t I am more interested in how the boundary is formed; the 'dash' between organism and environment. You say, "the organism interprets..." and one assumes therefrom that the environment does not interpret. So there is an action before the act of interpretation, which is the act of self identification, that has to happen for there to be a separate world to interpret. — unenlightened

Most of our living is social, and our cultural environment is reciprocally interpretive. In the agential realism of Karen Barad and Joseph Rouse the non-human environment also interprets. Not everything for them has to lead back to a perceiving subject. They are perfectly happy to imagine a world without humans or animals in which each aspect of it interacts with other aspects in an agential way. That is, material interaction always takes place within configurations of mutual affecting that lend to all phenomena an intrinsically interpretive character.

Concerning the idea of organismic self-identification, on the one hand, one would have to say that the ‘self’ of the organism is not something locked within the borders of the physical body or brain, but is instead the ongoing and continually changing patterns of activity produced by brain-body-world reciprocal interaction. On the other hand, the organism part of this body-world interaction is characterized by a certain operational closure or asymmetry with respect to the world. Merleau-Ponty describes this ‘boundary’ as a ‘flesh’ of the world or chiasm, a kind of reciprocal exchange. One would have to imagine a self which continually comes to itself from the world, reinventing itself through this exposure and yet maintaining a certain integrity or style of being through these changes.

. The idea of the eternal now requires the idea that we can transcend the experience-experiencer duality. As you seem to say, if we cannot do this the idea makes no sense.

We never experience the pure present. There isn't time to experience it. But we can be in it. This explains how yogis can sit for weeks without moving. They are not experiencing the passing of time. — FrancisRay

Is such a sitting yogi having an experience of anything while they claim to not experience the passing of time? There is a tendency to confuse the conventional measurement of time
via clocks and time itself. For instance, the concept of time dilation in physics is typically described as a slowing down or speeding up of time because clocks slow down when accelerated. But a more slowly ticking clock is not the same thing as a time moving more slowly. Most fundamentally time is not like motion, to be sped up or slowed down. Time is the nature of the changes in what we are involved in. If we are immersed in a flow experience, the consistency and coherence of that kind of creative unfolding will be experienced as a speeding up or stoppage of time, because we normally pay attention to a clock and it’s meaningless movements when our task is interrupted, or when we are distracted and bored.
In short , where there is no time there is no experience. The mystical and religious notions of pure unchanging reflexivity, of awareness without intention, fail to recognize that such notions of pure identity rely on fundamental difference. The only pure ground is already a repetition. It is the repetition of difference in itself.

Perspective seems to correspond to the form of the rock; the rock has a form, and that gives rise to any subject necessarily having a particular perspective on the rock. Whereas the 'affect' of an organism is the internally generated sense of its own being. The yeast cell defines itself and delimits itself as sugar in, CO2 or Alcohol out.

A subject locates itself as an entity, and its perspective arises from its location. But such a definition of self is necessarily permeable and incomplete. It's affect is its response to its environment as well as its response to itself. ( — unenlightened

The enactivists look at subject-object, organism-environment this way:
The organism interprets its world, but not by representing it, not by attempting to match an internal model with an external reality. Instead, perception is grounded in sensory-motor interactions with the world. We know by doing, not by representing. Organisms know their world by building a niche out of it and interacting with this niche. Whatever aspects of that world are irrelevant to the goals and purposes that are defined by organism-niche interaction are invisible to that creature. So all living systems, through their activity within their niche, continually define their world via what matters, is significant and relevant to their continued functioning. The organism ceases to be an organism as soon as it loses this goal-oriented integrity and unity of functioning. Affect in its most basic form is simply this normative, goal-oriented organizational a priori. To perceive a rock as an object with properties such as weight, size and shape is to first construct such idealizations as identically persisting object number, magnitude, extension and measure. In other words, mathematics, logic and empirical science are human-created environmental niches that guide the way we interact with our world. They are affective value systems, through which we normatively determine correctness or incorrectness, truth and falsity in relation to all the features of rocks and other value objects experienced from within our constructed niche.

