Joshs - I read in the above blog post 'Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…”

Do I not detect the echo of hylomorphism in these kinds of sentiments from Husserl? Where 'forms' or 'ideas' are now transposed as 'essential structures of consciousness'? — Wayfarer

I don’t fully agree with the way that blogpost characterizes how Husserl conceived of the constitution of spatial objects. I’m not denying that for Husserl form or morphe is an essential aspect of intentional constitution of objects , along with the hyle or ‘stuffs’.
But an individual object is general for Husserl not because a particular car belongs to a general category of cats, but because the unity of an object is an intentional achievement produced by a synthetic act uniting memory , anticipation and actual presence. The self-same object is an objectivating idealization concocted out of a changing flow of senses , and thus a generalization.

Phenomenology, insofar as it understands consciousness to be intentional, is still working in dualistic terms, and I see it as helping to understand how things seem to us in our everyday dualistic mindset; I don't see how it it can offer anything beyond that. — Janus

You seem to be understanding ‘dualism’ in an odd sort of way. When phenomenologists claim to be transcending dualism what they mean is the splitting of the subjective aspect of experience from the objective. Their solution is to be make the subjective and the objective indissociable poles of all experience
This is what intentionality means. It does not mean a subject aiming at an object. There is no pre-constituted, or ‘ inner’ subject for Husserl. There is only the interaction, which precedes both subject and object. Your solution to dualism , by contrast, seems to assume an inner feeling or experience of some sort that just subsists in itself, outside of time and interaction. This sounds like something like Michel Henry’s view of self-awareness. Dualism depends on the idea of a pure in-itself outside of relation to something else. Both the subject and the object have their own in-itself, interiority, intrinsicality, from out of which they encounter each other . That’s what your ‘non-dualistic’ awareness seems to consist in.

I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes. — T Clark

The authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia article would agree with you. They are among those who believe that a ‘mutual enlightenment’ between cognitive science and phenomenology is desirable and attainable. Husserl himself believed that trying to ground phenomenology in empirical science was putting the cart before the horse. I believe that it can eventually be possible to naturalize phenomenology , but this will require innovations in thinking within the psychological sciences that haven't taken place yet. Using current models within biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology to underpin Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology would completely misrepresent the subject matter.

I think the aim of meditation is to be in the way we primordially are. I wouldn't even call it being-in-the world, which is still a dualistic notion, but rather simply being with no distinction. The awareness of self arises 'later' as a thought. — Janus

You refer to the being of a ‘we’. In what sense is it a being if there is no distinction? Isn’t pure absence of differentiation non-being?

I don't agree with that article regarding pre-reflective self-awareness. I think pre-reflective awareness is prior to self and other; prior to subject and object. — Janus

Interesting. How would that work? Kind of like meditative awareness?

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

Try this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/

Do you think people are becoming deeper, more thoughtful and more in touch with themselves? Do you think modern societies are progressing away from frivolousness, stupidity, and superficiality towards character, intelligence and creativity? Do you think there is less and less evidence of mental conflict evidenced through reduced levels of mental illness, unhappiness, anxiety and drug use? Or are you positing this is as a positive potential in current society that has yet to be realised? — Baden

I think that the Marcusian model , with its reliance on libidinal energy and it’s notions of social conditioning, is too reductive and monolithic. It forces us to see ourselves as pushed and pulled and shaped by the same abstract encapsulated forces within ourselves and in our cultural environment.
It misses the fact that there is no such thing as consumer society or late capitalism. Not as some singular monolithic entity. There are many subcultures within the larger culture, and many ways in which economic, political and social aspects of culture interaffect each other. We dont all live within the same circumstances of culture because we don’t interpret the meanings of our interactions with others in the same way. Our identities aren’t formed by culture in a one-way manner , they are formed by the way we integrate and interpret culture on the basis of our own history and worldview. The way we adapt our behavior to the different propel in our lives is not a question of putting on an identity but rather of playing a role. To play a role with respect to family , friends and others is to make use of our understanding of how others see us. It is to anticipate how others will react to us on the basis of this understanding. The role we play with others is shaped by our sense of the regard others have for us. The inner conflict you are talking about takes place when others , or ourselves, act in ways that we can’t make sense of, that confuses us. In other words, it is when our role construal breaks down and ceases to be an effective guide for understanding our relationships with others that we experience conflict.

In general , people today are more psychologically self-aware than in previous eras. How well they adapt to stress and change is not a function of their exposure to some monolithic label like ‘consumer culture’ or ‘capitalism’ but the permeability of their ways of construing themselves and others.

Reasons are human-related (when distinguished from mechanics). If ask "why did you smash that vase?" I'm not expecting "because my arm raised, my hand released it and that caused it to smash". I'm asking about your motives.

In Physics, chemistry, neurosciences...etc, the distinction doesn't make any sense. There are no motives, to 'why?' and 'how?' are the same question. As I alluded to earlier, about the closest we could get to a distinction is in evolutionary sciences where 'why?' refers to the evolutionary advantage, and 'how?' refers to the genetics, but even there it's just convention. we could ask 'how?' of evolution too and get a good set of theoretical answers.

