Ethics is about what we do, and so it does not rest on argument but on action. — Banno

Aren’t actions themselves forms of questions we put to our world, experiments anticipating a response which may either validate or invalidate the action? Isnt even the firmest statement of ethical principle, and the most confident action in service of it, a kind of pragmatic question? Both thought and action seek justification, the first via further thought, the second through a material response from the world.

1. We have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction
2. We do not have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction

We believe that we have a moral obligation to save the human race from extinction. What is the practical difference between us being in world 1 (where our belief is true) and us being in world 1 (where our belief is false).

In neither case do we know that our belief is either true or false — Michael

It may be that in dealing with socially consequential values we are bound up in territory that in by its nature transcends the relevance of truth claims. Value systems are not true or false, and only very subordinate elements within them are truth-apt.

Given your comments, I have a more tailored question: what is the practical difference between a world in which we have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash and a world in which we don't have a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe and population crash, assuming that in both worlds we believe that we have such a moral obligation and so act accordingly. — Michael

I’m going to give my argument another try. A notion such as a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe is too important, too complex and too consequential a concept to be equated with a subordinate element of an established empirical theory whose acceptance or rejection as false has little impact on the theory within which its sense as being true or false is intelligible. Such weighty moral stances are more like empirical theories or paradigms than facts within theoretical orientations, and as such they cannot themselves be true or false. If one instead compared two perspectives within the larger umbrella of agreement on a moral obligation to prevent environmental catastrophe, one might be able to locate grounds for truth or falsity that have practical consequences. But then again, in dealing with socially consequential values, we may be bound up in territory that in by its nature transcends the relevance of truth claims

They’re not equivalent. The world being round or the world being flat has practical consequences.
There hasn’t been explained what the practical consequences are of homosexuality being moral or homosexuality being immoral — Michael

You’re ignoring what kinds of significant practical
reorientations of thinking are required in order to arrive at such a changed view. This isn’t a game of computer logic, it’s about how people arrive at and transform their thinking on important issues which are rooted in deeply entrenched social practices. Our attaching the labels of truth and falsity is alway ad hoc and comes late to the party.

By my reckoning we could replace moral facts with empirical facts and end up in the same quandary.

Imagine two worlds:

1. The earth is round but everyone falsely believes that the earth is flat.
2. The earth is flat and everyone truthfully believes that the earth is flat.

Not only does the belief that the world is flat have practical consequences but the belief itself comes down to a pattern of shared practices. It is only when these practices change that, from the vantage of the changed form of life, the former belief in a flat earth appears false. Thus there cannot be a change in truth value without an accompanying change in the practical landscape of social behavior.

On the other hand, given the significant consequences of a shift in attitude toward the moral and empirical facts cited above, these examples might better be conceived as theoretic presuppositions rather than facts. But then there are trivial and consequential facts, so maybe we could say that the more significant the practical consequences of a fact , the more akin to a theoretical
presupposition we should treat it as being. Trivial facts don’t disturb the practical landscape when they are falsified. But falsifying the belief that bisexuality is sinful has all kinds of consequences, since to arrive
at this change in attitude already presupposes a significant change in world orientation.

Is the belief that homosexuality is sinful a moral belief?
— Joshs

Yes. — Michael

And there are no practical consequences to changing one’s view from ‘it is true that homosexuality is sinful’ to ‘it is false that homosexuality is sinful’? Let’s say the person who has a change of heart is a legislator or a parent of a homosexual child.

"Unlike other kinds of beliefs, our moral beliefs being right or wrong has no practical consequences." — Michael

Is the belief that homosexuality is sinful a moral belief?

. I'm saying existence is the foundational good — Philosophim

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who still believe in quaint notions like ‘foundational good’. I wouldn’t say they are simply wrong. I would say that if you delve into the presuppositions such a notion relies on you recognize that what appears as eternal is only eternal within the context of a relative cultural context. Any good implies a choice, and any choice only makes sense within a framework of intelligibility. Change the framework and what is good and what is bad need to be redefined. There is no ultimate frame, so no ultimate substantive content can be attached to a concept like goodness.

This again is nothing more than self-interest. This is not an argument for why humanity ought to even exist apart from its own desire from the reasoning you've given. — Philosophim

This isn’t self-interest, its shared interest, which is not simply the sum of selfish drives. Oughtness doesn’t precede the feeling of oughtness, and the feeling of oughtness derives from what is perceived as coherent. To the extent that the idea of non-existence is repugnant , it is because non-existence is associated with a kind of chaos or meaninglessness. To say we prefer coherence over chaos is a kind of circularity. The sense of identity disintegrates in chaos and incoherence, so of course we perceive existence as ‘good’.

Can we have some explication of how that connection obtains?It feels intuitively sensible to me, but I can;'t enumerate any kind of necessity between our function and morals - which may just be my failing, hence asking for a hand — AmadeusD

Socially shared patterns of coordination express cultural ways of life that we aim to preserve.

Ken Gergen puts it this way:

“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..centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and the exclusion of alterior realities. 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.”

