, you are suggesting that "fa" is an incomplete analysis of predication, that we must represent as well the relation between f and a... and that the "is" is needed to explicate something in addition to "fa". — Banno

My argument, drawing from Husserl, is that fa is not an analysis of predication so much as a naive restatement of the idealization that predication represents, and that there is a ‘pre-predicative’ stratum of cognition that predication and all its symbols are built on top of. Trying to use these symbols, like fa, to describe this pre-predicative stratum is putting the cart before the horse.
This pre-predicative level of cognition has been misunderstood as a psychological realm, as if one were using neuroscience to explain the basis of the recognition of symbols , identities and propositions. But a neuroscientific approach that is founded on mathematical methods which in turn are founded on propositional logic is also putting the cart before the horse.

Regarding the treatment of the ‘is’ as an ‘added’ relation between S and P, let’s go back to Bradley. According to Wiki,

“Bradley seems to conclude that the regress should lead us to abandon the idea that relations are "independently real". One way to take this suggestion is as recommending that in the case of a respecting b, we are dealing with a state of affairs that has only two constituents: a and b. It does not, in addition, involve a third item…”

Not sure if you agree with this, but assuming you do, help me understand in what way there are only two constituents in the case of ‘Snow is white’. Certainly we can remove the ‘is’ and end up with the two symbols fa.
But when I hear the words snow is white, how am I able to understand what this means? Let’s begin with the first word of the syllogism. Snow in this context doesn’t refer to the memory of a particular instance of my encounter with snow , it refers to any and all possible instances, that is, snow in general. Would you say, then, that what I am understanding here is the general category of snow? And what about the predicate ‘white’? Am I not treating this word in the context of the syllogism as the general category of the color white? And how am I supposed to understand what this genera category of white is doing in the same syllogism with the general category of snow?
Of all the ways I can think about snow, only one way directs me toward a property or attribute of it, something that describes only own aspect of what snow is, in addition to its being wet, crystalline, sparkly, and so on.
So if, according to Bradley the only constituents of ‘snow is white’ are the two general categories ‘snow’ and ‘white’, what do we call our being directed toward an attribute of snow? If this is not a relation, and not a constituent, do we say that it simply belongs equally and inseparably to the two constituents? This could work if the meaning of ‘snow’ and ‘ white’ have been modified such that , in their participation in the syllogism , they no longer have separable identities apart from their role in the syllogism. Is this what you would say? Because if one can still tease out from the predication a general category of meaning called ‘snow’ and one called ‘white’ then one clearly has a third category, or at least sense, here in the form of ‘is a part of’. Then in order to understand the syllogism as a whole , one must go back and forth between ‘snow’ , ‘white’, and ‘is a part of’. I believe the first option rather than the second. How about you?

My point was that whenever the ‘is’ makes its appearance in a sentence it does so for a reason.
— Joshs
As I explained, it's to stop "Snow White" from being confused with "snow is white". — Banno

I don’t think you mean to say that this is the only function of the word ‘is’, because it can do many things in a sentence. I assume you’re trying to tell me what is NOT a necessary function of the ‘is’ , namely , telling us that two other terms are related in some way.

You might have caught my subtle hint that you seem to be running up against Bradley's regress. I gather you don't agree. — Banno

All components of language are doings, changes, transformations. They relate a prior sense with a new sense by modifying the old sense. The simplest way to convey this is with a sentence that consists of a single word or gesture. All higher structures of language build on this by elaboration and enrichment. Since a single word in itself already can convey a relation in the sense of a doing, I don’t think Bradley’s regress has any relevance to my argument. From my perspective, every addition to the relation conveyed by a one-word sentence would have to be considered a new and different relation rather than a regressive defining of the original relation. The ‘is’, when it is employed , contributes a new kind of transforming relation ( a doing) on top of that constituted by a pair of terms , rather than originally creating the relation between those terms.

Again, there are languages in which it doesn't occur; it is not needed in first order logic; and supposing that it is a relation leads immediately to Bradley's regress. That is, you are suggesting that "fa" is an incomplete analysis of predication, that we must represent as well the relation between f and a. — Banno

I didn’t mean to suggest that the ‘is’ is necessary in order
for predication to do its job. My point was that whenever the ‘is’ makes its appearance in a sentence it does so for a reason. It does something. Rather than calling it a relation, I would say that it modifies the sentence in some way. It acts as a verb, or perhaps an adverb, but then modern philology recognized that the roots on which languages are based act more as verbs than as nouns. The ‘S’ is already a doing, a performance, even before it is linked to a ‘P’, which is a further performance.