Equally, if I asked a physicist 'why did the vase smash?', he might say 'because gravity pulls objects toward the earth and brittle things like vases smash on impact'. That's considered an answer. I could ask why both those laws are the case, but all I'd get is further, more fundamental, rules. At the end of my questioning there'd always be 'it just is' — Isaac

Aren’t we talking about different epistemological accounts of causation? For conscious actions we use an intentional motivational account , and for physical processes we use an objective causative account ( or a variety of them). We might even talk of an intermediate epistemic account pertaining to living systems that we could call biosemiological. You seems to suggest earlier that we could reduce consciousness to a physical account , but it would seem that biosemiotic thinkers like Howard Pattee would disagree. “…all of our models are based on epistemological assump­tions and limited by our modes of thought…. if biosemiotics is not primarily the study of symbolic matter but the study of symbolic meaning, then as I have emphasized (Pattee 2008), this requires a different epistemological principle than does the study of physics and biology.”

So it seems your approach , reducing biological and psychological phenomena to the epistemological domain of physics and chemistry, is one of a number of positions that have been put forth(Btw, I would argue that free energy approaches in neuroscience, even though they borrow from physics, depend on a novel epistemic account. Without this , their model consciousness would look like Penorse’s). Another , which I believe Searle endorses, is to acknowledge that psychological and physical phenomena belong to separate accounts , but that these cannot and need not be reducible one to the other. They coexist for the different purposes they serve. Hermeneutisticts like Wilhelm Dilthey advocated something similar He divided the human sciences from the natural sciences based on their different epistemic organizing principles.

Another approach argues that we can and must reduce one of these accounts to the other , not by reducing psychological to physical but the other way around.
According to Husserl and Heidegger, objectively causal accounts as in physics are naive forms of naturalism. Put differently, objective physical causation is derived from intersubjective intentional processes. This does not mean that conscious subjectivity precedes the world, only that there are fundamental organizing principles uniting the physical, biological and psychological domains. As Piaget argued , “physics is far from complete , having been unable to integrate biology and the behavioral sciences within itself”.

y. Darwin found a mechanism for producing multiple species. The answer to the question 'why are there so many species?' was 'species evolve by natural selection and this process produces many species as a consequence of its mechanisms'. — Isaac

If all mechanisms are alike in their fundamental condition of possibility, then I agree that they cannot not answer ‘why’ questions, because they simply replace one arbitrary ordering scheme with another. We can only say ‘so it was not this way, it was that way’. It is only if we see changes in mechanism in a dialectical sense, as in some sense subsuming previous modes of representation, that they answer ‘why’ questions.

There are mechanisms like clocks or car engines , and there are mechanisms like evolutionary, organic and ecological processes. In the broadest sense, yes, we can call all of these mechanisms. But don’t you see a difference in the nature of the ordering system involved in these two domains? What about the difference between a hardware and a software description of a computer? What I am suggesting is that if we study the history of the empirical understanding of mechanism and causation , we find a parallel to its evolving philosophical understanding. Mechanical causation was understood differently by Newton than by Leibnitz and later thinkers. Causes were certain and absolute for Newton , but after Hume the history of a cause could not guarantee it’s future. More recently, dynamical , reciprocal and gestalt causation are further transformations of the concept of ‘mechanism’ that in some respect encompass and subsume the earlier models.

Kuhn shows us how paradigms are discontinuous, they are not answers to the questions left by the previous one (that would merely be a continuation of the investigation within the previous paradigm) they a new ways of framing the problem such that those question become meaningless. So the mere possibility of a new paradigm doesn't mean the questions in the prior paradigm are unanswered, just that they might, in future become obsolete, or meaningless. — Isaac

The prior questions don’t become completely meaningless. If that were the case, Kuhn would not be able to claim that there are reasons to choose one paradigm over another , that one solves more puzzles
than another. One can be perfectly satisfied that , even though the specific meanings of concepts used in one paradigm change in the alternative paradigm, enough remains stable in the general domain of relevance pursued by the competing paradigms that it can appear almost as if the new paradigm were being appended to the old.

The proof of this is that this is exactly how many sciences still think of the relation between Newton and Einstein, and progress of science in general. If it were so obvious that new paradigms “are not answers to the questions left by the previous one”. and that the previous questions become “meaningless” , Kuhn wouldn’t have needed to write his book.

It should be kept in mind that concepts are elastic: the meaning of a scientific term can gradually morph via paradigm shift without scientists being aware of it.

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed.
— Joshs

:clap:

Do you see any relationship with this and Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'? — Wayfarer

Absolutely, and Husserl’s natural attitude.

Science has the conceptual framework to address the easy problem. It lacks that framework to address the hard problem. To make progress, the realm of the physical will have to expand to include subjectivity. — frank

Alternately, we could say that to make progress, the realm of the physical will have to be rethought such that we recognize that the subjective was always baked into the very structure of physical science, but in such a thoroughgoing manner that it was never noticed. We artificially split it off it and now are trying to append it back on like a new object.

The freedom of identity a technically advanced consumer society facilitates (identity commodified / personal paralysis packaged as endless novelty) contains within it the anaesthetic that neutralizes a more valuable freedom, the freedom of resistance against an orientation towards the self that dictates that a self must consume even the self and in as many flavours as possible in order to fully experience itself. — Baden

I’m not convinced that it is in the interest of ‘advanced consumer society’ to keep personal identity fragmented and internally conflicted. On the contrary, the proliferation of techniques of the self can be argued to produce a creative, adaptively flexible intricate structure of personal identity that is less vulnerable to becoming paralyzed by internal conflict than more traditional forms of identity.
I think Habermas had the right idea, and was able to overcome the pessimism of other Frankfurt school thinkers, via his communicative rationality approach.

