But yet we want to maintain our inherent uniqueness, that you can’t know “This!” (#253), that my experience is still paramount to communication and the failure is intellectually explainable. That our intelligibility to each other is just “constructing, through joint action, shared systems of intelligibility” and not an ongoing responsibility to be responsive to each other and our moral claims on each other, or, all to often, to fail or refuse to make ourselves intelligible. — Antony Nickles

I thought you might be amused by the similarity between your last sentence and this by Karen Barad:

What if we were to recognize that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode" of objectivity as well as subjectivity? Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

…and this by Shaun Gallagher:

“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action.…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”

Barad and Gallagher both utilize Wittgenstein in their work, and are being more faithful to him than I am when I question their (and his) notions of relational responsibility. But just to be clear, the radically social constructionist position Im arguing from doesn’t see shared systems of intelligibility as grounded in autonomous selves. On the contrary, the self is derived concept , a social construction. Since responsivity is a given of relational being, the challenge isn’t how to become responsive to each other, morally or otherwise. The issue is how to enrich and enlarge the system of relational intelligibility that defines us as ‘selves’ within a tradition, so that we can make sense of and embrace alien traditions.

As Ken Gergen writes:

“... groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.

I would characterize Wittgenstein’s insight of our desire for certainty as a temptation based on the human condition (that we are separate and we want knowledge to bridge that gap).
The desire for certainty is as ancient as Socrates’ desire for knowledge, spawned from the desire for control, the fear of chaos (and death), and the mistrust of others, so again, I find it unlikely those responses will go away (though they may wax and wain/be overcome and succumbed to) — Antony Nickles

I am just pointing out that concepts like certainty and knowledge, as products of discursively formed social practices, differ in their meaning from era to era and culture to culture. Foucault performed an archeological analysis of such notions over the past millennium in the West to demonstrate that the very sense , value and use of terms like certainty and knowledge changed significantly from the Classical to the Modern period, across all modes of culture. So claiming that the desire for certainty is ancient is like saying that the desire for Romantic love is ancient, which is to confuse what is universal and transparent with what is culturally and historically contingent.

If there is any motive which transcends the locality of cultural eras, I suggest it is the need for intelligibility. We have always striven to make sense of each other and our world, and we do this by constructing through joint action shared systems of intelligibility. At a number of points in the course of cultural history, certain senses of the concept ( or family of concepts) of certainty were co-constructed. It was a means to an end; the means was the use of the term certainty and the end was the aim of making the world intelligible.

I think Wittgenstein’s focus on the desire for certainty resonates best in the context of the still-dominant influence of Enlightenment tropes of Truth. In poststructuralist and other postmodern forms of discourse, the idea of certainty is no longer considered useful. This is not due to a repression of the desire for it, but because the concept has lost its intelligibility.

Wittgenstein says that the rules of language are like the rules of chess, in that the rules of chess don't describe the physical properties of the chess pieces, but rather describe what the pieces do. Similarly, in language, the rules don't describe the words but do describe how the words are used — RussellA

As you may be aware, there are numerous competing interpretations of the later Wittgenstein. You embrace a more conservative, realist-oriented reading, whereas Antony hews to the interpretations of writers like Cavell. I also favor these more ‘postmodern’ approaches. For instance, Hutchinson and Read critique a key representative of this more conservative approach:

The mistake here then is Baker & Hacker thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-object relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

Interestingly, Gordon Baker, Hacker's co-author in these papers, had, from 1991 onwards, not only explicitly distanced himself from the Baker & Hacker reading of Philosophical Investigations but also frequently used ‘Baker & Hacker' readings as a stalking horse for his own new reading.

Joseph Rouse reiterates Hutchinson and Read’s contention that for Wittgenstein words do not refer to a pre-existing type or rule of use.

“… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances. Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”

I agree completely with your interpretation of Wittgenstein as you are using it in this thread to counter RussellA’s realist reading of him. I do have some reservations concerning Wittgenstein’s take on desire and motivation, specifically as it relates to such matters as our ‘desire for certainty’.

the interlocutor has the impulsive desire for certainty and “crystalline purity” that Wittgenstein is trying to understand and unravel… humans have (traditional philosophy has) a reason for wanting to hang onto the uniqueness of our sensations, our selves. Wittgenstein is getting at the motivation for those reasons. Maybe to avoid the responsibility to make ourselves intelligible, to block off the other from our imagined “knowledge of ourself”—so we imagine that it is the nature of humans that comes between us, rather than our choice, our “conviction” p 223. And it is possible (and terrifying) for you to be empty, just a puppet, fake, and, in the face of that fear, we want to stay unique, unknowable, so we look around for a reason, and pick the thing most certain—“our” experience. But all the focus on us is easier to face than the real problem to be accounted for: our lack of knowledge of the other. The desire to enforce a connection between outward and inward in me is actually about our limitation to have knowledge of the other, which shows how we do respond to them (acknowledging them, or not). — Antony Nickles

My uneasiness about these comments, which I think represents Wittgenstein’s view fairly faithfully, has to do with a distinction which he seems to want to maintain between the relationally discursive and that which would transcend the particularities of historical practices. Put differently, who is it that is motivated by the desire for uniqueness and certainty? If the self is a relational achievement, then aren’t desire and motive also relational, discursive constructions that emerge from traditions of intelligibility within particular communities? Rorty makes a similar point, arguing that what Wittgenstein reifies as a primal desire of humankind is in fact the product of historically changing social-discursive forms of life.

“It is certainly true that the desire to get in touch with something that stays the same despite being described in many different ways keeps turning up in philosophy. But it is not obvious that this desire, the one that sometimes manifests itself as the need to “emit an inarticulate sound” has deep roots. A desire may be shared by Parmenides, Meister Eckhart, Russell, Heidegger, and Kripke without being intrinsic to the human condition. Are we really in a position to say that this desire is a manifestation of what Conant calls “our most profound confusions of soul”?Wittgenstein was certainly convinced that it was. But this conviction may tell us more about Wittgenstein than about philosophy. The more one reflects on the relation between Wittgenstein's technical use of “philosophy” and its everyday use, the more he appears to have redefined “philosophy” to mean “all those bad things I feel tempted to do” Such persuasive redefinitions of “philosophy” are characteristic of the attempt to step back from philosophy as a continuing conversation and to see that conversation against a stable, ahistorical background. Knowledge of that background, it is thought, will permit one to criticize the conversation itself, rather than joining in it.

The transcendental turn and the linguistic turn were both taken by people who thought that disputes among philosophers might fruitfully be viewed from an Archimedean point outside the controversies these phi-losophers conduct. The idea, in both cases, was that we should step back from the controversy and show that the clash of theories is possible only because both sets of theorists missed something that was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Once we give up on the project of “stepping back”, we will think of the strange ways in which philosophers talk not as needing to be elucidated out of existence, but as suggestions for talking differently, on all fours with suggestions made by scientists and poets. A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization. Knowledgeable about the dead ends down which we have gone in the past, they are anxious that future generations should fare better. If we see philosophy in this historicist way, we shall have to give up on the idea that there is a special relation between something called “language” and something else called “philosophy.”

. Yes, objectification of other species and other people has certainly been widespread in human civilizations. It's an entirely self-serving and artificial position: even while vivisection was generally accepted, people had relationships with their pets and working animals, much as we do now. Nor would a bullfight or dog-fight be any fun to watch if the combatants were automata - it is precisely the awareness of the pain, rage and fear that makes these sadistic entertainments pleasurable to some humans. — Vera Mont

Hypocrisy is also a very human trait that can be fostered or discouraged in early childhood — Vera Mont

It's a rejection, suppression or outright persecution of any minority (their suffering doesn't signify) that threatens a carefully built and maintained structure of power. — Vera Mont

From a social constructionist perspective, you and I are coming from different traditions of intelligibility. The tradition of thought that you participate in is a form of realism in which real biological and social phenomena can be distinguished from , and act as constraints on, discursively constructed meanings. This allows you to believe
that you “have no doubt what they're feeling”, “The mirror neurons in the cerebrum of more developed brains don't require an interpreter”. If the real, non-discursively constructed basis of understanding feeling allows everyone across cultures access to the ‘ true facts’ of feeling and suffering, then according to this tradition of intelligibility the failure of some to care for and empathize with others the way your tradition assumes they should is a function of bad intentions and motives ( hypocrisy , manipulation, power, sadism, self-serving).

