Beliefs, don't cohere; there is a contradiction of essence. But then truth doesn't begin and end here. The process of its development starts prior and carries on further than coherence, and it is global, historical coherence that is most important, not the coherence of an individual's beliefs.
But then, this divests the self of agency. What is the utmost me and mine becomes a public me and mine. I take Kierkegaard's side on this, modified: I exist, but certainly not in the present at hand mode of existence (res extensa for Descartes) but in the radical indeterminacy of actual encounter.
There is this radical face to face with the world that discloses something alien that is not reducible to the totality of potentiality that issues from the repository of past experiences. Heidegger wrote pages on this in Being and Time, but as I see it, really didn't get it.
Hence the WWII indifference to the holocaust that he is criticized for. I don't think he understood ethics.
Quoting Astrophel
Youre misreading the meaning of transcendence of the object for Husserl. What transcends the noematic appearance of the spatial object is not external to the subjective process. It is immanent to it. For instance , out of my objectivating constituting performances, a football is given to me as this object which maintains itself as a unity through all the changes in its appearance. But the football as a unified thing is transcendent to what I actually
see. I strive to get closer and closer to the object as a unity via further adumbrations. But i can never achieve complete fulfillment. In this sense the idea of unitary object will always be transcendent to what I actually experience through constituted modes of givenness. But notice that the objects transcendence is already defined in relation to the direction of my intending activity. The world can never transcend me except in relation to , and on the basis of, my already structured intentional sense. In this way what is beyond me always in some sense belongs to me. Husserl was not a realist. Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:
What you refer to as the "3" of Heidegger's description of artist, art, and relation between these, can be found in Aquinas' description of the Holy Trinity. His description refers to father, son, and the relation between these two, represented in the Holy Trinity as Holy Spirit. I believe this specific trinity, the Holy Trinity, was first described by Augustine, but the derivation of trinities in general may be traced back to Plato's tripartite soul. In Augustine the Holy Trinity is described by the analogy of memory, reason (or understanding), and will.
An in depth understanding will reveal the temporal reference of Augustine's trinity, "memory" associated with past, "will" associated with future, and "reasoning or understanding" as what occurs at present. So the overarching trinity which all these different representations have in common, is the temporal trinity of past, future, and the present as that which relates the other two. Heidegger has a very unique way of dealing with this tripartite reality of time, and some modern phenomenologists, Derrida in particular, bring the temporal nature of being to the forefront. The representation of how we as humans experience being present in time becomes the most important principle toward understanding the other aspects of our being.
Depends on what is meant by a proposition. S knows P, but this knowing has to be unpacked, and it certainly is not as if when I see my cat I am explicitly recalling all the cat-presence indicators about the look of cats, their behavioral possibilities, and the rest. But clearly, I am already knowledgeable prior to actual encounter, about cats, this cat. There is history there that informs my familiarity, so this is a recollection, if not explicit, but merely "attending" to make cat recognition possible. The cat presence a "region" of associated experiences with cats that create the affect of knowing.
So if this is a rough account of agency, and I think it is, then we are implicit-proposition-bearing agencies. This must be the case in order to explain how it is that we live in a world so implicitly comfortable all the time. To perceive is to apperceive, so we are agents of apperception.
Quoting Banno
But ask, how is it that prior to getting the beer, you already know about refrigerators and their capacity to contain beer? If you want to say the agency precedes knowledge, then, as I see it, you have a lot of explaining to do, for to do this explaining you would be IN a matrix of propositional knowledge. Any thing you "put your eyes on" will be well received by an understanding, even if it is alien in appearance, it will be assimilated to a standard way of fixating beliefs. See Kuhn's "Structures" for the way science historically evolved. We are living "paradigms" in a world. Agency is paradigmatic, if you will.
Quoting Banno
No one is saying there is no world in public "space". This is a big issue. What is there is an event. This has to be understood. And this event IS me. An event in ME. Not at all to deny there are things in the world, but that they are not me. And our shared knowledge of the world in indeterminate (see Quine, e.g.) though pragmatically effective. I am not at all locked into some cul de sac solipsism. Why? Well, just look around. There are other things and people everywhere. The idea is preposterous. But the event of knowing is Me. How do I get out of the ME? THAT is metaphysics. I can say with confidence that physicalism leads to the worst solipsism one can imagine. It does not even get THAT far. How do you make a causal relation into an epistemic one?
Quoting Banno
All that is there in my beliefs are possibilities, not fixity. Beliefs are open and interpretative. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. A man's head turns into a lion's head. A miracle! That is, until scientific accounting steps in. Then all is normalized. Science's paradigms take the in unknow, the unpredictable, the "radically contingent" (Sartre) and brings them all to heel. Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. No one takes the so called "four humors" seriously any more in the medical community. The world showed otherwise, but note how the terms 'four' and 'humor' are still with us. The meanings and their application change, but this is an evolving language phenomenon. Future "discoveries" will just like this.
Quoting Banno
But my beliefs are mostly public. It is not about "my" beliefs when I go shopping and do my taxes. We all know. This is what is being discussed. The self is an embodiment of this language consensus, this cultural literacy, if you will (not to invoke what E D Hirsh said back then).
Quoting Banno
My belief that the cup has no handle cannot be loosened from beliefs about cups in general that are always already there when a cup matter arises. Negative statements cannot be logically torn from their positive counterparts.
Everyone's a realist in some sense, no? :wink:
John Searle argues that many of the great modern philosophers use perceptual verbs ambiguously in two different senses.
1. In a constitutive sense. The perception is understood as what is constitutive for having it, such as brain events or a perceptual process that exists only for the one who has the perception.
2. In an intentionalistic sense, The perception is understood as what is perceived, or what the perception is about. For example, the visual perception of the lamp.
But in talk that does not distinguish between the two senses it is easy to confuse the lamp that you're seeing with the seeing in its constitutive sense, i.e. the lamp as a figment of your own seeing.
Moreover, lots of philosophical confusion arises since it is possible, by stipulation, to experience seeing the lamp without there being a lamp, such as in a visual hallucination. But when you see the lamp both senses (1 and 2) are satisfied. When you hallucinate seeing the lamp, only 1 is satisfied (the constitutive sense).
Despite being ontologically subjective, perceptions are epistemically objective in the sense that we can describe them and compare our descriptions with available facts. That's a pragmatic way among many of finding out whether a visual experience is veridical or non-veridical.
God forbid. It might seem that way if you havent stumbled upon a satisfying alternative view of the world, but there are quite a number of these. The catch is that they require the overthrow of deeply entrenched metaphysical presuppositions. Given Searles longstanding clueless hostility toward postmodern thinking, I wouldnt count on him to offer guidance in this respect.
Not to take sides on Searle's contributions to philosophy overall, but this distinction is extremely useful, I think. You mention that this ambiguity allows us to stipulate perception in sense 1 but not sense 2 (hallucinating the lamp, or "seeing a lamp that isn't there"). But does it also support the reverse? That is, can I maintain that my sense-2 perception of the lamp is genuine, and a legitimate use of the word "perception," without committing myself to some story about how it supervenes (or otherwise connects) to a sense-1 perception?
Hmm. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.
Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is.
This is a corollary of Fitch's knowability. If any truth can be known it follows that every truth is indeed known. If every truth is known, whence novelty? Antirealism, which I take to be your position, is indeed forced to deny surprise.
But the better way to treat this is as a reductio: we are on occasion surprised; therefore there are things we do not know; therefore not every truth can be known.
Thus we can avoid the hubris of antirealism; the irony that in attempting to humanism truth by equating it with belief, one finds one is omniscient.
If that is your claim. But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.
Which I find wearying.
Which facts could you compare perceptions to? Other perceptions?
Quoting Astrophel
Generally, a noun and a predicate, but there are complications in the syntax.
Your account is that we only have beliefs, that the world is what Astrophel believes and nothing else. But this is nonsense. We interact with the world, doing things together in it in ways sometimes limited by what is the case and sometimes expanded by what we make the case.
That is, I know the beer is in the fridge because I put it there.
Quoting Lionino
Just so. It is a bit foggy this morning, so I may be overusing misty metaphors, but here again one might hope Astrophel's cloud might eventually also condense into something a bit more transparent.
For now it might be best left to itself.
I agree, Astrophel is being a bit obtuse in general, and I think they're going to have a field day with the above, because it satisfies their criteria for something you could 'know' to act upon under their account, being:
Quoting Astrophel
Hehehe.
We can never be radically surprised by the world. Even objects we have never seen before are recognizable at some level with respect to a pre-understanding. We havent seen this particular thing but we have seen things like it , or we at least recognize it as a thing. But we dont spend much of our time simply staring at things, we use them, and their status as objects with properties dissolves into the uses we make of them in order to do things. Most of our surrounding world consists of value objects that mean what we use them for. We then notice what is novel as an interruption of our goal-oriented activity. But even when things are going smoothly and according to plan, novelty is already at work every moment. We wouldnt be able to experience anything if that were not the case.
Quoting Banno
How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? Heidegger? Derrida? Deleuze? Foucault? I figure if you dont see the clarity in their arguments, and they articulate in a much more effective way what Im trying to get across, why not save my breath and just quote them?
Sure, we recognise new stuff in terms of old stuff. Yet there is novelty. The conclusion is that there are unknown truths.
Quoting Joshs
Who do you count amongst your brethren? Foucault is the better of those you list.
But here, in this thread, while it seems that you are disagreeing with what I have said, but it is far from clear to me what that disagreement consists in.
I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which apparently conflates.
What are you doing here?
The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter.
Quoting Banno
Just slumming. But dont you think that teasing out the relation between identity and difference, the familiarly same and the surprisingly novel, is relevant to the OPs assertion that existence is part and parcel of justification itself?
In one way, I agree with you. However, I have great difficulty in understanding the philosophical dialect you are speaking after that. One problem (which does not occur here) is that I suspect that the term "language" is often taken to mean a single structure; that is reinforced when you give it a capital letter "Language". I don't think language has a single, overall, structure. (I wonder if Platonism is not the back of that idea.) Wittgenstein compares language to an ancient city with many overlapping and interacting structures, and that seems more helpful to me.
I don't think that "gap" is a helpful metaphor to describe the places where development happens - though it may be useful in some cases. In others "fault" or "extended (stretched) application" is better. I have a similar problem with "History". But we seem to be agreed that the possibility of novelty is inherent in language. It is not a closed system (a grid). On the contrary, we respond to challenges, difficulties, inadequacies to a linguistic structure in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes we adapt, sometimes we invent, sometimes we just forget. (And yes, no language is an abstract structure, though it is convenient to think of it that way. But in the end (or rather, in the beginning) it is inescapably realized in how human beings live their lives in the world.
Quoting Joshs
There is an idea that I like in this, if I've understood it. It is the idea that we need to start with the world, rather than with language. Then we can see language as part of the world and as developing within it. So the question is not, "how does language reach the world?" but rather "how does language develop within the world?". Whether it involves transcendence or not, the starting-point must be our lives as actual physical human beings.
I am not necessarily using any philosophical dialectic, although I recognize how that creates a barrier between ideas I might express and readers in a forum of highly trained. All I can do is assure you I'm not being deliberately careless, beg the indulgence of those with whom I interact, and thank you when you assist/clarify-for me. And yet, on another hand, I sometimes think it is absolutely impossible to be precise in our language and speaking loosely is more honest, open, and helpful to the ultimate cause. (But perhaps I said that too loosely)
I am using Language as broadly as one can imagine, to include all images, representations, signifiers etc., if there are ceteras, stored in memory/History and structuring what we--philosophers and laity alike--think of as human experience.
I am using History to refer to the collective of these Signifiers operating on the Natural World beyond the individual body, and constructing Narratives beyond individual personalities, all of which moves autonomously in accordance with evolved Laws and Dynamics, is inter-permeable or accessible to Itself inspite of embodiment, is ultimately Fictional, and though it affects Realty via embodiment and the manipulation of resources into Culture, it has no access whatsoever to knowing Reality, despite all of our (Its own) efforts to prove it wrong.
When I say gap (or variations thereof) I mean this: With respect to that structure (Mind/History) which is ultimately Fiction cannot access Reality by knowing, since knowing too is constructed by Language and ultimately Fiction, there is an insurmountable gap between Mind and Reality because Mind is not presence, the "locus" of Reality. Mind is re-presentation. It is, for Humans in human existence or History impossible to get out of the representational (difference, Time, becoming, etc etc) and back to presence (being) by "using" Mind (thinking reflecting reasoning). We cannot cross the gap as the Subject I, also constructed by Mind, or by any kind of pondering. Reality is only accessible in Being (presence, Organic, Body doing; Body is-ing) not in re-presenting, becoming, constructing, knowing.
What I was suggesting, in relation to Novelty, is that Novelty Only arises/exists in Language/Mind/History. The dialectical structure, difference Time, make Novelty necessary. And contrary to what some may think, a "place" or "moment" where it seems that there are no words to
speak of, that is not because therein is a glimpse of Reality (see Kant's sublime or Wittgenstein's silence, loosely, for the notion that something "transcending" phenomenal experience is taking place in this "moment" or gap). The gap is still Mind/History, still fully Language and its constructions, ineffable though it may seem. Reality cares not for effability. Its just a moment where the Narrative is about to shift, as it is structured to do. As you suggested, a moment where "we are driven to develop new ways to speak". But its not the Truth trying to shine through, because any access to Reality is divided from Mind/History by an unbridgeable gap. If its Reality you want, just breathe.
This was an over simplification. But, alas, oversimplifying, I find, is unavoidable in a forum like this.
Since justification presumably makes use of propositions, then of course it has such implications.
But justification is not truth. There is a reason that both truth and justification are listed in the JBT account.
How'r the fish?
A reverse? Well, no you cant see the lamp (2) without seeing (1). The lamp that you see is genuine when the seeing is causally related to what you see.
By stipulation you could have an experience that is identical to the visual experience of the lamp although it is an hallucination. That's because the visual experience and the hallucination employ some of the same faculties in the brain, although having radically different causes. There's also a direction of fit in the brain's ability to conform experiences according to real lamps (e.g. the brain flips the upside-down projection of light on your retinas so that you experience the lamp standing upright.I suppose that it tries to make sense of hallucinations as well, you may hallucinate something identical to seeing the lamp.
Sorry if this is getting off topic.
Yet Ideas I seems to take a different position:
The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual meaning belongs to the perception, and that inseparably. The tree plain and simple can burn away, resolve itself into its chemical elements, and so forth. But the meaningthe meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essencecannot burn away; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.
But later, he does make the point clear:
As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we do not place ourselves on their ground, do not co-operate with them, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.
So I didn't really read closely enough. It is "the affirmations" that are not cast away, not the transcendental objects themselves. The affirmations are obviously there, but he is saying we make these affirmations about their independent existence out of the phenomena. Thus, it looks like Husserl's version of what Heidegger will later call "the they": a constructed "natural world" of general assumptions superimposed on a foundational ontology revealed in phenomenological analysis of Being and Time. We take, for Heidegger, the former "as" a natural world. Husserl is saying close to the same thing. The difference between them lies in the fantastic claim Husserl makes about this reduced phenomena being absolute.
So thanks for that!
It is also found in Kierkegaard's body, soul and spirit. The spirit is the dialectical tension that manifests as anxiety and alienation once one discovers the "nothing" at the foundation of everyday existence and turns away from "the sin of the race" which is essentially the temptations of the mundane affairs of a culture, especially, for Kierkegaard, the "idolatry" of Christendom. Sin begins here. Interesting to see how Heidegger plays this out in Being and Time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where, I wonder, does Derrida do this?
It is from Rorty, frankly. And he took a very disputatious issue and made a simple remark that really has nothing at all to do with schools of philosophical thought. I consider it a kind of primordial observation due to its simplicity: how does anything out there get in here? It is a question of knowledge, so the Gettier problems have a place, because when you examine all of the analytic efforts to deal with knowledge and the traditional analysis, the severed arm solution, the barn facsimile solution, and others, assumed that the normal causal sequencing that led from P to S had to be reestablished. But there was no recourse made to the matter of P being true being itself problematic. The problem lies in justification being separated from the truth of a thing, as if in the perception of P, P's being true had some independent standing apart from the conditions in play justify positing P. To do this, it has to be show that P can be disentangled from justification. I say can't be done.
Not so much naive realism. True, such a thing fails miserably to explain knowledge relations. But keep in mind that Quine held just this view that causality was the bottom line for all inquiries into relations in the world:
[i]the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physicsin the elementary physical states.[/i](Quine, Facts of the Matter, 16869)
Physics was the bottom line.
Certainly does NOT follow from the assumption that I never see the lamp. Not sure where this comes from. But a question that looks at the knowledge relation between me and my lamp and asks how it this possible? It is stunning in its simplicity as a existential query. I mean, forget philosophy. Two objects, a brain and a lamp. Causality fails instantly. So how?
Resort to talk about the "things in themselves" and their impossible "transcendental" nature is a start.It could be that what we acknowledge as apodictic causality is really an underlying metaphysical unity. Quantum entanglement seems to suggest something like this.
I beg your puddin! Obtuse? Me? Okay, here and there.
When I wrote "dialect", I did not mean "dialectic". But maybe you are pointing to the same issue - mutual comprehension. There's only one philosophy that seriously tried not to use specialized philosophical dialect/language/dialectic - "ordinary language philosophy" - and that didn't end well. (I say that it turned out that ordinary language was just another speciality.) I think we have to look at some sort of translation between philosophies if there is to be any kind of dialogue. You are clearly succeeding in that, because I at least have the impression that I can partly understand what you are saying.
Quoting ENOAH
Everything is an over-simplification. There's no final statement of a philosophical doctrine. What matters is relevance to the matter at hand. I need to think over what you say, but I will respond - as briefly as I can.
Quoting jkop
It is worse than that. If you know that you never see the lamp, you must know what it would be like to see the lamp. That means it is possible to see the lamp (under some circumstances). This "assumption" involves changing the meaning of "see". But the idea that hallucinating that you see a lamp (etc.) assumes that "hallucinating" is like seeing, but different. So even the conclusion that when we think we see a lamp we are hallucinating see the lamp, still assumes that it is possible to see the lamp.
Quoting Banno
Surely, more accurately, that something is, is found in a true proposition (but not in a false one). But I would agree that a (meaningful) domain of discourse includes criteria for distinguishing between truth and falsity. But discourse is not, as formal logic is supposed to be, a structure fixed for all circumstances - the rules can break down, but they can be revised. That seems to me to address, at least partly, the fundamental concerns here.
I'm in a desert and I see an oasis in the distance, a deep pool of fresh water. I predict I'll be drinking in an hour when I get there. I walk towards it and an hour later, there's no water and I realize I was looking at a mirage.
