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. — jkop

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.

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

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.

Just to add, I am reminded of Foucault in an introductory book. Molloy is dying:

Foucault associates himself
with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t
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).

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.

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. — jkop

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.

We start with a tautology
it is impossible to affirm something about the being or existence or reality [...] in the world without this reality being, well, affirmed, and this is an epistemic term
— Astrophel
to justify the controversial (if same) statement that epistemology and ontology
are the same, I suspect, or mutually entailed — Lionino

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.

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. — 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."

You would want to justify that by saying that epistemology is the same 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. — 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.

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. — 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.

If seeing the lamp means confirming a conformed version of the lamp, then the word 'seeing' is used in a different sense than when seeing means the visual experience of the lamp's visible features. In this sense you never see the lamp but something else, a figment of conformity, whose visual features are conceptual, not empirical. — jkop

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?

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. — Banno

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.

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

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

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.

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.

Astrophel is being a bit obtuse in general — AmadeusD

I beg your puddin! Obtuse? Me? Okay, here and there.

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. — jkop

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:
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 physics—in the elementary physical states.(Quine, “Facts of the Matter,” 168–69)

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.

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 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. — Metaphysician Undercover

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.

Derrida in particular, bring the temporal nature of being to the forefront. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where, I wonder, does Derrida do this?

You’re 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. — Joshs

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 meaning—the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence—cannot 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!

An agent is you or I, not a proposition. A judgement might be put in propositional terms, if that is what you mean. — Banno

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.

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. — 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.

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. — 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?

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. — 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.

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. — 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).

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. — 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.

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. — Joshs

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.

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 don’t think that’s the kind of value-thinking you have in mind. — Joshs

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.

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? — Lionino

If it's clear, please tell me, in a nut shell.

Ok, so intentionality. There are several different alternatives for that, none is preferred over the other, possibly never will. — 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.

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. — jkop

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.)

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll read Pinkhard. Thanks. Unfold globally? You mean historically and throughout disparate cultures?

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

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:

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.

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

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

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.

How would you differentiate his notion of the pure encounter with that of Merleau-Ponty or Husserl? Merleau-Ponty’s 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. — Joshs

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.

Truth is analysable in terms of T-sentences.

"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. — Banno

Thinking like this leads to a failure to understand the world. "How things are" is exactly where the issue begins.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. "The cup has a handle." is true, or it is false.

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. — Banno

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.

You're saying that the "assumption" is not about a specific P being true prior to verification, but rather about truth in general being knowable and recognizable as such. Or if not truth in general, then truths of the sort that can (putatively) be verified by simple perceptual experiences such as seeing a cat, coupled with some basic background information. This procedure would reveal "truth-makers," if all goes well. — J

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.

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. — 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.

...is simply working at different aims. Knowledge is simply no longer justified true belief, its a process being unfolding itself. — 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.

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? — Lionino

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.

For me it's important to distinguish between claims (statements/propositions) and facts, i.e., states of affairs. If a statement is true, then it represents a fact or facts in reality. The idea that there is an ontology connected with the truth has some merit, i.e., we're referring to the existence of particular states of affairs or the possible existence of a state of affairs. A statement is true if it mirrors a fact, but facts exist apart from the statements themselves (at least many facts). A statement can be true quite apart from any justification, which is to say, I may not know the justification, in which case I don't know it's true. I may claim it's true as a matter of opinion or mere belief, but it's not knowledge. All of us have opinions, some of which are true, and some are false. A claim is never knowledge in itself unless we're referring to statements like "All bachelors are unmarried men." Of course, one could claim that the statement refers to linguistic facts based on the meanings of the words. So, even in this e.g., we could use a linguistic justification.

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 claim—for 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. — Sam26

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.

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’. — Joshs

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.

Perhaps the problem here is that we’re 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 aren’t 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? — J

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 aren’t 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?

All one has to do is examine causality for what it is, and it becomes clear that causality doesn't deliver knowledge
— Astrophel

This doesn't make sense. — Lionino

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.

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. — 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.

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. — Ludwig V

The alternative is to do a philosophical examination of truth, and unpack the notion of justified true belief.

This is focuses on first-hand knowledge — 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!

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. — 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.

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). — 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.

But rarely will a statement be true simply because of the observer — Banno

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.

The cows are over there" will be true entirely and only if the cows are indeed over there; — 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.

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. — 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.

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. — 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.

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.

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. — Banno

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.

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? — Banno

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.

There are no unknown truths? Then I will bow to your omniscience, since you know everything that is true. — Banno

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.

That is, it may be true, or otherwise, regardless of any relation to an individual knowing it to be true. — Banno

If it lies outside of any relation to an individual, then it lies outside of propositional possibilities.

Your antirealism betrays you. — 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.

There are unknown truths — Banno

No, not really. It is not as if there are conditions in the waiting for discovery that are true outside of discovery itself.

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. — 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.

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.

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.

It certainly does. How would you interpret the meaning of transcendence as Husserl uses it to refer to such entities as spatial objects? For instance, when he says that a real object like a ball is transcendent to the various perspectives of it that we actually see? Does he mean the ball is external to the constituting ego, or that we constitute its transcendence via an idealizing gesture immanent to the ego? — Joshs

Looked around for the best way to look at this, and found in the chapter on noesis and noema (Ideas I) where he speaks of the transcendental object only in the context of the naturalistic pov. But the external object is, in the epoche, found in a systemic eidetic horizon and the object is epistemically secured in the intentional relation. So in the phenomenological reduction, the ball is no longer a ball, but its taken-as-a -ball (I see where Heidegger got this); the ball as a ball in space is suspended.