By contrast, according to the tradition of radical social constructionism, what you assume as universal, objective or common knowledge belongs to a multiplicity of competing traditions. So it is not a question of bad intent , but a different system of intelligible within which the other believes themselves to be as justified from a moral perspective as you feel.

I can as well understand the suffering of a fly in a spider's web or the distress of a swallow whose nest is threatened as the fear of an unknown human prisoner in a Turkish prison. Sop, in fact, can humans generally - or there would be no art or literature, and certainly no animated motion pictures featuring mice in trousers. As living entities, having descended through all of evolution from the first plankton, we are capable of experiencing the feelings and of all sensate creatures. This is evident in the mythology of pre-civilized peoples the world over: they did consider themselves kin to all species. — Vera Mont

The capability of experiencing others’ feelings is no
more straightforward than experiencing their thinking, since it relies on culturally embedded interpretation. If one examines carefully, in a genealogical manner , the epistemic basis of cultural treatment of other animals throughout human history, one finds much variation. For instance, in the modern era , the notion that other species have feelings , emotions and cognitions was not accepted widely until recently. The brutal treatment of animals on farms , by pet owners and in laboratories attests to the fact that we didn’t really believe our anthropomorphizing cartoons. Mickey the emoting mouse was no more real than the talking moon and sun behind him.

Do fish feel pain? Many today would say yes, unlike a century ago. But what about insects? Do they have feelings? Or plants? Our schemes of intelligibility are constantly changing. Future cultures may have very different views about such matters.

In human affairs, disagreement generally takes place not over whether the other can be seen as suffering , but what the significance of that suffering is. When Southern slave owners claimed their slaves were happy, was this merely a rationalization to protect their way of life, or the manifestation of a tradition of intelligibility common in the West that viewed certain cultures as simple-minded and incapable of the deeper human feeling that their own cultures supposedly possessed?

When certain gendered categories are labeled pathological or immoral, is this a failure to see the other’s suffering, or a failure to interpret the significance of the suffering as constituting an injustice?

Some concepts of good and bad may be subjective; most concepts of good and bad may be cultural, but the most basic test of good and bad is whether something causes harm, suffering and destruction or benefit, wellness and improvement — Vera Mont

I like Gergen’s social constructionist take on good and bad. Focusing on the origin of good and bad as specifically moral concepts justifying praise or blame, he connects these affective determinations to the ability of one group to understand another intelligibility within the scope of their traditions. The suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix.

“…centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and thus the exclusion of alterior realities. Groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.”

We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good. How so? If relationships-linguistic coordination--are the source of meaning, then they are the source as well of our presumptions about good and evil. Rudimentary understandings of right versus wrong are essential to sustaining patterns of coordination. Deviations from accepted patterns constitute a threat. When we have developed harmonious ways of relating-of speaking and acting--we place a value on this way of life. Whatever encroaches upon, undermines, or destroys this way of life becomes an evil. It is not surprising, then, that the term ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, the customs of the people; or that the term morality draws on the Latin root mos or mores, thus affiliating morality with custom. Is and ought walk hand in hand.”

That doesn't sound like close observation of a "bad seed"; it sounds like a child in the wrong environment. — Vera Mont

I don’t believe there is such a thing a ‘bad seed’, just bad psychological models.

She has been doing this from infancy, in spite of all attempts by her caregivers and teachers to modify the behaviour? — Vera Mont

That’s probably why she has been doing it so long. Because the people around her are more interested in ‘modifying her behavior’ than understanding her point of view. Her ‘dark side’, her ‘evil’ and manipulations are how her behaviors appear to us when we fail to see the world through her eyes , and instead try to force our perspective on her.

I will define duty as: a feeling of obligation brought about by expectation that is irreducible; it exists only as a meta-construction - as recursive and a sum of its parts - and yet it is a very basic concept understood by pretty much everybody…The best leaders know that duty begets duty — ToothyMaw

Why do I hear marching music in my head when I read this?

Not sure if it "fails to account" for intelligibility. I feel that is nurture no? One is nurtured based on the paradigm (culture and form of education) of the surrounding people — Benj96

It’s nurture but not blind conditioning, not a one-way shaping from culture to individual. Cultural meanings are formed and reformed in a reciprocally participatory manner in specific contexts of interaction.