How is that not an epistemic error even if humans are robots? This robot had a model of it's surroundings, it used that model to make a prediction, the prediction was wrong, followed by realization that the model was wrong.
Check out "Voice and Phenomena". We did a reading group on it here at TPF, a few years ago. It is a critique of some work by Husserl.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/512/reading-group-derridas-voice-and-phenomenon/p1
You'll find that by Ch. 4 he develops the concept of "repetition" which is an essential aspect of the nature of a "sign". It is a sort of recurrence of sameness. This is supported by the idea of "presence", as defined by present. The "present" grounds the presence of being, and the self in general as "I", it is an eternal sameness which transcends the individual.
From the Kantian attempt to explain how the perceived object conforms to concepts, where seeing the lamp means "seeing" a version of the lamp that has been conformed by your perceptual apparatus.
In your previous post you write this:
Quoting Astrophel
If seeing the lamp means confirming a conformed version of the lamp, then the word 'seeing' is used in a different sense. In this sense you never see the lamp but something else, a figment of conformity, whose visual features are conceptual, not empirical. Seeing a conformed version of the lamp's visible features is different from seeing the lamp's visible features.
Quoting Astrophel
Perception is complex, but I think it is helpful to avoid fallacies of ambiguity that result in a world of conformed lamps that you supposedly "see" (a conceptualized way of 'seeing') and transcendental lamps that we supposedly never see.
Like you, I apologize to others on this thread if I'm veering too far off topic. Just want to give this one point a closer look.
Hegelian Darwinsim? I like this because evolution as a physical process fails to see that the theory itself is produced IN an evolutionary manifestation. The evolved organism is neither an organism, nor anything else we can imagine beyond the framework of our own delimited determinations. Not organically delimited, but phenomenologically delimited.
But here is what I don't agree about Hegel. It's Kierkegaard who complained that Hegel had "forgotten that we exist." The way I see it, there is no account of what our existence is about that can exceed the concrete living reality of an individual experience. This rests with the brief but startling encounter itself, and things get Cartesian. I am referring to Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation, where he writes
[i]when I say 'I am happy' or more simply 'I am', that which turns out to
be 'aimed at' by my affirmation is possible only insofar as Being has
already appeared. Thus shonld not the true object of an inaugural
inquiry be the Being of the ego rather than the ego itself, or more
precisely, the Being in and by which the ego can rise to existence
and acquire its own Being? This is why the Cartesian beginning is
not at all 'radical', because such a beginning is possible only upon
a foundation which he did not clarify and which is more radical than
the beginning.[/i]
He is following through on Husserl's reduction. The Cartesian move toward an indubitable foundation for being and epistemology gave Descartes the cogito, but his res extensa is thereby derivative. Henry is saying the cogito cannot even be conceived without an object, that is, if one thinks, it is not an independent agency of thought that is absolutely confirmed as a stand alone agency of thought. Such a thing is inconceivable. What cannot be doubted is the phenomenon "in consciousness". This makes the Cartesian method complete in determining the world as the world in a non derivative way. It is not historical, but structural. The point is, the structural comes first. It is antecedent to any historical ontology. It is the hands on "fleshy" encounter with the world that, while certainly open and interpretatively indeterminate, the therest "there" possible.
Kierkegaard was right in affirming existence over essence, if you want to talk like that. Of course, the cogito is affirmed as well, which is the whole idea of Henry Essence of Manifestation: how do the eidetic structures imposed on phenomena provide for this clarity of the affirmation of existence, given that existence can be "conceived" to be not of the nature of language at all. Case in point: put a lighted match to your finger and observe. This is not an interpretative exercise, but is altogether something else. Any form of rationalism or historicism has to deal with this.
But for me, this doesn't go far enough. It is not the phenomenon as such that steals the show for ontological affirmation. It is value-in-being. The cat is taken "as" a cat in an interpretative apprehension of "that" on the rug (as Heidegger put it). But this "taking as" is an historical apprehension in a language event. In value, the "affectivity" is, if you will, its own essence. Unspeakable, but, as Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."
There may be an historical account to the generative possibilities of experience, but this, too, would be conceived in the primordial structure of a lived experience.
Just to note, Banno, that Lionino did a hit a run, that is, made a disparaging comment, then announced he didn't want to discuss it any more. Like taking the ball and going home. Not acceptable.
His trouble was that he was confused about the issue do to a lack of reading that investigates the agent's contribution in the apprehension of objects in the world.
No, no. And Kant has little to do with it. Call it common sense: You learned a language long ago. What was that? The infant mind faces models of interpersonal relations in parents, others, and in this language is observed and assimilated and associations between things and their language counterparts established. Now there you are, years later, equipped with this symbolic system to describe, discuss, think. Asked what something is, and there is language "ready to hand" for deployment.
As an infant, the world was a "blooming and buzzing" mess. The process of it achieving some articulation in your world was through language, unlike a rabbit's world, say. A rabbit goes hopping around through hill and dale, BUT: she is not hopping through a language articulated world, a symbolic world. In that world, is a hill a "hill"? Obviously not. But it is for your world.
Do you really think the world wears its symbolic possibilities "on its sleeve" so to speak? Or are these possibilities generated in social environments, making an alinguistic world (whatever that could be; notice how my saying this stands as a performative contradiction. The difficulty of Wittgenstein's Tractatus leaps to mind) toe the line of our categories for our pragmatic (and existential?) endeavors?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Novelty is in the eye of the beholder, you would agree. There are distinct varieties of novelty, defined by their affective meaning. A joyful surprise is a very different assessment in comparison with a horrifying surprise. I want to make the bold assertion that there is nothing but novelty, and we can group its varieties into two general categories:assimilable vs unassailable. Assimilable novelty is perceived as creative satisfaction , and unassailable novelty is experienced as what is boring, frightening, confusing.
Experiences of unintelligibility and meaninglessness represent a type of movement characterized by apparent emptiness and paralysis. Boredom, monotony, weariness and exhaustion connected with redundant experience would be, paradoxically, of the same species as the shock and trauma of dramatic otherness. As counterintuitive as it may seem, repetition of experience could only be perceived as redundant to the extent that such monotonous experience disturbs us by its resistance to intimate readability. Boredom and monotony are symptoms not of the too-predictable, but of a previously mobile, fluidly self-transformative engagement beginning to become confused, and thus seemingly barren of novelty.
So-called wearingly redundant or vacuous experience evinces the same pathology as the shocking and disturbing because these two types of events are variants of the same condition; an ongoing dearth of coherence or comprehensibility. The confusion, incoherence and mourning at the heart of experiences of monotony and exhaustion as well as shock and surprise manifest a
strange territory barren of unrecognizable landmarks. The `too same' and the `too other' are forms of the same experience; the terrifying mobility of the near-senseless, the impoverishment, moment to moment, of the meaning of each new event. It is AS IF the rate of repetition of novelty has been decelerated during experiences of crisis. We know that we are no longer what we were in such states, but we cannot fathom who or what we, and our world, are now; we are gripped by a fog of inarticulation. While still representing transit, such a destitution or breakdown of sense seems like an ongoing redundancy, a death of sense.
If the affectivities of disturbance and incomprehensibility we tend to associate with significant novelty are in fact symptoms of apparent stagnation and paralysis , which sorts of affects are indications of effective novelty? The unknown, the absolutely novel, may be most intensely available to us to the degree that we anticipate the
unanticipatable, which is only to say that a certain intimacy, continuity and gentleness pervade our most effective movement through repeated novelty. It is not affectivities of the shocking, the surprising or the strange which inaugurate our escape from the monotony and complacency of perceived authoritarian, vacuous repetition, since the latter are precisely species of the former. It is affectivities of joyful, interested engagement which express an acceleratively mobile engagement with otherness. The most stimulatingly fresh pathways imaginable are direct measures not of the confused incomprehension of disturbance but of the intimacy of familiar anticipation.
The problem lies in the possibility that "seeing," as in organic sense of sight, is one thing; a thing presumably accessible to all organisms with sight, and still "happening" by the Human Animal.
But with the advent of uniquely human Consciousness or Mind, "seeing" is immediately displaced by "perceiving." That is, it is displaced by the Signifiers re-constructing the sensation with its Narrative.
So we do "see" lamp, whatever that is. But seemingly immediately "Lamp" displaces our seeing, and now sensation is displaced by perception: object, linear movement, meaning, and we cannot "unsee," that perception (in its becoming--in its linear constructed Narrative form).
As for epistemology and it's relationship to ontology in all this. The answer is, in Nature there is Truth. But that is not in the object, but only in Body see-ing. In human perception there is never Truth, but always only justifiable belief. As long as such justifiable belief is functional--remains a justifiable belief--we ordain it with so-called, small t truth.
Knowing is never accessing Truth, but always constructing truth.
If a traveller sees a rope ahead which she believes is a snake, in human Mind, it is a snake, until she gets close-up and declares--by her justifiable belief--that it is a rope. Both instances are constructed knowledge; neither is Truth. In Nature the object is none of the things our Narratives have evolved to construct. (See Huineng: it is neither flag nor wind, but Mind which is moving)
All we can say regarding the Truth of this hypothetical in Reality is the Organism seeing. It is in the Organism do-ing, be-iing, see-ing , is-ing, all of which "exists" in presence, in is-ing/be-ing, which is True.
The constructions of Mind, the becoming, is never present, only settles upon a seeming presence, I.e., a justifiable belief, in its empty, fleeting, movement through constructed time.
Thank you. See my most recent post on this topic, if it is of any interest/provides further clarity
For what it's worth, I've always respected Susan Haack's theory of foundherentism, an unfortunate term for very interesting idea that tries to make a bridge between foundationalism (or realism, in this context), and coherentism. I cant do her justice here, but her inspiration is American pragmatism, and she quotes James approvingly: When we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself.
This exchange has motivated me to reread her Evidence and Inquiry to see if she considers her foundherentism to be a correspondence theory; I no longer remember.
And as I read that I can't help but notice your need to obfuscate rather than explain.
To profound to be of much use.
Does this mean wrote a response that for you is an unassailable novelty? :wink:
We start with a tautology:
Quoting Astrophel
to justify the controversial (if same) statement that epistemology and ontology:
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
You give no example of "taking a hard look at what IS" neither of "justification of positing it". We are left with completely vague phrases, whose meanings could be many.
Quoting Astrophel
You would want to justify that by saying that epistemology is the same as ontology, but you are yet to prove it. Until now, something being true and us being justified in believing it are still separate matters, and you haven't proven otherwise.
Quoting Astrophel
Is this supposed to be "How do I know that I know? And how do I know that I know that I know?". Because that would be a related though different point.
Is my interpretation of your OP wrong? If so, please explain to me while referencing the OP. If the OP needs rewriting, go ahead.
It sounds as if Language is a real rag-bag. But I'm guessing that you are relying on the structure of signifier and signified as the common element. But, in this use, it doesn't help the effect of the way you use these concepts to smother differences that seem important to me. Pictures are very different from descriptions, just because they are representations of something; descriptions, in my unorthodox view, and not representations at all; maps and diagrams are half-way houses between the two; signalling flags are a code; they are more like words, but not the same. Words are not all of a piece either; The numeral "1" stands in a very different relationship to its signified from "horse"; "walking" signifies something very different from either - and so on. You may think the differences don't matter. We'll see.
An important point for me is that "language" (and "logic") can seem to be something that exists in its own right, in some way and when we learn it, it does seems so. But though sentences may exist independently of speakers, in the sense that they can be written down, they are, like propositions until they are asserted or denied. The life of language is in its use by speakers and their use is what maintains or modifies it.
Quoting ENOAH
Like language, history is a mixed bag. But that's not my main problem here. My problem is that I simply don't follow what you say and in any case, I'm not at all sure that there are laws of history. Certainly, since it normally takes the form of a narrative, which does not present us with any laws, the idea must be problematic. But the biggest issue is that much history is about people. You seem to regard it as an independent actor. It's as if you were telling me about the army going to war, rather than people going to war.
Both these responses to you are well summarized by Astrophel when he says: Quoting Astrophel
However, the opening your paragraph - "I am using History to refer to the collective of these Signifiers operating on the Natural World beyond the individual body, and constructing Narratives beyond individual personalities," is very promising. But then you conclude with "it has no access whatsoever to knowing Reality, despite all of our (Its own) efforts to prove it wrong." Either you mean by "reality" what you mean by "natural world" or you don't. If you do mean the same, you are contradicting yourself; if you don't, I have no idea what you mean.
Quoting ENOAH
This is a jewel. I know I could argue that if I obediently breathe, language has put me in touch with reality. But you remind me of the Zen masters who will reply to questions like "what is reality?" by offering you a cup of tea. Perhaps we should share one and stop worrying so much. Or am I misunderstanding you?
Quoting ENOAH
I can just about get my head around this. But you said earlier:-
Quoting ENOAH
I don't see why you can't count perceiving as just one of the activities of human beings. Good, bad or indifferent as signifiers may be, they are also real and part of reality.
The key point to grasp, I think, is this. Language is part of the world. The world was there first and language developed in it. It is as real and natural as anything else in the world.
Besides my ambiguous terminology, there is a further aggravating factor to my speech. That is, I am ultimately proposing it too is Fictional. I think that problem applies to everything, and that it is resolved by recognizing its function, not its Truth-status, is its/the purpose (of inquiry etc). Leave that for another time.
Rather than trying to itemize your concerns by highlighting them as quotes, allow me to save space (and effort) by responding to what I see as three ideas requiring clarification. Language, History, Nature (although the last may end up being addressed within the Bodies of the first two)
Language. Signifier is probably the best word to describe what I am trying to express. I'm proposing that human mind--unique in Nature (lets assume)--is not a Natural-part of the world-structure. Assume our Sciences are correct, Nature is made of matter. Language is not the same as a Rabbits teeth or a bone, as real and natural as anything else in the world. If it (and Mind which I am proposing to be structured of it) exist as a Reality distinct from Nature, it must be something like a Spirit. But if you think this is a stretch...At one hypothetical moment in prehistory, the human organism was still using its images stored in memory, organically to trigger responses (feelings or actions) appropriate to survival. However, eventually, I guess given the complexity of our Brains, this process of Signifiers in memory (stored as "images" of smells, textures, sights, sounds etc) grew to such a surplus "size" that Laws emerged to structure the dynamics (again, admittedly vague terms). At the same time, these Laws were outwardly manifesting in small "l" language as grammar, logic, reasoning, the Narrative form, eventually math etc. While "internally," these Laws were governing thought and experience: difference necessarily emerged to resolve issues of use of these once organic, now dynamic Signifiers. Time emerged "internally" the Dialectical process, settlement/synthesis, the application of meaning onto everything (Signifiers must signify), the Subject "I" the "other". These are fleeting constructions, empty nothings which trigger every human body to feel and act. Displacing the Real aware-ing Organism which is Real and Natural and "finds" "itself" (no self--self is constructed) in breathing; in being. And these are input into every human child by what we have called socializing (etc.). Just observe, as Lacan did, the assimilation of the Subject "I" into the juvenile organism, perhaps marking the moment of inescapable displacement.
And collectively...
Which brings me to History. While this Signifier based autonomously evolving structure was displacing Real Organic aware-ing with its Narratives--now I cannot see a lamp without seeing Lamp; or better, Body no longer (is) see-ing; now "I" am "seeing" Lamp--and as it began manifesting in the world as small l language; so too did it begin manifesting as Culture. Yes, it, Language (the Signifier Structure) Mind, History: one autonomously moving System, ontology Fiction, yet constructing Civilizations, and personal anxiety. None of which is Real; all of which is never True, irredeemably alienated from True, but because it is believed (that justified belief settling upon true part of the Dialectic) it has moved bodies and built mountains. All authored by One human Fiction manifesting in billions of loci, but it is a shared and open system. Just because the bubbles near China are not the same as the bubbles near California, doesnt mean its not one Ocean. Not a perfect analogy but then none is.
I do believe that the instances in which I appeared contradictory may have been addressed herein. However, I might take another look.
By all means, I appreciate your input, but do not wish to drain you. Please do not feel obligated out of courtesy (a courtesy I have read in your voice) to engage further.
Here's one I neglected to address. Whether or not you misunderstood me, I cannot fairly say, owing to the ambiguity of my language, which, notwithstanding your skilled efforts, will inevitably leach into your responses.
However, we are close to some capital T Truth in the way you brought up Zen. Whether in the mind of your hypothetical Zen master it is intellectually formulated thus way or not, his reply to what is reality, for instance, with, as you say "a cup of tea," illustrates many of the points under review.
1. Foolish question given the forum of questioner, answered, and resources used by both has no access to Reality
2. The power of something like Irony and absurdity might awaken you to what is Real. As if it is a cup of tea or any object constructed by and known only as mediated by fiction.
3. If the master simply offers a cup of tea silently, she is illustrating that reality is in thevpresentvparticiple verb, be-ing, do-ing
There are et ceteras but I'm not willing to exert more effort, trusting that you get the
gist.
The call to breathe was not delivered as some cute koan. It is affirming, if you want to crack the nut of Being, you cannot do it by knowing, but only in Being (the animal you are).
You have to put your thinking cap on, Lionino. Note first that the OP says epistemology and ontology are the same or mutually entailed. To say "it is impossible to affirm something about the being or existence or reality" is meant simply as a standard way to talk about something being what it "IS", but in order to posit something like this, one needs to "affirm" that it is true. And to affirm something is an epistemic event. You see this? In other words, in order for something about existence to be affirmed, whether it is existence "as such" or some property, or really, anything at all, one has to state this is the case. And stating it to be the case, requires justification. Again: Tell me what you think the nature of existence is, and you find that you are telling me, and so "the telling" is propositional, and you have thereby committed yourself to an epistemology. This is analytic: Whatever existence is is bound analytically to the saying it is.
This is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about "the world" or the nature of ethics, value. He knew that these were "mystical" or transcendental, and to speak of them made no sense. Unless, that is, existence is taken as "equiprimordially" complex, as Heidegger did. He affirmed there is no such thing as "a simple primordial ground." Looks to me like he agrees with Witt.
Anyway, this should be clear. To affirm something IS as a claim about philosophical ontology, must BE a claim. And this is epistemic, claims that things "are" the case.
Quoting Lionino
But the theme is ontology! What IS is meant to be a matter of philosophical inquiry into the nature of being. The title is "on the matter of epistemology and ontology."
Quoting Lionino
The OP is not a dissertation. It does state that the two are analytically bound: what IS must bestated to BE. Try to prove the contrary. Am I saying that my cat IS language? Yes and no. It is a huge and fascinating issue. It is saying that whatever "lies outside of language" is impossible to affirm, and once it is affirmed, it is affirmed by being brought into a language context, and understood. Consider that this cat of mine "as I see it" is ontologically complex, stabilized as a cat by my long history of experiences with cats and cat contexts. The seeing the cat cannot just be a simple primordiality, like Descartes' res extensa. Proof for this? Simple. Ask what a cat IS, and see how much language issues forth. That is not res extensa.