1. What is moral is what “should” or “ought” to be done.
2. Many arguments believe morality is human-centric. Why “ought” this be the case?
3. There is nothing inherent in looking at humanity that shows it “ought” to be.
4. There is nothing inherent in any other identity, race, thing, species etc that “ought” to be.
5. This leads down to the true question of foundation for morality: “Why “should” existence be?
6. Looking at existence, it cannot be destroyed. It simply “is”. There is no “ought” or “should”.
7. Looking at what is, we can come to a conclusion of what “ought” to be. Existence is good.
8. This conclusion is a choice, not forced. Existence could very well one day “not be”. But since existence “is”, and we are composed of what “is”, we act with the will of existence “to be”. — Philosophim

Let’s examine point 4 and work backward from it. Is life to be understood as the mere co-existence of separate parts? Is there no ‘ought’ to be found in the organization of living systems? Let me put forth an argument that life is centered around a central ‘ought’. What distinguishes living from non-living things is that the latter predict and maintain a pattern of interchange with an environment under continuously varying conditions. This means that their function is normative in character. The organism has goals and purposes which it either meets or fails to meet. Human cognitive-affective functioning, including our moral oughts , are elaborations of the basic normative oughts characterizing living self-organization. Moral oughts are designed to protect and preserve certain ways of life.

Form this vantage, for a living thing it is not existence which is good but self-consistent functioning. For cognitive beings like ourselves it is not existence which is moral but intelligible forms of social interaction. The use of truth-apt propositional logic is one particularly narrow way to attempt to achieve moral intelligibility, at the expense of a more expansive and effective understanding of the moral.

I believe this about leftism: whatever its merits may be, it lost. The western world turned away from it. The opposing perspective didn't win by a blitzkrieg, but by giving the people what they wanted — frank

If you don’t live in a large northern American city, move to one. Then the possibility of another Trump presidency may not seem so daunting. In Chicago, where I live, we now have 4 self-declared socialist alderpersons and a mayor who identifies as a socialist ( or at least as a progressive). Of course their actions in office will likely fall far short of any socialist ideal, but I think it’s very cool that there was such willingness among urban voters to support them. I suspect that as millennials and gen Z’ers become the dominant share of voters, this move to the left in northern cities will continue. Since I don’t plan to live anywhere besides a large liberal city, what happens in Oklahoma or Florida is irrelevant to me.

Sorry to break it to you, but you really don't know what you are talking about, in describing science. You might as well be telling a fairy tale — wonderer1

Perhaps. But you can’t know that for sure without familiarizing yourself with some of the scholarship behind my claims. Maybe I’m just doing a bad job of describing these points of view concerning the nature and foundation of science. If you were to give me a short list of the philosophers of science you follow, I would likely be quite familiar with them , and would be able to provide a summary of their thinking that agrees with your understanding.

If , on the other hand, I were to give you my short list (Heidegger, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, Husserl, Feyerabend, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Rouse, Karen Barad), would you be able to summarize their assertions about science? I would be more impressed with your claim that I’m concocting a fairy tale once you’ve provided an adequate summary of the view of one of these writers on science.

We do those things when we actually do them, not when we see something. It's a mere truism to say that we build buildings, roads, etc., and alter the world of which we're a part when we do so. We do nothing of the sort when we see a tree. We don't build it or images of it in our minds when we see it. We merely see it. — Ciceronianus

Do you also want to make this hard and fast distinction between technological and scientific know-how? We build computers but we don’t build concepts like neuron and quark? Or do you want to argue that neuron and quark are constructions, but perceptual achievements like object permanence, depth perception and recognition of chords are not? Let me ask you, how is it that we are able to recognize any aspect of the visual environment as familiar when no aspect of the seen world duplicates its features from moment to moment? Is there not, as Piaget would say, an accommodation of our memory- driven expectation to the novel aspects of what we encounter? Do we not do in perceiving what we do in understanding language, adapt and adjust our rule -based criteria to accommodate the new context of interaction?

This says to me that you don't have enough of experience in engaging in scientific processes to know what you are talking about. It sounds like you have simply accepted a story about science. What basis do you have, for thinking people should believe that you know what you are talking about on this subject? — wonderer1

The Wizard of Oz gave me a PhD.
What your comment says to me is that the company I keep in philosophy of science and cognitive science is far removed from your neck of the woods.
https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer

I wonder though if much of this can be attributed to the selective application and subsequent disregard of metaphors. The claim is made that we "create" or "construct" objects or phenomena in the factory or workshop of our minds as if we carry tiny craftsmen or masons in us, building what we experience. — Ciceronianus

Tiny craftsmen and masons have to allow the material they shape and mold to guide their efforts based on how that material lends itself to , affords and constrains their aims.
Construction, constitution or construing, whichever term you prefer, refers not to a conjuring oblivious to an outside, but a back and forth , reciprocal conversation with a niche which feeds back into our efforts in very precise and specific ways to guide and adjust our direction. A craftsman can’t just use any methods they choose. Only some will get the job done, and this is how the real world shows its face. We build the models, apparatus of measure and observation, and the world responds just so to how we prod and alter it. It only gives up its secrets in the language of the questions we ask of it, and for the purposes we use it for.

Science deals with things as they appear to us (obviously, since what else could it deal with?} but it is not phenomenology, because it is concerned with studying the things and not with studying how we experience the things — Janus

The question is, what sort of notion of a thing do you have in mind, and how was it formed? The original notion of scientific ‘thing’ or object that can be traced back to Galileo, who recycled the geometric idealizations developed in the near East and Greece that were pure mathematical
constructions. He applied these constructions to the messy realm of empirical phenomena and from this synthesis emigres the modern notion of scientific exactitude and the idea of a natural world composed entirely of causally related bodies in a fixed mathematical grid of geometric space and linear time. In other words, the scientific ‘thing’ was seen through the lens of an imposed construction. Putting it in your terms, how science chose to experience the things became the basis of what the things were in themselves.