How many of you would propose it is down to one thing: that people are really born bad or good eggs, or that really there is only conditioning and interpersonal influence at work — Benj96

These two options fail to take into account the issue of intelligibility, that interpersonal influence isn’t blind or arbitrary conditioning, but is instead oriented around a reciprocally created pragmatic way of making sense of the world.

Ken Gergen explains:

“We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good. How so? If relationships-linguistic coordination--are the source of meaning, then they are the source as well of our presumptions about good and evil. Rudimentary understandings of right versus wrong are essential to sustaining patterns of coordination. Deviations from accepted patterns constitute a threat. When we have developed harmonious ways of relating-of speaking and acting--we place a value on this way of life. Whatever encroaches upon, undermines, or destroys this way of life becomes an evil. It is not surprising, then, that the term ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, the customs of the people; or that the term morality draws on the Latin root mos or mores, thus affiliating morality with custom.

Groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates. . Centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and thus the exclusion of alterior realities.

“…to declare that injustice is an unalloyed fact is also an invitation to conflict. Such declarations suggest that there is someone or some group that is acting unjustly. It is to make claim to a moral high ground, from which the unjust may be held accountable—possibly shamed and punished. It is to invite resistance, antagonism, and retaliation against an “evil other.“… In contrast to the consequences of this realist orientation, to understand that one's sense of injustice is one way of constructing a given condition—fully justified within a given enclave or tradition—is also to realize the possibility of other perspectives that may contain their own inherent justifications… Rather than creating a relationship of us versus them, it is to open the possibility of dialogue. It is to invite curiosity, mutual understanding, and possible collaboration in building a more mutually viable world.

”

if skillful navigation of the world represents the "most basic" form of understanding, then I think wisdom involves more than this. The foundation must be properly laid, but the wise person will have a deep understanding of the fact of skillful navigation, along with how it works and comes about. That is, they will be able to write about it and provide insight into it. This is why Heidegger is considered wise, because he is able to do these things, and his exposition is a theoretical form of knowledge — Leontiskos

Writing about something and providing insight isn’t necessarily the same thing as understanding a fact theoretically. Heidegger defines the theoretical as a derivative, ‘present-at-hand’ mode of thinking which forgets its basis in practical engagement.

In Being and Time Heidegger argues:

“Theoretical looking at the world has always already flattened it down to the uniformity of what is purely objectively present…

Derrida says of Heideggerian Being:

“The Being of the existent is not a theory or a science. There are few themes which have demanded Heidegger's insistence to this extent. Being is not a concept or theory or existent.”

Heidegger adds:

“No matter how keenly we just look at the "outward appearance" of things constituted in one way or another, we cannot discover handiness. When we just look at things "theoretically," we lack an understanding of handiness. But association which makes use of things is not blind, it has its own way of seeing which guides our operations and gives them their specific thingly quality. Our associa­tion with useful things is subordinate to the manifold of references of the "in-order-to." The kind of seeing of this accommodation to things is called circumspection.

"Practical" behavior is not "atheoretical" in the sense of a lack of seeing, and the difference between it and theoretical behavior lies not only in the fact that on the one hand we observe and on the other we act, and that action must apply theoretical cognition if it is not to remain blind. Rather, observation is a kind of taking care just as primordially as action has its own kind of seeing. Theoretical behavior is just looking, noncircumspectly. Because it is noncircumspect, looking is not without rules; its canon takes shape in method.

Handiness is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself initially a theme for circumspection. What is peculiar to what is initially at hand is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order to be really handy. What everyday association is initially busy with is not tools themselves, but the work. What is to be produced in each case is what is primarily taken care of and is thus also what is at hand.”

I think the Heideggerian and the Aristotelian concepts of ethical wisdom are very similar — Leontiskos

For Heidegger the important difference comes down to this:

"Aristotle had a more radical view [than Plato]; every logos is synthesis and diairesis at the same time, not either the one-say, as a "positive judgment"-or the other-as a "negative judgment." Rather, every statement, whether affirmative or negative, whether false or true, is equiprimordially synthesis and diairesis. Pointing out is putting together and taking apart. However, Aristotle did not pursue this analytical question further to a problem: what phenomenon is it then within the structure of the logos that allows and requires us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diairesis? What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something."

In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together. If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.”

