Do you think your emotions determine what is true? — wonderer1

It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. Do I think such a mechanism determines what is true? No.
Conservatives like to say that facts don't care about our feelings. I think the arbiter of empirical validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world. Rather, empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment.

Does what you say change the fact that stealing (which may have various definitions) is generally considered wrong across cultures? (And I am not saying all cultures, or all people in all cultures and I'm not talking about situational exemptions, etc)

How do you understand morality? — Tom Storm

The challenge here is to use a morally neutral term in place of ‘stealing’ and then attach a judgement of wrongfulness to it. Obviously , if we simply described stealing as seeing an object and walking away with it, we dont have enough of a context to make a moral judgement. We want to know why the person took it, what they were thinking, if they assumed the object belonged to someone else, if they also assumed that other person didnt have a right to the object. At some point , a non-neutral concept must be inserted into the description of an action to make it moral or not. How do I understand such moral concepts? A very simple definition might go like this:

Traditional morality comes into play when the intention behind the actions of a person runs afoul of previously established expectations and trust between that person and others. That person knowingly disappoints a standard of conduct for no good reason.

So, when you read the word 'same' you hear it as 'different'? Is that possible without some notion of 'same' that maintains the distinction between 'same' and 'similar'? — Fooloso4

As you know, ‘similar’ is a species of difference, as is disparate, homologous, analogous, synonymous, opposite. Identity and same are also species of difference. Unlike similar, people tend to use the concepts of identity and same in circumstances (A=A) where difference goes unnoticed even when it implicitly forms the basis of the comparison. This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth.

And that doesn't get you to a transcendent vantage point. When phenomenology pretends to become ontology, it's language on holiday. — frank

Rather than transcendence or correctness, such a method can bring us to an awareness of what appears to remain invariant throughout the changes in experience. If through this process we repeatedly discover that all specific contents are relative and contingent, then what remains invariant may be empty formal structures such as the synthetic relation between past, present and future. At the same time, such an awareness doesn’t render conventional views of empiricism, objective truth and faith in a same world for everyone as incorrect. It simply allows us to enrich such concepts by revealing a basis for them that they are not explicitly aware of. In other words, by dropping the focus on truth as correct match between subject and world in favor of truth as the invariant features of our constructions of experience, we enrich concepts like material reality with the dimensions of self-reflexivity and interactive reciprocity.

Morality doesn't vary all that much across cultures - not stealing, killing or causing suffering within communities of concern are the classic themes. — Tom Storm

Notice the circularity in moral proscriptives like these.
Stealing is defined at taking that which isn’t ‘rightfully’ yours. It’s not just killing but ‘murder’, or ‘wrongful killing’ that we disdain. It is not just causing suffering but intentionally willing the suffering of others that we disapprove of. These descriptions are just redefinitions of immorality as willful disregard of what is right. They come down to saying that wrongful behavior is a failure to do what is right. Looked at through this vapid lens , it’s no wonder morality doesn’t vary all that much across cultures.

But this doesn't go beyond the realm of speculation. Notice that you're giving an account of the nature of reality, but you don't have the transcendent vantage point implied by the narrative — frank

It’s a phenomenological analysis based on what actually appears to me, using the method of the epoche, or bracketing, of presuppositions concerning the empirically factual world. From a naive vantage, I see empirical objects existing in the same world as others,but from a more rigorous vantage, after having bracketed what is contingent and relative in my experience of the world, what remains for me are synthesizing processes that correlate never-repeating elements of experience based on patterns of perceived similarities.

It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do. — Janus

Why aren’t you talking about relevant meanings? Is there such a thing as a neutral meaning, divorced from relevance? This is crucial to understanding how we construct sense and language. Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time centers around the fact that how things matter to us is not separable from what they are in themselves. Extracting a neutral fact of the matter is “an artificially worked up act.”

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure…
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)

“The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood before hand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves.“ (Being and Time)

Is there a fact of the matter as to whether Derrida's work is "highly rigorous philosophy"? If he is, then you should be able to explain in clear language just what he is saying in that passage you quoted. — Janus

Is there a fact of the matter about anything? I can explain Derrida in clear language but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it. Clarity follows conceptual apprehension rather than preceding it. Look, if you tell me you dont get Derrida because his style of writing is too aleatory or digressive or whatnot, I can respect that. I also think his style is too aleatory and digressive, and that he has less to say than Heidegger. But at least add a qualifier if you’re going to claim he is just a sophist with nothing substantive to say, something like ‘I worry that his work may be not more than sophistry’.