This sense is neither purely a contribution of the subject nor the object but of a correlation between the two
— Joshs

Yes, the world as we experience it is a function of the interaction between the extra-human conditions and the human conditions — Janus

It’s not an interaction between already formed , pre-existing condtions, but the production of something absolutely original, which is why it doesnt make sense to talk about an independently existing world. What our sciences discover never existed before in the history of the world, which doesnt mean that they aren’t reliable means of navigating that world or making predictions that pan out. But what we are navigating and predicting is not something pre-existing. It is the patterned , anticipatable way in which the world that we interact with changes in response to our interacting with it.

We create human stories, about how we came to be in the world as we experience it, and of course those stories are cultural, historically mediated constructions, but to say they are exclusively constructed by us implies a creative freedom, a pure creative arbitrariness, which is misleading and brings about an anthropocentric illusion that reality is created by us tout court. — Janus

Building an apparatus that channels the behavior of particles is not just a story, it is a material configuration that interacts with and changes phenomena in predictable ways. Our narratives and theories, as products of brains as physiological systems, are also material apparatuses that are not exclusively constructed by us. They are co-constructions that require both our own material constitution and that of our environment. Our theories are not simply in the head, they are engagements between head and world that are composed of turnout of both aspects. New realities are created through this reciprocal relation, not from inside the head.

To my way of thinking your view suffers from excessive anthropocentrism. In a way of course our views are necessarily anthropocentric since we only know things as they appear to us, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to imagine beyond our human-centric understandings, or from realizing that those very understandings should in any case lead us to acknowledging that we are just one tiny part of a vast universe, the actuality of which is not dependent on us. — Janus

You’re right. Recent research shows dogs have better object permanence than infants. But my point isn’t who has object permanence and who doesn’t, but how we and animals like us acquire it, and what it says about how the way we see the world reflects how we move around in it in relation to our purposes. We see based on what and how it is useful for us to see. this is not a fabrication of the mind, but neither does it allow us to assume lawfully fixed contents of a world independent of our dealings with it.

[

I would expect that an infant sees what I see when it looks at a flower, despite it not having any sense of what is socially agreed upon.
— Hanover
This is doubtful, already physiologically.
A human infant's vision is qualitatively different from that of human adults; also, infants have not yet mastered object permanence. — baker

We don’t need to delve into physiology to demonstrate how what we see is importantly determined by how we put together the pieces, and more fundamentally, what constitutes the pieces for us. If we are familiar with an object that is a machine or other human-created thing (chair, computer, car), we scan it with our eyes differently than we would if we didnt know the object was created by humans for some purpose. When we recognize the car as a car, we organize its features ( front and back, tires, steering wheel) in relation to what we know a car does. Without this knowledge we have a disconnected series of things. And what that disconnected series of things amounts to for is itself a function of cultural background. Show a car to a 1st century Roman and they will recognize its parts differently from a Neanderthal.

An infant who has never seen a flower will see what they are already prepared to recognize in terms of shape, color, line, etc, but it will likely be a disconnected series of small objects, not the unified concept of ‘flower’, which is a concoction based on what we know a flower is for. You might say here that they do in a general way see the shapes and colors and lines that we do, but even color, line and shape are a function of what we recognize the total configuration to be for. In the duck-rabbit kind of optical illusion what constitutes a line or point or angle is a function of what we see the picture as representing. It is not enough to point out that even if we don’t see the image as being both a duck and a rabbit we are capable of such due to the fact that ducks and rabbits are available in the same world for all of us to learn about.

Because the duck and the rabbit. like the car and the computer and the flower, are constructions, ways we compose lines and points and curves based on how we interact with that aspect of the world i. relation to our goals and purposes, recognizing objects isnt simply a matter of giving everyone a chance to see a particular object. Perceptual objects are features of language, even for infants who haven’t learned to speak yet. They are language in the sense that they are constructions we put together from the resources available to us in our dealings go with others. Those dealings evolve over time to produce new cultures with new technologies, which changes how we recognize objects. In this way we reinvent how we see over time.

When we throw the frisbee to the dog to catch, do t they see the object we do? Yes and no. For the purposes of playing catch, the dog must see the frisbee as the same object thoughout changes in its movement. They have to be capable of this to track it. But if we cover the frisbee with a blanket will the dog know the same object is still there but occluded? If we cut up the frisbee into two pieces will the dog associate the pieces with the former object? What the dog can and can’t see i. the frisbee will be a function of what it is capable of doing with it. The dog constructs its concept of frisbee in relation to its behavioral niche, which is more or less fixed. The behavioral niche of humans , on the other hand, continually evolves.

↪Wayfarer So, philosophy forums are pointless then? :wink:

There are also a few definitions or conceptions of what doing philosophy consists in.

It seems to me you fail to understand that others do understand your point of view and simply disagree with it. — Janus

I’m not getting the impression you’re grasping what Wayfarer is aiming at here. For phenomenology, it’s not just that the world appears to us as phenomena, it’s that things appear in particular ways, and these particular ways contribute the sense of what appears. This sense is neither purely a contribution of the subject nor the object but of a correlation between the two. Anothern way of putting it is that when a thing appears in a certain way as what and how we take it to be, this is a function not of some ‘raw’ data’ inherent in the world independent of us, but of the web of relations between it and other things in world from our vantage, and the relation between all of that and our own activities and expectations. We tend to distinguish between things we construct , and things that
naturally appear to us, but it is better to understand all appearances as constructions. For instance, take a computer system. If i show you one and ask you what it is, you will recognize it as a unified thing with that name. If I were to travel back in time with the computer and ask someone what it is, they would see a disconnected series of objects that they would name according to what is familiar to them.