As you know, there are many strands and styles of philosophy taught within academia. Some of them find a more comfortable home in academic departments outside of philosophy. Are you dissatisfied with all of these approaches or just a certain one that you feel has been allowed to dominate?
— Joshs

I see the same approach being taken right across the academic world. It entails not studying the nondual philosophy of the mystics and then not being able to solve any philosophical problems or construct a fundamental theory — FrancisRay

One of the most productive current offshoots of the linguistic turn in philosophy is enactivism, whose founding authors ( Francisco Varela and Even Thompson) advanced a non-dual philosophy melding cognitive science, phenomenology and the mindfulness traditions of the buddhists.

It seems the Perennial philosophy is not considered relevant to academic philosophy, so nobody tries to falsify it and it is simply ignored…This would be how folks like Dennett and Chalmers can get away with publishing books on consciousness that fail to mention the views of those who study it experimentally without being laughed out of their profession. — FrancisRay

So you’re saying academic philosophers need to deploy, or at least cite the results of, scientific experimental methods of study in order to validate or falsify the claims of Perrenial philosophy? What are your own views on the validity of Perrenialism?

As a general rule academic philosophers examine all philosophies except non-dualism and a neutral metaphysical position. This is an academic scandal it seems to me. It means most philosophers are unable to explain why metaphysical questions are undecidable and so for them philosophy is an ineffective and interminable area of study that never makes any progress. — FrancisRay

Are you familiar with philosophical movements like phenomenology, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodern hermeneutics, enactivism, New Materialism, Science studies, Cultural studies or neo-Pragmatism? Do you think what you wrote above is true of the many academics who study and teach within these approaches?

I am not convinced that even the postmodern vision of wisdom is based in practicality. Do you have any quotes or sources that would support this thesis? — Leontiskos

If the begin­ning point of wisdom for Socrates is the realization that you don’t know what you think you know, for Plato it is that you do know what you think you don’t—you just don’t know that you know it. We are ignorant not of the relevant facts, but of the fact that we are not ignorant of them. Thus is the Socratic acknowledgment of ignorance replaced by the recollection and recognition of one’s concealed knowledge. In order to avoid traditional biases, Heidegger examines Dasein in its “average everydayness,” that is, amidst the mundane activities that fill our days. In spite of philosophy’s overwhelming emphasis on abstract theoret­ical thinking, the briefest glance at our daily conduct shows that “the kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’”

Heidegger calls this noncognitive, nontheoretical, inconspicuous understanding “cir­cumspection,” and defines it as a tacit know-how that “‘comes alive’ in any of [Dasein’s] dealings with entities.” We understand the three kinds of beings—tools, objects, and people—because we’re constantly dealing with them in very different ways; Oliver Sacks’ patients excepted, we rarely mistake people for tools or vice versa. These three regional ontologies col­lectively constitute our understanding of being, which does not consist in learning an esoteric doctrine but in being proficient at living a human life.

In order to behave as humans do, we must know how to use some form of equipment, how to communicate with others, and how to examine objects—which means that every Dasein has mastered these three ways of being. This skillful engagement with the world represents our most basic kind of understanding, grounding all abstract thematic thought. Hei­degger pursues ontology by studying Dasein for the same kind of reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the understanding of being is.”

( Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, by Lee Braver)

“ Ethics is closer to wisdom than to reason, closer to understanding what is good than to correctly adjudicating particular situations. I am not alone in thinking this, for it seems that nowadays the focus has moved away from meta- ethical issues to a much sharper debate between those who demand a detached, critical morality based on prescriptive principles and those who pursue an active and engaged ethics based on a tradition that identifies the good.”

“We always operate in some kind of immediacy of a given situation. Our lived world is so ready-at-hand that we have no deliberateness about what it is and how we inhabit it. When we sit at the table to eat with a relative or friend, the entire complex know-how of how to handle our utensils, how to sit, how to converse, is present without deliberation. We could say that our having lunch-self is transparent. You finish lunch, return to the office, and enter into a readiness that has its own mode of speaking, moving, and making assessments. We have a readiness-for-action proper to every specific lived situation. Moreover, we are constantly moving from one readiness-for-action to another.“

“My presentation is, more than anything, a plea for a re-enchantment of wisdom, understood as non-intentional action. This skillful approach to living is based on a pragmatics of transformation that demands nothing less than a moment-to-moment awareness of the virtual nature of our selves. In its full unfolding it opens up openness as authentic caring.”