Quoting Lionino
The point is to see that affirming something is true ALWAYS begs the question. "P is true" is never a stand alone singularity. Take the statement "Francis has ten coins in his pocket." This is true, for all practical purposes, and we talk like this all the time. But ask about the assumptions in place in the saying and we discover the questions never end. It is not about the facts being dubious, but about the terms themselves being indeterminate. Making sense of coins, pockets, coins being in pockets, people who have coins in their pockets is part and parcel of a vast language matrix that makes sense of things in contexts, and these contexts have their sense in other contexts, and there is never an end to the search for some final vocabulary that is "of the world itself outside of language." "P is true" is really "P's truth is indeterminate."
Then there is the other, related, problem with knowledge claims. How does epistemic connectivity actually work? Keeping in mind that causality that delivers "data" to the eye, the ear, delivers nothing at all. At the end of a causal chain of events, the final event is entirely other than the first. If not causality, then what? I am particularly fond of this way of looking at it because of its simplicity. One doesn't need Kant's "how are synthetic apriori judgments possible." Just look at the plain facts and things go south instantly.
A mental state supervenes on a physical state, meaning that the same type of experience can arise under different physical conditions.
However, the relation between seeing the lamp and the lamp is a direct causal relation. When you turn off the lamp, the change causes a corresponding change in your visual experience.
The hallucinatory lamp, however, is not part of what causes the hallucination. Nor is it caused by the lamp, which might as well be absent. Under the influence of drugs or disorder, I suppose that memories or knowledge of past experiences of a lamp can be mistaken for experiences in the here and now. At least that's what the brain may have at its disposal when the lamp is absent.
But now we're definitely off-topic, so I'll just say thanks for the response!
Quoting Astrophel
Right, languages are socially constructed symbol systems. Moreover, symbolic representations are asymmetric. However, it doesn't follow that the possibility to answer what something is is thereby confined to symbolic possibilities that supposedly make the task impossible. Nor must we assume that the world wears its symbolic possibilities on its sleeves.
For example, the principle of composition enables us to describe the world in unlimited ways. I don't know of a good reason to believe that none of them could ever correspond to the ways the world is.
But then, all you can say that can provide a possible alternative construal of what the world is, is done in language.
Meaning is constructed "out of" contextuality. One is tempted to say the world "causes" us to have language, but even here, the term 'cause' has it meaning entirely in generative complex of other terms. And there is something truly right about this. Take the simple causal idea I have been pushing about things in the world and knowledge claims. Causal sequences "convey" or "deliver" nothing. The one end is entirely other than the other in such a sequence. So even if you are working with such a simple intuitive causal model (the kind of thing simply assumed by everyday thinking and science), it has to hit you that in the general assumptions about the way the world works, knowledge never happens.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But what is knowledge if not spoken, thought, written? Instinctual knowledge? Well, "instinct" is a word. Certainly, it is derived after many years of research into the psyche, animal or otherwise, but this research, as being about a language-independent world, cannot step out of language to affirm this world. And even when one digs into the parts and principles of language itself, one is in the very domain of language. No way out! For cognition, understanding, knowledge. Derrida said, if I can recall the quote, words don't stand for things; they "stand in" for "things". A bit like saying We stand in for things.
Language is our existence.
Just to add, I am reminded of Foucault in an introductory book. Molloy is dying:
[i]Foucault associates himself
with the modernist voice of Becketts Molloy: I must go on; I cant
go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I
must say them until they find me, until they say me . . . (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215).[/i]
Those dying words are striking, to me. Just look at all the wonder and surprise and terror, all given to oneself by oneself in "the saying." Obviously this is not the abstraction of language, its rules and vocabularies. This is the "real" rub: the world's existence apart from what can be said: it not nonsense to say it, but we cannot "say" why it is not nonsense. This is the madness of philosophy's final "word" by my thinking. We have entered the Buddhist's world of extraordinary disclosure, which is why Buddhist and Hindu texts are so enigmatic. Putting down language puts down much, much more than "simple words," for words never were just words; they give experience structure and familiarity.
I don't know if I totally followed all of that, but I do think it's true that lack of novelty or its maximization end up having interesting similarities. From the frame of information theory, we could say that a code of just 1s or just 0s can hold no information. The opposite end of the spectrum would be a truly random process. There, you have potentially infinite new information. However, being truly random, the information you get never tells you anything about the source producing it it's predictively useless. So, in either case there is a strange inability to use the signal to say things about the source (aside from it lacking all variance or being truly random).
There are a few things like this, e.g. the way in which maximal order or chaos become fatal to complexity, same with total lack of interconnectivity and total interconnectivity.
But I'm not sure about "authoritarian." States, bosses, churches, and parents can be authoritarian, but experiences and novelty? I can see how a loss of intelligibility could interfere with freedom, with self-determination. However, "authoritarian" to me is indictive of some sort of social external restraint. Loss of intelligibility would be more a threat to reflexive freedom/self-determation, no?
Its infinite possibilities should be enough.
If there would be no difference between beliefs and perceptions, and if you would be stuck in a world of language, then you wouldn't know that there is a world and have no reason to lament the supposed limits of language. Yet you do know, but argue against it.
An oft missed point. If appearances [I]are[/I] the only reality then there is no meaningful appearance/reality distinction.
With language, this often seems to go back to the idea that the meanings of words must be (partially) grounded in social practice and rules. That's a fine thesis, but it should prompt the further question: "what determines social practices and rules?" Strangely, some people seem to miss this question, and this is how you end up with word meanings that are fully divorced from the world language as a barrier to intelligibilities rather than a tool for actualizing them.
Or, it becomes fully self-refuting in some versions:
Why can't we know what determines social practices and rules?
"Because we would have to know this in terms of words, which are only defined by social practices and rules."
And how do we know that words are totally defined in terms of social practices and rules?
Answer: because of more words.
But then the impenetrable barrier between us and the causes of rules and social practices turns out to also lie between us and knowledge of the fact that words actually are given their meanings solely by rules and social practices, so this too must be impossible to know. But now our grounds for the impossibility of knowledge itself seems hidden behind an impermeable barrier.
Multidirectional, dynamic, many to many relationships are possible to model. I think an extra level of difficulty is encountered here though when there is a commitment to austere nominalism (or a default to nominalism spurred on by the desire to "avoid metaphysics.") Any attempt to think through the relationships between signs and referents is liable to be significantly more confusing without essences or universals, and this probably a larger problem if nominalism has been embraced only implicitly.
Or is it that that barrier, i.e. language, is not (just) describing what we know, but constructing it? It is, in that case, the root/structure/nature of knowledge is not hidden at all. What makes it "hidden" is our ultimately false belief that it is something beyond/outside of/before/transcendent to its own structure and beyond its own "tools."
The "truth" about human knowledge (unique to us among all of the species we have encountered) is that it is constructed by and out of representations, and thus cannot be Real Truth, since the latter, presumably exist(ed)/by nature remains, in the present. We cannot have access to what happened, what is, what will be, we can only re-present these things. And that is knowing.
Epistemology, Ontology, even theology, physics and biology, are not means to uncovering available Truth. They are means/constructions to re-present/construct how things function from the perspective of the inquirer, and the functioning, both of which are necessarily restricted to said re-presenting and simply cannot uncover/disclose/discover.
So, finally, on topic: epistemology does provide "knowledge." And there are no barriers. It's just that it cannot disclose Truth; and that's where the barrier is.
There is a meaningful distinction. Appearances are the doings of human Mind, Reality is accessible to the rest of Nature, in the doing and being of reality; not in the knowing, a thing invented by Mind
I'm inclined to agree with you here. My point relates to those who would make the claim that there is only appearance.
That said, I have to ask, is your statement above a "Real Truth?" It would seem that, based on your criteria, you cannot have access to such a truth, making your claim merely "a thing invented by the mind."
Unfortunately for our unquenchable desire for "truth", you are correct. Mine too is an invention of Mind.
But so is Love, and Peace and E=MC² and look what treasures they have generated for Mind.
This kind of argument runs through the thread and, as someone pointed out, it ties into overall confusion between statements and facts.
It doesnt follow that if something is a statement then its a belief. It can be knowledge or deliberate fiction. What foundatonalists claim is that there are statements whose truth is directly known to the subject. The task of providing justification of each sentence is futile. But it's no threat to ontology and not an argument for replacing it with epistemology.
I would say it's very probable that knowledge is not a set of sentences or a formal system in the mind. Because if it was, it would be possible to formalize in this system a Godel sentence "this sentence is unprovable in the system". And its truth is rather obvious, but the system is not able to derive it, even assuming foundationalism. That's a basic reasoning behind Ajdukiewicz argument against transcendental idealism from Godel's incompleteness.
Once again, understanding is not a formal system if we're able to assess the truth of Godel sentences and we are. And the other hint is Tarski's undefinability theorem. We need a notion of a model, or a world to which the sentences conform. And their truth can be consistently defined in this model-theoretic setting. We all know there's a need for an infinite regress of meta-linguistic definitions in order to define stuff like truth and existence. But it's not an argument against realism. If anything, it's an argument against formalism or nominalism, if we are able to employ a notion of truth, we're operating outside of the given formal system. So my answer to the regress of justification you guys posed would be that understanding is (at least) an imperfect copy of reality, and reality is not a set of sentences. My intuition is reverse to yours. When we make an attempt at justification, at finding the necessary preconditions of knowledge, we're doing ontology of mind. Assumptions about existence, truth and quantifcation are all there.
Yes, as in, what we* are is just a stand-in(s) [for things]. Not what we breathlessly pursue, the thing itself.
*we, referring to those selves we live through, Mind, not our Bodies.
And to tie it back in, stand-ins cannot have or be Truth. They're stand-ins. Everything stand-ins "do" is a representation; an often multi-generational re-re-presentation, including all of the knowing and subsequent adopting, then ordaining with "truth;" when we've constructed a representation for Truth and we all "know" most of what we ordain does not fit that representation.
It is not as if it's all language. Rather, it is all interpretation. The many impositions that intrude into my world are value intrusions, meaning I care about things. The language is essentially pragmatic and pragmatism is a forward looking structure of our existence. To have a knowledge relationship with the world is to draw from the past and anticipate the future. So what IS my cat? It is, in the occurrent event of encountering it, an "if...then..." structured body of possibilities that comprise my memory of my cat, and cats in general, and environments in which they can be aggressive or congenial, and so on, that spontaneously come into play.
The "being" of my cat is the default possibilities that come into play when I see my cat, and all "seeing" is essentially pragmatic. I know everything on my desk, which means I am familiar with these things. The question is, what is familiarity? Clearly, it is something that is repeated over and over and doesn't change in some essential ways, so when I see it, deal with it, it responds in anticipated ways. This should sound familiar, for it is the scientific method: repeatable results, consistent outcomes; this is the way we live in the world, and this is what language does for us. We are all scientists with every step we take, confirming in this step that solid concrete will provide a certain resistance to the step, as has been demonstrated in countless "experiments" of walking.
This is the reason why we will never be "divorced" from the world, nor will we understand what it is in the res extensa of things, things being over there, as they are, stand alone existing or being real. Knowledge claims are simply not of that nature. They are pragmatic.
On the other hand, it is not as if the "world as such" is a nonsense concept (as Rorty would have it), referring to a world that is "there" independently of pragmatic context. As I see it, in this transcendental imposition the world makes us endure and deal with, there is one survivor of the "pragmatic reduction" I just spoke of. This is value-in-being.
That is a long story. The qualia "yellow" as such means nothing and its presence is exhaustively accounted for in our pragmatic dealings with the color. But ethics and aesthetics! This is whole different kettle of fish.
Perhaps you would find agreement with what I said to Count Timothy von Icarus. I would add to that, this: It is not that thee is no world to "know." But knowing does not give one the kind of "ontological" intimacy you seem to be suggesting. To knowledge, the world will remain transcendental. There is my cat, that lamp, that fence post over there, and here am I. Nothing is going tp bridge that distance, no matter how one theorizes epistemic relations. I know that they exist, but I don't know what that means. This is because language is pragmatic: in perceptual events I DEAL with the world, and meaning is bound up in this.
But then, what is, as I see it, that insistence that something is there in some uncanny and impossible sense of the Real? It isn't the fence post that delivers this to me from its being. IT is over there, but this intimation of real Being is somehow IN the "presence" of the encounter. Where does this come from? It comes from me, the perceiver. This "sense" of "absolute being" is me.
No, this is not the claim. The claim is that if something is a belief, it is a proposition. This may not hold for the pigeons outside my window, but their existence is not ours.
Is it because you know what it is? I've been reading a book on classical metaphysics, which says that the basis of the forms is that they are the what-it-is-ness of a particular. So you know a post as a post, because you recognise it as such. To a post itself, it is nothing, of course, because it's an inanimate object, so its form is imposed on it by the fencemaker, but the same general idea applies to particulars of other kinds - they exist insofar as they exemplify a form, which is what makes them intelligible. If they had no form, they wouldn't be anything. Of course, all of this is nowadays regarded as archaic, but often without much knowledge of what, precisely, has been rejected. Suffice to say for the purposes of this discussion, and your comment above in particular, that the pre-moderns did not regard the world as being 'mind-independent' in the way that moderns reflexively do, which is what engenders the modern 'problem of knowledge' that we're all continually running up against. A comment from an essay on the consequences of nominalism in modern thought:
Quoting What's Wrong with Ockham, Joshua Hochschild
The mistake of modern thinking is to regard particular objects (the proverbial tree or apple or chair) as 'mind-independent', when the act of knowing what each thing is, is itself an intellectual act, which is obviously mind-dependent. This error relies on the so-called 'view from nowhere', the conceit that one can rise above all particular acts of knowing to see material things as they are in themselves. It is a foundational error within empiricism, because particulars are not anything 'in themselves' in the sense that modern objectivism posits. They have no inherent reality, their reality is imputed to them by the observer. (This also shows up, needless to say, in quantum physics.)
Speaking of Frege, he obtains to a somewhat similar view with respect to the reality of intelligible objects:
[quote=Frege on Knowing the Third Realm,Tyler Burge;https://philosophy.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Burge-1992-Frege-on-Knowing-the-Third-Realm.pdf] Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." '
Furthermore in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic he says that 'the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness: "[the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they are authority for our thought if it would attain to truth."[/quote]
Plato lives! :party:
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, that's the point that one keeps coming back to - even if one thinks about different ways of using language.
Quoting Astrophel
This seems to me the right way to approach the problem. Is it too brutal to observe that the description of the cat is not the cat. Why should it be? It would be pointless if it were. But when we are dealing with the cat, interacting with it, it is the cat we are interacting with, and not a description of it. Is describing the cat inter-acting with it? Clearly not in the sense required to state the problem. To accept a sense of interaction that includes description as interaction is to dissolve the problem by definition and will satisfy no-one.
I want to question something here in a curious minded manner, no problems had as of now:
Quoting Wayfarer
yes! right on. good!
Quoting Wayfarer hm... :brow: yeah sure he does, whatever you say. YAY plato lets party :cheer: :razz:
Quoting Wayfarer
-well I Wonder why? Seems obvious to me, now but NEED MORE to act and you need to say more here! Interested yes its true...you already have the answers, i think...thats why i ask, just keep doing what you are doing, include everything you can and go for it!! Waiting and excited to learn and know something for sure, but again I am wondering... how bothered can I really be? A challenge? A competition perhaps? No, that is no fair. But is life anyways? I'm suspicious still...
*Chaos enters chat*
"my bad for mentioning chaos...lets just keep it, lame."
*Chaos leaves unbothered*
But go on, blame yourself for the mention of qm (is that right though??hmm i dont know if it was now) and if done so wrongly, saying because you did mention it, qm, for now it possibly can derailing this precious thread....why now? Not worth it, I feel.
Are your hopes high that this thread wont derail regardless? regardless OF ANYTHING ELSE?
thats fine, I see u!
We will see, cause WE can.
[i]"Prove it"
...at what cost though?
"It is a bother but Cmon!"
fine, [s]but only one more time[/s][/i]
Of course, you are excused Wayfarer. That is lame though, i feel...carry on :zip:
Opening statements such as this really help people getting on your side. Keep it up.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
That what it is the case?
Quoting Astrophel
By "an epistemology", I imagine you mean an epistemological system. Surely by telling you things I commit myself to some epistemological claims, but that is a truism. By telling you what I think the nature of existence is, I am talking to you about ontology, not epistemology you are yet to prove otherwise. So I don't know what epistemology I am committing myself to by telling you something, because as far as I know, everybody is also committing to it by saying something.
You are speaking in vague terms, I can't know for sure what you are referring to because you don't give examples.
Quoting Astrophel
This seems to be what other users were talking about, some sort of idealism or anti-realism, but apparently I am not the only who can't decipher it.
I asked you to reference your OP, not to explain it over again with a novel text. You did exactly that.
Knowledge is a strange bird. Does mouse know cheese? Or the excitement in seeing it? Or its own reproductive urges (putting it nicely)? Yes and no. Yes, because knowledge is familiarity. No because it is not our symbolic familiarity. My thinking is that language stands "open" to the world, and truth is aletheia, a disclosure or unhiddeness. What it discloses is its own nature, that is, language is reflexive, and discovery is the self, so language is the pragmatic modality of the telos of self discovery.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, they would not be nothing at all. But they remain transcendental. The qualia of being appeared to redly, e.g., is not nothing because, you know, it's just not nothing. "There" it is. MOST telling is events of explicit value, like having your flesh scorched of eating Hagen dasz. Or experiencing real happiness. These arise in the givenness of the world and while they certainly are entangled interpretatively, as in, ice cream makes you fat or "no pain, no gain," the value experience as such actually HAS an "as such" nature: the good and the bad of experience, designated in philosophy as aesthetics and ethics. The mouse "knows," that is, is familiar with this as well. It is truly primordial and its transcendence, that is, its has stand alone independence of language and cannot be spoken (as Wittgenstein was so emphatic about in his Tractatus). Givenness cannot be spoken.
The "form" we give the object, the entity of some kind? For me, one has to go through the likes of Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida as well as the pragmatists...okay, LOTS of thinking that culminates in Derrida and post modern thinking. I certainly am no expert on this, and my thoughts thus far are: Philosophy is a pragmatic endeavor, for all language is pragmatic, the essential telos of which is the discovery of one's own being, a "beyond dasein," if you will. Evidence for this lies int he pervasive "sense" of existence or reality that is IN the givenness of our being, and IN this givenness is the presence of value-in-being. Our dasein leads us to one inevitability: out of dasein, that is, our "existence" and into our transcendence, discovered in what Kierkegaard calls a "qualitative movement" when one realizes one's essential alienation in the everydayness of things. What is our transcendence? This is evidenced in the affective dimension of our existence, and this is difficult to pin because we all are different.