In other words, what a thing is depends on how we put its pieces together, and this is based on how we use it. This might seem obvious, but go back to your assertion that there are myriad things in the universe outside of what appears to us. Now imagine that we systematically remove (or bracket off) everything about that data that we contribute to the things, all of the relations of relevance and pragmatic utility that turn random bits of effluvia into computers and cars and chairs. You might say what we have left are the stuff of the universe that physicists and chemists have identified and described. But even such seemingly humanity-independent features of objects such as geometric shape, size, mass and movement make no sense outside of our conceptually mediated relation with them out of which we construct idealizations of shape and form. There would be no sentence we could formulate to describe what exists in itself out there beyond our interaction with things except that it is devoid of everything that our scientific language is constructed of. This is why @Wayfarer says that “nothing can be said in respect of them in the absence of any observation of them”.

The way I think about what is ‘out there’ independent of what appears to is in terms of a potentiality, not a specific set of contents or ‘furniture of the world’. The world is a constant changing flux, but it is not just this or we would have to say that our sciences are fabrications based on nothing. No, our sciences are useful because as the world interacts with us, patterns are produced in this interaction. And over time, we produce from our continued interaction with the world more and more integrally constructed patterns, leading to a progress in predictability.

What would Joshs say about the status of reason.
— Tom Storm

I would guess he would say it's contingent, as postmodernism generally does — Wayfarer

To the extent that I would locate something like a universal aspect of reason, it would be neither in anything external to the mind nor within the mind , but in the structure of temporal synthesis that makes mind and world inseparably co-depdendent. For instance, the pure ideality of a geometric form like a triangle is not universal because it is a form located outside of the mind, but because it originates in a special kind of synthesizing activity of thought upon an empirical substrates producing pure enumeration. In order to know what ‘how many’ means, we have to begin with a multiplicity of things in the world or in our imagination, direct our attention toward noticing individual elements while abstracting away everything about those separately noticed things that distinguish them qualitatively from each other, other than our treating them as empty, generic units of a counting. In other words, number, and the pure geometric forms which depend on it, is universal because it is not tied to anything but itself. It is not a special universal sense but the absence of meaningful sense, thanks to the peculiar intentional relationship to things that creates it.

Science since Galileo decided to adopt this empty mathematical idealization as the model for empirical exactitude. A scientific theory is accurate to the extent that it approximates a geometrical ideal of perfection based on empty enumeration of ‘same thing different time’. The power of a reason that can produce both the empty universality of mathematical objects and the meaningful sense of real objects is in its anticipative construing of never before seen events in terms of likeness and difference with respect to previous experience, rather than in some ready-made internal capacity to apprehend ready-made external forms.

Joshs adopts the atomistic view that we "build" the objects around us from sense impressions or some such, form the "random (sic.) pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas... construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements." More recent work shows that the process is one of prediction rather than construction. — Banno

When Husserl talks about sense data, he is not taking the naive realist position that there are concept or intention-independent features of the world that we incorporate into our perceptual schemes. The sense data are not raw but only appear to us on the basis of association. Rather than the Humean notion, for Husserl association is a synthetic activity based on likeness, concordance and similarity. One could say it constitutes on the basis of expectation.

“The old concepts of association and of laws of association, though they too have usually been related to the coherencies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts…association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche" according to the old figure, something like an intrapsychic gravitation….all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity. Such association is essentially possible only by virtue of similarities, differing in degree in each case, up to the limit of complete likeness.Thus all original contrast also rests on association: the unlike comes to prominence on the basis of the common. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.”

And the "pixels" are not "random". We see the flower with four petals because there is a flower with four petals. — Banno

What if one has been blind since birth and only recently acquired sight? Would a flower appear at first as anything other than a random collection of colors, shadings and lines? Would we not have to construct the meaningfully recognizable object called a flower out of a series of sensory-motor interactions we have with it? There is no flower with four petals , or any other visually identifiable object, until we first establish these relational interactions between ourselves and the world. Developmentally speaking, we have to use the flower to see it, and that is intrinsic to its meaning for us.

Are you claiming that the ancient Egyptians and others perceived each other as rigid and depersonalized, expressionless? That the Greeks discovered the inner dynamism of human beings (whatever that may mean)--those before them were unaware that humans could do more than stand and sit (referring to statutes) or could laugh or cry? People before the Renaissance thought children looked like tiny adults--that's why they drew them that way? That before the Impressionists, people didn't perceive all the colors of the rainbow — Ciceronianus

What we see is a function not simply of what random pixels of shape and color happen to impinge on our retinas. It is a function of what patterns we are able to synthesize out of this chaos of sensation. We have to discern correlations among initially disparate elements of the world, and coordinate these with our own movements.
In addition, we have to correlate different sense modalities associated with what we see into a unity.
Perception strives to achieve relative regularities and stabilities in navigating our surroundings, not veridical truths. It is about goal-oriented interaction, not mirroring. That’s why puppies deprived of movement in their early years fail to see objects properly, despite a healthy visual system. And why when wearing glasses that invert our visual field, eventually we come to see the world right side up again despite no change in how the visual information is reaching us. When we hallucinate from Lsd, which fragments the constructed stabilities and regularities, we can learn to re-stabilize the chaotic scene somewhat by adjusting our interactions with it. At the very least, we can eventually learn to separate out the influence of the drug from the changes in the visual scene, just as we figure out the distorting effect of bad glasses.