Whenever our sciences leave us with an arbitrary starting point , this should be an impetus to start asking ‘why’ questions.
— Joshs

But to say it's arbitrary is to already frame it as requiring a reason (but lacking one). 'Arbitrary' doesn't make any sense in the context of things not even requiring a reason. — Isaac

What circumstances do you think require a reason via those that do not? Some are perfectly happy with the current status of quantum theory , and others think it is lacking a deeper reason , or as Lee Smolen says, a deeper ‘why’, and so is incomplete.
What would we be saying about the nature of an event or fact such that it would be exempted from requiring a reason? Put differently, what kind of reality is it that cannot be potentially construed in an alternate way, so that we come to see it’s role within an order that did not exist to us previously?

I don't see how. In a multi-verse theory (which I make no claims to understand I should point out), we would have one speed and other universes would have another speed. That doesn't in the slightest answer the question why we have the speed we have, it only says that others don't. — Isaac

I’m not saying that placing the constants of our universe on an evolutionary spectrum removes all traces of arbitrariness in their numeric values. What it does is diminish the arbitrariness by placing these values within a larger order. This is analogous to the origin of species before and after Darwin. Pre-Darwin, the answer to the question ‘Why are there different species’ was , because God made them arbitrarily unique in themselves. Beyond this, no deeper inquiry was attempted. After Darwin, the deeper ‘why’ question could be answered ‘ because each is the product of an overarching process that allows us to relate one to the other via temporal genesis. Are there still arbitrary differences from one species to another? Of course, but the concept of species in itself is , since Darwin , much less arbitrary than prior to Darwin.

alternative mechanisms don't require even a question of 'why?' let alone an answer. One can simply say 'it needn't be that way'. All it takes to shift paradigm is an understanding that things need not be looked at the way they are, that grounding assumptions can be questioned. none of those questions need be 'why?' they could be 'is it?' — Isaac

What youre describing doesn’t sound like paradigm change so much as minor adjustments with an ongoing theory, which deals with questions of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’.

‘Is it’ suggests to me invalidation or disproof. We ask ‘is it true’ and answer yes or no. But for Kuhn , there need be no invalidation in order to investigate new orientations. The question isn’t ‘is it right’ or ‘does it work’ but ‘how does it work’ ? Don’t we choose one paradigm over other because changing the way we look at things ‘solves more puzzles’, as Kuhn put it? It seems to be that choosing the way that works by solving more puzzles, albeit differently, amounts to finding a why where there was none before. One cannot solve more puzzles without making correlations, connections and unities where they did not exist before. This is what a why question does, it is a ‘meta’ -how question .

↪Joshs I think harm is less deniable than the good. Pain seems to be obviously bad but pleasure could be obtained from anything good or bad. — Andrew4Handel

You mean like S-M? It hurts so good? Pleasure through pain? Harm me, baby?

magine you are good at art - you can, if you so wish, produce beautiful paintings - but you decide not to. Have you done wrong — Bartricks

I discovered when I was very young that I had a talent for drawing. This was the first skill that I was good at, and I enjoyed sharing my art with family and friends. I developed my skills through college, but since then I have all but abandoned it in favor of other interests which I find more creatively satisfying. Others ask me from time to time if I still draw, and I know some of them think it is a shame that I haven’t continued to pursue this talent. Also, my art was aesthetically accessible to them , whereas my philosophical interests are generally not.
From my vantage , it is as though I never abandoned my artistic interests. My philosophical thinking is very visual, and it has always felt to me as though , rather than abandoning art , I simply transferred my visual creativity from the canvas to the page.

The point I want to make is that there are myriad ways at any point in time we can choose to add value to the world, from contributing to charity to creating art to supporting our fiends and family to building a successful business.Whichever of those at any given time seems to us to be the most satisfying way to contribute to the world ( and to our our own well-being) is what should determine the correct path, not the second-guessing by others who do not know us. The value of the art within us is not for others to determine. The tortured novelist or musician who quits writing or music completely is not cheating the world of their gifts , but opting for the best way to offer themselves to others.

By the same token, art is destroyed ( the demolition of temples and religious icons by new regimes) when it is determined that its existence will cause more harm than good, that is, when it is not perceived as inspiring art but as a source of corruption. What you’re arguing is a truism: we should not destroy what we consider to be uplifting art. And no one ever does. They destroy what they fail to see as uplifting art.

What is harm? — Andrew4Handel

This seems to be just the contrast pole of the ‘Is good indefinable’ thread.

:up:

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good.
— Joshs

No, no, no. Read the previous page. Read my definition of "good". It is not circular. — god must be atheist

I must have missed how your definition avoids being circular. Did you somewhere indicate how good is more or other than just what benefits an individual relative to their needs?

I'm with Isaac on this one. There doesn't have to be a why. The speed of light has to be something. Why does there have to be a reason? Sometimes "just because" is a good answer to a question. — T Clark

‘Why’ questions have to do with the fact that explanations in science aren't just about what works, they are about coming up with different ways of construing how things might work. The why questions the frame within which the ‘how’ works A reductive stimulus -response account of human behavior works, but only when we ask why it works can we begin to see alternative ways of modeling behavior that also work, but according to a different ‘why’. It is via a ‘why’ that we can turn an arbitrary mechanistic explanation into one that transforms the arbitrary and seemingly random into a patterned regularity.