Honestly, few have interest in this kind of esoteria. I consider Buddhists, the serious ones, among the most "enlightened". The quintessential phenomenologists, taking the Husserlian reduction to its conclusion, its telos. Buddhism gets VERY simple, doesn't it? Meditation is the radicalization of the Husserlian Cartesian method, which is apophatic. Husserl's "epoche" leads to an annihilation of "the world," (our being in the world) and its telos is not truth as correspondence, or coherence, but truth as a radical existential affectivity. This is a long argument.
Quoting What's Wrong with Ockham, Joshua Hochschild
Interesting to compare what Husserl has to say about "realism," not referring to the tradition, but to the issue of what is "out there" affirmations:
As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we do not place ourselves on their ground, do not co-operate with them, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.
Affirmations here refer to the "affirmation that posits a real thing or transcendent nature as a whole, or co-operates in setting up these positions." He understands that we "posit" real things as things beyond the conditions of our experiencing them by "making" them into objects. The traditional position of reals res extensa is reduced to a "part of" the phenomenon. So the idea here is this: True, reality ha(s) an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole, but reality is phenomena. All phenomena. Anything posited beyond this is just bad metaphysics. Where is the justification to invent realities beyond what is given? Husserl is essentially not denying realism, but insists that analysis goes further to embrace the real of our contribution in the perceptual act. Reals things are there, and they are intelligible, and they are over there, not me. But ALL of this is in the phenomenological presentation.
Just responding to your preemptive, "You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. This is my closing statement for this thread ?(¬ _ ¬)" which I thought rude.
Quoting Lionino
Speech and existence: how can you separate these? Examples: One may point to a chair, and say, that is not language, but is entirely apart from the language we use to talk about it. I say, if this were true, then there must be a means of affirming it to be true outside of language. Not unlike one affirming the brain to be an entity beyond the thoughts and experiences the brain produces, but having to deal with the brain itself being generated by thoughts and experience. Once analysis reveals that all one has ever, or can ever, acknowledge about the word is the phenomenon, then the chair/the brain, and the thought that conceives, that is, "speaks," its existence are delivered from the delimitations of ordinary dealings. The point is, even when the thing is right before your eyes, there is no way to affirm this "radical exteriority" of the thing. This is why I discuss causality itself, which is not "truth bearing" in any way. All roads lead to phenomenology.
this is NOT to say there is nothing there that is not language and experience. Important to see this. Rather, it is saying that when we think about what that is, there is nothing to say, and we should keep quite about it. Can we say it "exists"? Well, this itself is a language-structured inquiry. Language is always, already there, IN the apprehension.
And, when you are "talking to you about ontology, not epistemology" you are nevertheless talking! The "talking about" is inherently epistemic. You bring the knowledge claim, and a great number of knowledge claims implicitly, into the ontology...that is, of course, unless you can demonstrate that the language and structures of experience that are integral to the perceptual act can be set aside allowing you to apprehend the object "as it is." I just do not think this possible. You would, and this comes from Wittgenstein's discussion about logic and its foundations, have to be in a third pov, outside language, and this in turn would require yet another outside pov to affirm this, and so on.
I made an entire argument to the effect that beliefs aren't propositions and certainly not propositions of a formal system obeying the usual laws. If they were, the use of truth predicate would be impossible and understanding of the Godel sentences would be impossible. And we do understand (are able to asses the truth conditions of) the Godel sentences like "this statements is unprovable". As I said, understanding must be something more more than a set of sentences. That's why Carnap's syntactic view of theories failed and he himself changed sides to the semantic one.
Depends on what you mean by a sentence. And re. "formal system of obeying usual laws," the same. I call sentences pragmatic constructions that are demonstrated by the conditional form if...then... This does not mean at all that one brings out this sentential structure whenever one crosses the street. But what we call beliefs about streets are really established anticipations at the ready whenever streets enter one's actual affairs. Knowledge is "predelineated," there as a potentiality prior to street crossing, street repair, street anecdotes, and so on. The truth as a propositional property amounts to this anticipatory feature of any given knowledge claim.
Beliefs are propositional because propositions are expressions of actual engagement. I take logic as an abstraction of this. i suppose I would treat Godel sentences accordingly, noting that there is nothing, save logic itself, that prevents such constructions, for there is no other system that can be used to see where things go wrong. Self contradiction are then, not an issue any more than modus ponens is. It is just the structure of language.
But I don't really know about how logicians handle Godel sentences.
As I see it, yes. And when one turns attention to this or that cat issue, this, too , refers us to anticipated possibilities. Even if God were to come down and announce her presence, this would be greeted by an awe and wonder based on the familiar things in the world. Wittgenstein said in his Lecture on Ethics that, say a man's head turns suddenly into a lion's head. We would all be shocked, suspect a miracle; that is, until science got a hold of it and a discovery, perhaps something completely new, was measured, compared, tested in different environments, etc. And if this were simply not explainable because the results defied the repeatability requirement of science, then this, too, would be admitted and normalized. We would call this "chaos". There are many things called chaos by science.
You're familiar with the 'myth of the given'? It critiques the view that knowledge is based on a foundation of given sensory experience, saying that all perception is conceptually mediated; that is, our understanding and interpretation of sensory data are always shaped by our prior knowledge, beliefs, and concepts. So there can be no pure or immediate knowledge derived directly from sense data. I don't see how that can be avoided. And your reference to 'bad metaphysics' sounds like A J Ayer!
The idea of correspondence is inherent In Tarski's approach, and it is only a problem if reality is considered to be something absolute and out of the reach of human experience and judgement. What is generally considered to be real is of course not out of the realm of human experience and judgement.
:up: Couldnt have said it better.
Derrida and his criticism of Heidegger is the "final" critique, isn't it. After deconstruction one can either follow Husserl's reduction to it grand finale, or retreat back into more conversation, aka analytic philosophy. For if language can only produce the "trace" effect of its own existence, and philosophical correspondence and representation are thereby obviated, then language hangs eternally on its own peg. "Turtles all the way down" is what Hawking told when talking about foundations of ontology.
But sense data is no longer sense data, and this is most important to see that deconstruction liberates absolutely. And though it seems like a sleight of hand, it is most powerful if realized for its existential insight. What is it we are liberated from? Knowledge assumptions that clutter perception. What is knowledge? It is essentially pragmatic. To know is to enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world. Language is really this, even in the saying "language is really like this" Heidegger runs through Derrida, only the latter takes the final breathe of philosophical meaning making, accusing Heidegger of the same thing Husserl was so rightly accused of, which is affirming presence, i.e., "the given". Even Heidegger gets pummeled by the Zen master's fan!
Husserl's reduction leads to only one place, being silent whereof one cannot speak. And one cannot speak of Being as such, which is where we are.
No, not A J Ayer. Reading positivists' writing is an exercise in learning why one should not be reading positivists' writing. It is conceived in a mentality of narrow logical rigidity. Very good at arguing arguments; terrible at understanding the world.
That's a good quote. I think the idea of meaning being defined by social practice causes particular problems for nominalists. On the one hand, I don't think many people want to say such practices have no reasons outside other practices. We develop and change practices for reasons out in the world. But it becomes very hard to articulate how this works when your picture of the world is a seething sea of multiplicity that only ends up differentiated by practices in the first place. When you look for the causes of practices, there is nothing concrete to point to behind them, no essences to inform what it is that rules might be used to point out. Then you're in danger of positing that the world must be "social rules all the way down," or getting "trapped in the box of language," because the rules that define meaning have become unfathomable.
I am not really sure I've understood what you were trying to get across. Language and knowledge as a whole are pragmatic? But then why does the theory vs praxis division seem so obvious to us and why is it useful in philosophy? Is truth not sought for its own good? It would seem to be in many thinkers.
I'm more confused by the idea that perception could be "pragmatic." It seems like perception just happens, regardless of if you intend to use it for something or not.
It might be in some worlds, but not in mine.
Quoting Astrophel
The over-arching issue of modernity, and of human existence generally, is the illusion of otherness, the sense of separateness and apart-ness that is part of the very condition of being born. As you suggest, Zen has bearing on this - which is why, I think, Heidegger acknowledges it (in the well-known anecdote of him being found reading one of D T Suzuki's books and praising it. Recall that Suzuki was lecturing at Columbia University during the latter half of Heidegger's career and was a contemporary. There was also a considerable exchange of ideas between Heidegger and the Kyoto School.)
But Zen is an exotic tradition and can't simply be assimilated or appropriated by Western culture, while Heidegger, as I understand it, wished to maintain the philosophical dialogue within the bounds of the Western tradition. But nevertheless the convergence of phenomenology and existentialism with Buddhist praxis has become a factor in current discourse (mainly through publication of The Embodied Mind but also in other works.)
Anyway, I've spent some time with Japanese Buddhists, and the point of their culture is precisely to 'enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world' but to do so whilst fully mindful of both its transience and its beauty. They have ways of understanding the centrality of 'the unmanifest' (mu) without absolutizing it. That is what their culture is, being able to maintain that, and it's still largely lacking in Western culture, and one of the main reasons the West has turned to Zen as a meaningful philosophy.
Agree you're not preaching positivism, but the 'all metaphysics is bad metaphysics' comes dangerously close. Many depictions of metaphysics in modern philosophy are poisoned in my view.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That essay, by Hochschild, is about the momentous implications of the defeat of Aristotelian realism for Western culture. History being written by the victors, we tend not to be able to see that, because of course nominalism is true. It is foundational to modern culture.
Here's a rather abstruse idea but bear with me. I've noticed that there's a topic in history of ideas, under the heading of 'the union of knower and known'. If you google that phrase, nearly all the returns are about Thomism, Averroes, and other medievals. Of course a very large and abstruse topic, but the gist is this: that in classical metaphysics, and in hylomorphic dualism, the ability to 'grok' the Forms, which is the sole prerogative of reason, is an antidote to the 'illusion of otherness' that I mention in my reply above. It is a holistic vision, which is very much the thrust of that Hoschschild quote. Metaphysics, in that context, is not a dry textbook of scholastic definitions and dogmas, but a grounding vision, a way of being-in-the-world, but one that has been long forgotten, on the whole.
What happens when you "see" something? Why are you not shocked? Because memory informs the occasion, making it familiar. So what is familiarity? Repetition of results. This is the scientific method, isn't it? Every time I see something, I can predict what it will do or not do. This is the basic knowledge relation with the world, to experience, have repeated outcomes, then "know" something to "be" because the seeing is inherently anticipatory, a "consummated" anticipation, to use Dewey's term, is when what is an anticipated outcome is confirmed, as when I tie my shoes or open a car door: I grab the handle and push or pull or whatever, and this frees the door from its holding, and just like that, the door opens! So, what IS a door? Just this consummatory event, the process to consummation, the door opening, is the "meaning".
In pragmatism, this kind of explicit activity, like opening a car door, is IN the perceptual event itself. This is the point. To take note of something at all is an event that is familiar, and familiarity is due to this "forward looking" consummation of an existing belief, i.e, experiment confirmed in the occurrent event: I look up, see a rabbit, I "always already" know rabbits! Nothing new here, just a confirmation of what I already know, pretty much. We are walking embodiments of the scientific method, confirming what is there already in the potentialities of possibilities afforded by past experiences.
I am convinced this is right, but then, one has to reconceive what it is to be a self in-the-world, as Heidegger does. His "ready to hand" in environments of "equipmental" needs and meanings. What you call perception just happening is likely what Heidegger calls presence at hand. Things just sitting around here and there which I understand to be use in waiting. Turn your attention to them, and they are alive we meanings that issue from your personal history, as well as your culture's history (where it all comes from). But Heidegger isn't exactly like the pragmatists (Dewey, Peirce, James, later Rorty) and his view of language is more complicated. But his analysis of human dasein and time is extraordinarily revealing. We are not IN time; we ARE time. We ARE forward looking beings, and perception is historically interpretative. You can see the Hegelian influence in this: Heidegger doesn't not talk about the personal soul, and I believe this is Hegel as well. The Zeitgeist of the Hegelian time frame is found in Heidgger,
Truth is not traditional truth, some kind of agreement between subject and object. Truth is dynamic disclosure, aletheia, revealed in the event of the self creation by the explicit act of drawing upon one's potentiality of possibilities in the openness of one's freedom.
Now this gives me an idea for a book I had in mind. I really enjoyed Christopher Buehlman's "Between Two Fires," a historical fiction/fantasy novel set in France during the Black Death and Hundred Years War. The key idea is that Satan has decided to destroy man through plague and war, but then God is silent as society dissolves and demons begin to walk the Earth.
But I thought it was also a missed opportunity in that it diverges radically from the source culture it had been following pretty closely early in the book and doesn't actually make much of a point.
I thought of a sequel of sorts, where a defeated Lucifer realizes that man's faith only gets stronger when faced with external horrors and pressures. So instead, the Devil whispers to the faithful, turning the certainty of faith against faith, resulting in the cataclysm of the Wars of Religion (Mammon also does a good job getting the Spanish to chase gold in the Americas, enslaving the peoples there). But tracing this plan back to nominalism on the 1400s, as Satan licks his wounds from the failed Black Death campaign would be interesting, since nominalism definitely paved the way for Luther and the resurgence of fideists.
But the Thirty Years War is such a shit show I find it impossible to write about, so maybe it will never work. Plus, I don't want to suggest Calvin, Luther, and co. were "agents of Satan," but rather that something goes dreadfully wrong when man reaches for a divided and false certainty, and this was certainly as true for Counter Reformation figures as well. Some allow the fear of error to become fear of truth, while the worst are "filled with passionate intensity," led on by an angel of light who promises to reduce all things to some single idolatrous image the elevation of man's ideas to divine status.
Consider that the moment it is spoken, it is bad metaphysics. This is the point. Of course, this is a philosophy forum and one does have to speak. But nothing in the Japanese exotic tradition is going to make any difference. The world as such does not speak. Logic does not tell you what logic is and value the same. This philosophical metaphysics in Kant through Derrida culminates in, well, let John Caputo say this:
[i]If Derrida thinks that the surcharge of surreal, hyperousiological being dreams the dream of pure presence without différance, does that imply that something that would be plainly and simply absolutely other is plainly impossible? Now this is a delicate point about which we must be clear because, as we have seen, Derrida is not against dreams, is not against the impossible, and is not against the tout autre. Far from it. Everything in deconstruction, we are contending, turns on a passion for the impossible, on setting a place at the table for the tout autre, which is the impossible.
Caputo, John D.. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) (p. 20). Indiana University Press.[/i]
The moment it is spoken it is taken up in a totality of possible thought. Language is pragmatic, and has nothing to "say" about the world. It is a tool for discovery. It "stands in" for things in the world. It is not that enigmatic terms like ineffability, ultimate reality, nirvana, the sacred, the holy, and so on are nonsense. They are a means to an end that itself is not a means to and end, but is an end, as Kierkegaard put it, it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-being. There is a very good reason why Wittgenstein refused to speak about "the world" and "value" in the Tractatus. These are simply given. Heidegger's dasein can be talked about for centuries because the language possibilities are endless if one is committed to the totality of language possibilities. The endless conversation humanity is having with itself, as Rorty famously said. But this is not metaphysics, not really. Metaphysics is in the cat, the sofa, the coffee cup--these are Wittgenstein's world, which is mystical, a miracle, if you like.
No, I wouldn't say so. This would seem to flatten out what makes the "scientific method" distinct, why it only emerged in the modern era, etc. It renders all perception, seemingly even animal perception, "scientific," and collapses the meaningful distinction between pseudosciences, such as astrology, and the sciences.That is, it generalizes the term "scientific" to the point where it no longer has anything like its original meaning, which I don't think is helpful.
I think it might be more useful to say that there are general principles that are essential to making the scientific method work that are also relevant to statistics, probability theory, perception, Hebbian "fire-together-wire-together" neuronal activity, and how physical information works at a basic level.
It doesn't seem helpful to make every human action "scientific," in the same way it doesn't seem helpful to make it all "pragmatic." What exactly is the universal goal that is being pursued such that all things are pragmatic? Moreover, importantly, there seems to be a useful distinction between what is commonly called pragmatic and what isn't a notable difference between pragmatist epistemology and Aristotleanism, etc. If the point is simply that people have purposes, why not just say that?
Consciously or phenomenologicaly, I would not say this is the case. When I take the trash out, I am vaguely aware of my lawn, but I don't make predictions about it. Perhaps this is true in a way of pre-concious processes, the ways in which information is pruned for relevance before entering the system of recursive self-awareness it would seem to be. But then it seems worth disambiguating these two types of "prediction."
I'd be more worried about trying to reduce all meaning to correlation and inference though, the way computational theories of mind do when they lean to heavily on intuitions from information theory.
Is the meaning of what? The meaning of a door is opening a door or the meaning of opening a door is opening a door? Is it that things are known in terms of their final causes? I'd agree with that, but the formal, material, and efficient causes can be objects of our inquiry as well, and these are all made manifest to some degree in perception.
I don't know what to make of this. Truth is often a constraint on freedom, something that asserts itself in the world against our will our expectations. How does this definition apply to usual cases of truth and falsity? E.g., if someone tells me Miami is the capital of Florida or a mechanic claims to have fixed my car and it starts having the same problems again?
Freedom would seem to be posterior to perception. It is the sort of thing that must be developed. Infants do not have much by way of freedom.
Hamlet's stoic lemma that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," was understood by the Stoics as a very limited sort of freedom. Rather than a declaration of moral relativism or moral freedom, it assets our affective freedom as we respond to events. Yet even the Stoics admitted that this freedom was limited.
But "nothing is either true or false but thinking makes it so?" I am not sure about this one. Yes, there is a sense in which thought and belief are required to give the appearance/reality distinction content but truth does not arise from mere "thinking that it is so." I would say that, to avoid a sort of nihilism, truth has to be grounded in the intelligibility of the world, which is a part of thought, but which transcends it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In this context, do we really have a basis for making these judgements? I've no problem with the idea that the Enlightenment is not perfect, and perhaps it has run its course. But when I think about what preceded it, I do not find myself longing to return to the Good Old Days. So we find ourselves trying to work out the Next Thing, avoiding the mistakes of the Last Thing.
But Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So perhaps we should be very careful, and sceptical of certainties.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Aren't practices and ways of life ("This is what I do") foundations for Wittgenstein at least? If they are, your question does arise, as it always does for any foundation. For some, it leads us to a change of discourse, to naturalistic ideas about human beings, social animals finding their way through the "real" world. But that seems to be where we came in!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do their have to be general principles as such? Should we not change the model and think of something more dynamic, more evolutionary?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's one of the themes of Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie, which I mentioned.
