Husserl seems to be gesturing at the same 'pregiven' shared situation or primordial we-world that I'm calling the minimally specified world. — Pie

The relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity gets complicated for Husserl. He never seems to give up the insistence on the primacy for me of my subjective vantage on the intersubjective world The world for all of us is a world constituted through my own subjectivity, which cannot be bypassed. This ‘world for us', from one to the other to the other, is constituted within MY(the primal me) subjective process as MY privileged apperception of ‘from one to the other to the other'.

“...one of the main tasks of pure intentional psychology is to make understandable, by way of the progressive reduction of world-validity, the subjective and pure function through which the world as the "world for us all" is a world for all from my—the ego's—vantage point, with whatever particular content it may have. ...”(Crisis, p.256)

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)

So do you believe in a thing-in-itself (atoms and void) or just a relatively 'material' side of a continuum ? — Pie

I am attracted to naturalistic models that don’t cut corners , either by reifying materiality through reductive physicalism , or by making the manifest image of conceptualization unaccountable to the empirical world.
This is a naturalism in which normativity plays an essential role even outside of its connection to a human subject.

Husserl has its virtues, but my non-Husserl-expert impression is that he's too Cartesian.

--God is real. He talked to me last night.
--No, he didn't. Take these pills, sir. — Pie

Is Heidegger also too Cartesian? He rejected truth as correctness in favor of truth as whatever discloses itself to Dasein.

Is it not safely taken for granted that individual humans have incompatible beliefs? So that not all of them can be right ? — Pie

Why do beliefs have to be right or wrong? Why can’t different ways of making sense of one’s world be valid and useful in different ways, as different sorts of niches?
Much of the progress of science consists not in correcting ‘wrong’ theories from the past , but in producing concepts in areas where they were no concept
at all . Perhaps one can find ones way through supposedly incompatible beliefs by further articulating one’s own approach such that it is capable of subsuming alternative beliefs?

It's all 'just' speech acts, suggestions, co-creation rather than co-discovery. The only deep problem with this that I can make out is its utter lack of authority. As soon as one wants to bind others in terms of what they ought to believe, one is in a normative space. From a structuralist perspective, something is going to play the role of [what's-better-to-believe] and something else is going to name [the-reason-why-it's-better.] — Pie

What one creates or co-creates in language implicates and is reciprocally dependent on material changes in one’s world. The feedback from those material
changes produces new discovery in language. Invention and discovery are two sides of the same coin, since we construct the world that talks back to us , and offers constrains and affordances in accord with how we construct it. We co-inhabit the partially shared construction we call a space of reasons, within which we invent, discover, agree and disagree.

Does it make sense to take as a fact that there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to ? Seemingly not, right ? And this approach itself would have to be established and defended in terms of the very pragmatic relevance it would institute as a replacement for truth. — Pie

If we took such a thought as a fact , that is , as an identically reproducible idea, then it would merely be a shift from the realist to the idealist side of a metaphysical trope. If instead of a formal fact , we were to take ‘no independent facts of the world’ as a performative act arising from within the midst of contextual sense-making, obliged to re-validate itself the same differently in each new contextual instantiation of its use, then we would have a way of thinking and talking about what happens to notions like truth and belief when they are examined from a radically contextual vantage.

I doubt humans will stop needing 'seems', 'believe', 'supposed', and synonyms to make sense of one another. — Pie

Husserl argued that there is no veil between subject and world. What appears to us, in the mode that it appears to us, is not a proxy or representation of something independent of what directly appears, but is the thing in itself ( whether imagined, perceived, remembered). From this vantage, what ‘seems’ to be, what we ‘believe’ or ‘suppose’ , is just one way of talking about different sorts of direct experiences.

If we abandoned the assumptions of correspondence or coherence with a real outside in favor of notions of enaction and construction of a world , would we change our vocabulary? I think so. It is already happening in certain quarters of philosophy , where truth and belief are no longer considered particularly interesting or significant aspects of how humans interact.

For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

The facts in logical space are the world.


Beliefs articulate the world's possibilities.

True beliefs are the world's actuality.

Much of our language has developed so that we can talk about things like beliefs and logic and truth — Pie

What do you surmise the Wittgenstein of PI was trying to get away from with regard to concepts like belief, truth and logic as he is using them in the Tractatus? I suggest he was not merely showing how instances of the use of these concepts reveal unique senses of meaning within the categories of truth and belief. Rather, he was trying to get us to see that the general categories that would be called ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are not themselves stably fixed by their relation to the facts of an empirical world. If there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to, them concepts liken pragmatic relevance, consistency, anticipatory compatibility and coherence replace true and false belief as expressions of how we cope with our world. This is self-creation rather than a fitting of language with fact.

↪Joshs Animals don't have genders, just biological sexes. — Michael

A psychological gender is a set of behavioral dispositions that are linked together to form a recognizable style. Female dogs are, among other things, shyer and less aggressive than male dogs. This is gender.

I don’t know what any such characteristics would be. I can imagine waking up in a woman’s body, whether by magic or a brain transplant, and yet I’d continue to identify as a man, so it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with my body. And I can’t think of what psychological traits I have, except the obvious of identifying as a man, that would count as being such characteristics. — Michael

If you were a gay male , you may have experienced the following from childhood, as I did:

I had no reason not to label myself as a male , based on anatomy and how I was being classified by my culture. But ( and this is a gigantic but), I always felt different from most of my male peers, on the basis of a whole constellation of behavioral dispositions linked to gender. Among the least important of these was who I was sexually attracted to. I call these dispositions ‘perceptual-affective style’ because they are functionally integrated as a whole. We all have it from birth. It’s like a stable , life-long personality trait. It’s what allows us to distinguish masculine from feminine behaviors in other animals, but we deny it in ourselves , claiming that masculine and feminine behavior is purely a matter of social conditioning.