‘Just because’ ignores the fact that facts are what they are because of their role within paradigms( the ‘how’) , and paradigms are upended ( the why) on a regular basis.

we cannot conceive how a cascade of biological processes can lead to the observed symptoms of consciousness, because we cannot conceive how any physical process can lead to consciousness.
— hypericin

I can. It's simple. Some collection of biological processes leads to the observed symptoms of consciousness. Why wouldn't they? What's in the way? What compelling physical law prevents biological processes from causing whatever symptoms they so happen to cause? — Isaac

To be fair to hypericin, the recent ambitions to explain consciousness were only possible as a result of innovations in thinking about biological processes which
removed the basis of those processes from traditional
accounts of physical causality. One cannot derive consciousness from a conceptually impoverished physicalist account.

I don't think the question makes any sense at all. We don't ask why the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second — Isaac

Whenever our sciences leave us with an arbitrary starting point , this should be an impetus to start asking ‘why’ questions. Asking why a physical constant happens to be what it is is part of what led to the hypothesis that our universe with its constants may not be the only one , that perhaps an evolutionary development of universes produced a series of constants linked to each other via a genesis. Thus, ‘dont ask why’ was transformed into ‘this may be why’.

There are absolutes in this world, and there are relatives. "Good" is a relative. Only ethicists on the Kantian (?) vein of thought (or maybe in other veins as well) think that there is some ideal, everlasting, and perfect "good" out there — god must be atheist

I think all absolutes are also, at the same time, relatives. For instance, the qualitative content of a moment of awareness is contingent and relative, but its condition of possibility is time consciousness, the appearance of now as a tripartite structure of past(memory , present and future( expectation). This is true of ‘good’, of course, but in addition, what is experienced as good involves a validation of expectation, whereas
what is not good involves a mismatch between expectation and appearance.

The Kantian hope of an absolute specific qualitative content of meaning associated with the good ( categorical imperative) turned out to be only relative, but there are formal structural conditions of possibility for the experience of goodness that post-Kantian philosophers argue are absolute.

definitions are circular....

In @particular, the question as to whether it is good topreserve stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions"".

That's by no means obvious. Perhaps ask schopenhauer1 or any other antinatalist. — Banno

Definitions are circular within a finite frame. The circular series of terms for ‘good’ used in this thread that I referred to are mutually defined according to a common or interwoven sense, in which the ‘meaning of the ‘good ‘ is contingent, either relative to the individual or culture, but arbitrary in its basis. My circular frame of definitions for the ‘good’ are interwoven via a different sense. In my circle, the arbitrariness of the good is only an apparent arbitrariness. That it is only apparent makes it neither true nor false, but a certain useful way of understanding the good. My definition is useful in a different way , which leaves the previous definition intact ( if one only sees the good as arbitrary then that is valid, as far as it goes). I invite others to see my definition as enriching the arbitrary definition, by saying what others are unable to say about the good besides the fact that it is arbitrary. This would be like inviting others to see that the relation between an electric current and a magnetic field is not arbitrary but interlocked. I don’t need to say that what I show them is true, only that it allows me to do things that connect the two concepts in more ways than what they were able to do.


Schopenhauer1 believes it is good to not be born, and that it is not good to be alive. Is this a disagreement with
the idea that goodness is synonymous with "preserving stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions"?
I would say no, in the same way that showing a connection between electricity and magnetism is not a disagreement with seeing them as unconnected so much as having something more to say about them.
In this case , the more than can be said concerning the condition of possibility of having a desire to live , die or not be born involves showing what is presupposed in having any desire whatsoever namely the avoidance of interruption, discontinuity and chaos. This is not inconsistent with a circular frame of definitions that an antinatalist might use , rather it also says what they cannot say , or see.

I'm a meta-ethical nihilist of the error-theory variety. I don't think there's really a way to define good in some natural or factual way. I think the argument from difference is what persuades me of this, in the end -- people simply do disagree over what is most important and make choices between goods, and in those cases people have good reasons in spite of contradicting one another in a matter of choice, so to say one is good or the other is good is to make a similar choice. I think we make choices between competing goods, and "goods" is itself something which we define for ourselves — Moliere

The organizational dynamics I laid out don’t have to be understood in naturalized fashion. In fact I think it’s best understood as a metaphysical presupposition, and it underlies, in different ways, the ethical thinking of philosophers as diverse as Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze , Rorty , Gergen and Derrida.

Yes, people do disagree over what is most important if we look at their preferences strictly in terms of qualitative content. But we can’t stop there , because then we are only reifying the domain of good as an arbitrary value rather than getting at its origin. There is no such thing as a good in itself , even if we are restricting this good in itself to a contingent subject. What arises for any of us as something good is what works for us within the framework of a system of values to enrich and move forward that system. But value systems are always in the process of changing into new systems, so that the particular qualitative content that represents a good within one system is no longer works within the new system. So this is the contingent and relative aspect of good. But the other aspect of the good is universal and a priori.