( Ethical Know-how, by Francisco Varela)

This is an example where the understanding wrought by the linguistic turn seems to backfire. "Take language the way it is commonly used," is all well and good advice in some cases, but it missteps when it assumes that people don't ever think about metaphysics in their day to day lives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ordinary language philosophy is just one of many strands within the linguistic turn. What OLP gets right is the appreciation that whether we take our world for granted or make a deliberate effort to ‘think metaphysically’, we can’t help but do so within the wider metaphysical mesh of a pre-existing community, which is what makes the terms of our inquiry intelligible.

Pragmatics has to do with how the question is being asked. But sometimes we ask things from a purely speculative place — Count Timothy von Icarus

Speculation is always oriented around what matters to us and how it matters. This is a question of pragmatics. Speculation is relevant to ongoing concerns. This relevance is thus constructed socially via pragmatic interaction.

The issue is that many people do not see the ideological limitations of modern academic philosophy,or how they can be overcome, so tend to dismiss philosophy as hopeless. Thus the tools get blamed for poor workmanship.

I must be careful not to start ranting on this one. — FrancisRay

As you know, there are many strands and styles of philosophy taught within academia. Some of them find a more comfortable home in academic departments outside of philosophy. Are you dissatisfied with all of these approaches or just a certain one that you feel has been allowed to dominate?

Isn’t wisdom the ability to make pragmatic sense (what works) of an aspect of the world,
— Joshs

I don't think so, but if you have a source in mind I would be willing to look into it. I think ↪Wayfarer captured it well — Leontiskos

What Wayfarer captured is a classical Greek notion of wisdom carried over into the Enlightenment. What I am depicting is a postmodern notion of wisdom (Later Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Foucault, Rorty, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche).

, that which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results, — Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I (Tr. Ross)

What is the motivation for this knowing if not the desire to make sense of an aspect of the world, or the world as a whole. How do we distinguish wisdom from folly except on the basis of its results in terms of guiding our subsequent interactions with the world? In this sense the highest and seemingly most impractical wisdom is the most practical form of knowing.

Neither would I want to call wisdom "what works, what is effective — Leontiskos

Isn’t wisdom the ability to make pragmatic sense ( what works) of an aspect of the world, to effectively anticipate events using some interpretive scheme that one has erected for the purpose? I would agree that when we have to creatively revise our schemes in the face of invalidation, there is no shortcut to painstaking trial and error.

Despite institutional conventions, philosophy is about wisdom, which is not ‘to know’ in the sense of ‘to describe’, but to understand in the sense of being able to act correctly. Intelligibility - in the sense you are using it here - is about being able to describe this knowledge (using language) and be understood with sufficient certainty. So we’re clearly striving for different goals here. But it should be clear that understanding reality is not the same as understanding how reality is described. — Possibility

I think for Barad philosophy, and science as well, first delineate the contours of what matters by enacting an apparatus( configuration of practices of intra-action with the world). Then, within those configurations descriptions and distinctions of intelligibility can be made ( true-false, relevant, irrelevant, etc). A particular logical grammar of propositional truth would constitute only one narrow form of intelligibility, that used by humans in a particular historical era within certain cultural domains. In its wider form, intelligibility is not limited to humans.

“There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman ele­ments in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.”

If reality as a whole is not intelligible it is only because reality is a becoming. To make an aspect of the world intelligible is to participate in this becoming.

I think we can then question the effectiveness of the main argument against physicalism because it assumes that our experiences should be reducible to information about the brain.
— Apustimelogist

But your whole OP actually questions reductionism — Wayfarer

I would say its plausibly fully physicalist because the reason for the inability to reduce I think can be explained physically, for instance through the limitations of what a computing / information processing device can or cannot do. — Apustimelogist

Perhaps your non-reductive physicalism is compatible with that of Davidson?

Non-reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind–body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.[53] Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism. (Wiki)

so it can’t be the same old eight ball even apart form the pool game
— Joshs

Oh, but it is. It aligns perfectly from my last game. Well, a few more scratches. As for Barad, They are a person who has taken a certain perspective of quantum physics and applied it to feminism, genderism, and other societal issues - perhaps successfully. Elsewhere applied it seems highly speculative and tangential rather than fundamental. — jgill

If by ‘same’ you mean similar enough to pass for same, that’s fine by me, as long as you recognize that there is nothing intrinsic to an entity that persists identically from one moment to the next, since we’re no longer talking about self-same objects but changing configurations of intra-actions.