↪Joshs "Snow is white" is just a noun and a predicate... f(a). The "is" does nothing. — Banno

If it is in a sentence, it plays a semantic role in that sentence, albeit one that can vary widely in importance depending on the context. Components of a sentence are like notes in a song. Every note has a meaning in the context of the piece. There are no notes which ‘do nothing’. I say ‘ All snow is white’. You say, ‘No, it IS NOT!’ I say , yes, all snow IS white.’ Or I say ‘this snow was white’. You correct me by saying, ‘No, this snow IS white’. It seems to me the ‘is’ carries the central semantic message via the emphasis in these sentences, but via slightly different senses of meaning. Hebrew doesnt use the word ‘is’, because other elements of a sentence take over the function of identifying tense, personal pronoun, etc. But this doesn’t mean that there is no semantic effect of this difference in grammatical structure between English and Hebrew, or between English and any other language. These differences are among the reasons that there cannot be a perfect translation from one language to another.

No response to the rest of my post?

It has a use? What does it do? It doesn't even occur in certain other languages, where the concatenation of a predicate and a noun will suffice. It does Fa in standard logical parlance.
It tells us how to bind or separate them.
— Joshs
"...how to..."? It's a set of instructions? — Banno

‘Snow is white’: In this case , the ‘is’ tells us that white is a dependent attribute of snow. ‘Snow is snow’: In this case, the ‘is’ tells us that snow is identical to itself. ‘Snow’ is whiter than rain’: In this case the ‘is’ tells us that two independent objects are being compared. Of course, the ‘is’ isn’t doing this all by itself. The sentence that it occurs in defines its sense. And this must be true for the sense of the S and the P also. And I take it your point is that the ‘use’ of all of these components of a propositional statement involves not just the role of each symbol in the context of the sentence , but the use of the sentence in the context of public communication.

Better, use is creating a category — Banno

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is what I was trying to get at. So if the components of a syllogism get their sense from their role in the sentence, and the sentence gets its sense from its use by a community, is this community use the creation of the category that defines the sense of a particular syllogism? And if so, do we do things with categories other than create them?
Are there instances or aspects of the actual engagement with a syllogism that don’t involve the fresh creation of a category? And if we are not always creating a category when we converse , how should we describe what we are doing with the category as we employ it in a syllogism? Tell me more about the difference between the creation and the employment of a category.

What is a prediction for you? Is it the relation between an S and a P?
— Joshs

You are asking what is the "...is..." in S is P?

It isn't anything; certainly not a relation.

Let's not reify syntax. — Banno

It has to be something. It carries a meaning, and the meaning changes with the structure of the logical relation.
Logic doesn’t consist of S’s and P’s basking in solipsism. It tells us how to bind or separate them. Actually, in my question concerning the nature of a predication, I’m more interested in the S and the P than in the copula , which , btw, I suggest gives us the structure of ‘use’.
I recognize that the forms of logic that you are most interested in represent innovations over older forms of logic in which the copula has no connection to use but instead simply connects independent symbols. In modern pragmatic logics, from my understanding, the objects that S and P stand for are always themselves the effects of use relations. Thus, no object senses escape the structure of public use.

It seems, though, that , even given that the ‘S’ in a predication is never independent of a use-context , these logics must be able to keep the sense of the ‘S’ stable. That is , its use points to a category that can be symbolized. A use belongs to a use category , and this is what the symbols in a logic stand for. I think this where interpersonal of the later Wittgenstein split off from each other. Those Wittgensteinians who endorse the value of formal logic see him as making symbolizable use categories irreducible ( Hacker and Baker) , while others argue that uses aren’t symbolizable categories but contingent, situational contexts.

↪Joshs Reality doesn't care whether you've read Foucault — Banno

Thank you for that exemplification of how some of us use the word ‘reality’.

↪universeness The 1986 remake as the classic?

I grieve for my people. — Banno

The fly-people?

Seemingly I am for the notion that meaning persists over time. Namely, if Plato's Dialogues translation, still conveys the same meaning as it did some two millennia ago, then why would anyone think that meaning doesn't persist over time. — Shawn

Every product of culture, without exception, must be continually reinterpreted for each era. This goes for music, art, literature, history, science and philosophy. There is no getting back to some veridical original meaning. History is repurposed from the perspective of current thinking and concerns.

There is only one motivation we should care about. Truth. Cold, unfeeling, horrifying truth that takes our feelings and stamps them to the ground. Until that is your motivation, everything you think of will be tainted in another direction. Sometimes truth fits our worldview wonderfully, other times it does not. — Philosophim

I guess Foucault won’t be on your reading list any time soon.

Identity, similarity and differentiation are predictions. Presumably you wish to say something like that while they are predications, the judgement isn't; but how could one make a judgement involving a predicate without using that predicate? — Banno

Perhaps the distinction Husserl makes between the pre-predicative and the predicative stratum of constitution (and his notion of pre-predicative judgment) implies a different use of the word predication than the one you are familiar with. What is a prediction for you? Is it the relation between an S and a P? If so, when you say all identity, similarity and differentiation involves predication, are you making the relation between a subject and a predicate the irreducible ground of sense as use? Are you claiming that predication is involved in the most basic forms of perceptual discrimination and construction?
If so , it isn’t surprising that Husserl’s writings on the pre-predicative genesis of predication doesn’t make sense to you. This realm of intentional constitution of sense simply doesn’t exist for you. Put differently, it will likely appear to you as a misguided attempt to anchor predicational use in some stratum that eludes language.