Sense modalities coordinate with each other, with concepts we have learned about the world and with our movements. And our movements coordinate with the seen world in ever more complex ways so as to produce new patterns where before we saw nothing. Perception sees through interacting. Artists see nuanced gradations of color the rest of us don’t see. Musicians perceive sound patterns others cannot.

Because perception is conceptually mediated, whether we see a random pattern of dots or recognizable letters forming words or a face is a function of what we expect to see. Optical illusions and the ability to understand spoken and written language depends on our expectations filing in shapes that are incomplete. We see a completely formed letter A even though what is there is a degraded and broken set of points. We hear a complete sentence even though some of the words have been drowned out by background noise.

We see facial expression, bodily comportment, posture and attitude based on what we expect in the other’s behavior. The pre-Greek cultures produced art that expressed their ways of interpreting human behavior based on cultural schemes of understanding The Greek enlightenment produced a psychological, philosophical, artistic , literary and spiritual revolution in thinking that was expressed in new expectations in seeing the human form through sculpure. Many art historians have written about the originality of the Greeks in seeing persons as animated by an inner volition or movement absent from ancient ways of thinking.


What the Renaissance brought to seeing was the recognition that the elements of a scene are related to each more radically than simply by the fact that they all fit within the room or landscape. They are tied together in relation to each other and to the viewer by a unified perspective, and by a unified light source. These relational patterns were invisible to previous seers, who only had simpler notions like shrinking size correlates with distance from the viewer. It is not that only the Impressionists saw the rainbow , it is that they were the first Western painters to see that the rainbow resides in all objects that light illuminates. Again , this is a matter of construing more complex forms of relational pattern tying one element of a visual scene with all the other elements than had previously been seen .

The empirical object is something that no one actually sees, because it is a social construction derived from myriad subjective perspectives.
— Joshs

So because our calling it a "flower" is a social construct, we never see the flower? — Banno

As opposed to Joshs, who apparently thinks that since the language we use for the flower is communal, the number of petals is, too. — Banno

Following Husserl, there are different components that contribute to what we see. We perceive the actual flower in front of us but apperceive the empirical ‘same flower for all’. In both cases we ‘fill in’ from memory what isn’t actually in front of us. Parts of the flower may be visually occluded, the outline and coloration may have breaks, and inconsistencies, but we still perceive the whole flower based on what we fill in from many previous experiences of it. In empirical seeing, we also include the socially agreed upon idealizations we have learned, such as pure geometric shapes. Ask a child to draw a desk in front of them and they will try and draw a pure rectangle or square rather than the perspectivally given object presented to them.

A history of art book offers a chronology of changes of socially shaped ways of perceiving. In many respects, this has involved leaning to ‘unsee’ previous socially formed notions of how things present themselves to us. Greek sculptors unsaw the rigid, depersonalized statues of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Mesopotamians when they discovered the inner dynamism of human beings. Renaissance artists had to unsee the inherited idea of a perspective-free landscape, no unifying light source and children depicted as tiny adults. Impressionist painters learned to unsee objects reflecting only a narrow band of colors onto the eye in favor of trees, skies and seas composed of every color in the rainbow. Expressionists taught themselves to unsee scenes in which subjective mood played no part in how things appear., giving us Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Munch’s Scream.

If I see an actual flower, the object I actual see
— Joshs

Why do you think that when you see an actual flower, you actually see something else? — Ludwig V

What I meant was that the idea of a spatial object as a persistingly self-identical thing enduring throughout changes in perspective is something we surmise, something we contribute to the phenomenon in front of us rather than something the world contributes. So what we see is a melding of conceptual expectation and what the world contributes, and the two sides are inextricably interwoven with each other.

Its objectivity is thus a socially constituted ideal.
— Joshs
I think that you misunderstand what objectivity is. It is something that happens irrespective of any socially constructed ideal — Ludwig V

Again, I’m thinking of objectivity as empirical objectivity. Following Husserl, this way of seeing objects is an idealization, The empirical object is something that no one actually sees, because it is a social construction derived from myriad subjective perspectives.

This just seems doubtful. I would expect that an infant sees what I see when it looks at a flower, despite it not having any sense of what is socially agreed upon. This concept would apply cross-culturally as well, lending support to the idea that we reach out to the flower to pick it not due to some inter-subjective, socially agreed upon basis, but because we think the flower it out past our hand ripe for picking — Hanover

I didn’t mean to suggest they a baby has to wait till it is informed of a social construct till it can recognize an object as a flower. What I meant was that the baby constructs the idea of a unitary object like a flower out of constantly changing perspectives, which it coordinates with its own movements. This personally synthesized construction
is not the same thing as the intersubjectively constructed empirical concept of flower, the identical flower for everyone. This ‘identical flower for all’ is something that no one actually sees, since it is an abstraction derived from multiple vantages.

As far as your question about what cognition would be like if emotions were removed is important because it raises the issue of artificial intelligence and robots. It is connected to the issue of sentience, because it is central to having an organic body. A computer doesn't cry, is not sensitive about what anyone says about it and doesn't experience sexual attraction — Jack Cummins

But then we have to ask what sense it makes to talk about what computers are, have or feel ‘in themselves’ , as though
there were such a thing as a computer self or personality (even if zombie-like) independent of human interactions with it. What I am suggesting is that our machines are appendages of us, like a nest for a bird or a web for a spider. The concept of a computer is only intelligible in terms of what we design and use it for. Without our aims, goals and purposes , which are intrinsically affective, a computer is a meaningless collection of parts. We couldnt say that on its own it calculates, because calculation is always for a purpose.