You say you have no trouble understanding early Heidegger. Here’s your chance to prove it. Have you read Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger in ‘Heidegger and the Question?’ He lays out a clear series of points of disagreement with Heidegger, on Animality, questioning and oppositional thinking. These critical remarks have had quite an influence on Heidegger scholarship. Do they amount to just sophistry? Heidegger may have been the more original thinker, but I do think Derrida went beyond him. And since I think Heidegger was the greatest 20th century philosopher, that says a lot.

We do this sort of thing all the time, without problem. You read the same post I wrote. You are on the same forum as I am. You seem to think it problematic, and hence the scare quotes. But in doing that, you are presuposing the problem you think you are arguing for — Banno

When I hear the word ‘same’ I read it as ‘similar’. I find
Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the construction of empirical objects helpful here. According to Husserl, in my perceptual experience of the world, my empathetic connection with an intersubjective community in the form of apperception of alter egos leads to an ‘objective’ social space in which each individual believes himself to be living in the same world, in which his own perceptions are mere appearances of the identical things that everyone else experiences. But this sense of my own perception as mere appearance of what is factually the same for everyone is the appearance for me of what can never be actually identical. The ways in which I apperceptively fuse others perceptual contributions to the constitution of objects with my own perceptual adumbrations will always provide me with constituted appearances of things which are unique to my own construing, even as I calls these personally construed appearances a mere representation of the true world, identical for everyone.

“If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually
experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere
"representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Crisis Of European Sciences)

If we want to discover whether people see the same things and features of things all we have to do is ask. It is a commonplace fact that people do see the same things including relatively insignificant features of things, and this can easily be proven if they are asked to look closely and report what they see — Janus

Psychologists have tools for this , such as Rorschach tests. They reveal how striking different one person’s sense of the relevant meaning of a thing is from another person’s. Dont confuse conventional language, which is designed to hide these differences, from the differences themselves.

The postmodernist who best represents the obscurity I have in mind is Derrida; his idea of the endless deference of meaning I find unconvincing and his writing generally impenetrable on account of the ambiguity and arcane references. When his philosophy is boiled down to its central ideas, it seems neither groundbreaking nor insightful — Janus

Try Heidegger then.

“I believe that, indeed, as was said in the 1980 Cerisy conference, there is a point at which between what I am attempting and what Heidegger did, there is no difference in terms of content. One can very well retranslate the entirety-I'm speaking hypothetically here-one can retranslate the entirety of the thinking of the trace or of writing into the thinking of being. One can do this translation. At that point, only one difference will remain, which some may deem extrinsic, namely, a difference in style, tone, gesture, manner, pathos. But from the point of view of content, if it could be isolated, one can translate one into the other, and so reduce everything I'm doing to one paragraph in Heidegger's work... This gesture would consist, obviously, would presuppose the erasure of questions of tone, language, posture, gesture, as secondary questions. Ok. And of idiom! Of linguistic idiom, as well.. Which I, for one, would not be ready to do so easily…” (Derrida on Heidegger)

So, I would say " too obscure" rather than "too complex", and I doubt it is possible to formulate "a clear understanding", and even if it were I doubt it would be worth the effort, since it seems to be mostly sophistry. I — Janus

It’s not sophistry, it’s highly rigorous philosophy. I’m sorry you dont understand him but don’t blame the messenger for your failure to understand the message.

Well, no; they all looked at the same vase, but it looked different to each of them — Banno

Where do we have an example of ‘ same’ , of ‘identity’, to draw from in coming to that conclusion? What is the origin of this understanding of ‘sameness’?