Quoting Ludwig V
Quite. I'm not pushing for a return to a golden past. It's more along the lines of a forgotten wisdom.
Quoting Astrophel
I think Buddhism is far better at mapping these ideas of what can and cannot be said - much more so than 20th century philosophy, although to explore it would be beyond the scope of the thread. Suffice to point to the 'parable of the raft', an early Buddhist text, in which the Buddha compares his instruction to a raft, thrown together out of twigs and branches, necessary to cross the river, but not to be clung to as an ultimate. I think it contrasts with the absolutism of Judeo-Christian culture. Anyway, that's a major digression as far as this thread is concerned, I won't pursue it, but thanks for your replies.
Thank you very much. I didn't know that Wittgenstein articulated this thought.
It's one thing to retrieve the wisdom. It's quite another to one bring back the fool's gold. Effective panning is essential. And then I wonder whether you can have one without the other.
Quoting Wayfarer
That would explain why he's so hard to understand.
I would explain my position further but it would be a complete digression from the thrust of this thread.
No, no. Pseudo sciences are what they are because there is no repeatable results, the essence of the scientific method. And the scientific method certainly did not emerge only in the modern era. The wheel, the pulley, the lever, and on and on, is science. Animal perception? The cow sees grass is greener on the other side and relocates. Was this science? It was proto-science. Our conditional sentential structure "If P, then Q" is a formalization of this. We don't use this "principle" when we conduct our affairs, generally, either.
Nothing at all about the scientific method is undone by observing that such a "principle" is grounded in everydayness, any more that logic is offended by it, too, being ubiquitous in ordinary affairs. Sometimes we are illogical, sometimes logical. Logic remains what it is, even if I leave the house on a rainy day without an umbrella.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But this is about ontology: the Being that is presupposed by talk about neuronal activity. See Karl Popper on this. It is called the hypothetical deductive method, or, this is how I learned it, and this is offered as a replacement to induction. The idea is that when an object is encountered, we are always already equipped with a body of theories that already define the object. Knowledge is predelineated. See Thomas Kuhn Structures of Scientific Revolutions: Normal science is paradigmatic meaning assumptions already in place that make "shifts" even possible. The mind works like this, and one does not encounter an object ex nihilo, but rather the object is "deductively" determined from an existing data base, if you like that term.
No one denies the terms you talk about have validity. But "how physical information works at a basic level," in philosophy, has to be THE basic level. Otherwise you are just doing science.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We don't just "say that" because it is not about the vague sense of people having purposes. It is a rigorous description of what a knowledge relationship is between epistemic agents and their objects. Walk into a classroom and there are chairs, desks, a white board, markers, and so on. The question is, what ARE these to you AS YOU KNOW what they are. They are use-values to you. A chair you can sit in, a desk you can write on, and so on. Of course, these all just sit there as well, as things merely present, but it just sitting there is not what knowledge is about. Knowledge is about what happens when you turn your attention to them and activate their meaning. Encounter a bank teller and think of all that comes to mind in terms of what a bank teller qua bank teller is, and you will have a list of all a bank teller Does.
But this really is not the point. The reason pragmatics is foundational is TIME. It starts with Augustine (earlier, I know) and then Kant comes along. To understand pragmatism, you would have to read Kant's deduction. Not that pragmatists are Kantians, but that is a very long story. When one encounters something, an object, a feeling, an idea, what is this encounter? Everything hangs on the answer to this, but alas, it is a very long story. When an infant, the encounter had no knowledge dimension, this "blooming and buzzing" knew nothing. A chair was not a chair, nor a cat a cat. How do you think knowledge relations are made? In the learning process.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But this is about the knowledge relation. You are the knower. What do you know when you say you know what a car door is? This is the point. You know what will happen when you approach the door, try to open it or close it, roll down the window, etc. When your eyes meet the car door and you are engaged with its possibilities, this is the essence of your knowledge of what a car door IS. The OP is saying that it takes an epistemic agent to "make the door what it its" because apart from these pragmatic engagements, there is no meaningful ontology. Talk about its existence independent of this agency is impossible. Major idea of the OP is this.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Truth is made, not discovered. See Rorty's Mirror of Nature and his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (goes without saying my thoughts derive from others). When we encounter an object, it is an interface, a construction of a phenomenon in a pragmatic interface. What there is "outside" of this is impossible to say, for even to speak of an outside is to borrow from contexts where something being outside makes sense, like the outside of a house. There is no outside that can be imagined. This is Wittgenstein.
It is not a mere "thinking that it is so." It is a matter that thinking is "of a piece" with the object. One is not a mirror of nature. Does this idea make any sense at all? If you talk about the physical neurons of a brain as you did above, as part of what explains knoweldge, the question is begged: how does one affirm such a thing, neurons, that is? Why, IN this very neuronal matrix. But this physicality is supposed to be outside of the brain's interior.
Intelligibility of the world? I assume you mean by world you mean the things laying around. These have intelligibility? How does one make the move from the intelligibility of the mind, to that of the world? One can simply affirm this, true, and suspend justification, but you know justification is everything to a meaningful assertion. I can't imagine how this works.
Cant let that go by. Ill refer back to that quote I mentioned the other day
Quoting Frege on Knowing the Third Realm,Tyler Burge
I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned. I think confusion arises from treating objects as mind-independent, when all our judgements about objects are contingent on sense-experience. But then, metaphysics proper never understood objects as being mind-independent in that sense. Yes, we construct the object from experience, but there are real objects, or at least objects which are the same for all observers - ideas, in other words. And as for basic arithmetical facts, they are not objects at all, but the operations of mind, and also invariant from one mind to another. Whereas it seems to me that you have adopted an attitude of unmitigated relativism.
In respect of intelligibility, what it meant in pre-modern philosophy was precisely the identity of thought and being. Ive started to understand this through a text Ive gotten hold of, the title of which says exactly that, Thinking Being, Eric Perl. I had previously been familiar with the Platonist expression to be, is to be intelligible, but couldnt understand what it meant. This book has helped with that.
In any case, I dont agree, truth is not made, or simply made. Truth includes and so transcends both object and subject. Im totally on board with Kants Copernican Revolution in philosophy, but I also dont believe it implies that kind of relativism.
The problem is that all such "facts" require symbols, or signs. The symbol is essential, as necessary to the existence of an individuated fact. And the symbol is "made up". Therefore at the foundation, the basis of all such "facts of arithmetic" is the application of symbols, and this is something which is made up. The key to the usefulness of the sign, as discussed by Derrida in the section of "Voice and Phenomena" which I referred to earlier in this thread, is the capacity for repetition. And this as the "repeatable results", referred to by @Astrophel above, is fundamental to science.
Repetition is a temporal concept, and repeatability is displayed to us through sensation as a continuity of sameness. The usefulness of the sign is found in a repetition of the sameness within the supposed independent reality, as time passes. The repetition is simplified into a continuity by epistemic, because that is how we apprehend it through sensation. When things are reversed, and priority is assigned to the continuity of sense data, instead of the individuated facts represented by the signs, misunderstanding results.
I think Buddhists, Hindus (not everyday Hindus praying to Ganesh) are the most advanced people in the world. The serious ones, dedicated to overcoming the self, overcoming all "attachments". Dock the raft, and move on, away from yogas. Language is a yoga. It may be more, that is, it may have an ontological significance we know about, and I suspect this true, for language and agency itself seem inseparable. Without language, where is the "I" of an experience, mundane, profound or otherwise?
Just to say, when you read this in the Lecture on Ethics (online and free) you will not find exactly my interpretation. You read it an make up your on mind how this goes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Number is based on same thing , different time
We look ar may aspect of our word and we see different thing, different time. How do we get from that to repetition of identity? Its it just that there is no pure repeated identity in nature, but even in our imaginings of nature. The answer is , from a historical view, we got to it when it became useful to construct the ideality of same thing, different time, which didnt occur all at once, or just in one region of the world. We had to create a rule telling us that when we observed or thought of a multiplicity of things, we should abstract away everything else about the things other than the fact of their being individually noticed by us. This is a very specific concept designed for a specific human purpose. With this rule we now had the concept of pure , empty unit. We arrived at this concept well before it occurred to us that we could impose it back on nature as the ideal of scientific exactitude, forcing nature into categories of unitized things. Thus, we convinced ourselves that nature itself is made of numeric relations, fixed calculable qualities in relations of numeric exactitude. But nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count.
It is only when we empty the world of everything natural that we locate the context-free abstraction of same thing, different time. Number is the very essence of thought in its most stripped down functioning, as associative synthesis. Frege believes that number refers to a concept in the world , but Husserl argued the opposite:
What context? Judging the various merits of historical lines of thought? I should hope we have some basis for making these judgements, or else philosophy doesn't really seem possible. I don't think we have to "go back," to say something like "well here the Stoics really got off track..." or "in retrospect Descartes' dualism has these issues," etc.
It's easier to have destructive certainties when you allow them to sit apart from one another, and so to selectively decide where reason applies. So, yes we should be skeptical of certainties, but we should also not be terrified of them.
Consider Plato's "noble risk" at the end of the Phaedo.
We should not want to reach the point where fear of error becomes fear of truth for us. We shall have to act anyhow or others will act for us. We don't want to end up in a situation where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
In an exchange with Erasmus, Martin Luther allows that his predestinating vision of God "seems evil and cruel," but then states that this simply shows how degenerate man's sense of reason is after the Fall. That God should seem evil just shows that man is evil. Man cannot judge properly. Except Luther uses his judgement often and forcefully, in part, to articulate the very theology he his citing as evidence for his inability to reason.
Having read a number of Luther's letters, I feel they can oscillate between the sublime and the horrid. When he goes into his unhinged rant against the peasants "crush and stab them, kill them where you find them," and seems to embrace the political expediency of "every prince a Pope in his lands," this seems to flow from the fact that he has cut up reason. Now reason can stand in some places. In other places absolute certainty blocks its application and warrant. This leads to chaos.
Obviously, Catholics did this too, as did Calvin's tradition at times. They placed some dogmas outside the realm of reason, and in doing so ruined reason and faith. Erasmus was hated by both Protestants and Catholics at the time for refusing to do this, but I think time has proved him to be the wiser soul of this era. He was not too timid to risk certainty in some areas, but also unwilling to butcher reason for piecemeal consumption a sin Plato puts a lot of focus on.
People take Wittgenstein many ways. If the ideas in PI around social practices are deflated enough, they begin to look trivial. Everyone knows that different peoples call different things by different words and that a child learns to speak by being around a given language. A Greek child raised in Latin society speaks Latin, an Arab raised in France comes to call things by French words. People who move to foreign countries come to refer to things by foreign words. Often, the sounds that represent words seem quiet arbitrary, and they change with social trends. All this was known and accepted since antiquity.
Did the verificationists and positivists Wittgenstein was speaking to forget this? At first glance it might seem this way, but I don't think they did. Rather, they abstracted the social variances away in their conception of abstract propositions to try to grasp the nature of meanings and reference.
What does Wittgenstein say to such attempts? Interpretation is very varied here. Kirpke moves past the trivial at the cost of advocating a theory of rule following that seems implausible even to other self-described Wittgensteineans. McDowell gets rid of interpretation, sort of turning it into an unanalyzable primitive grounded in practice IIRC. Point being, "rules all the way down," is saying something novel, although I don't think it works.
If we say, "well the natural world is involved in meanings, as well as human cognitive architecture, the phenomenology of human experience, intentionality, and purpose," though, which I think we must, then the role of social practices seems to slide back towards the merely obvious. Once we locate the proximate source of meaning in social practices, the obvious next question is "what causes those practices to be what they are?" I find some phenomenological explanations of how predication arises quite plausible, but then these lead to the question: "why is human phenomenology this way?"
This seems to lead back to the way the world is, the way objects of predication are, and the way human minds (part of the world) are, which seems to reintroduce the question of "how language hooks to the world," that some, such as Rorty, thinks Wittgenstein has proven to be unanswerable. I personally don't think Rorty is right here. The question of "where do rules come from," seems both possible to investigate and very relevant.
IDK, IMHO, what PI says about justification is more interesting than what it says about language.
I don't see why not. I feel like too much is dismissed as unknowable because it can't be formalized in static systems, as if the limit of current modeling abilities is the limit of knowledge. Sort of like how many in physics say the universe must be computable because we lack an understanding of how things would be "decidable" otherwise.
Unmitigated relativism: There was a time when I would agree with you. Now I am convinced that the lines drawn between the world we are IN and what is supposed to be beyond these lines don't really exist at all. Nothing changes in science nor in our familiar affairs. Relativism? But if a thesis says all knowledge is contextual, and nothing can be affirmed outside of a context, and contexts themselves are relative to other contexts, and there is no way out of this, for one would have to actually demonstrate a contextless propositional environment is even possible to make sense of it, and this necessarily requires, you know, context!; then the very idea of noncontextuality (at this level of the most basic assumptions) is out the window. The great rub is this: This is NOT saying everything is relative, for even relativity is a contextual and contingent idea. Everything is OPEN!!
This is the strength of Heidegger. From here, one can move forward, for we have a new horizon of possibilities that is grounded in the "given" vis a vis the openness of interpretation. Eternity is no longer spatio/temporal eternity, for what we called eternity is now the indeterminacy IN the givenness of the world we are IN. You know how Kant divided ontology, making noumena completely remote from understanding. In this openness, we now are "allowed" to embrace the noumenality IN the phenomenon,
for when we are no longer committed to fixity of any kind interpretatively, we can practice true "gellasenheit".
Rorty, of course, we leave behind....and keep. There is no such thing as non propositional knowledge, her says; yet what it is that is to be fit into a proposition is indeterminate. As I see it, the world can once more BE, what it once was, arguably, prior to the bloating of knowledge assumptions that fixate it with such vigor and authority. Standing in the openness of Being is not a philosophical exercise. It is something else. The world is something else, something "tout autre".
I am pretty confident that the first sentence is right. As to the second sentence, I find myself considering the possibility that the two concepts of decidability and computability may be defined in terms of each other. If they are not, then I'm rather unclear what they mean.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, that's part of what I'm saying. Any proposed foundation will generate a question why that is so. There are only two ways to stop the regress - first, find an indubitable, self-evident, axiomatic starting-point or second, turn the regress into a loop. Neither is very satisfactory. On the other hand, I don't find the idea that there will always be unanswered questions or that our explanations are incomplete and no matter how fast we run, we will never arrive at the Grand Theory of Everything. None of that means that what we call following a rule is not the result of human practices and way of life.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not sure that this is much of an objection to what Wittgenstein is trying to do - assembling reminders to enable us to find the way out of the bottle. Like the fly, once we've seen the way out, it is obvious. He starts on the basis that everything is in plain sight. Actually, this sounds like the well-worn "trivial or false" dilemmas that analytic philosophers used to be so fond of.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. I think that Hume is very sensible when he distinguishes between judicious or moderate scepticism and radical or Pyrrhonic scepticism. (He thinks the former is necessary and wise and the latter is unhinged; he recommends a month in the country for anyone suffering from it.)
I think that a parallel critique of certainty is entirely appropriate. A judicious and moderate certainty is indeed wise, but a radical and dogmatic certainty is not only divisive (but, let's be blunt about this, people love a fight, especially when they can join in) but also unlikely to stand up to the test of debate.
When I asked whether we have a sound basis for making large-scale judgements about movements of ideas in the past - especially the distant past, I did intend the question as a reminder of the complications involved in reading those texts and the need for caution in evaluating them. I was particularly exercised by what appeared to be Heidegger's nostalgia for scholastic philosophy and by doubts about how far it is reasonable to apply modern philosophical ideas to what are much more like religious texts rather than what we would think of as philosophy. I know we think we can separate the two, but I'm not sure about how appropriate that is. It depends, I suppose, on what the project is.
I have to admit, however, that I have a prejudice about any pronouncement about History or Culture (Ancient or Modern). The grand and large scale too often sweeps aside nuance and detail and creates distortions in doing so.
I believe the important philosophical perspective they bring is that of non-dualism. The modern world, cosmopolitan as it is, is then able to consider these perspectives through dialogue with its representatives. (Heidegger seemed aware of this, there's a televised discussion between him and a Buddhist monk on the Internet, and quite a bit of literature on Heidegger and Eastern thought.) I'm also aware of the well-grounded criticisms of Buddhist modernism but nevertheless the Eastern tradition can help cast light on many deep philosophical conundrums of the West.
(Also I will acknowledge that whereas your approach seems defined in terms of the curriculum of philosophy, mine has been eclectic, as I encountered philosophy in pursuit of the idea of spiritual enlightenment. Consequently I am not as well-read in the later 20th C continental philosophers as others here, including yourself, although I'm always open to learn.)
Quoting Astrophel
Well, sure! But teasing out the implications of that, actually treating it as a discussion in analytic philosophy, may also cast some light. There is that which is beyond words, ineffable, 'of which we cannot speak', but we can nevertheless can try and develop a feeling for what it is, and where the boundary lies (rather than just 'shuddup already'.)
Quoting Joshs
Sure. My contention about number is a simple one: they are real as constituents of reason but not materially existent, and I think that says something important.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In Theological Origins of Modernity, Gillespie places the origin of this tendency with the Franscisan order who insisted that God was was not bound by reason, an attitude was anathema to the Scholastics, who tended to see in the workings of reason a mirror of the divine intellect. He says this tendency makes God capricious and wholly unpredictable and unknowable and that this 'theological voluntarism' is also characteristic of Islam.
Quoting Ludwig V
Something I'm often grappling with due to my preoccupation with ideas arising from spiritual traditions. I think there is something of an implicit barrier in modern philosophy against ideas and indeed ways of thought that are deemed too close to being religious, and that also is a barrier against a considerable amount of pre-modern philosophy in the West.
Quoting Wayfarer
If the concept of number emerged at some point in cultural history , was this a necessary or contingent event. And if it was not necessary, that is, if we could conceive of a different trajectory of culture in which the concept of number did not emerge, can we still say that it is independent of thought?
Quoting Astrophel
If you havent ready Lee Braver yet, I think you would really enjoy him. He reads Heidegger through Kierkegaard.
Yes, Heidegger: Thinking of Being. I'll take a look. Thanks!
Well, the qualifications of necessary/contingent generally apply to facts, don't they, rather than events? And the discovery of arithmetic, mathematics and geometry was not a single event, it occured over thousands of years, and is still on-going. But the basic point is, I take it, that basic arithmetical principles are true in all possible worlds, as the saying has it.