As far as the relevance of Barad’s work outside of societal issues, Barad is not intending to revolutionize the practical doing of physics but rather provide a new philosophical interpretation of it. Is this tangential to the real subject matter of physics? Barad doesnt think so.

I part company with my physics colleagues with neopositivist leanings who believe that philosophical concerns are superfluous to the real subject matter of physics. Rather, I am sympathetic to Bohr's view that philosophy is integral to physics. Indeed, Einstein felt much the same way and once quipped: ‘‘Of course, every theory is true, providedyou suitably associate its symbols with observed quantities.'' In other words, physics without philosophy can only be a meaningless exercise in the manipulation of symbols and things, much the same as philosophy without any understanding of the physical world can only be an exercise in making meaning about symbols and things that have no basis in the world. This is why Einstein and Bohr engaged with all their passions about the meaning of quantum theory.

I get the impression that you think the social-philosophical and natural science spheres of knowledge are somehow independent , such that what amounts to a revolution in one sphere may be irrelevant to the interpretive underpinnings of the other.

The practical doing of physics hasn’t changed very much in the past 80 years, according to a number of historians of physics. Meanwhile, there have been important changes in social science and philosophy over that span. This has led to the suggestion that the creative juices in physics have been stagnating. This doesnt prevent physics from ‘working’ in the sense of continuing to solve the same puzzles it has been solving in the same way over the past 80 years. But it keeps the field from finding new and more powerful ways to solve puzzles. I think Barad is a more talented philosopher than physicist. I believe they have started the creative juices flowing , and it will take a brilliant physicist to translate those juices into changes in the way practicing physicists do their job.

When two players rack the billiards and play a game of pool, there is intra-acting and entanglement, but the eight ball is the same old eight ball. — jgill

According to Barad, space, time , and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements, so it can’t be the same old eight ball even apart form the pool game.

I'd say that scientific paradigm switching is rational in the larger ethical-dramaturgical sense, and I'd support that by noting that it happens within science. Neurath's boat seems appropriate here. Some modifications are more substantial than others (perhaps foundational physical theories are questioned), but the basic style of communication ( under the meta-authority of the critical-synthetic tradition as such, which transcends all of its theoretical products ) remains intact. — plaque flag

Does the basic style of communication transcend its theoretical products, or do its theoretical products redefine the very nature of the tradition? Does paradigm switching happen WITHIN science as it is understood under the terms of the old paradigm , or does the old guard, protecting its interpretation of the tradition. reject the heretical paradigm as non-science?

As human being, we have many primitive reactions that serve us well, like thirst, hunger, pain to name a few. But would we say that an infant has the meaning or the concept of “thirst”, “hunger”, or “pain” before they even learn these words from an adult. No, but they do experience these things and later, adults teach the infant to replace this behavior with language. — Richard B

There is quite a bit of research in developmental and perceptual psychology indicating that what you are calling primitive reactions is in fact complex conceptual understanding.

Public meaning makes private meaning incomprehensible. — Richard B

What about pre-linguistic perceptual meanings? Do pre-verbal infants not construct meaning from their surroundings through the use of perceptual-motor schemes?

Who’s to say what constitutes corruption?
— Joshs
Every human being on the planet. We punish one another enough for perceived immorality; the least we can do is acknowledge one another's moral compass.
....How to draw thr moral lines is far from clear.
Not to me.
...One person’s corruption is another’s innovation....
— Joshs
No, that's backward. Things are innovated by one person and corrupted by another. You cannot corrupt that which does not yet exist — Vera Mont

I’m with Ken Gergen’s brand of social constructionism when it comes to issues of social justice and morality:

Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.

I suppose one could find a constructive use for mace and the guillotine, but I'm hard-put to imagine what that is. My contention was that it's not one single invention [capital] that brings all the trouble, but the fact that we can't stop corrupting our inventions. — Vera Mont

Who’s to say what constitutes corruption? One person’s corruption is another’s innovation. How to draw thr moral lines is far from clear.

There are similarities between Rouse's postmodern view that we can never get outside our language and Wittgenstein's view, as a possible anti-realist or linguistic idealist, that the meaning of a word is determined by the language itself rather than any transcendent reality. — RussellA

Yes, Rouse was heavily influenced by Wittgenstein.