We are self-aware as a unified whole - perception of shape, colour and movement appear to us as a unified whole (or gestalt) even though the sub-systems of the brain which process these are separate. Neuroscience hasn't identified the particular brain system that provides for this unification. It's called the 'neural binding problem' and is recognised as a scientific validation of the hard problem of consciousness… current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience. — Wayfarer

Enactivists disagree with Chalmers belief that we dont have a way to explain the unification of consciousness or subjective experience empirically. For instance, Evan Thompson sees affectivity as the unifying glue.

Rather than being a collection of pre-specified modules, the brain appears to be an organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and experience-dependent activity (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997; Quartz, 1999; Karmiloff-Smith, 1998), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997).”

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. Affect has numerous dimensions that bind together virtually every aspect of the organism—the psychosomatic network of the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system; physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and the superior cortex; facial-motor changes and global differential motor readiness for approach or withdrawal; subjective experience along a pleasure–displeasure valence axis; social signalling and coupling; and conscious evaluation and assessment (Watt, 1998). Thus the affective mind isn't in the head, but in the whole body; and affective states are emergent in the reciprocal, co-determination sense: they arise from neural and somatic activity that itself is conditioned by the ongoing embodied awareness and action of the whole animal or person.

Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living beings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.”

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.”
(Thompson 2001)

How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved? — baker

Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.

“The human being lets “himself” be influenced not only by particular other humans (actual or imagined) but also by social objectivities that he feels and apprehends as effective objectivities in their own right, as influencing powers. He is afraid of “the government” and carries out what it commands. He views such and such individuals, for instance, the police officer, etc., as representatives of the government only; he fears the person who is an official representative. The customs, the church, etc., he feels as powers, too. Seen from the objective perspective of the historian and sociologist, human beings are real and, among them, such and such interconnected relations exist, such and such social objectivities exist, etc. And the task is to describe this in general, concrete and, where possible, in comparative terms, to describe the factual connection, to delineate universal class-concepts and rules, etc., just as in any morphology.

If the community of humankind is to be described historically in concreto in its becoming and in its dependence on other communities (for even the social objectivities have their “causality”), then the objective of an understanding of the inner connections requires that one immerse oneself so deeply in the consciousness of the respective individual human beings, so as to be able to exactly relive their motivations. One must immerse oneself so deeply that one brings to “givenness” their interpretations, supposed experiences, their superstitious fantasies, by means of which they let themselves be “influenced,” let themselves be guided, attracted, or repelled. The “real connections” consist in this: Under given circumstances such and such notions, etc., were (“understandably”) evoked in human beings, whereby such and such reactions were motivated in them, which in turn determined the course of their development.” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology)

but I favor an inclusive approach. It's all real. Confused daydreams are real, and they exist in the style of confused daydreams. All entities are semantically-inferentially linked in a single nexus. Language is directed at the one common world. — plaque flag

You’d like Deleuze’s approach. He distinguishes between the virtual and the actual. Both are real; the virtual is the problematic field within which actual events arise and disappear.

I'd rather say physics doesn't need to make metaphysical suppositions. It has banished metaphysics to a different department. Physicists often stray into metaphysics and sometimes hold strong views, but when they do they're no longer doing physics — FrancisRay

I’m not talking about sitting down to write a treatise with the word ‘metaphysics’ in the title. I’m talking about the presuppositions , usually unexamined, that make it possible to do any kind of science. Thomas Kuhn understood this. Think of a scientific paradigm as a kind of metaphysical frame. Physicists may think they have banished metaphysics, when all they have done is banish a certain strand of metaphysical thinking and substituted for it another, even more insidious one , which they are so far from recognizing that they have convinced themselves they have somehow escaped from history.

we do not experience time. It is a fiction created from memories and anticipations. This is what Husserl means by saying time is stretched. It has to be stretched in order to create the illusion that we are experiencing it. — FrancisRay

I would say it is the pure present we only experience as a fiction , and that, most primordially, the only thing we do experience is the tripartite structure of time.

The study of appearances is physics and the natural sciences and the the study of their origin and true nature is metaphysics and mysticism, so I'm not sure how phenomenology could be defined as a distinct subject. The boundaries are always going to be messy. . . .