↪Joshs, ↪Heracloitus

Presumably Joshs is bracketing the next part of the conversation... epoché. — Banno

I was going to respond to your comment on the expression of a rule, and then realized I didn’t actually disagree with it.

First, it's worth noting that predication applies more broadly than to "judgements of experience". 2 is a number. That's not generally something one experiences as a phenomena... unless perhaps one has synethesia — Banno

From a Husserlian vantage, there is nothing to be said about anything outside of experience. The number 2 is an intentional experience in a particular mode of givenness.

— Banno

instead of “is it true that the cup is red" we ask if it is useful to talk of the cup as being red. And several things become immediately apparent.

It's clear that it is appropriate to call the cup red if it is helpful in the task at hand - "pass me the red cup" works if you are handed that cup and not the green one. And we can seek clarification: "Do you mean crimson one or the vermilion one?" and so on. There's an interaction between the participants here that can serve to specify the cup to whatever level one desires.

I hope it is clear why it is a bit silly to berate logicians for not starting with experiences. — Banno

Logicians do start with experience. More specifically, they start with an implicit theory of experience. Their theories of experience pay lip service to the sorts of preliminary processes that are necessary in order to establish logical subjects and predicates as recognizable, unitary objects that can be compared and distinguished , bound together or separated. Usually , this consists of acknowledging what they consider to be psychological developmental capacities like object permanence (it’s hard to manipulate abstract objects without seeing objects as persistingly self-identical) .

But these preliminary, or pre-predicative, capacities tend to be seen as peripheral to what the logicians you support see as the ‘ground floor’ of logic, ‘public use’.
You have said you are not a conceptual relativist, so use for you ultimately is tied to the way things really are, even if in an indirect way ala Davidson, or maybe Anscombe. There is no endless hermeneutic circle of use defined by family resemblance. This chain of ‘in order to’s’ must come to an end somewhere, and that end is presaged by the formal components of predicative logic.

Husserl is also concerned with what works, but for him use applies not only to interactions between people involving objects but also to one’s pre-predicative perceptual involvement with objects. Every aspect of our experience of our world in terms of recognizable features, colors , shapes , the objectivizing constitution of whole objects from a changing flow of perceptual perspectives, distinctions between these constructed whole objects and their components parts , distinctions and similarities between one whole object and another, all of these involve a progressive emergence of more and more complex differentiations and syntheses based on perceived similarities(not a Humean causal concatenation but an intentional synthesis that draws from prior established correlations to produce more complex new syntheses.”.. each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense.”) There are no qualia to be referred back to here. Everything about perceptual judgement is relative, circular and contingent , just as Isaac would have it.

Predicative judgements have their origin in these pre-predicative judgements of identity, similarity and differentiation. Being able to recognize a ceaselessly changing flow of visual perspectival variations, accompanied by independent auditory and tactile sensations, as ‘this persisting spatial object’ is more useful than experiencing a random flow of meaningless
phenomena. And abstracting further from such particular objects to a general object ‘S’ can be useful too. But we need to recognize the sort of synthetic constructive activity that is required to create the sense of ‘general category’. And the same is true of the further constituting activity involved in the relating of the general category ‘S’ to a ‘P’. For Husserl, every the the most seemingly transparent, obvious and irreducible steps of a logical construction involve the constituting of new senses of meaning(For instance, when I introduce an ‘S’ , that is one sense of meaning, and when I introduce a ‘P’ this changes the sense of the original ‘S’. When I add a conditional IFF this further changes the sense of the ‘S’, as well as the ‘P’.

[

folk have been using cognates of "S is F" without explaining what they are talking about. Is it that S=F (they are equal)? Or S ≡ F (they are materially equivalent)? Or just F(S) (predicating F to S)? or S∈F (S is an element of the set or class S), or none of these, or some combination, or something else? — Banno

Let’s start with Husserl’s characterization of the syllogism. He spends most of Experience and Judgement and Formal and Transcendental Logic unfolding the intentional strata that constitutively lead up to the understanding of the most elementary basis of formal logic, the predicative synthesis S is P.

“…what has been established from the beginning, from the founding of our logical tradition with Aristotle, is this: the most general characteristic of the predicative judgment is that it has two members: a “substrate” (hypokeimenon), about which something is affirmed, and that which is affirmed of it (kategoroumenon); from another point of view, according to grammatical form, we can distinguish onoma and rhema. Every declarative statement must be made up from these two members. Every judging presupposes that an object is on hand, that it is already given to us, and is that about which the statement is made.
(… a unitary proposition can be more or less highly articulated. For instance, the hypothetical judgment, / / A is b, then C is d. It is sharply articulated as having two parts; it too has a "caesura": / / A is b II then C is d. Each of these members is, in turn, articulated.)