If the subject were a still life with flowers, vases, glasses and fruit, for example, and the instruction to represent every item, I have no doubt that most people would do that, which shows that people see the same things. — Janus

Have you seen how 15th century Japanese, Chinese or Indian artists conveyed “photographic reality”? You might say they preferred not to render the world with photo realism, but then what about early Western art? Such inventions as perspective , unifying a scene via a single light source , the understanding of the interaction of color, human proportionality( not rendering children to look like miniature adults) were not incorporated in older periods of art. You might say that artists came to understand how to convey the ‘real world’ more accurately over time, whereas I’d say that their pictorial constructions of the world changed not by better approximating it but by shifting their worldview to accord with changing purposes.

↪Joshs what, in all that, renders up anti realism? Why are there no true statements? — Banno

Let me first comment on Lawson. I just read a chunk of his book, Closure, and my conclusion is that his approach fits comfortably into the New Materialist wing of realism, in spite of his claim to be anti-realist. Karen Barad gives a flavor for the nature of the opposition between this group and poststructuralist anti-realists like Foucault:

“Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the
extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.”

we know that we all (most of us) perceive the same things, at the same times in the same places, which suggests that there is something about the structures of the world that give rise to that situation. — Janus

Gather 10 people in a room, and include persons from all corners of that world and all eras of human history. Ask them to paint the ‘same ‘ vase of flowers as accurately as possible. Compare the results and try and find any aspect of their paintings which exactly match each other. The wide variety of differences shows us how we actually interact with each other on the basis of supposedly shared experience. You might argue that even while our interpretations of the flowers vary, the physical world is sending the same data into all our heads. But the same problem crops up when we inquire into our shared understanding of the nature of the empirical data, its scientific structure. 10 physicists making use of the same mathematical calculations based on the ‘same’ qualitative variables to prove the ‘same’ physical world for us all come up with varying pictures, which fortunately goes unnoticed in most mundane situations of applying empirical knowledge. It’s when we shift our social activities away from the highly abstractive and conventionalized vocabulary of mathematics or natural science to political and ethical domains of engagement that we discover the implications of our varying pictures.
On this terrain of opinion, assuming there is a same world ends up forcing us into a moralism of blame and culpability, based on the seeming failure of persons to believe correctly.
Polarized political communities, believing the other side is absorbing the same basic facts as they are from the same empirical world out there, has no recourse but to cast aspersions on the other side’s intentions. This results is accusations of deception, greed, evil intent, brainwashing, motivated stupidity.

↪Banno Lawson seems to think that the way we divide the world up is somehow arbitrary and entirely dependent on us. I think that kind of postmodern thinking is absurd.

In any case, since we all (or most of us) agree about how we do divide the world up (whatever the explanation for that might be) then of course there are truths relative to that common division. — Janus

I’m not familiar with Lawson but I am familiar with anti-realist positions ( Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Rorty). Do they believe the way we divide up the world is arbitrary and entirely dependent on us? Well, they believe that there are better and worse, more or less valid ways to carve up the world, but the arbiter of validity is itself a construction. Put differently, the world speaks back to us in the language in which we couch our questions, so truth is the product of a ceaseless conversation between personal and interpersonal construction , and events. Not a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other. We may agree about how we divide up the world within the bounds of a particular cultural episteme, but epistemes change historically, neither arbitrarily nor rationally, and with them our truths.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics — Astrophel

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance.

If we take this to extremes than one would imagine two phenomena or things: on one side is that which is in constant flux, changing so fast that it barely even could be said to assume any state for any given amount of time, it changes at the fastest/maximum rate possible.

A curiosity here is that the speed of light is fixed. And yet it is tha fastest rate at which something can "change" location (velocity). Could this mean there's some strange union between that which remains constant and that which changes the most rapidly? — Benj96

That’s not a curiosity, it’s built into the presuppositions of empiricism that make change subservient to identify. When we posit quantitative changes within a qualitative domain which is assumed as fixed throughout the changes in its components ( such as temperature or motion) , we are not really grappling in a fundamental way with the relation between identity and difference, stasis and change.

True change is qualitative change, a change in the sense of meaning of the category or concept (motion, temperature, mass) that we are using as a basis of measurement. Al” other changes amount to just slot rattling within a static and unchanging substrate. We force these static categories onto a world which is continually qualitatively changing beneath our sight.

The changes required, then, reduce to the fact that I do not actually think in the way that seems to me to be the case. Hence…..psychology on the one hand and cognitive neuroscience on the other. — Mww

Are you saying that cognitive neuroscience is misguided?
Today’s psychologists certainly seem to be sympathetic to Nietzsche’s views on the subject:

When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,' I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,' and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is.”