I wonder if we all agree on the definition of phenomenology, since all those I've seen are quite vague. . — FrancisRay

I would say physics is the study of appearances as filtered though a particular set of metaphysical suppositions, what Husserl calls objectivist metalhysics. All science is doing metaphysics, but implicitly rather than explicitly. Heidegger would say that the notion of ‘appearance’ of a world before a subject is itself grounded in a particular metaphysical presupposition. A perhaps you can see, Im defining metaphysics as a set of grounding presuppositions guiding any domain of culture.

Husserl shows that (the 'experience' of ) time is stretched. There is no pointlike now, except as a useful mathematical fiction (the glories of R). But the gap between the so-called experience of time and time itself is also a fiction. 'Time in itself' is silly talk, 'decadent' metaphysics without an intuitive foundation — plaque flag

Yes, which is why I think Heidegger’s critique of internal time consciousness as a metaphysics of presence is a bit unfair to Husserl.

The point is that phenomenology is exclusively concerned with observable phenomena or appearances and has nothing to say about the origin and essential nature of phenomena. Thus it is defined as being free from any claims concerning existence. It doesn't stray onto metaphysics but is a non-reductive approach. Nothing wrong with this but it cannot produce a fundamental theory — FrancisRay

This doesn’t seem to be true for the founder of phenomenology:

Our monadological results are metaphysical, if it be true that ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical. On the other hand, what we have here is anything but metaphysics in the customary sense: a historically degenerate metaphysics, which by no means conforms to the sense with which meta­physics, as "first philosophy", was instituted originally. Phe­nomenology's purely intuitive, concrete, and also apodictic mode of demonstration excludes all "metaphysical adventure", all speculative excesses. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

To bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities and thus to bring to in­sight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility—this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the
strenuous road to realization. It is the only way to decide
whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy—that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its truth and genuine human nature— whether this telos, then, is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations * and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not
rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy. ( Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences)

The 'pure witness' is, in my view, anonymous being, more like a clearing or the light that shines on the scene of development. Or really just its being there. Just its happening.

FWIW, I don't think babies are able to think of being in this world, but I think we practiced concept-mongers understand their awareness to be awareness of the world. — plaque flag

Yes, indeed.
The personal ego is itself an idealism in that, rather than leading us back to the apodictic self-othering, subjective-objective becoming of temporal constitution, the psycho-physical ego is itself a product of constitution, via self-apperception. When we complete the epoche by abstracting away this self-apperception, we arrive at the primordial stratum where there is as yet no ego, but there remains the unitary flow of subjective temporal processes. “At the beginning of its development, the subject is not an Object for itself and does not have the apperceptive unity, "Ego."”(Ideas II, p.361)

Husserl argues that “As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.”(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. “...the ego which is the counterpart (gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. “ This suggests that for Husserl, the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity.

The world is never the same 'twice,' and yet I am describing the world, as predictably infinitely novel. Concepts have a relative stability that makes our conversation possible. — plaque flag

Husserl’s genetic method begins with an ego-intentionality which we imagine as preceding the constitution of any regularities in experience. At this point there isnt much to determine that there is something like ‘the’ world, if this is to indicate a realm of recognizable regularities, patterns and meaning. So what sort of process is required to turn a chaos of meaningless flux into the meaningful, stable patterns that would justify calling what we experience ‘the’ world? The flux would certainly need to make itself amenable to the construction of simple predictable groupings of some sort or other, but this is still a far cry from a world of stable objects that the subject can interact with. One would have to imagine that the subject progressively synthesizes out of simpler correlations more and more complex ones. In Heidegger’s terms, the subject creates a ‘worlding’. If this is an entangling of subject and world , it is one in which what the world brings to the correlation is subordinated to the requirements of recognizability and similarity.

“...consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness [in the same person] by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through "commonality." through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth)

Right, but it isn't just translation. We'd need some sort of very good predictive capability — Count Timothy von Icarus

Predictive capacity is already implied in the philosophical approach. Translation proceeds from a philosophical mode of anticipation into a conventionalized mode of prediction, which in today’s sciences means mathematisizing the objects of study i order to build apparatus for the purposes of calculation and measurement. This doesn’t make the scientific version more precise than the philosophical , it merely swaps a deeper philosophical notion of precision for a shallow instrumental idea of precision.