(One of the posts I often point to is What is Math? Smithsonian Institute Magazine. It explores the ideas I find interesting about this question, in particular the pro's and cons of mathematical platonism. The representative Platonist is one James Robert Brown, an emeritus professor, who's book I subsequently sought out. But alas, many of the arguments are really too difficult to understand for someone without a background in maths. But there's one gem of a quote in that essay, which I think unintentionally exposes the source of much current hostility towards platonist ideas: 'Platonism", as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science. The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, hell take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?")
Are we talking about truths, or a method that is self-confirming by its very nature as method? Dont mathemarical statements have to be true in all possible worlds by virtue of the fact that the method of same thing, different time stipulates the very concept of true in all possible worlds as empty repetition of identity? Wittgenstein recognized the truth of mathematics as hinge propositions that are true in virtue of being the unquestioned ground of assertions within a language game.
As you can see, I am no expert. But I do read and think like you, just different books and essays.
Consider that non dualism only makes sense when played off of dualism. I read a paper by Dick Garner, who was a professor at Ohio State, in which he tried to logically formulate the Buddhist resistance to being spoken about plainly, and it was not in the assertion that something is the case or not the case. The Buddhist "truth" was to be found in the cancelation of these (and he drew out the symbolic logic for this).
There is a strange threshold one gets to reading phenomenology, where the "nothing" get a lot of attention. I am reading, and have been for a while, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, Jean luc Nancy, when I get the chance.
Heidegger and a Buddhist monk. An interview? Of course, there is that famous Der Spiegel interview where he mentions Buddhism, briefly. Where would I find this?
Quoting Astrophel
Ive been reading Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, where he states
What drew me to the question, was 'what is the nature of number?' Without going into all the background, the idea that struck me was that numbers are real, in that they're the same for anyone who can count, but they're not material in nature. They exist in a different way than do objects, they're only perceptible to an intelligence capable of counting. And mathematics is also fundamental to the success of modern science. But it turns out to be a contentious debate. Naturalists generally disparage the 'romance of maths'. Another article I have on my links list is about the 'Indispensability Argument' for mathematics.
For some reason, this strikes me as faintly comical. But it also says something about the stranglehold of empiricism on philosophy.
To me, this all ties into realism about universals, questions about the nature of reason, the Greek and medieval philosophy of the rational soul, and questions about the nature of meaning, and how it is grasped. They are themes I like to explore.
Incidentally, looking around for more info on Lee Braver, I found his book Groundless Grounds, from the abstract of which:
As you might guess, given the content of my posts, I tend to recoil from the very idea.
Quoting Astrophel
Maybe, but your posts are quite interesting, and, like mine, eclectic.
Quoting Astrophel
It takes some doing to get a feel for non-dualism. I first discovered Advaita (Hindu) before delving into Buddhism. I will say that non-dualism is a very subtle idea - once you get a grasp of it, elements of it can be found in the Western philosophical tradition, but the origins are very different. It's very much tied to meditative awareness as a different mode of being.
Quoting Astrophel
That's where there is some convergence with the Buddhist principle of emptiness, ??nyat?. Very deep topic, but I will say that 'no-thing' is not quite the same as mere absence or lack. In any case, there are scholars who work on the crossover between phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy. It was a theme in The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, et al.
There have been quite a few essays written on convergences between Heidegger and Zen Buddhism although I don't know of any to recommend.
Heidegger's dialogue with a Buddhist monk is here.
I saw that review or article. If that is in fact what their project involves (and perhaps the wording is wonky). My quesion is what exactly does 'dispensed with everything transcendent' mean? Do they mean this is the sense that their ontology makes transcendence inaccessible or incoherent? It's one thing to bracket something away, it's another to say it is meaningless. I'd love a bit more on this.
Oh, and as to how to delimit 'the transcendent' - very good question, I would say. 'Ethics are transcendental' does appear at the very end of TLP, in fact that and the sorrounding aphorisms are about the only ones which appeal to me.
I hear you. I've been watching Braver on youtube but I work 50 plus hours a week, so I really don't have it in me to read anything except for the labels on shampoo bottles.
//probably another thread//
One thing to keep in mind is that the ancients did not have the separation between living and inanimate, which has since been developed and is fundamental to us. So the common understanding was that "natural" things are all things other than those created by humans. It's interesting to recognize that in Plato's "Symposium" the Idea of "Beauty" is understood through reference to artificial things only. This provided the relation between beauty and good, the fact that the beauty of human artifacts and human institutions is related to their purpose. That grounded "beauty" in something real. But in modern days we completely dissociate beauty from purpose, and this has been developed as a fundamental metaphysical division, the division between "good" (for the sake of something else) and "beauty" (for the sake of itself). In ancient times, since both the artificial and the natural, were products of activity (becoming), they each required soul as the source of activity. The separation we have today was initiated by Aristotle.
But you'll notice in Aristotle's "Physics" there is significant discussion of final cause. And when he makes a comparison between artificial things and natural things, to demonstrate how the form of a thing comes to be within the thing itself, his choice of a natural thing is an acorn, which is a living thing. So in that sort of "natural thing" we can see clearly how the matter of the seed provides the potential for the thing which will come into being, and how that form is put into the material potential (the seed) from a prior being the parent tree.
Now we separate the inanimate, and the activities of the inanimate are the subject of "physics" proper, while the animated "beings" are the subject of biology. You'll notice that the defining activities of the living beings (biological) are internal to the being, so the being is animated. within. On the other hand, the defining activities of the inanimate (physical) things are in the external space, which surrounds the active things. These are the two distinct types of activity outlined by Aristotle in his "Physics", internal activity which is "change" proper, and change of place (locomotion), which is relative change.
Physicalists will insist that all change is reducible to the relative motion known as change of place, which is studied by physics. However, modern (quantum) physics demonstrates very clearly the incompatibility between the two through the problems with the principle of locality.
The reference to Hebbian learning was just an example of the extremely defuse number of phenomena that are "scientific," in the sense of involving correlation. I wasn't trying to make any other point aside from the fact that this seems to make a very large number of things "scientific," in a way that stretches the word far past its normal usage. So, the suggestion is that, if you can elucidate what all these things have in common more clearly, it would be helpful for your case. I do agree that they all have something in common, but explaining exactly what will not be easy. Information theory has been used to unify many of these ideas, but it leaves our the subjective element and so leaves out something essential.
Funny enough, Boethius also criticizes the image of the mind as "mirror of nature" for being misleading writing in 524AD. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver." But crucially, he has as organs of perception the "imagination" and "intellect," capable variously of abstracting objects away from their surroundings and of comprehending their intelligible forms. This makes all the difference in the conclusions he draws from this sort of relativism.
Let's back up from metaphysics for a second. A phenomenological explanation of intelligibilities might be something like "the sum total of true things that can be elucidated about an object of discussion across the whole history of the global Human Conversation." Here, "truth" is defined in phenomenological terms, e.g. the truth of correctness, whereas a metaphysical explanation is set aside for now. An important point made by phenomenologists is that predication emerges from human phenomenology and intersubjectivity.
When we move to intersubjectivity, to predication, we make a significant step.
For a longer excerpt on this process, see the long quote midway through this post: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/879424
The work of metaphysical explanations of intelligibilities then is to elucidate what lies behind these processes and what makes different minds work similarly.
Many ways. Wittgenstein for example, points out the compelling nature of clarity, symmetry, and parsimony in explanations.
Demands for absolute justification can undermine any assertion. How are you sure there are other minds other than your own? How are you sure your thoughts aren't piloted by an evil demon who makes you only sure of falsehoods? Why speak of the "intelligibility of mind," when all you really have grounds for is the [I]apparent[/I] intelligibility of things in your own mind? Why believe reason or argument is useful? This is an aspect of the transcendental nature of reason. We can always ask "but is this really true?" in the same way that Moore identified how we can always ask re practical/moral judgement, "is this truly good?"
The position that intelligibility is a sui generis creation of "mind" itself makes metaphysical assumptions. It not unlike how Hume's arguments re cause assume that seeing a baseball break a window or seeing one billiard ball move another [I] isn't[/I] observing cause. At first glance, it seems to be a somewhat pious statement about the limits of knowledge, not assuming too much, but the assumption of ignorance itself assumes much. On closer inspection, such claims end up grounded in the conceptions of causation dominant in Hume's day, the idea of extrinsic eternal laws shaping the interactions of discrete things.
IMO, any successful metaphysical theory of truth has to recover the phenomenological given of truth, the way in which truth is prephilosophical.
Sure, but Wittgenstein leaves untouched the issue of how the house is built and from what it is constructed. If you can build additions onto the house as needed, if there is no limit to the size of the house, and if the house is built from the very things you are trying to fathom, then I think very different conclusions will follow compared with the case where the house is said to fixed and sealed. But I would say there is plenty of evidence that people can both move between different houses (consider Eriugena's different affirmations and negation re levels of being if you're familiar with that) and reconstruct or expand the houses. The goal of "getting outside" might be a "blind alley," but I think it's possible to take different conclusions from this.
Well, I'd say the house is built from the materials of human phenomenology, and these include intersubjective predication and essences. But do these spring to mind uncaused? Intelligibilities seem to be "in" the world to start with, as a given to our experiences. Metaphysics has to try to explain the why of this.
Stunning, really. This from the unapologetic Nazi (that Robert Solomon and others say he was. I've read some of the "black notebooks" and they are pretty hateful.) ?? Levinas' "totality" is premised on just this moral deficit in B&T.
It would be more, shuddup and attend! How does one attend? This takes thoughtful insight, not just shutting up, the thoughtful insight that is implicitly THERE in the shutting up. As the epiphany comes to the mathematician or the scientist, it seems to come from nowhere, the discursivity of thought in the underpinnings of realization unnoticed. Shutting up and allowing the world to "speak" is a matter of all of our speculative resources at bay, yet in an anticipatory silence. Drove Kierkegaard to his dark nights of torment.
Great links for that topic:
https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Allendoerfer/1980/0025570x.di021111.02p0048m.pdf
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-mathematics/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/
Lower-case platonists holds that numbers are abstract objects, non-causal, non-spatial, non-temporal objects.
But then Benecerraf's problem:
And one may then wonder about the implications of each of these ideas. Obviously mathematics exists, I can do calculations right now, so, without ignoring the topic, someone must decide what it is that mathematics is about, and pick a side, be realist or antirealist. A physicalist cannot be a realist about mathematics¹, so he must adopt another view. But both immanent realism and conceptualism have a fair share of trouble, which leaves us with nominalism.
One might then seek the connection between these ontologies of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics. The paper linked claims that formalism is closest to nominalism, logicism to platonism, and intuitionism to conceptualism. But then there will be contentions still.
This debate is also intimately linked to the queston of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. For the intuitionist, for example, mathematics would be unarguably invented.
1 Unless he adopts a naturalised platonism.
--
Quoting Astrophel
:100: Great post! One of my early favourite books of popular philosophy was Arthur Koestler 'The Sleepwalkers' which contains many accounts these kinds of serendipitous discoveries in the history of science.
1 Any view that takes mathematical objects to be simultaneously abstract and perceptible (Balaguer, "Against (Maddian) Naturalized Platonism", 1994).
Yes, but there is also the idea that understanding requires training the mind - or maybe even reconstructing it. (I mean, by meditation, of course) Christianity, it seems to me, talks a great deal about belief and so presents itself as primarily a matter of doctrine. (Judaism emphasizes law, Islam acceptance, and so on.) This is complicated and not a sharp distinction, but the emphasis is there and sets these views apart from Western empiricism and rationalism.
Quoting Astrophel
This is the difference between what a bank teller IS and what a bank teller DOES. Popper, in the Open Society, identifies this difference as part of the difference between science and (some kinds of) philosophy. (Maybe in other places as well - I just don't know.) It seems to me a very important difference.
:100: That was known, at one point in history, as 'metanoia', although that is now usually translated simply as 'repentance', thereby blurring the distinction between insight and belief. Originally it meant 'mental transformation' or something like a cognitive shift.
Yes. Christianity has a similar trope. So does Islam. My point is that in Bhuddhism the shift is not merely cognitive. It's very complicated.
On further thought, although it is true that Western philosophy does not pay much attention to it, training is not treated as an important feature of its practice. But it is. Philosophers often speak as if the distinction between what is rational and what isn't, between what is logically true and what isn't is available to everybody instantly. But anyone who teaches introductory philosophy knows that it isn't so. There is a moment of dogma when philosophy's ideas (and practice) have to be taught and much philosophical discussion is incomprehensible without it.
Even empiricism requires explanation and teaching. If it were not so, "naive" realism would be the final arbiter of perception and philosophy could not rise above common sense.
But I suppose that the difference is that this initiation or induction is not thought to require a "metanoia",
It gets more complicated. Some of what Wittgenstein says about philosophy comes to close to suggesting something like a "metanoia". Arguably, that is exactly what Berkeley is looking for - but then, he is seeking to persuade us to accept Christianity.
This is a consequence of modern philosophical innovations and the Reformation. The idea that understanding requires training, asceticism, meditation, and contemplation, was quite well developed in the early and medieval church, as was the idea of rigorous sets of spiritual practices. In the middle ages though, these became more and more aesthetitized and formalized, so that they began to revolve more and more around specific rituals and less on abstract understanding e.g., the very common practice, even among the peasantry, of undergoing to rigors of pilgrimage, the jam packed liturgical calendar of the medieval holidays, the various religious festivals and processions, the vast pantheon of saints and shrines venerated, guild and local support for chantries, close observance of the daily liturgy of the hours, etc.
The Eastern churches have kept more of both the old aesthetic ritual and the ideas of internal practice alive, in part because theosis and illumination remain such a large part of their doctrine. Catholics tend to keep more of this than Protestants, but it's not prescribed for the laity, or if it is, it's at the initiative of an individual confessor.
I am not sure how different this really is from Buddhism as practiced by the laity. It seems like a lot of the Buddhism that makes it to the West comes from monastics, not necessarily reflecting the laity. People act shocked that Buddhists are carrying out genocides against Muslims in their lands because they think of Buddhism primarily in terms of monasticism. But if we thought of Christians primarily in terms of monastics and modern monastic writings, we'd continue to find asceticism, practice, meditation, and contemplation at the very heart of the religion. E.g., I go to a Cicstercian monestary near my house and the daily schedule 365 days a year revolves around the Liturgy of the Hours (communal meditative chanting), farm work, mass, study, silence at almost all times, ministering to visitors, and contemplation.
But this is also very far from the general culture now. The Medieval uncomfortableness with commerce and the vice of "coveting/grasping" has become essentially a virtue, which casts the old homeless, impoverished saints in a new light. I always find it ironic when conservatives are so out of sorts at the sight of homeless people in San Francisco, their very existence, given who the city is named after.
I notice that you are not arguing that my summary is wrong and I accept that there's much complication when you start considering things in more detail.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, of course it is. And one should mention the revival of Ancient Greek Philosophy specifically as a way of thinking about one's way of life in a recognizably philosophical, as opposed to religious, way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
From my observation that's true.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are indeed Buddhist monks coming to the West. Some of them are returnees. And it does somewhat slant the general impression. But Buddhism is no different from every other religion (so far as I can see). There are different strands at work, but there are common themes - fundamentalism and violence among them. What religions are (especially when they become embedded in a society and have to deal with the local power structures), and what they aspire to are rather different things. I realize that monasticism is still alive and well in Christianity, and I'm inclined to believe monasticism in Christianity shares a lot with monasticism in other religions. It's the surrounding conceptual structures that interest me here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I assume you know about Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and the slogan "Private Vices, Public Virtues" (or at least Benefits). I think the genie is out of the bottle now. In any case, there was plenty of coveting and grasping going on even in the Middle Ages. It's the presentation and propaganda that has changed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't hear much about San Francisco, but I see your point. The rational response of anyone who is horrified by homelessness is to ensure that sufficient help is provided to prevent it occurring and sort it out when it does. One has to conclude that what horrifies them is not the fact of homelessness, but it being visible.
Most Asian Buddhists Dont Meditate, Lewis Richmond.
The Japanese Buddhists I most recently had contact with were Pure Land Buddhists who sermonised against any effort to meditate as being own-effort, and incapable of producing merit.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Youd be one of very few with a Cistercian monastery near your house.
Where Ive moved now, there is a Buddhist vihara, led by a friendly Sri Lankan expat, who has regular meditation sessions, but Ive fallen out of the practice, at my age I can no longer assume the customary cross-legged posture that I persisted with for many years. Im trying to find a way back into some kind of community of practice, but its not easy.
Quoting Ludwig V
And the conservative American response to that is that its communism.
They've got a point. From what I've read, Zen encourages effort, while at the same time suggesting that it is beside the point. Typical.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've seen discussions of this that do not prioritize that, or any other, particular posture. Sitting in a straight-backed chair (but upright, not using the back) and lying on one's back, - and there's always walking (slowly). Thich Nat Hanh has a discussion somewhere that suggests that anything that happens in ordinary life can be a bell, calling us back to meditation.
Quoting Wayfarer
The crucial thing for joining a community, IMO, is turning up and trying to participate somehow - provided they will at least accept you being there.
There are a lot of people who are inclined to take meditation/mindfulness seriously, but find it difficult to work out what suits them. (I'm one of them.)
Quoting Wayfarer
The fact that they cling on to that defunct threat shows how much they need something to be afraid of.
There is a lot in this. Husserl is a little dated and the excruciating detail that you posted is an example of why. Here is what remains that interests me, the four principles of phenomenology:
The firstso much appearance, so much beingis borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term appearance, we prefer this strict wording: so much appearing, so much being.1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: zu den Sachen selbst! The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: so much reduction, so much givenness.3
This is Michel Henry. Analytics philosophers don't like this kind of talk because they essentially are following Kant, of all thinkers (they would hate me saying that as well): Kant spelled out in many pages how there is nothing to say about metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic and elsewhere. We know where this goes in the division today between anglo american and continental philosophies, the former being all about clarity of ideas, the latter often taking up problems about the the mysterious connection between the plainly visible world and the world unseen that Kant called noumena. This conversation has evolved. You know all this, I gather, and I bring it up just to make a brief statement about where phenomenology has taken thought. A LOT of it is post Heideggerian. Heidegger's Being and Time is something I take as the the standing paradigm for resistance for the postmodern thought, and the more I can grasp his phenomenology, the better I can see where Derrida comes from. Heidegger was the "Greek" while Derrida was the final critic of any and all perspective in ontology.
