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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( Ethical Know-how, by Francisco Varela)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But your whole OP actually questions reductionism — Wayfarer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public meaning makes private meaning incomprehensible. — Richard B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Rouse was heavily influenced by Wittgenstein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Rouse argues:

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

Merleau-Ponty states:

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

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

.

He critiques the superstition in religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.
— Joshs
Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure — plaque flag

It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance.

Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it. — plaque flag

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.

n. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure — plaque flag

I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined.

Wittgenstein showed that meaning is largely social and structural. People born blind can know about color. Why ? Because knowledge is essentially inferential, founded on the norms governing justification in “logical space.” — plaque flag

But it is not the norms and rules. that found knowledge. Rather, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

As Joseph Rouse argues:

“…normative conception of social practices does not identify a practice by any exhibited regularities among its constituent performances or by their accountability to an independently specifiable rule or norm… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”

If Wittgenstein is in fact either an anti-realist or idealist, where there is no mind-independent world, then as for Wittgenstein the meaning of a word is in its relation between mind and world, and as for Wittgenstein the world exists in the mind, then it follows that for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word must also exist solely in the mind. — RussellA

There are other ways of thinking about the relation between mind and world than in terms of the binaries realist vs anti-realist or empiricist vs idealist. One need not post mind as having an ‘inside’ that can be distinguished from an outside.

Where do family resemblances exist - in the mind or in the world — RussellA

Neither and both. For Witt, these are not categories in the sense of boxes within which the particulars fit. If that were the case, there would be something common to all the particulars. But there is nothing common to all the words that share a family resemblance.

67:“ Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

Furthermore, the existence of the particulars is neither strictly in the mind (which is not a box) nor in the world. It is in the relational practices that make linguistic meaning dependent on the enacting of material configurations through our engagement with the social and non-human world. Think of mind though the 4EA moniker: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective.

I think the distinction here is between a notion of the real as bolted down , recalcitrant facts that one must abide by, and real constraints on one’s wandering that are responsive to one’s interpretive frame of reference
— Joshs
Yes. Imagination vs reality — Vera Mont

No, a moldy philosophical model of what reality is (bolted down facts) vs a more contemporary way of thinking about the real (intra-action that creates material phenomena rather than interaction between pre-existing objects) that has made its way from philosophy into the social sciences.

No, they're not examples at all. They don't ditch school at 14 and go off whistling down the road. But private tutor is another occupation that will provide travel if you manage to latch on to a family that gets posted to various places around the world. The real world, mind - you can't go wandering, willy-nilly in somebody else's kid's imagination — Vera Mont

I think the distinction here is between a notion of the real as bolted down , recalcitrant facts that one must abide by, and real constraints on one’s wandering that are responsive to one’s interpretive frame of reference. I think the concept of travel implies that one will be affected , shaped, surprised and constrained by what one encounters on one’s travels. After all , if surprise and discovery were not intrinsic to what it means to take a journey, there would be no point to it. The OP wants to outrun reality , seen as the bolted down facts of conventional society, by constantly changing locations. In other words, it would be a matter of continually swapping out one set of bolted down conventional redirections for another.

The problem with trying to outrun social entanglements is that it becomes very lonely , not to mention that one deprives oneself of the creature comforts of modem life.

Not quite the same as a nomadic life in the real - actual, physical, material; place where the body needs sustenance, protection from extreme temperatures and disease, sleep and waste-relief - world. — Vera Mont

My original response to your comment about the real world was focused on your emphasis on social convention. You wrote:

“In the real world, society sets limits to personal freedom and imposes obligations on its members.”

When I said there was no one real world, I meant that even within the status quo of societal rules and conventions, there are multiple realities at work, in the sense that individuals must interpret rules and conventions as they apply them, even when they believe that everyone in their community is following the ‘same’ legal and moral
code. The person who is aware of this can use this to their advantage. If one bureaucrat on the phone says no, hang up and try the next one. There are all sorts of ways to maneuver one’s way within and manipulate a system by remembering that the system doesn’t exist until it is put into practice by individuals, who all have a slightly different take on what it is, how it is supposed to function, what their role is, and what motivates them to particulate in it. Yes, there are real limits and constraints that one must contend with, but these are mobile constraints that respond to the ways we learn to engage with them.

If philosophy is unable to mention one single thing that it has been able to understand about the world, I don’t think that assessing my competence will be a help to fill this gap — Angelo Cannata

If I mention innumerable ways in which contemporary approaches in Continental advance our understanding of the world, and you have no competence to grasp the substance of that understanding, because you haven’t read the work of these authors well enough, then I’m not sure how I could convince you.