The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you.

Phenomenology might help us find an answer to the hard problem, or it might tell us that the answer we want is unattainable, but it can't answer the problem because the problem is about explaining the subjective elements of consciousness in the same sort of language/model that we use for explaining how a car works — Count Timothy von Icarus

So by way of circular reasoning, if we define science as a conventionalized philosophical language, then the philosophical solution to the hard problem only becomes a scientific solution once we translate the former language into a more conventionalized form. Kind of like what enactivist psychology and neurophenomenology have done with phenomenology.

….

I claim that we see the same object differently. Even I, by myself, see the same object differently as I walk around it or shine my flashlight on it. The object transcends and unifies its adumbrations. — plaque flag

For Husserl the object transcends its adumbrations because it is not an actual substance but only an idealization, the noetic striving toward the fulfillment of the idea of a unified, singular object, which can never be completely attained. The unified object is the subjective (noetic) interest in or attitude toward the adumbrated elements we constitute. This ‘intentional effect’ forces us to think the similar in terms of the same. Nothing in our experience of the world ever gives us the justification to claim that what we see is the ‘same’ object, except in a relative way.

“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

“…only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjec­tively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about. But idealism was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions…”(Basic Problems)

Sounds like an important point. I can guess at the answer, but for you, as a long time student of phenomenology, what is the significance of this point for how humans live with each other? Can it be applied in a practical way? — Tom Storm

A misinterpretation of the significance of scientific results can result in the marginalizing and excluding of those who deviate from the norms out of which the scientific facts are generated. I was watching a youtube presentation by the popular physicist Shaun Carroll He was charming his college audience with his confident and humor-laden assertions about the superiority of the scientific method over claims from religious traditions. The ignorance he displayed concerning the basis of his own field in unprovable presuppositions turned my stomach. Phenomenology gives us a way to identity and protect the unique perspectives of all participants in a community even when their views deviate from the dominant scientific conventions.

Granted that the stream of experience changes, are their general structures which are relatively constant ? I think Husserl and Heidegger and others have tried to sketch that relatively constant structure. If being is a river, it has a shape. (?)

The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers… The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties — plaque flag

What you’re quoting is an analysis of how we perceive our relation to things within the natural attitude. You realize of course that Husserl goes on to ‘deconstruct’ the idealizations of the natural attitude and its objective time as derivative of subjective time. When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. Through the reduction we can come to see that it is not the same empirical thing we all see from our own vantage, any more than the aspectual features unfolding in our apprehension of a spatial object belong to the ‘same’ object.

ccording to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods). It is the "observing self" that remains when we bracket out or set aside all our beliefs about the world, including our own existence in it. This bracketing process, which Husserl termed "phenomenological reduction," allows for the focus on consciousness as such and its structures without becoming entangled in empirical or naturalistic assumptions. For Husserl, the transcendental ego is the source and condition for the constitution of all meaning and objectivity. Objects appear as meaningful and objective only within the intentional acts of the transcendental ego. This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. (It is in this last where one can trace the influence of Kant although of course Husserl also departs from Kant in many important ways.)

This doesn't so much 'dissolve the sensing and thinking subject', as dissolving acts of sensing and thinking so as to lay bare the transcendental subject. — Wayfarer

The reduction doesn’t dissolve acts of sensing, that is, acts of constituting and objectivating, and certainly not acts of feeling. It dissolves the products of these acts ( real spatial objects and empirical facts) in order to lay bare the irreducible structure of synthetic constitution itself.

“In no way do we accept what any empirical act presents to us as being. Instead of living in its achievement, and instead of clinging naıvely to its positing with its sense after its achievement, we rather turn to the act itself and make it itself, plus what in it may present itself to us,
an object.

The transcendental ego is not an observer, it is a synthesizer and product of synthesis, continually generating new senses of meaning. The transcendent ego is not a subject as opposed to an object. It is a synthetic structure composed of a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) pole. It is only abstractively that we can think of these poles separately from each other. This subject-object structure is only what it as through its acts, as the flowing repetition of temporal syntheses (retention-presencing-protention).

“The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all embracing consciousness of internal time.”

Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“In my ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

The transcendental reduction does not remove empirical
contents, it leaves them as they are but does not attend to them in their specific relativity and contingency. Rather, it uses them as examples in order to extract from them what is universal to any and all particular data of consciousness, the fact that what an object is is a function of its mode of givenness within intentional constitution.

:up: I think the human imagination is a domain for fruitful exploration, but not for definitive knowledge of anything other than just what is imaginable. I, like you, am science oriented in that I think the only really definitive knowledge comes from observation. Phenomenology, including introspection, I would say gives us knowledge of how things appear to us to be, but I don't have any confidence that it can tell us how things really are. Here I have principally the nature of consciousness in mind, and maybe we can never know what its nature is as it cannot be directly observed. — Janus

Imagination and observation can’t be disentangled in the way you think they can. It is not as though what we imagine is locked in some secret inner sphere we call subjective consciousness. That’s an old fashioned way of thinking about subjectivity which just perpetuates a dualistic thinking (imagination is non-observational subjectivity, scientific observation is oriented toward contact with a real, objective world). This way of thinking is utterly unable to explain how leading edge philosophical ideas thoughout history have anticipated , by decades or more, the results of the sciences. Observation indeed.

I tend to think our world is pre-cognitively co-constructed by the bodymind/ environment and that we are constitutionally blind to that process. We and the world, the whole shebang, emerge out of the other side of that process, so to speak — Janus

This intersubjective construction of objectivity is what phenomenology is about , not ‘introspection ’, which is a common misunderstanding of its method.

Mama say what? :yawn: — jgill

Don’t tell Sokal

(By the way, googling for the source of the quote that Josh provided above, I happened upon this pdf from the erudite and charming Michel Bitbol, a French - therefore continental! - philosopher of science - Is Consciousness Primary?) — Wayfarer

One of the important features of the paper is that it isn’t trying to posit consciousness as an ineffable, inner sanctum. On the contrary, Bitbol emphasizes the irreducibly intersubjective nature of experience.

“…objectivity arises from a universally accepted procedure of intersubjective debate. Do not construe it as a transcendent resource of which intersubjective consensus is only an indirect symptom. Draw inspiration from a careful reflection about physics : either from the process of emergence of objective temperature valuations from an experiential underpinning , or from the model of quantum mechanics construed as a science of inter-situational predictive invariants rather than a science of “objects” in the ordinary sense of the word. Then, recognize that intersubjectivity should be endowed with the status of a common ground for both phenomenological reports and objective science. Start from this common ground in order to elaborate the amplified variety of knowledge that results from embedding phenomenological reports and objective findings within a unique structure.”

IMO, there is nothing particularly theistic at expressing awe at the regularities in the world. We appear to have a universe with a begining. So at one point, there was a state at which things had begun to exist before which nothing seems to have existed. This forces us to ask the question "if things can start existing at one moment, for no reason at all, why did only certain types of things start to exist and why don't we see things starting to exist all the time? Or if things began to exist for a reason, what was the reason?"

I don't see how this is essentially a theistic question though. It seems like a natural outgrowth of human curiosity, God(s) or no. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One can trace a Platonism beginning in Greece, making its way through religious Christian thought and finally arriving at a humanism which retains the idea of the uncaused cause and the pure immanent identity of what presents itself to itself, but transfers these from God to mathematical idealities such as identity, pure quantitative magnitude and
extension.

↪Joshs Seeing the same things and conceiving of them in different ways are two different things altogether. I haven't denied that we might come, and historically speaking have come, to conceive of things in novel ways — Janus

I think I sent this to you before, from Francisco Varela, but I’ve always found it provoking.

One of the most seductive forms of subjectivism in contemporary thought is the use made of the concepts of interpretation, whether by pragmatists or hermeneuticists. To its credit, interpretationism provides a penetrating critique of objectivism that is worth pursuing in some detail. To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.

We experience things with preconstructed abilities to represent; but this isn’t where knowledge starts: that’s a model we came up with to predict our experience. It could be that we don’t represent anything at all, nor do ‘we’ exist in the world as it actual is. — Bob Ross

I think phenomenologists would agree that our ability to represent or model is not primary. They would say instead that there is no experience of any kind that is not conditioned by prior experience, which anticipatively projects forward into and shapes what we actually experience. This is not a consciously created model or representation that we simply fit over what we see. It is an intrinsic part of what we see. This mutual dependence between subjective projection and objective appearance is most fundamentally what the world actually is, and we can never get beyond or beneath this intertwined structure of experience to get to an independently objective world or an inner subjective realm.