So the four principles of phenomenology, these are the terms at the center of the discussion about Husserl that are reaffirmed in the post Heideggerian movement. The French are in the middle of this, and they are not the "scientists" Husserl was, meaning the hope Husserl had for a greater elucidation of the noematic field of phenomenal interface, which is wonderfully anticipated by Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, turns into a rather extravagant extension of words that take the strange threshold of our finitude into places where language barely has meaning, as with Jean luc Marion's notion of the "transpiercing" nature of the icon vs the existential opacity of the idol. If one is looking for clarification in the words that are there in the "potentiality of possiblities" that the "totality" of our history of language can provide, one will be sorely disappointed here. But then, this is the where the point is to be made, and it is a BIG point: Words can be made clear, or clearer, and we look to analytic philosophers for this, but the WORLD is not clear AT ALL! Apologies for the capital letters, but it can't be stressed enough that philosophy has reached it end with Derrida, and, well, Buddhists and Hindus knew the end was at hand long ago. What happens when language meets the world? This is the question that haunts the issue.
Michel Henry (above quote) is emphatic on this Husserlian movement toward the pure phenomenon: put down the text, walk away from the desk (as Emerson told us, one must "to retire as much from his chamber as from society), and for the first time, if you will (think Heidegger's verfallen. Authenticity can come as a jolt of rebellion, as Kierkegaard put it, seeing that one actually exists!) behold the world as a free agency, bound to nothing but your own existence. For these theo-phenomenologists of the "French Turn" the "truth" lies in the thrusting oneself into the world, digging fingers into its soil, in "fleshy" encounters. You see, there is NO denying this. One cannot return to the armchair and reason it away. One encounter the absolute.....only one cannot speak this. For language is entirely OTHER that this.
History and language are neutralized.
Quite so, just an area that interests me so I can't help but throw my $0.02 in.
Yes, and I agree that social conceptions of virtue only get you so far vis-a-vis natural temptations. However, I do think there is a distinct difference between "grasping" (Aristotle's pleonexia, always wanting more) being an explicit vice and it being a virtue. Today people discuss feeling guilty about not doing more to make more money, to get raises, to work "side hustles", etc. Yes, a strong work ethic has always been a virtue, but these days it seems increasingly merged with this idea of having a sort of "big ego" and always wanting more. "Continuous innovation," and "continuous growth," are goals in and of themselves in the small business literature I read back when I was part of a start-up.
Contrast this with the medieval ideal vis-a-vis the trades. Yes, it was good to be profitable, to grow and train others. However, "being a great tradesman" was far more likely to be defined in terms of the quality and beauty of the products, not simply growth and volume.
I've actually read that Japanese culture still does a good job at this, and that it makes people happier. Here in the US, being "a pizza delivery driver" or "flipping burgers" is often thrown out as a sort of insult. Apparently in Japan there is more of an emphasis on the individual's display of mastery at work, even in contexts seen as more mundane. This certainly seems to come across in their entertainment to a degree, even if they poke fun at it (e.g., people being comically overcommitted to being "the best" at relatively menial jobs). I think Hegel gets at this in the Philosophy of Right as well, when discussing "corporations," his update of medieval guilds, which focus on a sort of "greatness" in a field that isn't defined by income, but rather by mastery. Some fields still have this, e.g. doctors, but most don't.
I don't love Marx, but the part about people becoming alienated from their work seems all to true. And once that happens, income becomes the obvious measuring stick for success.
"Yes, in one sense most Buddhists don't meditate, but in a more universal sense all people, of whatever faith, are as close to meditation as the nearest cushion or chair. In that sense, everyone can meditate."
Which is not the same as what I suspect is the real reason they don't meditate: living and breathing IS a meditation. Interesting comparison to Kierkegaard whose knight of faith is simple yet penetrating, living entirely in the confidence and light of something that overrides all mundane meaning, yet being still embedded in familiar affairs, carried through as if all things were the same, but they are not the same at all. There has been a transformation. Something not demonstrable or arguable, any more than one can "argue" pain or happiness. Kierkegaard longed for this simplicity, but it was beyond him. It is the bane of being a philosopher that the very thing that lead the world to "visibility" is thought, yet for something to be purely visible requires at its core the cancelling of this very thinking.
I think you mentioned the boat being docked on the shore metaphor, then left behind as one walks onward. The boat, as this goes, is yoga. Hard to simply "dock" the meditation, the thinking and the curiosity. It is like docking one's very being-in-the-world (which Kierkegaard called inherited sin, though doing so entirely outside of the Christian assumptions). So radical.
'blessed are the pure of heart'
I am with you on this. Presumptious of me, but I will briefly detail why I think so.
It's a bit problematic to bring SK into this because his knight of faith (kof) is tied in with Christianity, Abraham being a model--resignation, obedience and so on.
But. I think SK had an intuition about something useful which, owing to his specific locus in History, he interpreted in his (deficient) christocentric way.
Here's what that was, and how I think you expressed it above.
The kof is one who "returns" (my term, not his--he said something more like, "is opened to") to its True Self, not the self who is troubled by the mundane, but the living being which is in its Truth a breathing organism; i.e. the real self displaced by attunement to the mundane.
Hence, your "living and breathing is...meditation" fits. The kof carries on embedded in the mundane and nobody even knows it. It's not because, in the kof's newly acquired superpower the kof can fool everyone. No. The kof cannot leave the mundane. No one born into History can. But the kof simultaneously "knows" its real self is not the mundane, but rather the [eternal] "that" which is presently breathing.
The being which is thought to be pursued in an inquiry into Human ontology is, tragically, not the true self which is breathing, but the very mundane self caught up with the mundane. That is, as you aptly noted, SK like all (most?) philosophy, at least Western, intuited that the Truth was in the breathing, but remained trapped in the mundane, the thinking.
Some eastern approaches, particularly, (not the philosophy of Mahayana, but) the physical practice of Zazen, seems to have grasped the locus of the kof. That is, in being, not thinking.
In Fear and Trembling, this is how Johannes de Silentio describes the knight of faith:
[i]With the freedom
from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take
care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys
the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do
even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. And
yet, yetyes, I could be infuriated over it if for no other
reason than envyand yet this man has made and at every
moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the
deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the
blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing
everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet
the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never
knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would
have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has
this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were
the surest thing of all. And yet, yet the whole earthly figure
he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He
resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything
again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making
the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision
and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and
no one ever suspects anything else. It is supposed to be the
most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific
posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture
but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there
is no ballet dancer who can do itbut this knight does it.
Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and
sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the
dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have
elevation. They make the upward movement and come down
again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not
unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are
unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a
moment, [b]and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the
world.[/b]
[/i]
A long quote, but worth the read. This last line reveals what he means by the absurd, and it is something Heidegger lifts from Kierkegaard. Here is how H puts it:
In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the nothing and nowhere. But here uncanniness also means not-being-at-home
Or as K put it, being an alien in the world. Heidegger, like K, sees his authentic dasein as one who lives, and does not retreat from, one's ownmost existence, which reveals one's freedom, and this makes the world's affairs "uncanny" for one is free and not possessed by the interests and values of normal living, yet ,as you say, no one born into history can leave it (save a Buddhist recluse?): normal living is all there is to be in one's finite existence. This puts a person in a threshold existence that thematically runs through existentialism, this tension between freedom and existence. A baker or a teacher IS just this. But in freedom, one is not this at all. The baker is both the baker and free of being a baker.
Quoting ENOAH
'"REAL" angst is rare," said Heidegger. Especially considering that one has to always already be IN the "existentiell" role, that is role that is played, when one comes to understand this onto-philosophical weirdness of our existence. So one wants to understand, and pulls away, threatening the integrity of, say, being a baker in-the-world. The original conviction weakens. Kierkegaard wants to make the move to live fully with God in faith and in-the-world. He says he never met anyone who could do this.
Quoting ENOAH
Thinking traps the philosopher, like Kierkegaard, who was too smart for his own good, I guess.
Such a radical and onerous method, serious meditation. But it pushes one outside of philosophy. A strange matter to say the least. But I am with Kierkegaard, in that I am SURE that what is in play here is momentous. Hard to argue such a thing.
Quoting Astrophel
I found your entire reply very edifying, sincerely. I see the tie-in with Heidegger, and the basic struggle which similar "existentialists" addressed in modified ways. You presented that eloquently. Thank you.
I lack your eloquence, am not always confident in my word choice or the strictly academically, most suitable terminology but, coincidentally, that fact contributes to my next query.
On this locus of philosophy and the strangeness of, e.g. Zazen, with respect to, how can it fit in (again, I presume--and acknowledge where I mis-presumed before)
While I recognize and respect there are strong arguments in favor of orthodox reading in philosophy, or readings which are true to authorial intent, please bear with me as I offer a modification.
First let me preface it with a brief reasoning, also unorthodox. I would view Philosophy, as a discipline, to have as its ultimate goal, the pursuit of Truth or, if one is inclined to believe that capital T Truth is inaccessible to Philosophy, then the latter necessarily becomes the endless pursuit of Understanding. If anything resembling that definition is acceptable, in contrast to a definition like, Philosophy is the Science of properly grasping the Philosophers gone by, then there may be benefits to reading Philosophers beyond their intent, or prior to, or hidden in, their intent.
I even dare say, misreading philosophy might bear fruit, if the misreading has results which are functional to ones locus in History.
Now my query, which I admit, adds nothing new, but attempts to clarify my earlier post, and ride atop your quotes above.
Regarding his constructions of the knights of infinite resignation, faith; and, the absurd, I see in those reflections, some more steps.
The knight of infinite resignation who wavers and cannot complete the leap (emphasized in your excerpt from F&T), is an alien in the world and suffers the existential tension of knowing the mundane, to put it simply, is not ultimately true or what ultimately matters*, while at the same time incapable of faith that he Already is what ultimately matters. By contrast one who doesnt even know is happy in the mundane, ... So far, so good, right? ...
I add, and do not think this a step further than SK, but you may tell me differently, That Knight of Infinite is what traditional philosophy is; those who pursue, like Heidegger and Hegel before him, the Infinite, because he knows it is there, but does not make the leap.
and the knight of faith... here is where I think SK was moved by a real intuition conditioned by his locus in History, but we dont need that back story: whether he said this or not, this is my bold read: The KOF is happy in this world, knowing the mundane is not ultimate, not because of faith in the crucifixion, the absurd historical fact that god died a criminal. Thats SK's locus. The KOF is happy because he can abide in both. He knows conventional existence is mundane and empty, he also knows it is inescapable But he also knows he already is the Infinite Truth as a living breathing being. Yes, there is the painful sub-reality of the becoming; but there always has been the Ultimate Reality of the living being.
*(I'm deliberately trying to avoid Phil. terms because I've been conditioned to expect a debate on the terms. I can explain later if needed)
There's no doubt that there are important - and oft-neglected values here. They struggle to be seen or heard in the world as it is.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's right. The first question when you meet someone for the first time - politely disguised under the question what one's employment is.
After the Black Death, there was a shortage of labour (because so many people had died). So workers tended to move to where they were better paid. The aristocracy were outraged by this, and by their demands and tried hard to prevent them (without paying them any more). It didn't work very well. It wasn't until much later (18th century) that employers realized the great advantage to themselves of employing free people for a wage, namely, that they had no responsibility for them beyond the work (e.g. welfare, health and safety) and could simply dismiss them when they weren't needed. Workers took great exception to this (rightly). (Luddites &c.)
This may not be quite what you had in mind:-
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
It shows how deeply embedded the thinking in terms of money is and how damaging it is. Yet it is not just a question of compiling a happiness index. There's no getting away from the need to prioritze and allocate resources accordingly; the money measure is quite helpful as a way of doing that.
People misunderstand what communism, as opposed to state socialism, is all about and what Marx thought was the culmination of his revolution:-
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, Vol. 1, Part 1.
Though this can be taken in many ways. Maybe he under-rates the value of specialization.
Quoting Astrophel
You remind me of Wittgenstein's fly trapped in a bottle. Or this:-
Christopher Reid, Expanded Universes,
Quoting Astrophel
Can one dock one's being-in-the-world without docking one's self, and is that possible? Philosophy often seems to me to under-rate the difficulty of such things. In philosophy, all that is needed is a flourish of words and the thing is done. That's where religion scores, because it recognizes and addresses the need for "metanoia" or conversion. Yet one can find traces of it in what is said in philosophy.
Quoting ENOAH
You remind me of the conclusion of Voltaire's Candide. What's wrong with that, if it works for you? Perhaps it's as much a matter of reconciling oneself to the actual, rather than working out something else.
Yah, like in Nietzsche's, Heidegger's, Sartre's et. al. call for self actualization or authenticity.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. The actual, not the becoming (of Mind and its empty, fleeting attachments; its incccessant workings out); but the Being (of the human Organism, and its breathing etc.).
In plain language, the absurd is the experience one has when realizing that whatever stands before one in the world that might be defining as to their true nature, their essence, turns out to be contingent, ephemeral, and entirely "other" than what they are. So this question, who or what am I? never finds an answer in all of the possibilities one can conceive. One is not a teacher, a father, a business woman, lover of pizza, or anything one can think of. One stands outside all of these in the asking itself, because, as Heidegger put it, the "question," that "piety of thought" intrudes into spontaneity of just "going along"; it interposes between one's existence and the familiar affirmations that are "always already" there. In the most general sense, these are knowledge claims in a world where knowledge cannot make claims at all.
The question takes one to the "nothingness" of the indeterminacy that one faces when realizing that there is no "being" that one is anxious about, like a lion, tiger or failing grades in school. It is a "nothing" that pervades everything, this impossible question that interposes itself between who/what one "is" and possible identities in the world. Eternity is now, no longer the vague sense of space and time having no end so familiar. Eternity, so to speak, is IN the world of normal dealings. Everything is, at this level of inquiry, indeterminate.
And this is, I argue, where discovery begins for questions about the nature of religion.
Yes. But they are all philosophers with a mission. Although, thinking about it, I'm not at all sure that the distinction really stands up.
Quoting ENOAH
Yes. But then I remember that some fleeting things are worth attending to and that I sometimes wish that some non-fleeting things would flee. I'm a bit of a contrarian, I'm afraid.
By traditional philosophy you mean what is called continental philosophy. I think neither Hegel nor Heidegger fits into Kierkegaard's thinking, but yes, I think you are qualifiedly right. It was Kant who drew the line in the sand. I mean, he was the one said you can know this, but never that. Never ever! Hegel was just as adamant, certainly considering Kierkegaard's complaint that Hegel attempted "to support a reduced existence as a clever expression of the logical." Heidegger's "nothing" is a concept entirely grounded in out finitude. He has a lot to say about this in Chapter 4 of B&T: Care as the Being of Dasein, and while his language sounds as if he is talking about some mysterious great beyond, he's not. This finitude is our "not-yet" existence which is anticipatory, and we face the "nothing" of an unmade future. Nothing otherworldly about it, but to realize one's freedom to create a future does require that we stand apart from possibilities, and are no longer blindly adhering to some predetermination.
Quoting ENOAH
Well, if this is meant to be a summery, then one should dismiss the actual things he says. The Concept of Anxiety is not something to be reduced to a few general notions, for example. I think one has to remember k's nostalgia for the time when there was no "culture" to speak of. Imagine Abraham's life with goats and sheep and family. Who in such a community of "Abrahams's" was literate? Rituals were simply acts of piety. His Attack on Christendom issues from a distain for the church collapsing into culture of the church, lacking that extraordinary simplicity in which there was nothing to compromise earnest faith.
Anyway, sure, the metaphysics of Kierkegaard seems along the lines of a faith of such implicit acceptance that it stood above the most inviolable rules of ethics. The rule against filicide, I think it is called, murder of one's son. This IS what is missing in Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, and even in Kierkegaard himself: it is one thing to reason and believe, quite another to be nailed to a cross of push the knife into your child.
Wait. Why missing in Kierk? Isn't that exactly his point? Arriving at belief through reason is "inferior" to arriving by a leap.
He stepped beyond the very line he drew explaining the way out. Russell called him a mystic. Wittgenstein then walked away, for he knew they, the positivists, had missed the point: it wasn't about the lack of meaning in the world. It was about language's inability make statements about logic wouldn't allow (in the Tractatus). This frees meaning rather than inhibits it.
Quoting Ludwig V
Depends on the philosophy. Philosophers differ most radically, especially considering the anglo american analytic vs the continental, the latter being European, mostly the German and the French. It is the continental tradition that continues to take metaphysics seriously, even when it's principle aim is to cancel metaphysics.
In analytic philosophy, words and meanings and their combinatory possibilities are intensely argued about. And these, as the original idea goes, work because snow is white, iff, snow is white. This is THE way to trivialize our existence.
Some thoughts: If you can stand the metaphor, the boat is never to be docked and abandoned, because the boat, too, is part of what unfolds. Put it this way: it is not thought that is to be discarded, but, I'll call it derivative and inhibitive meanings, these have to be put aside. Science has a lot to say, but it presupposes a lot, too. It presupposes the very structures of experience that lay the groundwork for observation. Continental philosophy goes here, to this grounding. Eastern meditation practices cut to the chase, so to speak. Where following through on Husserl's reduction ("Ideas" is a very worthy read!) is long and it wrestles with assumptions over and over, meditation simply cancels meanings, that is, as I see it, cancels the superstructure of pragmatic meaning that conceals the world. Nothing at all stops one from talking about this, but the talk will be filled with a strange uncanny problematic, because what unfolds is not, as Heidegger would put it, a being, or beings; but being as such. This pervasive "suchness" is "open" not simply to further interpretative work, but is existentially open. All concepts are interpretatively opens concepts, meaning if you track them down, you run into Derrida. This can remain in its mundanity and can stay, as you say, in a flourish of words, but this "metanoia" needs unpacking.
Let him tell you:
my courage is still not the courage
of faith and is not something to be compared with it. I cannot
make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and
plunge confidently into the absurd;18 it is for me an impossibility,
but I do not praise myself for that. I am convinced
that God is love; [b]for me this thought has a primal lyrical
validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably happy;
when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than the
lover for the object of his love. But I do not have faith; this
courage I lack.[/b]
And later:
The dialectic of faith is the finest and the
most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can
certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can
make the mighty trampoline leap20 whereby I cross over into
infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer's, twisted in my
childhood, and therefore it is easy for me. One, two, three
I can walk upside down in existence, but I cannot make the
next movement
For me, K takes this too far. He was, after all, a religious thinker. His complaint against the church was with the culture of the church, not the church as a standing historical institution. But then, his analyses are not religious. Original sin he calls a myth, though no worse than the myths of intellectuals. He didn't see that religion taken seriously, as he took it, was dangerously too disengaged to evolve ethically, which is something we see today in the narrow provincialism of the far right. Philosophy's job is negative, bringing question and doubt to basic ideas. What emerges is more pure, even if it is Derrida telling us language has no meaning outside of context. Things like Mill's "do no harm" are vague yet authoritative. "God is love" is like this. Int he simplicity lies the key, for after all, what IS the "referent" of this notion love? Once it is divested of the assumptions that fill this concept, and ground it in everydayness, what is ls after this reductive movement?