I'm inclined to say that humanity's troubles are not caused by any particular human invention so much as the fact that humans keep coming up with destructive inventions. — Vera Mont

Aren’t all inventors both destructive and constructive? Isnt this true of knowledge in general?

To me the essential difference between religion and philosophy is the rationality I specified a moment ago. Both Popper and Kojeve talk of a second-order critical-synthetic metamyth, which is basically that infinite framework of the meta-authority of reason itself. Reason is god. I mean the 'rational' human community recognizes no higher authority beyond or above itself. — plaque flag

Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions?

There are other ways of thinking about the relation between mind and world than in terms of the binaries realist vs anti-realist or empiricist vs idealist.
— Joshs

What other ways are you thinking of, of how the subjective mind of colours, pains, fears and hopes relates to the objective world of rocks, mountains, supernova and gravity. — RussellA

Joseph Rouse argues:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”
By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality

Merleau-Ponty states:

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis 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.

Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ? — plaque flag

.

He critiques the superstition in religion.

“Religious figures and philosophical concepts are not really on the same plane of immanence. The plane of immanence that is populated by figures “is not exactly philosophical, but prephilosophical…. In the case of figures, the prephilosophical shows that a creation of concepts or a philosophical formation was not the inevitable destination of the plane of immanence itself but that it could unfold in wisdoms and religions according to a bifurcation that wards off philosophy in advance from the point of view of its very possibility…”

When we attribute immanence to something transcendent to it, we move from philosophical concepts to religious figures.

You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best — plaque flag

You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary. For writers like Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger and Deleuze all that’s left of the rational is a kind of relative intelligibility, a way of anticipating the new that finds aspects of similarity with what came before, a relative ongoing consistency ( kind of like the ‘rationality’ of Kuhnian normal science vs the irrationality of revolutionary scientific change) . But this anticipatory coherence is not completely absent in what would be called irrational experience, because there can be no experience utterly devoid of anticipatory familiarity. The confusing, the incoherent, the surprising are kinds of anticipation also, since any new experience will come pre-structured to an extent. Thus the rational and the irrational are species or modes of the same process. The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. It should not be a matter of giving preference to the rational over the irrational through some idealized totalization, like a dialectical unity of differences which subordinates the negative and the irrational to a lessor status.
Rather, our understanding of metaphysics can be built on what is common to both the rational and the irrational as irreducible in experience (anticipatory structure of pragmatic relaronality). The rational can never ultimately ‘overcome’ the irrational, and has no priority over it, no superior power. Each are modes of becoming, necessitating each other in an endless intertwining dance. Each is affirmative and creative in its own way. Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal.

I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme. — plaque flag

Yes, well keep in mind that his plane of immanance is the immanence of difference to itself, from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement.

there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.

He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies. — plaque flag

What Rorty is saying must continually reaffirm itself differently in the very act of re-enacting the saying. Thus, his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim but rather as an invitation to a way of life, wherein we see ourselves , at each moment, as participating in a continual reinvention of the meaning of our vocabulary. When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. Others have more carefully made the point that Rorty is trying to make here, which is that post-structuralism’s approach to language is not a truth claim or belief, but instead is performative. Rorty can only enact what happens for him in the conversation in which someone else makes a truth claim concerning something like a metavocabulary.

Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe. — plaque flag

I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality.

That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.

If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.' — plaque flag

Is there any writer you know of that this seems to be true of (transrational mysticism)? Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida?
This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring.

When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? Isnt our determination of how violent, arbitrary and polarizing such drift is at its core a function of how substantially we ground the basis of semantics? I suggest that it is those discourses that begin from identity and the persistence of self-identity which are forced to characterize drift in oppositional and polarizing terms. By contrast, those discourses which begin from difference within identity( the most rapid onset of drift imaginable , from your vantage) that reveal intricate relational stabilities internal to discursive communities, and unseen by those philosophies for whom drift is only secondary to semantic meaning, an unfortunate accident that can happen to it and that we must recover from.
We don’t communicate by avoiding drift, drift is the condition of possibility of comminication. Stable normative understanding results from a dance of responsive interchange in which my utterance doesn’t mean what it means until your response determines it, and vice versa. This interchange is drifting semantically every moment in an intricate way, and this is what maintains its stability.