Science observes, and then attempts to explain what is observed. I see fire, for example, and I explain it in terms of phlogiston, then later I explain it in terms of agitated molecules. I continue to see the fire the same way; its appearance does not change regardless of the theory about its cause. — Janus

Do you think you would see a group of lines the same way if you recognized them as just a pile of sticks compared with seeing them as forming a familiar Chinese character? Would your eye follow the shapes in the pile the same way? If you had never seen a computer before would you recognize the tower, mouse and screen as belonging to a single object? If you didnt know what a bus was for would you interact with it in the same way?

The way we formulate our enquiries towards the world is in response to the way the world appears to us. We have no control over how the world appears to us. — Janus

What would you consider conscious control? Remember those magic eye puzzles with the embedded 3-d object? Or what about optical illusions where you can switch between tow images within the same picture? Isn’t that analogous to how well science can reconfigure the way that world appears to us though a gestalt shift?

•Logic is relationships which always replicate; a subset of science — Kaiser Basileus

Do relationships which always replicate exist in nature?

I'd have to say, "Of course mathematics is in the world — wonderer1

Mathematics is the world to the same extent that French or German is in the world, as a peculiar grammar by which we organize it for our purposes.

Bitbol provides a counter to this argument:

... the reality of first-person consciousness is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied.
If X is true by definition (i.e. apodictic), then X is merely abstract and not concrete, or factual. Given ubiquitious and continuous (i.e. embodied) stimulae from environmental imbedding, sufficiently complex, functioning, brains generate recursively narrative, phenomenal self models (PSM)¹ via tangled hierarchical (SL)² processing of which "first-person consciousness" consists. That these processes are also voluntarily as well as involuntarily interruptable, Wayfarer, demonstrates that the "reality (that) cannot be plausibly denied" is primarily virtual. :sparkle: — 180 Proof

“The creators of objective knowledge become so impressed by its efficacy that they tend to forget or to minimize that conscious experience is its starting point and its permanent requirement. They tend to forget or to minimize the long historical process by which contents of experience have been carefully selected, differenciated, and impoverished, so as to discard their personal or parochial components and to distillate their universal fraction as a structure. They finally turn the whole procedure upside down, by claiming that experience can be explained by one of its structural residues. Husserl severely criticized this forgetfulness and this inversion of priorities, that he saw as the major cause of what he called the “crisis” of modern science (Husserl, 1970).

According to him, it is in principle absurd to think that one can account for subjective conscious experience by way of certain objects of science, since objectivity has sprung precisely from what he calls the “life-world” of conscious experience.
One might suspect that this is only the old-fashioned opinion of some philosophers of the past who knew virtually nothing about modern neurophysiology. But, interestingly, the same remark was stated in several texts of modern scientists, as an elementary truth one is bound to rediscover after a long wandering in the labyrinth of naturalism. One finds it, inter alia :
• in many articles of Francisco Varela, according to whom “Lived experience is where we start from and where all must link back to, like a guiding thread”

my OP is using the definition of metaphysics which is the study of that which is beyond all possible experience, so within that terminology I am saying it is an illegitimate source of knowledge… I think the single biggest problem for Kant is that he starts out with a model and not pure experience. We should always start epistemically with pure experience. We do not know immediately that our conscious experience is a representation, once we do take up that model then Kant’s arguments come into play. — Bob Ross

Kant’s metaphysics grounds the condition of possibility of experience in something prior to experience. This turns the subjective categories into in-themselves objects, transcendent to the experience they condition. Your recommendation to start out from pure experience runs the risk of substituting for Kant’s idealist metaphysics an empiricist metaphysics in which we assume the objects of pure experience can be made to appear to us disconnected from the presuppositions and expectations we bring to our apprehension of them.

Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who advocated a return to the things themselves, argues that the pure experience of things always comes already conditioned by prior experience. Things appear out of a background interpretive field.