Thus tradition provides us, so to speak, with an original model of the judgment which, qua judgment, we must interrogate as to its origin. We must leave entirely open here whether with this we are really dealing with the most primordial logical structure.

Only the elucidation of the origin of this structure, traditionally defined as judgment, can provide the answer to this question and to all further questions associated with it: to what extent is the predicative judgment the privileged and central theme of logic, so that, in its core, logic is necessarily apophantic logic, a theory of judgment? Furthermore, what is the mode of connection of these two members which are always to be distinguished in judgment? To what extent is the judgment synthesis and diaeresis (analysis) in one? This is a problem which has always created an embarrassment for the logician and for which there is no satisfactory solution to this day. What is it that is “bound together” and “separated” in the judgment? Further: which among the multiple judgment-forms which tradition distinguishes is the most primitive, i.e., that one which, as being the undermost, and founding all others, must be presupposed, and by an essential necessity conceived as underlying, in order that other forms of a “higher level” can be founded on it? Is there a single primal form, or are there several, enjoying equal rights, standing beside one another? “

“Since Aristotle, it has been held as certain that the basic schema of judgment is the copulative judgment, which is reducible to the basic form S is P. Every judgment having another composition, e.g., the form of a verbal proposition, can, according to this interpretation, be transformed without alteration of its logical sense into the form of the copulative bond; for example, “The man walks” is logically equivalent to “The man is walking.” The “is” is part of the rhema in which always “time is cosignified,” and in this it is like the verb. Thus, we require an exact understanding of what is involved in this copulative bond, of the nature and origin of the copulative predicative judgment, before we can take a position regarding the question of whether in fact this convertibility is justified and whether the difference between the judgments is merely one of a difference of linguistic form, which does not refer to a difference of the logical achievement of sense.

However, should the latter be the case, the problem would arise of knowing how both forms, the copulative proposition on the one hand, and the verbal on the other, relate to each other. Are they equally primitive logical achievements of sense, or is one (and which one?) the more primitive? Does the copulative form S is p, as tradition holds, really represent the basic schema of the judgment? Further, the question about the primordiality of this schema would in that case also have to be raised with regard to the fact that in it, as a matter of course, the subject is set in the form of the third person. In this, it is presupposed that, in the first and second persons, the judgment in the form “I am . . . ,” “You are . . . expresses no logical achievement of sense which deviates from that expressed in the privileged fundamental schema “It is . . . This presupposition requires testing and would again put the question of the primordiality of the traditional basic schema S is p in a new light.“

Husserl’s thesis is this:”Logic needs a theory of experience, in order to be able to give scientific information about the legitimating bases, and the legitimate limits, of its Apriori, and consequently about its own legitimate sense. Tthe ideal "existence" of the judgment-content is a presupposition for, and enters into, the ideal "existence" of the judgment (in the widest sense, that of a supposed categorial objectivity as supposed).

“The possibility of properly effectuating the possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs.

“This fact is easily over-looked by the formal logician, with his interest directed one-sidedly to the syntactical — the manifold forms of which are all that enters into logical theory — and with his algebraizing of the cores as theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be kept identical.”

I just wanted to add this:

So snow is white. Why do I care? In what context of concerns and goals does this become a topic of interest to me? Wittgenstein tried to show how we end up in confusion by trying to pretend that ‘S is P’ makes any sense outside of a specific context of wider motivated engagement with others. This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts.

The left side is about a proposition, the right side is about how things are. — Banno

↪Banno Isn't this like the correspondence theory of truth? More suited to matters which can be resolved empirically? — Tom Storm

↪Tom Storm It works for any sentence, empirical or otherwise. — Banno

This is about correspondence, even if it consists of correspondence within a discursive community rather than between that community and things-in-themselves. In order for it to be correspondence, the referents that are being compared have to ‘sit still’ long enough to be compared. We have to be able to trust that what we are referring back to in a comparison has a sense that continues to remain what it was for the sake of the comparison. Entities to be shuffled, arranged and rearranged are required to have persisting identity during all this calculative coordinating .

I bring this up because I want to contrast it with what may appear to you as a strange way of thinking, what Andrew4Handel might call ‘extreme philosophy’. This strange way of thinking is common to poststructuralism, phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein, and it consists of the following analysis of propositional statements such as ‘snow is white Iff snow is white’, or, more generally, ‘on the left of the truth sentence is a sentence being talked about, on the right is a sentence being used’