This is the aspect of the good which survives changes in values systems, it’s formal rather than specific structure. This aspect of the good we all can agree on. Since eventually any good within a particular value system will stop working for us as we move beyond that system, the philosophers I mentioned above agree that it is universally ‘better’ to keep oneself mobile , to celebrate the movement from one value system to one that replaces it rather than getting stuck in any one system for too long. So you see that for these thinkers the universal , formal aspect of goodness as efficacy of relational change ( usefulness) is more significant that the contingent and relative aspect that you highlight. It is this understanding of the universal aspect of the good that allows us to honor an endless plurality of value systems, and along with them an endless variety of qualitative senses of the good, rather than looking for the correct one. We understand that each sense of the good works within its system, and is valid for that reason and within that context.

Even if there are natural, ethical facts -- people choose against proper functioning and call it good. — Moliere

You lost me. How exactly are you understanding ‘proper functioning’ and what does it have to do with the normatively oriented organizational dynamics of living systems?
And give me an example of how one ‘chooses against proper functioning’? I have a feeling you are conflating ‘proper’ with a specific qualitative content of meaning, which places you squarely back within the circular defining of ‘good’( my qualitative meaning of good differs from your qualitative meaning of it).

So if the good is defined by happiness, we can ask "But is happiness really good?" -- does that question make sense to you?

If we double down and say, yes, happiness really is the good, then the question falls flat.

But if you agree that the question makes sense, rather than it being a tautology, then there must be a distinction between happiness and goodness such that we can ask the question and make sense of it — Moliere

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good. Even fairness implies a moral notion of equivalence or balance. Fair refers to a ‘good’ sort of balance. Justice may not be pleasant but it is ‘good’. Hmm, so there is no ‘pleasantness’ associated with aim of justice? What’s needed is a definition of good , pleasant , happy , absence of suffering, that breaks out of the circle and shatters Moore’s contention. We have a number of options to choose from here. We could look at biologically-based thinking that grounds affective valuation in the organizational principles of living systems.

Of course , in the most basic sense, all life forms are shaped by pressures for survival. But it is not simple survival that is at stake, but the ability to preserve stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions. Thus living systems have an overall normative directionality, and it is this which it is necessary to maintain when we talk about ‘survival’. So what is ‘good’ for an organism is good from the perspective of its own aims and purposes, which are anticipatory. Living systems are anticipatory sense-makers. In a cognizing creature, what is good is associated with what is coherent , intelligible, predictable in a relative sense, and what is ‘better is aligned with what enables one to attain greater intimacy, consistency and intelligibility of events. What is bad is associated with chaos , confusion, the interruption of coherent sense-making.

It s not as if the subjective feelings of good and bad are mechanisms arbitrarily tacked onto these organizational
dynamics, such that at some point the correlation between goodness and intelligibility could be severed and good could become attached to incoherence.
Goodness is simply another way to talk about what enhances normative functioning of a cognizing system.
Goodness must be detached from the reliance most moral theories place on specific qualitative content of meaning, and instead conceived in terms of the anticipatory integrity of sense-making.

After Davidson in On the very idea..., any completely incommensurable worldview could not be recognised as a world view. — Banno

Davidson thinks he is dismissing the very notion of a conceptual scheme, when in fact he is only dismissing the Quinean model and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism( Davidson’s third dogma of empiricism) , which involves the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages and the thesis of redistribution of truth-values across different conceptual schemes. Two schemes/languages differ when some substantial sentences of one language are not held to be true in the other in a systematic manner.

Conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompat­ible metaphysical presuppositions. They do not lie in the sphere of disagreement or conflict of the sort arising when one theory holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. The difference lies in the fact that one side has nothing to say about what is claimed by the other side. It is not that they say the same thing differently, but rather that they say totally different things. The key contrast here is between saying something (asserting or denying) and saying nothing.”(On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Schemes and Conceptual Relativism)

If every new use of a word is an original creation, language would be neither usable nor learnable. It would be mere babble, a different word each time.

Rather, as Davidson suggests in derangement of epitaphs, novel use is built on convention. — Banno

There is a way of continuing to be the same differently. Novelty built on convention doesn’t have to mean that the convention is ‘extant’ and then utilized to build the novel use, or , put differently, that a word belongs to a ‘type of use’, as Hacker and Baker argue. It can mean that what the convention ‘was’ is just as much determined by how it is used freshly as the novel speech is governed by the past convention which it employs. That way we don’t end up talking as though words ‘refer to’ types of use or conventions or are accountable to an independently specifiable rule or norm.

↪fdrake
Banno may or may not be emotionally attached to naive realism and uses his intellect to find ways to ignore challenges to it and deny others the right to entertain those challenges. His strategy is to somehow use language as a foundation while simultaneously denying that foundationalism of any kind is appropriate. Thus he can't really allow any ineffable components because that screws with his foundation.

Josh's foundation is some sort of ever evolving change. Where Banno abhors privacy in a sort of neurotic way, Josh abhors stasis. And this is the central conflict. Josh needs part of the world to always be slightly out of reach, unknown, unexplained, etc. He needs an open window for his foundation of Becoming, so he's fond of the ineffable. — frank

I think I like this characterization of my position. But as regards Banno, I would ask you if you think that his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe, who he admires, and who are certainly not naive realists.

I have a few more things to say about the ineffable.
I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic.