This is where post Husserlian thought takes one. Right to the place where it is realized that the world is a staggering presence, irreducible.
Brilliant! But has there not been anything vouchsafed for the fly, that is, embedded IN the delimited world of fly existence. Not the sky that summons like an impossible "over there," as the fly conceives the over there from the "in here" that establishes the distance to be spanned. It depends on the details of the carry over of meaning from the metaphor to the relevance at hand, which is our metaphysical quandary. A Buddhist would say the distance between fly and exit is no distance at all. We are always already the Buddha! Wittgenstein would agree, but in his own way. We should be silent about that which cannot be spoken, but only to leave the latter unconditioned by interpretative imposition, that maligns and distorts. For Witt, he says briefly, the good is the divine. Language has no place here.
Just looking over what I wrote to make sure my failure to proofread didn't cause a calamity and found this: "Well, if this is meant to be a summery, then one should dismiss the actual things he says."
Of course, it should read, one should NOT dismiss.
Yes, I see that he personally could not "transcend" to the leap. I meant for SK, ideally, a leap from reason, also a suspension of the ethical; all of which brings me back to seeing a subtle resemblance Zen. Not that either SK nor Zen deny reason and ethics their proper functions; but both recognize a "ultimate" truth/Reality which I'd not accessible by either means.
But your reply is informative. Thank you
Odd, that. I would have thought with all his musing about sin and despair, that it would seem a self-evident truth to him. My personal belief is that it signifies something profoundly real about the human condition, albeit obviously mythological.
Quoting Astrophel
Also oddly, perhaps, this resonates with Buddhist attitude of no-self (anatman) and emptiness (??nyat?), which is also precisely about the lack of any intrinsic self. But in Eastern culture, so far as I know, that is not described in terms of the absurd.
Well, you know this is the way it leans among those I pay attention to. Camus no doubt word this differently. And Heidegger doesn't talk like this. He takes one's finitude to be the only way to construct an authentic self. Camus' Sisyphean rock pushing is nihilistic, and he argued explicitly against Kierkegaard. What binds them is realizing that freedom is our existence. Freedom is the standing apart from the lived life and affirming it from a distance. THAT kind of existence doesn't possess you anymore.
Heidegger, later on, affirmed the value of gelassenheit, the yielding to the openness allowing the world to "speak," if you will. A very important move, I think, for even if one's thoughts are constructs of historical possibilities, there is in this openness things that are alien to this. And language may gather around this and discover a new "primordiality."
Buddhists and Hindus (metaphysics aside) cut to the chase.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kierkegaard thought that reason and existence were a train wreck. What can be said is qualitatively other than what IS. No wonder that Wittgenstein valued K so highly.
He confirmed it early on, too, but he said that people misread Being and Time. For H. , both early and late, ones thoughts project historical possibilities from ahead of oneself. History comes from the future, not the past.
We are essentially "not yet" even in the grasp of a memory, the memory as grasped is a "not yet". Our existence is "fundamentally futural." But in "the moment" (what looks to me like Heidegger's version of nunc stans) one is still bound to finitude: "So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a fall from a purer and higher primal status. Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or clues for Interpreting it. (p. 336 Stambough). There is nothing of a singular primordiality in this analytic. I read this to say that truly novel possibilities are simply bad metaphysics based on extravagant thinking about presence at hand (like Descartes of the Christian God).
Quoting Astrophel
By finitude, Heidegger, like Derrida, Deleuze and Nietzsche, doesnt mean we are hemmed in by cultural norms or our past. On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. It is not our past that produces our finitude, it is the utter individuality of our future. Fallneness is not a fall from some purer, higher status because the futural finitude of temporality functions implicitly even within fallnness.
Ah, you mean as in Kierkegaard's Repetition, as opposed to the "recollection". But in the liberated "moment," we are still bound to that which is there to be liberated, and this is cultural, bound, that is, in the sense that there is nothing else "there" in the possibilities.
Not for Heidegger. He defines primordial anxiety as dissociating oneself from ones familiar world, rendering beings as a whole meaningless, irrelevant and insignificant, so as to simultaneously open up new possibilities of acting and being. The self continually comes to itself, and ex-ists, from out ahead of itself. It is not the human will that creates this transformation, but time itself.
I see two different representations of the issues at play in this. They are often confused. The context in which Witt. talked about silence in the Tractatus, was a very narrow, restrictive notion of language. He (and Russell) approached everything in the context of logic - i.e. truth and falsity, the use of language to describe, the project of theory. So, in the Tractatus, what you and I would say were other, non-descriptive uses of language were not saying anything - silent - and were therefore meaningless. So when Russell called Witt. a mystic, he was not wrong, because Witt. did use the word "ineffable", but was not using it in quite the traditional sense of the word. But this generalizes the narrow, technical disagreement between them so that other issues appear to be included in its scope and, because Witt. is so hermetic in the Tractatus, it is very hard to be sure what scope he thought his ideas actually had/have.
Having said that, whatever exactly is going on here, he was indeed at least pointing to, or showing, something beyond the limits of what he thought language is and that does, in a way, free meaning, as you say. This leads us to meaning beyond language, language pointing beyond itself. Which is where we came in.
How far this issue is still in play in his later work is very hard to discern, except that he certainly doesn't work through arguments with premises and conclusions. He is much more interested in presenting examples and cases and letting us work things out for ourselves. How far he was imitated is another question.
What is finitude for Nietzsche? He affirms the primacy of a world of becoming over a world of being: That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being. (WP, 617). Likely, 'a word of being' corresponds to 'finitude'. Nietzsche does not deny that there are regularity, patterns, and identity, the same or the similar. Yet, they acquire stability of the same due to an endless translation and articulation of what becomes into what we perceive as the recurrence of the same. Deleuze formulates the principle of the eternal return such that only difference in itself (pure difference) returns, and never the same. It means that the same necessarily implicates time.
The time implicated in this way is also implicated in itself. The communication of time with itself, or the interplay of the past with the future, composes the eternal return of pure difference.
Quoting Astrophel
Thanks. But your subsequent comments opened up lines of thought that I have not explored before. Thank you also for that. I settled for the opening up of language beyond truth, falsity and description, the recognition of human knowledge as not necessarily entirely a matter of propositions and human life as more than knowledge as penetrating the Tractatus silence. But this (and this thread) is something else.
As to "But has there not been anything vouchsafed for the fly, that is, embedded IN the delimited world of fly existence. Not the sky..." I can't really grasp the viewpoint of the fly, but watching the behaviour of the insects caught in this trap does give some basis for some sort of empathy. Their behaviour is uncomprehending, furious, frustration and incredulity, expressed in repeating the same futile attempt to batter through the obstacle. (I did once walk straight into a glass wall that I had not noticed, and it was indeed completely bewildering, so I deeply sympathize with them.) Their eventual escape seems to be the result of a strategy - to back off and try again, - but each new attempt is random and eventual escape is the result of pure luck. They do give the impression of being delighted by their success and it is easy to empathize with that. Since one doesn't know why they are trying to get out through the window, it's hard to guess how they conceive what lies beyond it. As you say, it isn't the sky. Perhaps freedom is enough.
But the point, and the delight, of the metaphor lies in the difference between their understanding and the more comprehensive human view. So one point of it lies in the limitations of a specific point of view and the better understanding that can be gained from a different one - changing the game, so to speak. Pedestrian as it is, that certainly seems to apply to the problem of this thread.
In connection with that, the futility of the insect battering itself against the glass reminds me of the futility of our battering ourselves against the circle that language points beyond itself and yet there can be nothing beyond itself. I'm not convinced by any of the candidates for breaking this down. They are all suggestive in some way, but all seem to involve yet more words. Perhaps we need a change of viewpoint.
I don't say that Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Buddhists are all just plain wrong. Perhaps they are right, or partly right. Perhaps.
But, just for fun, here is another possibility. We approach this question by distinguishing language and world, epistemology and ontology, and then trying to work out how to get beyond the first to reach the second. But language also has its place in ontology (language exists). So if language is part of the world, perhaps we needs to understand it, and knowledge, by starting with the world and working out the place(s) and ways that they exist in it, taking their origin from it.
Of course, I take a stronger view: it is not that language has its place in ontology, but that the two are analytically inseparable. You cannot speak in any meaningful way about an ontology without an epistemology; or, it is impossible to affirm an ontology without affirming an epistemology simply because it is, after all, an affirmation, and this is an epistemic idea. Any attempt to talk about 'material substance," say, as foundational ontology apart from epistemology has no basis in observation and is just bad metaphysics. Observation here is meant in the most general sense: something must conform to the principles of phenomenology, which is to say, it must "appear". Appearing is the basis for being. That objects are "out there" and apart from me appears just in this way, and this is not challenged, our "difference" is not challenged, but the way this difference is expressed in language remains contextually bound.
Perhaps you can see, as I do, how liberating this is. It is essentially Cartesian, but Descartes didn't really understand that the cogito's affirmation issues from the beings it realizes in its gaze. This is what is not to be doubted, the very intimacy is encounter qua encounter, once the perception is cleared of busy assumptions that are always already there when I sit before a computer or look up and notice the time. Husserl provides the direction for this kind of philosophical thinking with his epoche.
Why it is so important, in my view, that phenomenology should rule our thinking in philosophy lies with religion and metaphysics. I should let Michel Henry speak on this:
Phenomenology is not the science of phenomena but of their essence, that is, of what allows a phenomenon to be a phenomenon. It is not the science of phenomena but of their pure phenomenality as such, in short, of their pure appearing. Other words can also express this theme that distinguishes phenomenology from all other sciences: demonstration [monstration], disclosure, pure manifestation, pure revelation, or even the truth, if taken in its absolutely original sense. It is interesting to note that these keywords of phenomenology are also for many the keywords of religion and theology.
When one makes the move toward a philosophy of our existence, then one moves into religion, and philosophy's job is define what this is minus the things that are extraneous to its essence, that is, one has do to religion what Kant did to reason, which is discover what is there in experience makes religion what it is, grounded in the world rather than in the extraordinary imaginations religious people.
Yes, that's the possibility I was getting at. In addition, I was hinting at the possibility that the "truth" or maybe just something deeper (whatever that means) might lie in the totality or intersection of the different ideas that have been presented (assuming that each of them works in its own context). That's not really a particularly exotic idea.
So how might we proceed? Let's start by identifying where we agree.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes. I want to add that language is an essential part of knowledge, at least in philosophical discourse, so we need to bear that in mind. Also, what an affirmation is may turn out to be complicated. Not all affirmations are the same. For example, affirmation of God's existence is not simply an empirical scientific hypothesis - or so I believe.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, Berkeley had to amend his slogan to "esse" is "percipi aut percipere", thus allowing that inference from an appearance to an unseen reality was not always illegitimate. That enables him to allow not only that he, as perceiver, but also other people (minds) and God exist. (He classified these additional entities as "notions" rather than "ideas", so that his principle was, he thought, preserved.) This seems to me to undermine his argument somewhat. But you only assert that appearance is the basis of being. So I think you could accept adding "capable of being perceived" to the slogan. (My Latin lets me down here.) I can accept that, though I might be more generous than you in what I consider what might appear to us or what might count as the appearing of something to us.
Quoting Astrophel
I agree that the conventional dismissal of the existence of God is not the end of the discussion and that an understanding (explanation) of the phenomenon (if you'll allow that word to apply in this context) is desirable and should be available. But whether that is possible without taking sides in the argument is not at all clear to me.
Quoting Astrophel
I'm puzzled about the "epoche" which I would have thought was meant to distinguish phenomenology not only from all other sciences, but also from religion and theology. Also, I would have thought that "demonstration [monstration], disclosure, pure manifestation, pure revelation, or even the truth," were also keywords for science. I must have misunderstood something. Perhaps I haven't understood "monstration" which I think quite specifically means the display of the host to the congregation. I don't see how that can be clearly distinguished from the display of an experiment to its audience.
Consider: Wittgenstein was wrong about the limitations of language (in the Tractatus), for there really is no limit to what language, as structured meaning, can say, or, whatever limitations there are, are trivial. Content is the issue, not logic. There is, I have read, a language that is shared among Tibetan Buddhists that is impenetrable from outside of this culture because there is no shared experiences with those on the inside. Hume once said of reason that it really had no value In it, and that left to its own nature, it would just as soon annihilate humanity as save it. Reason is an empty vessel, and if there were anything better than reason, reason would discover it. And finally, structural limitations are, of course, language limitations, and these are indeterminate. How does a term like 'logic' really pin things down without itself having been pinned?
I like to note that if God were to show up tomorrow at my doorstep, reason wouldn't flinch. So when Derrida says that language use generates a "trace" that is based on difference and deference within language, and there really is no way language reaches objects because the possibilities of positing a being rest with this trace within language as a whole (a contextual whole), I see this not as a prohibitive on what can be said, but rather a critical declaration of freedom. The world is not simply a logical structure of dictionary meanings interrelated to other dictionary meanings, but is an overwhelming content that has nothing to do with trace, or better, that "escapes" the grasp of the trace.
To understand something? Clearly there is a fence post there, but analysis cannot reveal how this epistemic connection is possible. So where does one begin to understand this? Start with the clarity of the encounter, the clear and forceful event, for THIS is what rules "primordially," and not Derrida's analysis. I grab the post "physically" and gaze at its "presence" and the certainty will not be challenged. Language is in play, but the encounter is not possessed by this. What is a world without all the thinking? One could say (Kierkegaard, for one) that the ancient mind was more attuned or aligned "authentically" not because their thinking was so free of error, but because there was so little of it. Imagine a mind that could look up at the sun and believe it to be a God, unfettered by a massive cultural embeddedness and a high school and college education.
Quoting Ludwig V
But being in love or suffering a burn is not complicated. These are entangled in complexity, just as working for General Motors is entangled, but does GM "exist"? I think the hard part of philosophy is determining if it is at all possible to say that there is something that is not language, not a construct, with neither a long historical lineage, nor a brief personal one.
Just because one can say it, doesn't mean it's real, and just because one cannot say it doesn't mean it is not real, and this doesn't divide the world into sayable and unsayable things, for ANYTHING can be said if it appears before one: Oh look, there it is! Remember when God appeared and you could fathom eternity? Why yes. Extraordinary! Language was NEVER about speaking the world. It was about shared experiences and the pragmatic requirements of doing this. Language is pragmatic.
God is no more unfathomable than my cat or this pencil. The question about God is not how unfathomable the concept is, but rather, what there IS in the world that tells us the term is not a fabrication, like General Motors or unicorns.
Quoting Ludwig V
Of course, there are things to be discovered, but if these are going to have philosophical significance, they have to elucidate at the most basic level. Quantum mechanics may demonstrate a startling acausal connectivity between events in the world, and who knows, this may lead to a revolution in epistemology, for I am convinced that this openness to the world which allows me to encounter other things is not reducible to any kind of idealism, but then, you can see why this has prima facie objections, for science presupposes the original setting of being and beings in the world. Epistemology is a relation between me and the world, and the agency I call myself is not empirically "observable" so what a quantum physicist observes is not going to be the original relation.
Quoting Ludwig V
I argue that Religion hangs on value in the world and the world's foundational indeterminacy. The joys and sufferings of the world are not contingent in their nature. Their entanglements are contingent, but not the ethical/aesthetic "good" and "bad" that is discovered IN these entanglements. All ethical issues are value-in-play issues, so the question as to what value is, is essential to understanding ethics. Value is the essence of ethics, meaning you take value out of a situaltion, and the ethics of the situation vanishes altogether. God is a construct, but the world's horrors are not, and nor is the indeterminacy of understanding of what these are.
Quoting Ludwig V
The phenomenological reduction (epoche) is a method of discovery of is "really there" as opposed to what is merely assumed to be there prior to inquiry. It is mostly a descriptive "science" if the original givenness of the world, and this is where philosophy belongs. A physicist will tell us Jupiter is mostly gaseous, a phenomenologist will say this simply assumes what Jupiter IS prior to calling it gaseous or anything else. Science's Jupiter is first a phenomenological construct, and science sits like a superstructure on top of this essential phenomenological structure.
The four principles of phenomenology:
1. so much appearing, so much being.
2. every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition
3. zu den Sachen selbst!(to the things themselves)
4. so much reduction, so much givenness.
The reason I think phenomenology is right is a bit complicated, but essentially, I have come to understand the bare simplicity of the idea that all one can every witness is phenomena. This is analytically true, for to be is to be witnessed. As I see it, there is only one way to second guess this, and this is through indeterminacy. It is, after all, caste in language, and language itself is indeterminate.
As to religion, I argue that this term has to first be liberated from its metaphysics and institutions. One does this by making the phenomenological move: what is there after we eject all of the superfluous thinking? Science does this with its regions of inquiry, the same rigor here. The ontology of religion is value-in-being. Like ethics, remove value, that is, the value dimension of experience, from the world, and religion vanishes as well. Religion is a metaethical and metaaesthetic phenomenon.
Thank you for this. I need to think about how to reply.
I grant you that the ancient people who thought that the sun was a god were unfettered by our culture and upbringing. It would seem that we have developed a culture that can free us from their cultural limitations. Consequently we can, to some extent, imagine ourselves in their place. But that does not mean that we are not ourselves limited in other ways. But they were surely fettered by their culture and upbringing. Unless culture and upbringing are not simply fetters but are the conditions of the possibility of thinking at all.
Quoting Astrophel
If it is not possible to say that already, it never will be.
Philosophers can say "let's free ourselves from all assumptions" and think that the thing is done in the saying of it. As if you could draw a picture without drawing a first line or, better, play/sing a tune without defining the notes. The preliminaries do not restrict us, but enable these things to be done.
Quoting Astrophel
Whatever it is, it is not the world that we know. Once you have developed the skill of making pictures or making music, you cannot go back and unmake it. One of the distinctive features of the sub-atomic world is that we have to acknowledge that the act of observation disrupts the objects we observe. We cannot go back and unmake our existence and intervention in the world.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
Here's what really bothers me about this. We talk of "phenomena" as if they existed independently of reality. But an appearance is always an appearance of something. When the sun appears from behind a cloud or the moon or rises, as we say, above the horizon, there are not two things, the sun and its appearance, but one thing, the sun appearing. When we are confused by the bent stick in water, there are not two things, the stick and its appearance, but one thing, the stick appearing to be bent. So the entire project of phenomenology rests on a specific ontology, which is taken for granted; this way of thinking about things is part of the preparation for the project, so cannot be lightly abandoned. But other ways of thinking are available.
I'm not saying that phenomenology is wrong, just that it is not the only game in town. We remain free to choose which game to play and when. Language, knowing and thinking are not complete and consistent wholes and so they afford us opportunities as well as imposing restrictions.