The notion of the possibility of self makes no sense, insofar as the even the inception of it presupposes what is asked about — Mww

What changes would be required in your thinking about what the self is in order for the possibility of self to make sense? What if we imagined the self not as a metaphysical a priori but as a construction, just as the concept of a spatial object is a construction?

The weak version more modestly suggests that language influences thought and cognition but doesn't entirely determine it. It acknowledges that language plays a significant role in shaping our perceptions and understanding of the world, but also recognizes the influence of other factors such as culture, social context, and individual experiences — Wayfarer

If instead of defining language narrowly in terms of formal verbal concepts, we understand its basis in construing , and define construing as an ordinally organized system of discriminations we make on the basis of similarity and difference, then we can include basic perception along with conceptual thought as language-based. Then instead of claiming that it is only verbal langauge that shapes our understanding, we can recognize that the functionally integrated system of construals that acts to channel our ways of anticipating events is what shapes our expectations, and those of other animals , and that what verbal language adds is merely a more complex and condensed field of discriminations.

I see that such coexistence is not the case, under a certain set of preconditions. Consciousness of self as subject is very far from a cognition of self as object. — Mww

Would any notion of self be possible without the ability to experience self as object? That is to say, to recognize that there are other selves, of which the ‘I’ is just one more?

, an illusion happens at the level of perception, while a misinterpretation happens (obviously) at the level of interpretation — goremand

Many psychologists and philosophers today would argue that perception is interpretation all the way down.

No, it just says we're all self-centered. We are, but it's not an all-or-nothing condition — Vera Mont

What if we define ‘self’ in terms of self-consistency as a primary motive of behavior? This way, we can dump the dichotomy between selfish and selfless and instead see all behavior as self-centered. But in doing so we are not reverting back to Hobbes and modeling self as some kind of fortress behind whose walls we accumulate stuff and protect it from an outside. Instead, the drive for self-consistency is a drive to anticipate, to assimilate world on the basis of familiarity, recognizability, consistency with respect to our ongoing ways of understanding. This explains why we do ‘selfless’ things for those we relate closely with and act ‘selfishly’ toward those we are alienated from. No need for religious moralistic motives or reductionist biologistiic explanations positing ‘instinctive’ inclinations for altruism.

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions?
— Joshs

That sounds like denying there is a territory being mapped by our minds/brains, and to me it would seem a little silly to believe there is no territory being mapped, and yet also believe that you are something other than a figment of my imagination — wonderer1

It is denying that knowing is direct correspondence , representing or mirroring between knower and world. Scientific and other forms of knowing, far from being the epistemological representing of a reality independent of the knower, is the evolving construction of a niche. We are worldmakers rather than world-mirrorers, whose constructions are performances that pragmatically intervene in the world that we co-invent , changing it in ways that then talk back to us in a language responsive to how we have formulated our questions. This discursive account accords with the postmodern philosophy of science that Joseph Rouse espouses:

“…the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.”

Seems like a rather fatalistic view to think we can't know anything about reality independent of agreement with other people. Not to mention a little silly in light of the history of humans learning things, that we can to some degree look back and see. — wonderer1

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions? In other words, truth and falsity are relative to our constructed schemes, not some scheme-independent reality.

But the thing is, smoking is much less common now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
— BC

I wonder if that has just been offset by vaping and now marijuana. That is, more alternatives. — Hanover

The key question is if rates of lung cancer are continuing to drop or whether they are starting to move in the wrong direction.

On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance, but is of no discursive significance. — Janus

If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?
— Astrophel

Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling — Janus

Reminds me of Heidegger's encapsulation of the long-standing Western attitude toward affect.

“Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being.”

In opposition to this view, enactivists insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it, “moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical.”

Embodied theorists reverse the traditional scheme of prioritization of thought over feelings, by making affective inputs the condition of possibility of relevance and meaning in thought. It is through the feeling body that things show up as salient; an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it.

As a solution, we are told that the mind cannot be reduced to matter, but if we introduce "form" into the equation, things are resolved. And this is where my total confusion begins.