The assumption they all share is that the transformation
in the meaning of language concepts that Kuhn associated with scientific revolutions is already at work in the most basic uses of everyday language.
Thus, even predicational logic must in some way be expressing more than what it is commonly assumed to be expressing (the novel arrangement of extant concepts).

Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, only concepts that, in their incorporation into a syllogism as subject, predicate or related element, arrive as already changed in their sense by the situational context of the structure of the syllogism. As Wittgenstein said, a word only exists in its actual use. That does not mean that a situational use of a word links up to an extant category stored in individual or social memory. It means that the category doesn’t have an existence outside of the situational use of the word, that there are in fact no extant categories.

In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding.







I

the laws of biology, chemistry, electricity, and quantum mechanics in no way explain consciousness—or even hint that consciousness is possible… no understanding of physical processes, however complete, explains consciousness. — Art48

As others have pointed out, it may be the particular organizational terms ( reductive causality) in which the sciences of physics and chemistry are rendered that has limited an empirical description of consciousness. Neuroscience believes it is beginning to make headway, and this is due in large part to an enrichment of the language of empirical causality. As dynamical, reciprocal forms of causation are adopted consciousness becomes amenable to modelling. So it seems that it is not an unbridgeable divide between subjective experience and the physical world that has been responsible for science’s difficulties in explaining consciousness. Rather, it is the restrictive ways we have chosen to render physical processes that is the culprit.

If you can translate this out of Heideggerese for the purposes of this thread, I'd really appreciate it. I do think there's good things to pursue in that approach, but I don't think it's right to turn the discussion into more Heidegger quibbles — fdrake

This quote from Joseph Rouse belongs to a paper in which he critiques Steven Crowell’s Heideggerian account of identifying with a vocation. Even though he is channeling Heidegger to an extent here , his overall project owes more to recent ideas in ecological biology (niche construction) and the later Wittgenstein than to Heidegger, and his main interlocutors come from the Analytic tradition( Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, Brandom, Haugeland, McDowell).

His central interest concerns how conceptual understanding, as a form of biological niche construction, forms and is reciprocally shaped by both discursive and material interactions with an environment. The point he is trying to make is that as individuals we are not simply locked into particular conceptual norms , even if only temporarily. Every moment of interchange allows for the contestation and re-defining of those norms in partially shared contexts of discourse. Identities are placed over us from the culture, they are redetermined in each context, for each participant of a language game.

Rorty is just an ontological anti-realist. There's a whole spectrum of that including various hard and soft options. It's all analytical philosophy, though. If you want to read an article about it, it will be an analytical philosopher you're reading. Nothing particularly reformed about it, I don't think — frank

Except that on one side are those who find the symbolism of logical formalism important, perhaps indispensable , because it gets at the root of all those things that are relevant to philosophy ( the nature of language, meaning , truth, justification ) and on the other those who find it not very useful and certainly not engaging with the fundamental issues of philosophy. They side with the later Wittgenstein who found formal
logic to get in the way of a clarified understanding of such fundamental issues. Would you call someone who had almost no use for formal logic , and thought ‘ truth’ was a confused idea an analytic philosopher? Even Putnam said analytic philosophy had reached the end of its relevance .

our language of logic is what makes it so more than what is the case. We can say what we like, and define what we like, and while that will change how we talk about things that won't change whatever "stuff" is. — Moliere

Reformed analytic philosophers like Rorty will argue the opposite. Once we divest ourselves of our temptation to assume intrinsic features of the world, all we have is our changing performances of language as they simultaneously express and shape our material
interactions with each other. Formal logic and its various notions of ‘truth’ depends for its sense on faith in intrinsicality. Even those at the very progressive edge of the analytic tradition, like Hilary Putnam, who is a conceptual relativist, hold onto a valuative realism
On the one hand, he argues “So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathematical objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.” “…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”

But then he insists there are intrinsic non-relative valuative grounds for scientific and ethical truth. This belief allows him to uphold ideas of warranted justification and truth.

Rorty , however , believes the following about warranted justification as it is used in formal logic:

“The metaphysician thinks that there is an overriding intellectual duty to present arguments for one's controversial views - arguments which will start from relatively uncontroversial premises. The ironist thinks that such arguments - logical arguments - are all very well in their way, and useful as expository devices, but in the end not much more than ways of getting people to change their practices without admitting they have done so. The ironist's preferred form of argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference. Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of obiects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and extend that jargon. An ironist hopes that by the time she has finished using old words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words, people will no longer ask questions phrased in the old words. So the ironist thinks of logic as ancillary to dialectic, whereas the metaphysician thinks of dialectic as a species of rhetoric, which in turn is a shoddy substitute for logic.”

I met a man today who claimed to know everything everyone was thinking. — trogdor

It’s interesting that you didn’t add that he knew WHY they were thinking what they were thinking, which is much more important. For instance, perhaps he could hear their thoughts broadcast to him. That would not solve the issue of interpreting motivation or sense, and it would not by itself allow him to empathize with their perspective.
We can turn this around and posit a man who couldn’t hear people’s thoughts , but when they deliberately communicated with him, he always know why they were thinking what they were thinking, such that he was able to always see things sympathetically from their point of view. Some are better at this than others, and this skill is much more valuable than simply being able to hear people’s thoughts.