“We must show that idealism is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.”

r. If the regularities are there, then "what mathematics describes," is everywhere in the universe, even if "mathematics" is not. If we take mathematics only to be the descriptions, not the things described, then mathematics is still "embedded in the universe — Count Timothy von Icarus

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin described the empirical world as a ‘responsive order’. By that he meant the evidence we receive from the world is a response to the way we formulate our inquiries toward it. It can respond very precisely to different formulations, but always in different ways, with different facts. This is why the evidence ( and regularities) changes with changes in scientific paradigms. We can think of the responsive order as a kind of dance or discursive conversation. The assumption here is that our perceptions, observations and models are not representations of something. Instead they are forms of action on the world. We make changes in our environment and anticipate how it is likely to respond and talk back to our instigations, based on channels of expectation we erect from previous interactions with it. This is like a dance that I teach someone, in which my moves have built into them expectations concerning how the other will respond to my actions. Their actual response will never precisely duplicate my expectations, and so I adjust my next move to accommodate the novel aspect of their response.

Through this continual reciprocal process of action, feedback and and adjustment, not just between me and the world but between me and a discursive community of other scientists, I come to see a world of predictable regularities. I may even convince myself that these regularities are embedded in the world itself rather than being the product of a particular interactive dance that I initiate according to certain rules. In order to form this belief, I must formulate the dance in such a way that I abstract away my intricate adjustments to the continually changing qualitative feedback the world answers my actions with. To do this, I construct logico-mathematical idealizations that force changes in kind into changes of degree. Out of a flowingly changing experiencing I abstractively construct idealized ‘objects’ that I can then compare and contrast calculatively through methods of quantification. But then to claim that these mathematical structures are embedded in the world is like saying that the actual dance that results from the reciprocal back and forth adjustments between me and a partner are embedded in that partner. In fact they are embedded in neither the subject nor the object, but in the in-between interaction guided and constrained by the subject’s normative expectations.

What mathematics addresses is in the world, but it is no more a description of that world than my initiating and participating in a dance is a description of the dance. What mathematical structures describe, then, is the idealizing objectivating comportment of a subject toward its world, that way in which it conditions the world to talk back to it in the form of self-identical objects and quantitative relations. Having a world to idealize ( even if the aspect of that world one is idealizing derives from imagination) is is as essential as having a subject to do the idealization. Each side is in partnership with the other.

I will say this. It is no accident I used the metaphor of the dance , rather than something like a chaotic flux, to describe our relation to the world. I believe ongoing structural regularities are intrinsic to our experience of the world, but I also think logic-mathematical reasoning is derivative and secondary in comparison with the reciprocal, pragmatic kind of regularity exemplified by a dance.

What have humans got, the other species haven't got?
— Corvus

Symbolic language. — Janus

(Access to this article is behind a paywall, so I copied most of it here)

The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean? by Sonia Shah

Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.
Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called FoxP2 — in a London family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2 as the long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the gene turned up in the genomes of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the “language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read, “It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats, dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch discovered that species with larynxes different from ours — ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them, the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might appear in other animals as well.


Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T. linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on the subject as a co-author. That paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and things separated by time and space and its power to generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like, ‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

One of the thorniest problems researchers sought to address was the link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was “a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I. studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized distinct brain pathways. Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an adult human brain.”

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure, in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction, philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.
For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as theoretically accessible to any social species.


The search for the components of language in nonhuman animals now extends to the far reaches of our phylogenetic tree, encompassing creatures that may communicate in radically unfamiliar ways.
This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition, in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times, he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be trained to use sign language to converse with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad that allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine. The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy, like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to the early stages of language acquisition in children.”

While experimenting with animals trapped in cages and tanks can reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild. Past studies often conflated general communication, in which individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals, with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets, it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys. But critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies, Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a special vocalization when they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether “jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another element to his experiments: an eight-inch stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was, by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the “jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600 instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked “across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far, her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures that trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and 2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes, which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant. She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50 gestures from the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023 paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing very special about human language. Other species use intentional wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission, satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species that use features of language in their communications have few obvious geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the properties of language in any species other than our own.
For some scientists, the mounting evidence of cognitive and linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,” Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of “language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a 2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with the computer scientist and computational linguist Robert C. Berwick, Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different” from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the “striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity. Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional. But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.”