I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson.
— Joshs

Interesting! Thanks. :up: I hadn’t heard of him. Any suggestions for a starting point in his writing?
This book looks like an interesting combo of philosophy and psychology. — 0 thru 9

Feelings of Being is a good starting point, since it captures his fully developed notion of moods like grief and depression.

Matthew Ratcliffe
— Joshs

I'll be reading Rethinking Commonsense Psychology the next couple of months. I may rant about it at you. — fdrake

I look forward to your rant.

If I have an image of the flower in my mind after I close my eyes, I experience the phenomenal state of the flower with my eyes closed. If I open my eyes and that elicits a flower experience, then I then have that experience. Phenomenal states are brain created, often elicited by our senses, but not always. — Hanover

Or we could say that these are two types of phenomenological experience, experience given to us in distinctly different modalities. If I see an actual flower, the object I actual see is already shaped by my expectations, which I draw from memory. It is a concatenation or amalgam of expectations and the meager data that is given to me from the world. When I close my eyes I eliminate the data from the world ( which as I said is already concept-laden) and draw strictly from memory. In either case, the flower with its petals is not something there i. the world but a subjective construction. More precisely, the concept of flower is an intersubjectively constructed object. Its objectivity is thus a socially constituted ideal. We judge error and illusion in perception in relation not to a world as it is in itself but in relation to our constructed idealities, which, being relative, can always be other than how we now constitute them as objectively existing.

You will know if you read Stoic literature, that 'the passions' are something to be subdued, and that 'subduing the passions' is one of the marks of wisdom. I don't think they're praising callousness or mere indifference to suffering, but the ability to rise above feelings, emotions and moods. 'Constancy of temperament' was a highly prized virtue in the classics (reflected in the name 'Constance').


I wonder if what we call 'emotion' is in some way equivalent to what was meant by 'the passions' in those sources. I did learn, from practicing mindfulness meditation, that emotions always pass, and that's an important thing to learn. Because when you're feeling down, when you're possessed by negative emotions, which happens to all of us, it seems, in that state, that everything seems grey, in all directions. But once you learn that it is an emotion that will pass, it makes it easier to deal with. — Wayfarer

This take on the emotions seems to be the foil for Heidegger’s integrative approach to affect, feeling, mood and emotion:

people will reply:… Attunements-joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger-are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, 'feelings', are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant. They are merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events. Attunements-are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?”

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

We stated in a provisional and rough and ready manner that attunements are the 'presupposition' for, and 'medium' of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which irrupt then disappear. Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

You'd probably get a lot out of "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman-Barrett — fdrake

Feldman-Barrett’s alright, but predictive processing approaches are a bit behavioristically reductive for my taste. I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson.

our emotions can alert us to danger, show us our attachments, and help focus on things that are important in life. But emotions, if allowed to run unchecked can lead to us to our own destruction. Pain can lead us to danger or loss, but it can also lead us to down the road to torment and despair. Love can set us free, but also lead to paranoia or anguish. Desire can awaken us to our potential, or it can lead to greed and obsession. Anger can spur us into action, but it can also lead us to death or destruction. Fear can show us obstacles and help us plan, or it can paralyze us into inaction. Emotions are good if they are useful or beneficial- after that the emotions are more of a distraction from happiness than anything else.' — Jack Cummins

In the above quote, emotion is considered as some kind of substance that is added to the mix of mentation and behavior, as though we could imagine functioning without it. Emotion does this and that, adds this and that, provides us with this and that. I want to offer this question:Is there any aspect of cognitive function that can be made sense of if we imagine removing the thing we’re calling ‘emotion’? What if, instead of artificially extracting from experiencing some mysterious entity we label emotion and then asking about its nature, we abolish the distinction we have been making between affect, will and cognition and instead see affect as an inseparable dimension or aspect of all human functioning?

Contrary to ↪Joshs, if we commence by assuming that there is no possibility of communication on important issues, then we are throwing out the possibility of "ameliorating" the "violent breakdown in communication".

Again, we can come to understand that the rabbit is a duck-rabbit, and hence to see the point of view of those who only see the duck. Only where there is some potential for agreement is there also potential to avoid violence. — Banno

The impossibility of communication on important issues is a historical fact, which is to say, it is a product of historically
situated philosophical assumptions concerning the necessary preconditions for agreement. If, for instance, it is stipulated that agreement must be grounded in pre-existing states of affairs (i.e. that all individual points of view look out onto some aspect or other of the same pre-existing field which already contains ducks and rabbits), then agreement on many important issues will be impossible.
We have to allow that one point of view sees a rabbit, another a duck, a third a duck-rabbit, and a fourth a new form whose sense of meaning may not be available to the other three because it brings a new form of life into existence whether than representing a pre-existing form. To agree about the meaning of this new form, one must first enact it intersubjectively rather than simply discover it in the world. If we are having trouble enacting some other community’s new form of life, we can still respect its validity and legitimacy for them.
Requiring agreement to hook onto a same world for all forces outliers into the position of error and falsity.