According to this analysis, to be talked about is already to be used. S is P is usage.In stating S is P, we are seeing S as P. What that means is that the ‘is' connecting S with P is not a neutral relational copula between two pre-existing things, it is a transformative action altering in one gesture both the S and the P. The ‘as' enacts a crossing of past and present such that both are already affected and changed by the other in this context of dealing with something. When we take something as something, we have already projected out from a prior context of relevance such as to render what is presenting itself to us as familiar and recognizable in some fashion. But in this act of disclosure, we only have this context of relevance by modifying it, that is , by USING it in a new way.
This is how we understand ‘snow is white’. And it is also how we understand the move from ‘snow is white’ to the conditional IFF. This conditional, like the ‘is’ in S is P, is not a neutral , external relational connector specifying conditions of truth between two pre-existing sentences. It transforms the sense of meaning of the first sentence (snow is white) as it is used in the context of the second sentence, while the second sentence, in being used in the context of the first, constructs a fresh sense of meaning for itself .
So what one has in this logical construction is not an external combining, comparing , shuffling and coordinating of extant symbolic meanings , but a continually self-transforming construction of sense. Every step of the process involves producing new sense and relevance rather than taking extant persisting symbolic forms and shuffling them around to discover truth or falsity of their relations. Propositional statements aim to stay a step ahead of ineffability by capturing anything sayable within a formal logic of use. But the very formality of the logic, with its presuppositions of extant, persisting symbolic meanings ,neutral , external connectors (is , iff) and activities of shuffling and coordination achieves its triumph over ineffability at the expense of meaninglessness.

. It's been a long time since I did drugs, to be sure, it's a fine way to be shown the arbitrariness of the world...Reality doesn't care what drugs you take.
— Banno

Or perhaps it shows that perception’s role is to adaptively guide behavior rather than to veridically recover ‘reality’.

I see a continuity from what we say to what we do and what is not said but shown. It's the place where stating the rule is replaced by enacting it, and where saying what the picture is of is replaced by showing it. That continuity means that we can always say more, but enough is said when the task is done. Hence the term "ineffable" is inappropriate. — Banno

A bit different emphasis from Gendlin’s phenomenological dictum that:

“We think more than we can say, we feel more than we can think, we live more than we can feel, and there is much else besides.”

But I don’t see these as incompatible.

no matter what the position people seem to hold, as soon as they leave the keyboard or the class room, they mostly enter the quotidian world of realism, cause and effect, common sense, and ordinary moral agreements. — Tom Storm

I must have the wrong map, then.

I have tried to show that God-Spirit is never alone, was co-created alongside of human. I have tried to say identity is socially negotiated by insight of QM. I have placed the self-and-other dialogue at the core of reality. The gist of my premise, that IAM speak forestalls the isolation of solipsism, abhors a vacuum. Where have I said or suggested the creation is static? — ucarr

If God was “co-created alongside of human”, what accounts for the dualistic split between the natural( the human as a physical and biological entity) and the spiritual? These two realms seem to be interacting from across an unbridgeable divide. What makes scientific naturalism ‘isolated and solipsistic’ if not as
one pole of a nature-spirit dialectic? In other words , don’t we first have to assume your nature-spirit co-creation , and then by subtracting away God arrive at a solipsistic physical nature? Don’t we eliminate the problem by not starting from the dualism of nature and god? That is , if all there is is the natural , by comparison to what can we call it ‘isolated’? I agree that the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is the product of a certain approach to naturalism, but there are ways of dissolving it through a modification of the understanding of naturalism. Your way leaves the dualism intact, leaving the interior of both nature and spirit as solipsisms even as they superficially interact. Kant made human conceptualization and empirical nature inseparably co-dependent, and yet Kantianism is accused of a solipsistic conception of subjectivity.

Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates. — Constance

I would add that he didn't think the very concept of truth was particularly useful, even as warranted assertion, and on this point he differed from Dewey and James , as well as Davidson and Putnam.

I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics. — Constance

He liked the fact that Derrida critiqued the metaphysics
of presence, substituting playful irony.

whatever is ineffable in human experience, propositonally considered, "drops out of the conversation", but may be the subject of poetry and the other arts. The ineffable, as such, may drop out of the philosophical conversation, but the fact that there is the ineffable need not: it may, on the contrary, be considered to be of the greatest philosophical significance (but obviously not on a conception of philosophy as narrow as AP or OLP). — Janus

What do you think of the idea that the ineffable used to be thought of in terms of a hidden substance , a thing -in-itself, the noumenon that stands on the other side of a divide between our representations and the essences buried within external nature as well as in the interiority of our own subjectivity? And more recently the ineffable , rather than pointing to a hidden substance, is associated with the unconscious of thought , the fact that the origins of our values are not transparent to us, and neither is language transparent to itself. In other words, the ineffable is irreducible difference , displacement and becoming rather than interiority, essence, ipseity, pure self-reflexivity.

The universe cannot create herself except through the mysterious dialogue of self and other. — ucarr

Atheism, though faithful, in the absence of physicalism explaining existence, has no idea where it comes from. — ucarr

This is the dilemma that both modern religious and scientific thinking has created for itself. It has managed to extricate itself from static mechanistic and rationalist models in order to embrace a perspective of holism, historical transformation, organicism, dialogical relationality and interdependence. And yet it still insists on deriving this dynamism, interconnectedness and historical becoming from a ground which is anything but dynamic. Why does change have to ‘ come from’ something unchanging , some dead first cause, either nothingness or a God who creates axioms? Isn’t such a creator the essence of solitude and isolation? Why not let time and history stand on their own, without having to nail them down to a beginning?