Fine’s paper is an illustration of the divide between Analytic and contemporary Continental ways of thinking about metaphysics.
— Joshs

I don’t think this is plausible, and largely because Fine’s construal of metaphysics is the classical construal, stretching back thousands of years. It predates the curious dichotomy between the analytic and continental schools. — Leontiskos

I don’t doubt that Fine’s construal is the classical
construal, but that doesn’t change the fact that contemporary Continentals don’t understand metaphysics this way, for the same reason that they don’t understand the origin and function of logic in the classical way. I dont just have Heidegger in mind here , but the heirs of Husserl, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

You seem to be defining logic differently than Fine does. You seem to have in mind particular logics or particular epochs in logic. Fine is thinking of logic as that which pertains to the structure of thought itself — Leontiskos

If we define logic in the broadest possible terms, then it is simply the basis of the functioning of an economy or system of relations. Each metaphysical system brings with it its own logic. In his paper, Fine is not treating logic in this general sense, but presupposes a particular kind of systematics which he applies to his definition of metaphysics. All logic to him seems to be propositional in character, but this is not the case for the Continentals I mentioned.

Here is a paper by Kit Fine on the topic, "What is Metaphysics?" — Leontiskos

Fine’s paper is an illustration of the divide between Analytic and contemporary Continental ways of thinking about metaphysics. This paragraph encapsulates the difference:

“…the elements of meta­physics are those of penultimate generality, next in generality to the logical elements. Thus anything more general than a metaphysical element will
be logical and anything less general will be neither metaphysical nor logi­cal. If we were to think of logic as relating to the structure of thought and of metaphysics as relating to the structure of reality, then logic would provide us with the most general traits of thought and metaphysics with the most general traits of reality.”

Fine’s paper exemplfies this thinking by using a logical grammar to articulate his definition of metaphysics. By contrast, for contemporary Continentalists of various stripes, logic is not more general than metaphysics, it is the contingent product of a certain era of metaphysics.

They can be useful words, but in philosophical conversation in which we are trying to come to an objective solution to a problem, these words have so much cultural subjectivity loaded into them that their meaning become debates within a debate… When having a discussion that needs clarity, we should remove such words where possible to focus on the true issue we wish to discuss.
— Philosophim

What about words like worldview, cultural subjectivity, formulation of problems, perspective, frame of reference, bias, set of presuppositions, paradigm? If we dont remind ourselves that objective solutions to problems are true, factual and objective only in relation to the way problems are formulated, and that the formulation of the nature of problems is not itself amenable to scrutiny in terms of objective truth, then we fool ourselves into believing that objective truth can somehow transcend the cultural relativity and contingency of problem formulation.
Furthermore, focusing on objective solutions to problems often ends up marginalize those who don’t come into the conversation with the same set of presuppositions.

2. Making philosophy more directly relevant to the sciences. Because I read a LOT of popular science and philosophy of science it's become fairly obvious to me that a lot of bad science, bad philosophy, and wasted efforts talking past each other could be avoided by having science majors have a single "applied epistemology for the natural/social sciences," course — Count Timothy von Icarus

Most university philosophy departments offer specialization in philosophy of mind, which reaches into biology, neuroscience, computer science and cognitive psychology. Isnt this an example of scientifically relevant philosophy?

s this thumbnail sketch of Husserl's philosophy of math any good? — Wayfarer

The only issue I have with it is that one could get the impression that the reason Husserl “argued against the idea that the validity and truth of mathematical principles were dependent on psychological processes” was because he thought their validity and truth was dependent on the world. What he was trying to do was avoid psychologism (which he was accused of in Philosophy of Arithmetic) by grounding mathematical principles in transcendental
phenomenology.

What a happy coincidence how well the products of mathematical science work! We should all thank our lucky stars. — Wayfarer

That’s the point. To understand the origin of mathematical
logic in certain presuppositions about the way the world is constructed is see why it is not coincidence at all. As you say, the products of mathematical science work well. I would add that they work precisely, accurately in the sense dictated by the demands of formal logic.