I think I see what you are getting at. I would worry that this way of putting it seems to claim (or could be misinterpreted to claim) that we are infallible or that certain beliefs are infallible. Don't we have to acknowledge that error (I assume that's what "a disconnect between what is actual and what we think is actual" means) is always possible? The point is, we can recognize it and rectify it (in principle). — Ludwig V

The concerns you express here address our epistemic and empirical goals within the confines of our paradigmatic schemes, but those paradigmatic grounds for our beliefs are not themselves beliefs, so at this level the issue is not one of fallibility or error. Our paradigms are not epistemic hooks looking to grasp the actual, they are already actual. This does not mean that there no progress of paradigms, but this cannot be u destroy as a progress from error to truth.

Some thinking out loud:

Incommensurable is the word I'm tempted by :D

But then it seems to be too convenient, in a way. It depends upon just how radical is radical incommensurability, I think -- taking Kuhn's book sometimes it seems a matter of harsh disagreement, and sometimes it seems they inhabit different experiential worlds which in turn give the theories meaning which in turn explains their radical incommensurability. — Moliere

There are lots of degrees and levels of agreement within science, and just as many degrees and levels of incommensurability. Among participants in a scientific paradigmatic community, there need mot be unanimous agreement on conceptual definitions in order to work
productively together. I do think it can be helpful to conceive of normative discursive communities in terms of shared worlds, as long as we treat the idea of world as something like form of life or language game. In a shared world, my behaviors and your responses are mutually intelligible enough to allow for each of us to anticipate the other’s next moves in the game. Now let us say my scientific community undergoes a paradigm shift. Is our new shared world incommensurable with our old one, and if so, how are we then able to go back and forth between the old and new paradigm? I suggest what happens here is that in formulating the new way of thinking, at the same time we subtly reconstrue the sense of meaning of the old concepts such that we now see that old vocabulary in a different light. It is not as if we are able to make the old theory and the new one logically commensurable, but our redefining of the old terms in themselves makes it possible to form a bridge between the old and the new concepts. The old scheme becomes an inadequate or incomplete version of the new one as we retrospectively look back at it. Much the same thing happens in religious conversion. When look back at our old thinking, we implicitly reshape what the old notions were through the filter of the new ones.

Now let’s say we encounter someone who remains within the old way of thinking. We can share their world with them, maybe even consciously taking into account that we no longer conceive of the particulars of that old
world exactly in the way that we used to and the other still
does. But the bridge we created between the old and new doesnt exist for the other. Our new world is mostly invisible to them, at least as evidenced by the impossibility of sharing practices based on that new thinking.

But there are many other ‘worlds’ of practices that we CAN share with the other. We can participate with them in shared recreational activities, for instance. We can do the same with ‘alien’ species like dogs, when we play fetch with them. Whether we are ‘really’ understanding each other is not a question that need be asked as long as the game is flowing smoothly. Given that astrology makes use of concepts that are loose enough to be amenable to a wide variety of interpretations producing different practices among disparate communities, one can find those who consider themselves to have undergone a ‘conversion’ form astrological belief to astronomy, where for others astrology and astronomy can happily co-exist as distinct but not incommensurable worlds.

I think it’s important to take seriously the reality of radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, worlds, forms of life. The often violent breakdown in communication that incommensurability between ethico-political communities produces cannot be adequately ameliorated by consultation of a presumed single real world, even Davidson’s indirect one One needs to recognize that these multiple worlds of practices cannot be reduced to a single correct one., even if we believe such reduction is only an asymptotic goal never to be reached.

Isn't the limit something that is imposed on us from the things themselves? (I.E. imagine a perfect triangle-square) We cannot impose that limit on ourselves at will, it is shown as something foreign to our will. — JuanZu

In the case of the constitution of a real spatial object via the synthesis of perspectival adumbrations, passage to the limit never succeeds in fulfilling the idea of the object as a unitary identity. We strive for this fulfillment through our continued interest in the object , but the self-identical object always remains transcendent to what we actually experience. In the case of a geometric ideality like a straight line or circle, passage to the limit assures an exactitude because mathematical shapes are free idealities, whereas real spatial objects are bound idealities.

Mathematical idealization is free, unbound (within the strict limits of its own repetition); no contextual effects intervene such as was the case in the attempt to constitute a real spatialobject. Contextual change implies change in meaning, and a mathematical ideality can be manipulated without being animated, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification. Such an ideality can be repeated indefinitely without alteration (passage to the limit), because its meaning is empty. In the case of a bound ideality, what repeats itself as self-identical returns to itself as `the same' subtly differently each time; the immediate effects of contextual change ensure that alteration is intrinsic to the repetition of an intentional meaning. Put differently, we impose the real unity of a spatial object via intention acts, but can never fulfill this intention. We likewise impose the ideal unity of an identically repeatable geometric shape through intentional acts. But in this case we succeed in fulfilling its exact and universal reproducibility because it is an empty , unbounded iteration.

So we inhabit a series of contingent 'domains' which we can explore through our shared presuppositions or rules? Which means that we do not access Truth/Reality but shared truths/realities - frames which are without foundation, are relational and context dependent. A meta-narrative version of reality is not something even recognisable from this position. We inhabit forever preconditions for belief and doubt, but never reality itself. Can you expand on this or correct my take? — Tom Storm

I think your summary captures the idea. The meaningful sense of what is true and what is false is only coherent relative to a background intelligibility that orients us in terms of what is at stake and what is at issue for us, and this background grounding shifts over time as our purposes change. Lee Braver puts it this way:

…this lack of justification does not rob thinking of its legitimacy; rather, it makes certain factors and structures “groundless grounds.” The important point about this phrase is that both terms are in effect: while the grounds of all thinking lack the kind of foundation philosophers have long dreamt of, and thus are groundless, they still function as grounds for finite creatures like us. (Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds ;A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger)

Wittgenstein likens this relationship between the fast dynamics of ascertaining proportional truth that play out within larger frames of grounding, and the slower movement of the grounding frames, to the waters of a river and the underlying river bed.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.