↪Ludwig V There is a section in Neurocomputational Perspective where Paul Churchland speculates that, if we could develop a deep enough theoretical understanding of the mechanics of brain, we would be capable of having direct experiences of those processes, the sensation of neural events. The ultimate embedding of belief I guess you could say. — Pantagruel

This is where phenomenology can be helpful.

“…it is phenomenologically absurd, as Heidegger once pointed out, “to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else
of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself (Heidegger 1985: 86).

For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity.”

I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.

…how do epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world? — Constance

Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world.

Well put. I'd go further than "culturally constructed nature." Some of our reality is constructed based on biological, genetic, neurological, and instinctive factors, e.g. the structure of our nervous and sensory systems. We are born human with a human nature. — T Clark

Yes indeed. Kant laid the groundwork for psychologists to begin paying attention to our ‘embodied’ ways of relating to the world.

all of this is based on our paradigmatic example of a person - a human being, with all the complex legal and moral questions that follow. What else could it be based on? The question is about how far that paradigm can be extended to similar cases, what kinds of similarity are required and how far and under what circumstances extension can go…we are agreed - aren't we? - that there is a real need to separate attribution of beliefs (and hence knowledge?) from articulation of beliefs in language, whether externally, by saying something or internally, by saying something to oneself.

In that case, surely we need to think of explanations of (rational) action as a structure to be completed, rather than a process, whether internal or external. The pratical syllogism is the only paradigm we have for this, so perhaps our question turns into an exploration of that. — Ludwig V

Let me try a hypothesis that links opinion about human-animals differences back to models of embedded beliefs. You mentioned rationality and the syllogism in connection to belief. Many approaches in psychology and philosophy take the propositional statement as their starting point for the understanding of judgement , interpretation , belief and value. I identify with those writers who critique this assumption. Their argument is basically this. Propositions of the form ‘S is P’ and their derivatives indicate that something is or is not the case, that a statement about the world is true or false. This leaves out the fact that when we relate two events we are not just determining what is or is not the case. We are at the same time determining ‘how’ they are the case. Interpretation of events reveals how things seem to us, how they are relevant , how they matter to us, what their significance is in relation to our immediate contextual goals and purposes, how enticing they are.

Even the seemingly most cut and dry statements of truth or falsity show up an aspect of the world in a new way for us, so that it is never simply a matter of something’s being the case or not. Propositional logic is thus not at all the starting point for human belief, it is a narrowly conceived , abstract derivative of basic human interpretive , intentional activity. A much better model of the fundamental ground of cognition and belief is perception. In perceiving anything in our environment, we blend expectations drawn from memory with what is actually in front of us , and synthesize out of that pairing of recollection and anticipation an interpretation of what we are experiencing. Put differently, we believe we are seeing a chair as a result of this mesh of memory, anticipation and actual sensation. Thus all perception involves belief. Not of the propositional form ‘S is P’, but of the hermeneutic form ‘S AS P’. We see something as something, which means we don’t simply regurgitate a copy of something from memory and compare back and forth between this self-same thing and another self-same thing to see if there is a match(truth or falsity). We build our computers to do this computational trick .

We are not computers. Contra Chomsky, we are not computational, representational rationalists. Seeing something as something is recognizing that thing. Recognition is a creative act , not a representational comparison. To recognize a thing is to see it as both familiar and novel in some freshly relevant way. Belief is thus fecund rather than calculative. It is also affective. Things matter to us in affectively valuative ways.
Enactivist psychologists will tell us that we get this way of organizing perceptual interpretation not from an act of God or evolution blessing humans with some unique capacity not available to other animals , but to the basis feature of all living organisms as autopoietic self-organizing systems as functionally unified sense-makers.

Living systems are normatively goal-oriented, and in this sense the are affective and value-forming. They form their own environmental niche and guide and determine the ‘rightness’ of their functioning in their world in accordance with how the feedback from their constructed niche accords or fails to accord with their aims. Thus , all living systems have ‘beliefs’ in that they are purposive in relation to their niche, anticipating forward into their world and adjusting those ‘beliefs’ in relation to feedback from it.

Of course this is along way from human language, but how necessary is language to belief? If belief is a perceptual phenomenon, present in newborns prior to language-learning, then what does language add to belief? I have been arguing that since we are not computers, and belief is not a matter of abstract symbol manipulation like the early cognitive scientists thought , and many on this forum still believe, what language does is allow us to synthesis sources of information from many modalities into words. Animals are also synthesizing many modalities. When a hungry cat hears the can opener, the sound is a form of language that activates the memory of the sight and smell of the food that is in the can, as well as anticipation of the actions of the pet owner that will bring the can of food into the cat’s dish. So a whole sequence of sensations and actions are evoked by the one simple sound of the can opener. It acts as a proto-language. But it will not occur to the cat to reproduce the sound, to share it with others. Why not?