In both examples, external norms seem to render identifications as determinative. This, secretly, is also part of the Behaviour Only account, as what counts as a characteristic property for an identity is also - at least partially - determined by an agent's relationship with binding norms. Eg, the general understanding of what it means to be a Star Wars fan, and what institutional rites need to apply to the agent to make them a police officer over and above the constituents of the property cluster.

Just as unenlightened said, when you look at personal identity closely, not even the bits which are "in you", or that "you feel" come even close to establishing your identity. In that regard, personal identity is deeply impersonal. Thus something like an institutional account of personal identity needs to be explored. — fdrake

Neither what is only ‘in you’ nor what is externally institutional get at how we understand language. The two need to be intimately interwoven such that the meaning of an identity is always only partially shared.

As Joseph Rouse argues,

“We find ourselves already thrown into some “abilities-to-be” and not others, in a meaningful situation whose salient significance is responsive to how we press ahead into those possibilities. Both whether to continue in those roles, and what those roles would demand of us, is not already determined, however, but is at issue in whether and how we take them up. If I am a parent or a teacher, what it is to be a parent or teacher is not already determined but is continually worked out in how I take up those roles and respond to what they make salient in my situation. What I and others have been doing all along is at issue in those ongoing responses, along with what the practice and its roles and disclosures would thereby become. The disclosedness of my role or vocation is the space of intelligible possibility opened by our mutual involvement with one another in ongoing patterns of practice whose continuation and significance are not already determined but are instead determinative of who and how we are.”

I say the "is" of predications such as "the cat is on the mat" have no great semantic role, and evidence this by the fact that there are languages that do not have any such arrangement - first order logic and sign language and so on.

You contend that the "is" has some thing to do with being, and is indispensable. — Banno

I’m sorry I haven’t made myself very clear.


Predicational logic assumes already defined and separable units or parts.The fact that these parts are already defined means that their ‘being’ is treated as a frozen ‘is’ for the purposes of the proposition. But we do not learn, know, or use language by knowing separate, defined, unitized 'variables' of circumstances. Using language is a creative activity in which some new event of meaning crosses with a substrate such as to redefine the sense of the substrate in the act of creating the new sense. It is irrelevant whether we use the copula ‘is’ or not in a sentence. What matter is that we realize that the being of all of the components of a proposition does. ot amount to a static ‘is’ ( even if we dub them categories of use). None of the members of a proposition have any existence outside of the unique context of their actual use.

Let's see if we can address this without needing to account for the metaphysics of humour. — Banno

“The metaphysics of humour is somewhat of a mystery, as it is not a science that has been heavily studied in the metaphysical context. Generally speaking, jokes and humorous scenarios can be thought of as moments of understanding outside of the conventional sense. This understanding often comes from a sense of familiarity, as the joke addresses a relatable issue. As such, the understanding gained from humor can be thought of as a type of insight into the world and our relation to it. Humor also serves as a way of helping to decrease stress, foster communion with others, or gain awareness and perspective. Therefore, it can be seen as a type of metaphysical experience, as it helps people to form a tangible connection and deeper understanding with reality. The laughter and joy elicited by humor can be a sort of spiritual release, that can bring a sense of affirmation or peaceful reconciliation to such metaphysical understanding.“(Chat GPT :nerd: )

If you don't have one, then we can move beyond this and discuss the ramifications of metaphysical subjectivism, namely how it slips into idealism and solipsism. It's the position that Descartes started with.

If, however, you do believe truth does exist independent of justification, then you'll have to explain why it is irrelevant when we execute the wrong person — Hanover

Do you believe that radically relativistic perspectives of truth within philosophy, such as we see with postmodernist and post-structuralist writers, are examples of metaphysical subjectivism?

"One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time". It's not obvious that this is so. We do have double entendre, after all, which seems to do exactly that. — Banno

Why does it seem to do exactly that? Because logical analysis uses at its ground-floor starting point the product of a genesis of sense, the point after one has lumped together two temporally distinct acts into a single meaning. Double entendre is a category that includes two members. How do we learn that those two members form a category?
Let’s use a visual analogy. Double entendre is like those optical illusions where one has to perform a shift of attention, or gestalt shift, to see an image as one form vs another. For instance , one either sees the image as a vase or as two faces facing each other, but one cannot see both figures at the same time. But we learn to create one categorical concept out of this series of experiences, which includes both images as well as the shift between them , and this concept is called the Rubin Vase illusion.

The moments of attentional sense making up the genesis of this concept begin with our experience of one imagine, then the other, followed by a synthesizing act of sense in which we form the concept of a two-sides gestalt shift. Similarly , in learning the meaning of double entendre, we understand first one meaning of a word, then a second meaning of the same word, followed by a synthesizing conceptualization encompassing both meanings as mutually exclusive but paired together, and we call this concept ‘double entendre’. Its meaning includes within it its genesis from these separate acts of meaning.
Double entendre means the grouping together in one word mutually incompatible meanings. Put differently, it is a single concept expressing the impossibility understanding two distinct meanings at the same time.