97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other. (On Certainty)

Since we are talking about an internal relationship that is deduced from elements of an object that differs in its identity from the mind. That is, in order to reduce it to a psychological act you would have to express the internal relationship in terms of a relationship of psychic elements. — JuanZu

Husserl analyzed the origin of geometry in terms of a historical genesis, imaging the proto-geometer as someone who needed to strive toward more and more abstractive forms out of practical needs.

"In the life of practical needs certain particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always aimed at the production of particular preferred shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness. First to be singled out from the thing-shapes are surfaces—more or less "smooth," more or less perfect surfaces; edges, more or less rough or fairly "even"; in other words, more or less pure lines, angles, more or less perfect points; then, again, among the lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces, straight lines, and points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are undesirable for many kinds of practical interests. Thus the production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) always plays its role in praxis. So also in cases where just distribution is intended. Here the rough estimate of magnitudes is transformed into the measurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts."

“Out of the praxis of perfecting, of freely pressing toward the horizons of conceivable perfecting "again and again/' limit-shapes emerge toward which the particular series of perfectings tend, as. toward invariant and never attainable poles. If we are interested in these ideal shapes and are consistently engaged in determining them and in constructing new ones out of those already determined, we are "geometers." In place of real praxis—that of action or that of considering empirical possibilities having to do with actual and really [i.e., physically] possible empirical bodies—we now have an ideal praxis of "pure thinking" which remains exclusively within the realm of pure limit-shapes. Through a method of idealization and construction which historically has long since been worked out and can be practiced intersubjectively in a community, these limit-shapes have become acquired tools that can be used habitually and can always be applied to something new—an infinite and yet self-enclosed world of ideal objects as a field for study.

Like all cultural acquisitions which arise out of human accomplishment, they remain objectively knowable and available without requiring that the formulation of their meaning be repeatedly and explicitly renewed. . It is understandable how, as a consequence of the awakened striving for "philosophical" knowledge, knowledge which determines the "true," the objective being of the world, the empirical art of measuring and its empirically, practically objectivizing function, through a change from the practical to the theoretical interest, was idealized and thus turned into the purely geometrical way of thinking. The art of measuring thus becomes the trail-blazer for the ultimately universal geometry and its "world" of pure limit-shapes.

What makes geometric idealities identically transmissible form person to person and culture to culture is their rootedness in the construction of numeration, in which we abstract away everything meaningful about a collection of objects except their identity as an empty unit, for the purposes of iterating the ‘same thing different time’. This empty enumeration at the heart of geometric idealities makes the latter ideal rather than real.

I don't understand why you think I take the position that "evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real." Our interaction with the rest of the world and its results are the best evidence we have of the real. — Ciceronianus

I didnt explain myself very well. I meant that this is a position I assumed you would not take. But it’s worth examining the consequences of rejecting such a path. Going back to Descartes, the belief at that time that the world offers itself up to us in its unvarnished truth only when we use our faculties of reason correctly was accompanied by the anxiety that evil liars and manipulators could plunge unsuspecting innocents into a 17th century version of the Matrix. All an evil genius would have to do is take advantage of the fact that the world that appears to us doesn’t have the power by itself to reveal its true nature, it needs our help via our proper use of rational faculties. Perhaps all Descartes succeeded in demonstrating to his peers is that those faculties are adept enough to make his doubt- based thought experiments seem ludicrous. And yet it did highlight a common assumption of the era, which is that the difference between truth and falsity hangs entirely on the functioning of a rather arbitrary mechanism of logical cogitation.

By the time we get to Peirce, the thinking has shifted in favor of a more equal participation of the material world in the production of truth, thanks to his absorption of Hegelian dialectic. Rationality is not dependent entirely on the skills of a solipsistic cogito, but is intersubjectively produced through interactions with the world. The Matrix scenario no longer makes sense given the dependence of truth on pragmatic interaction, so evil liars become less of a threat.

But still with Peirce we have to worry about situations in which we fail to gain purchase on truth:

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question. That truth consists in a conformity to something independent of his thinking it to be so, or of any man’s opinion on the subject.

The independence of that truth produces anxiety that we might fall victim to hallucination, madness, illusion. We doubt the reality of our world, which is different than saying we doubt that there is such a thing as a real world. That would be self-contradictory, given that doubting one thing is only possible against a wider backdrop of certainty.

But for Peirce as well as Descartes that certainty rests ultimately on faith, faith that whether we have gained proper access to it or not, there are intrinsic objective truths that apply to the world. For the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, faith is no longer needed in order to ground certainty in the existence of the world. They have freed themselves of the anxiety that has accompanied all belief and evidence based foundations of the really true. For them it can never be the case that a disconnect exists between what is actual and what we think is actual, a source of fear that illusion and error could cloud our apprehension of what is true.
We always already find ourselves ensconced within one language game or another, one or another form of life providing the frame of intersubjectively shared certainty within which we can agree or disagree on what is true or false. The frame itself is not a belief but an unquestioned prerequisite and precondition for belief or doubt.

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