What is this ‘real world’ you speak of? I’ve never encountered it
— Joshs
So, you've been living in Narnia or Oz maybe? I'm pretty sure the societies there also place limits on individual freedom and obligations on their members. — Vera Mont

No one can place limits on the freedom of thought, especially when it comes to creative thought that is invisible to conventional society. You can’t limit what doesn’t exist to you. You can put only put limits on bodies. I know the OP puts the issue of freedom from convention in terms of physical travel, because they see physical escape as the only way not to become sucked into conformity. I’m pointing out that one doesn’t need to flee one’s physical environment to do this.

Only the person who orders their life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters makes themselves the victim of circumstances.
— Joshs
Yeah, like I said, most people. Not ascetic hermits, yogis on the verge of Nirvana or Ayn Rand — Vera Mont

I think Spinoza and Kant are better examples, or anyone in any creative endeavor who manages to see things differently from the status quo. Kant apparently never travelled outside of his hometown, and yet defied the conventional thinking of his time and place. Are these people hermits? Well they certainly have to be comfortable with endless hours of solitary thought.

Is there at least one single thing that philosophy has been able to understand of the world, able to withstand criticism? — Angelo Cannata

What contemporary philosophy are you familiar with, other than analytic?

if philosophy carries on going through this way of looking for strong things, then it is dead, it has no reason to exist; science is much better at doing this job. — Angelo Cannata

What do you mean by ‘strong things’? Understanding the raw truths of the world?

We could say that philosophy worked so much on “how to understand things” and this made it forget its being an experience more than a science. Let’s leave to science the task of understanding things and let’s restore to philosophy the task of exploring understanding as an existential human experience.
So, let’s discuss philosophically about metaphysics, language, morality, criticism, any philosophical topic, but not with the purpose of understanding it; rather, with the purpose of experimenting the pleasure, the depth, the seductive attraction of exploring connections between ways of understanding and human existence — Angelo Cannata

I couldn’t disagree more. Philosophy at its best is absolutely about directly furthering an understanding of the world It is in this sense a more comprehensive and through going science than empirical research.

I think Wittgenstein (both versions) has a fundamentally flawed conception of language. Ordinary language is clearly flawed, whereas the later Wittgenstein makes too much of the distinction between language and other elements of experience. We understand language through experience, and have the innate ability to develop linguistic skills due to the same selection effects that shape the rest of our biology… — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you have it backwards. We don’t understand language through experience de, we understand experience through language.

it seems to me like he, and those who followed him in the "linguistic turn," make the mistake of making language too distinct, too cut off from the rest of experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you’re right that some who claim to follow Wittgenstein are carrying forward Kant’s split between conceptualization and the non-human world. Rorty made this point about the linguistic turn. But Rorty and others would argue that this is not what Witt was doing. Thinkers in physics (Karen Barad), biology(Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margolis), the social sciences and philosophy extend Witt’s work on human discourse to the non-human world in order to show that reciprocal interaction within a field or configuration applies not just to human discourse but to the biological and physical worlds in themselves.

in the real world, society sets limits to personal freedom and imposes obligations on its members. — Vera Mont

What is this ‘real world’ you speak of? I’ve never encountered it, only a popular conception that there is such a singular thing, and a multitude of notions of what this universal reality consists of.

Most people grow out of that adolescent rebellion, either because there are things they desire and want to accomplish, or because circumstance forces them onto a path not of their own choosing — Vera Mont

Only the person who orders their life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters
makes themselves the victim of circumstances.

Ideally, if you're of a nomadic disposition, you should train for a mobile occupation: join the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders; be a surveyor, salesman or long-distance trucker. — Vera Mont

Or any job involving remote work that can be done from a laptop anywhere in the world where there’s a cell or wifi signal.

I should add that what constitutes travel is not just a function of where and how far you travel in a geographic sense, but HOW you travel. I hike 5 miles every day, mostly in the same woods, but the trees, flowers and wildlife are constantly changingd. I am also writing while I am walking, and my changing ideas meld with the changes in the environment. One has to learn how to look. Anyone living in a large cosmopolitan city has inexhaustible worlds within worlds at their disposal, if they learn how to see them. This is the most effective sort of nomadism, the kind that can be achieved by staying in place.

. I have little interest in discovery or searching — Tom Storm

And yet you’ve been active on this site quite a while, asking searching questions, especially of those who opt for bedrock truths in science, philosophy or religion. I suspect at heart you’re a Bilbo Baggins, and if a wizard and band of dwarves came knocking at the door of your hobbit hole , you’d find yourself off on an adventure.