If Jaworsky claims that it is logical to believe that a particle with 0 consciousness can form consciousness, how can he believe that a particle with 0 consciousness + form with 0 consciousness can create consciousness? — Eugen

For me the problem with Jaworsky’s model is the assumption that materiality, including such things as the nature of particles, can be separated from structural aspects, as if changes in structural organization don’t have any effect on what a particle is. As an example of an alternative to Jaworsky’s thinking, physicist and philosopher Karen Barad writes:

On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “ob­served”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra­-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and
that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.

Let me guess. That’s not the point of your issue with Jaworsky.

We neither live in a simulation nor a ‘real’ universe, if ‘real’ here means an environment unaffected in its meaning by linguistic and material interactions among humans and between humans and that world. We co-construct the sense of the real through social interaction as well as via individual perspectival practices. The real is enacted, not passively observed.
— Joshs

And yet what you don't know can still kill you — jorndoe

If you absolutely don’t know it, it can’t do anything to you because it has no existence from your perspective. How you know something determines the way you construe what it does to you.

It has recently been shown, rather convincingly [for me, at least,] that we cannot distinguish between living in a simulation and living in a 'real' universe. — Torus34

We neither live in a simulation nor a ‘real’ universe, if ‘real’ here means an environment unaffected in its meaning by linguistic and material interactions among humans and between humans and that world. We co-construct the sense of the real through social interaction as well as via individual perspectival practices. The real is enacted, not passively observed.

unfortunately the forum itself is not moderated,
— Darkneos

This site is moderated — Ludwig V

I believe @Darkneous was talking about
https://forum.philosophynow.org/
which, however, is also moderated.

only young people like Nietzsche's final period best — Srap Tasmaner

Which writings would you place within Nietzsche’s final period?

Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances — apokrisis

yes, I think that’s right.

Kantian Transcendental Idealism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Do you think that people shouldn't outgrow Christianity? — wonderer1

They should. And realism should outgrow Kantian Idealism. But most forms of realism in fact haven’t outgrown it. That’s what the author I quoted meant when he said that Kant “lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.”

He goes on:

“ On the standard view, idealism and realism are incompatible philosophical theo­ries. For Kant, however, they are not. He rather claims that transcendental idealism and empirical realism form a unity, i.e., only in combination they demonstrate that objects of external perception are real: Transcendental idealists hold that the objects as we represent them in space and time are appearances and not things-in-them­selves. This, according to Kant, implies empirical realism, i.e., the view that the rep­resented objects of our spatio-temporal system of experience are real beings outside us. “

Relative to the OP’s assertion that “this forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is”, I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize.

I wonder if you can assist me to better understand the issue of how language does (or does not) map onto the world and what the significance of this matter might be for philosophy. I have done some modest reading in this space but am curious what others think.

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?) — Tom Storm

I would say that language doesn’t simply represent, describe or map onto a pre-existing world, it maps out a way to go on. When we use a word , it forms a bridge between the memory of our previous usage and the new circumstance that it helps to create. To name something is to help bring it into existence as this freshly relevant event.

It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities” — apokrisis

It seems to me that when I say there is a cat on the mat,
there is more that must be understood besides a fact of the matter; namely the sense of the matter itself. Is what I mean by cat and mat the same as what you understand them to mean? This is especially pertinent if you deny that there is a cat on the mat. We might have to investigate to what extent what I intend to convey is compatible with the way you are interpreting my utterance. In traditional logical conceptions of the meaning of words, when a person employs a concept they have simply embraced a set of objects and ignored all others, the way a dictionary does.
But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used.

This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. The Philpapers survey says:

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%) — wonderer1

One problem with this survey is that modern realism is itself an outgrowth of Kantian Transcendental Idealism.

“… “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism… Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.” (Dietmar Heidemann)

There are of course other forms of Idealism than Kant’s, so you might want to specify what you have in mind.

Nietzsche had his own theories how the world functions. I think his extremely cynical views represent biologism. Or that the world becomes "fatally" ordered or disordered through the battle of strong and weak ones. — waarala

Deleuze, Foucault and Heidegger were profoundly sly influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas. None of them would label his views biologism. Instead, in their readinga he offers an overturning of Platonic metaphysics by placing difference as prior to identity.