There is substantial limitation to a cat’s memory when it comes to contextually synthesizing in a much more global and complex way a whole range of information that allows humans to share events through language.
So memory is the limiting factor for animals when it comes to language, not some ‘rational’ or ‘propositional’ capability. There are humans with brain injuries which prevent them from holding items in memory long enough to do the ‘S is P’ calculative thing , but they still have language thanks to an overarching ability to remember complex associations.

In sum, in its most basic form, what we call belief is not logical symbol manipulation but the purposive , normative, goal-oriented anticipatory character of perceptual interpretation, which animals share with us. The higher , more abstract forms of belief we achieve through language is unavailable to other. animals due to sever memory limitations. They care about their world and make their way through it on the basis of more temporally constricted , immediate contextual beliefs. They plan, decide and disambiguate within more narrow parameters of time and space.

Some here think only humans are clever enough to figure out what to do with a syllogism. I follow those psychologists and philosophers who think we should take a cue from other animals and be clever enough to get rid of the syllogism as the paradigm of ‘rational belief’.

“For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief. In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind.”(Anthony Chemero)

If there were people claiming that animals don't feel pain, I'd love to hear it. Seems ridiculous. — Mikie

How soon we forget.

“The idea that animals might not experience pain or suffering as humans do traces back at least to the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, who argued that animals lack consciousness.[14][15][16] Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain, and veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were simply taught to ignore animal pain.[17] In his interactions with scientists and other veterinarians, Bernard Rollin was regularly asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" grounds for claiming that they feel pain.” ( Wikipedia)

But I'd be happily proven wrong if there's a shred of evidence suggesting other animals have language. They communicate, of course, but they don't have language. There's been a lot of research on that as well, with primates. They simply cannot acquire it, no matter how it's tried….we're left as the only species on earth with the capacity for language. — Mikie

Apparently they can acquire it, but only with aggressive interaction with humans, and only if begun at a very young age.

“Elisabeth Lloyd (2004) shows that the fortuitous success of the bonobo Kanzi in acquiring a rudimentary linguistic capacity has changed the terms in which these issues should be addressed (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor 1998). Kanzi inadvertently participated in experiments on language acquisition because his mother was a research subject, and he was too young to be separated from her. While his mother struggled with the experimental protocol, Kanzi did much better despite not being initially targeted for instruction. Eventually, Kanzi acquired not only a substantial vocabulary of symbols but also the ability to produce novel, intelligible syntactic recombinations. The experimenters plausibly characterized his eventual linguistic capacities as in some respects comparable to those of a thirty-month-old normal human child. The interpretation of these data is controversial, but I follow Lloyd in her insistence that Kanzi's achievement shows that the neurological capacity for linguistic understanding is homologous between humans and bonobos and probably extends further to common ancestors.”(Joseph Rouse)

I don't see animals as having concepts either. Again I feel most of this is anthropomorphism. — Mikie

And insisting on an irreparable gap between human capacities and those of other animals could be deemed a classic form of anthropocentrism. How many claimed distinctions between anthropos and other animals have fallen by the wayside in recent years? Only humans use tools, only humans have emotions or can feel pain, or can empathize, only humans have cognitive capacities and can calculate. We didn’t even accord such capacities to the young of our own species.
Infants were nothing but a blooming, buzzing confusion.

I predict that eventually we will come to see that the cognitive differences between us and other higher species is more a matter of degree than of kind.

I consider scientism as standing for the notion that science can answer for every conceivable thing asked of it, which is false, from the point of view that science can only answer for that which is asked of it empirically conceived. From that, it follows, first, that science may very well be the only true method for obtaining knowledge about the nature of things, and second, the nature of things is not the only knowledge possible for humans to obtain. — Mww

The other definition of scientism deals with the assumption that the world which provides us with the source of our empirical evidence of truth is not already caught up in a hermeneutic circle. That is , scientism fails
to recognize that the ‘ evidence from nature’ which forms our truths belongs to a culturally constructed nature which we can never get beneath or beyond. In chasing truth we are chasing our own tail. In its progress, science moves farther and farther away from some original nature rather than closer to it. This doesnt mean that science isn’t extremely useful, just that truth as pragmatic usefulness is not about knowledge of the “true nature of things”, or even knowledge at all so much as practical ways of interacting with a world.

speculative metaphysics, even when treated as a logically grounded science, as in pure mathematics, has no empirical proofs. And without strict empirical proofs, itself a euphemism for indubitable fact, it cannot be said such speculations are indeed the case, hence are fictions, albeit logically justified. — Mww

One definition of scientism is treating science as if it were the only true method to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things,or, as Wiki says, “ the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.”