I'm asking if it is possible that you divorce yourself not from the factual memory but from the hurt (emotional memory) and thus you meet the situation fresh. — TheMadMan

I think that’s difficult to do because one has to have a reason and a way to modify how one approaches the situation. All we have to go on is how we have previously understood it. In order to behave freshly , we have to be able to come up with a new insight, and we can’t just will that.
There is a psychotherapeutic approach called focusing (developed by Carl Roger’s colleague Gene Gendlin) which enables us to tap into our bodily feelings in such a way as to allow new understandings to emerge. Rather than verbally rehashing a stuck situation, we non-judgmentally sense it as a whole from a holistic bodily felt perspective, being on the lookout for shifts in meaning.

↪Joshs

All that seems overly complicated. Putting it more directly, seem to me that "snow is white" is about two things, snow and white; but you insist that it is about three things: snow, white and being — Banno

It is about intentionality, that is , aboutness, which is an act of doing. To intend is to be about something in a certain way, and there cannot be a sense of meaning without aboutness. To think the word ‘snow’ is to think about snow in some manner of givenness ( recollection, imagination, perception). One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time , so the syllogism should be seen as a temporal succession, a movement from one aboutness to another which progressively constructs a higher level concept. One can also think of an act of aboutness as a shift of attention.

Let’s put this in visual terms. I am told to imagine that snow is white. My attention is initially directed , even before I process the meaning of the word ‘snow’ , toward the context of the request, which could be seeing the syllogism as part of a discussion in the philosophy forum. From that attentive context, my attention is now directed toward the image of snow, an image which belongs in my mind to this larger context of an example within a philosophy discussion. From this image of snow my attention is then directed to the word ‘is’ ( if that happens to be part of the syllogism’s construction). Before I hear the word ‘white’ , the word ‘is’ initially directs my attention( primes me) in an open-ended way to prepare for some new event of understanding involving snow( many possibilities are prepared for at once, such as snow is nice , snow is snow, snow is falling, snow is colder than fire).

Hearing the word ‘white’ after the ‘is’ directs my attention in a focused way onto one of these many possibilities, not simply white as a free standing category, but white in its role as a modifier of snow. More specifically, the ‘white’ here modifies the meaning of ‘snow’ by representing a component or dependent part of snow , as something which is contained by or included within snow. This is a spatial aspect of snow , like saying that something is to the left of , on top of , underneath, alongside , outside of or encircling snow. Notice that the word ‘is’ is not necessary to convey these spatial meanings. The important point is that these directional concepts are real. People with damage to spatial areas of the cortex cannot comprehend the meaning of certain kinds of spatial relationships between objects.

In order to understand spatial positioning or containment relationships ( P is a part of S) , one must hold the substrate ( snow) in memory all the while manipulating the contained item (white) , such that one can then experience both the containing ( snow) and the contained ( white) ina single experience. This requires more memory effort than such patients are capable of. The substrate is lost sight of when they move on to the attribute, so it is never seen in its role as attribute, but only as a free-floating concept. The concept ‘inside of ‘ simply doesn’t exist for them.
If you present ‘snow is white’ to someone with this kind of injury, they’ll respond ‘Fine, I know what snow is , and I know what white is , and I even understand that you are claiming some kind of connection between the two, but I don’t understand what kind of connection this is supposed to be.’ On the other hand , they may have no trouble parsing ‘snow is pretty’ , a non-spatial relationship.

My point isnt that one needs a healthy psychological system in order to understand syllogisms , it is that relational elements of syllogisms are real concepts that involve cognitive achievements. There is no more danger of a regress with these sorts of ‘connector’ concepts than there is with the nouns that populate logical propositions.

Assuming one doesn’t have these neurological abnormalities, my attention to the belongingness of white to snow changes my initial understanding of snow, when it was the only word of the syllogism I was exposed to, from a general idea of snow to ‘this snow that is white’.

In sum, the final result of the temporal succession of attentional , and intentional, shifts that marks my moving through the words of the proposition is not three components( ‘snow’ , ‘white’ and ‘a dependent part of’) or two components( snow and white), but only one component, ‘the white snow’, which has embedded within its meaning all of the attentional shifts of sense that mark the history of its construction in the very short period of time it takes to read or hear the syllogism.

That's how it usually is. The 'now' stops being 'now' and becomes the future through the past.

The question is: Is there a 'now' that is not mechanically determined by the past, a 'now' that is constantly refreshing? — TheMadMan

A number of schools of philosophy, as well as researchers in perceptual psychology, believe that a ‘now’ divorced from memories of a past is a now with no content and no meaning. For instance, to recognize the words on this page , or any object in your environment, requires the filling in of what you see with all sorts of information from past experience. Otherwise nothing would makes sense. As a other example, it would be impossible to enjoy music if all we ever experienced was each note in the pure ‘now’ of its appearance. Following a melody requires that we retain in memory the previous notes as the next one is being played.
I would argue that the key to optical moral judgement has to do with what sort of larger framework of interpretation we use to guide our experience of the moment, not cutting ourselves off from that background understanding, which would not only be impossible but would render our world incomprehensible to us. This relation between past and preset is not mechanical, because we subtly reinterpret our past in each fresh moment of experience.

I only acted through my understanding of the present situation' says virtue (although virtue would prefer to remain silent).

So we have the moral person who acts through the traditions of their organized belief system and we have the person of Heraclitus, of Chuang Tzu, of Christ and of many old wisdom who acts spontaneously through their understanding — TheMadMan

Isn’t acting spontaneously still a making reference to one’s accumulated experience, which is shaped by their culture?
Is t the immediate ‘now’ always a synthesis of past and present?