Some have embraced scientism as a positive term. Personally, I consider a strict empirical proof as a fiction which just happens to have a large intersubjective community backing it. But then, I support Nietzsche’s view that “the world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (Will to Power.)

Your "actual input" is a misleading notion. One's neural network, starting at one's retina, constantly and actively re-works the signal it receives in order to construct the sense of green and brown. The "idea of tree" is constructed much later in the neural net, perhaps involving the areas of the brain that handle language. Our resident Neuroscientist, Isaac, might be able to explain with greater clarity — Banno

Here’s an enactivist perspective:

…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.
From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This
activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow (Engel, Fries, and Singer 2001; Varela et al. 2001).

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint,
we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”(Evan Thompson, Mind in Life)

I don't consider animals as having beliefs, tacit or otherwise. I think that's an anthropomorphic projection — Mikie

The. you’re going to have to clarify what you mean by belief. Many psychologists and philosophers argue that neither humans nor animals pursue goals on the basis of belief if belief is defined in a formal way as propositional knowledge of the form S is P, that is , statements of truth or falsity. On the other hand, both humans and other animals are guided by conceptual understanding in which expectations are formed that can be validated or invalidated. The difference between human and animal conceptualization is that ours is linguistically mediated, which frees us from the confines of the immediate situation.

The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even actions which seem far-removed from enculturation can ultimately be traced back to beliefs and values instilled in one over time, even if long forgotten or completely unconscious. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.
— Joshs

Indeed that is popular. The point being? — Mikie

The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even apparently belief-based actions which seem far removed from our biology can ultimately be traced back to values instilled in one as a result of evolutionarily adaptive affective feelings, even if completely unconscious.

I like this much better than the "popular view". Can you suggest anything I could read to learn more about it? — Ludwig V

Anything by Matthew Ratcliffe or Evan Thompson, especially the latter’s ‘Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind’.

The way you phrased this ('It is popular these days...') suggests you take issue with the view. I have no dog in this fight but is there a better account? — Tom Storm

Phenomenologically-informed enactivist psychology preserves the emphasis on affectively-based values in organizing and situating cognitive appraisals and beliefs.But it avoids the biological essentialism of inherited affect modules and programs.

“… emotions are said to be enabled by genetically endowed, hard-wired neural modules, the existence of which can, at least in principle, be associated with selection pressures flowing from the survival or reproductive advantages produced by the action potentials and states of preparedness these capacities bestowed: to fight off predators (anger), manage changes in social status (sadness), prepare for something unexpected (surprise), cement a social bond (happiness),
avoid something toxic (disgust) or retreat from something dangerous (fear).”

In contrast to this account of affect and cognition , enactivism believes that :

“Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)

“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation’.”

This extends down to bodily reactions to stimuli. One looks at a corpse and instantaneously reacts with fear. If examined from one point of view, this reaction is conditioned by the environment -- namely, the milieu -- and at bottom is nothing more than an embedded belief that corpses are to be feared, or that they are aversive objects, because death is considered bad. It is not truly instantaneous at all -- there are judgments and interpretations being made despite appearing as natural reflexes. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.. The corpse is deemed aversive fundamentally not due to a belief but an inherited affective response, and the socially constructed beliefs are overlayed onto this biological ground. According to this approach, values
are subjective and relative because they don’t originate from propositional beliefs, which can be judged as correct or incorrect.

No. Facts do not change. Our perception of them may grow clearer, our understanding of how they fit together may render them less cold, but our concerns and practices shape nothing but our immediate environment, and our expectations are as often dashed as are fulfilled — Vera Mont

“ Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30).

How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, sciencecaptures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that sciencesimply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes” ( Zahavi)

“…the success of science cannot be anything but a puz­zle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts."
“So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathemati-cal 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.”

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of the world and the basis of ethics.
— Joshs

I agree with much of this. But the general response will likely be 'no one says that the truth has to be appealing.' — Tom Storm

Ah, but appeal IS a central element of what we call truth, especially in the sciences. An important value in choosing one theory over another is aesthetic appeal. The facts have no coherence outside of their relation to our pragmatic goals and purposes. We convince ourselves that we conform our empirical models to the cold, hard facts of the world, but those cold , hard facts are constantly shaped and reshaped by our evolving concerns, expectations and practices. The same goes
for our gods.

the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms
— Joshs

Indeed. Care to say more about why? — Tom Storm

At some point , we will no longer have need of a hypothesis that locks us into an arbitrary view of the world ( I’m speaking both of religion and the view of science as ‘truths that dont care about our feelings’. God and objective realism are tied together, not opposites ).

I would say I am an agnostic atheist. Similarly, I don't know if Bigfoot exists, but I am not convinced it does. The time to believe it is when there is good evidence. — Tom Storm

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of traits and the basis of ethics. Everyone here ( that includes Dennett, Dawkins et al. They wish they could believe ) whose atheism or agnosticism is tied to ‘evidence’ is a closet -believer until they can get to the point where they find the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms, when they no longer wish they could believe.