So you first need to tell me what it means to be a man or a woman. — Michael

What does it mean to be a male or female dog or sheep, apart from the anatomical differences? From our perspective, there are recognizable gender-related behavioral differences across mammals thar connect affect with perception and motivation. We assume a single normative gender binary ( masculine vs feminine behavior) for animals, but what if there are intermediates , and biologically male sheep with female gendered behavior? Would this be evidence for a hard-wired brain basis for homosexuality and gender ‘non-conformity’ in humans?

The meanings of true assertions just are the world.

To imagine a true statement becoming false is to imagine a different world. — Pie

Is there a ‘same’ empirical world that different languages link up to, placing a barrier to conceptual relativism by assuring translatability?( Davidson’s argument as I understand it).

And when someone like Ben Shapiro militates against the limited but still existent subjectivity inherent to something like gender, he claims he does so in the name of biology and to try to establish some hard truths. I think he is at least partially honest when he states his motivations, but he must know that gender is at least partially subjective; we know there is more to being a man than “lifts heavy things” or “has broad shoulders”, such as strong paternal instincts. — ToothyMaw

Not sure if anything you mentioned in the OP deals with what is involved in something like recognizing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behavioral differences between male and female animals having to do with perceptual , motivational , emotional and cognitive styles. These are biological( more specifically , neuro-psychological) non-subjective features of gender that someone like Shapiro may or may not admit are robust behavioral characteristics that differentiate heterosexual sis-gendered males from females across mammalian species . He most certainly would deny, however, that there are intermediate points in this binary , or that there could be individuals in which brain-wired gender does not match their biological sex. What about you? What’s your position on brain-wired gender-determined perceptual-affective style?

How would one recognise that one was looking at an alien's conceptual scheme, unless one has at least partially interpreted it? To recognise it as a conceptual scheme is give it an interpretation — Banno

Perhaps Davidson thought translation from one linguistic community to another was unproblematic because he understood perception as a merely causal prompting of discursive judgment in thought and talk. Assuming perception to be non-conceptual, he may have assumed, as Kuhn remarked about Quine, “that two men receiving the same stimulus must have the same sensation and therefore has little to say about the extent to which a translator must be able to describe the world to which the language being translated applies.”

That one recognizes something doesn’t necessarily mean that one already has a scheme ready-made for it, the same scheme that it was produced within. One can transform the nature of one’s interpretive framework such as to accommodate what may at first appear incoherent.

Could you elaborate ? I tend to model the situation in terms of the social as the bottom most layer. I am fundamentally one of or a piece of us. The tribal language and form of life is my operating system, deeper than the performance of individuality that it makes possible. (Descartes was a shallow thinker from this perspective, taking the top layer for granted, ignoring that it's language that cannot be doubted intelligibly, not some mere ideological product thereof like the self. — Pie

I’m going to be lazy and quite the last 4 pages of my paper:

If Dasein's being-in-the -world is always structured as an intimate, pragmatic self-belongingness, how does Heidegger explain the basis of apparently normatively driven intersubjective ‘we' contexts? Heidegger's most systematic treatment of Dasein's role in a linguistic community appears in his discussion of average everydayness and das man in Being and Time.

Zahavi is among those thinkers who interpret Heidegger's ‘we-self' of every day das man as taking precedence over his authentic self of ‘ownmost' possibilities. As das man , Zahavi claims

“group belongingness, rather than being founded upon an other-experience, preceded any such experience.”

“...an everyday being-with-one-another characterized by anonymity and substitutability, where others are those from whom “one mostly does not distinguish oneself” (Heidegger 1996: 11)

He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.”

Zahavi is far from alone in interpreting Heidegger's discussions of the discursive practices of Das man as assuming an introjection of norms by a socially created self or a socially conditioned self-affecting subjectivity. Heidegger's critique of Husserl's model of empathy was taken by many interpreters as evidence that the primacy of being-with for Dasein functions as the conditioning of a self by an outside.

For instance, Rousse(2014) says

“...the particular way I ‘carry out' my being and relate to myself is unavoidably susceptible to the pressures of the others' normative expectations.””... inauthenticity is a matter of a person having his practical orientation dominated by ‘outside forces',...the tacitly operative normative expectations about how one ought properly and normally to behave.” “ Dasein, as essentially ‘being-with', initially ‘gets' its existential answerability by being socialized into the shared behavioral norms of the One. In turn, this enables, even encourages, Dasein to act in accordance with them and to avoid taking its own (‘existentiell') answerability for how it comports and understands itself. To be responsible, then, is to be the kind of agent who has the possibility to take responsibility for the socially normative determinants of identity.”

By taking for granted the notion of normativity as a shared understanding, Rousse exemplifies the kind of thinking that Heidegger says disguises, covers over, conceals and obscures a genuine understanding. Das man isn't a matter of simply acting in accordance with norms that are communally understood but a way of thinking that pre-supposes and takes for granted that the self can internalize and introject meanings from others. Public interpretedness is not about behaving in accordance with culturally assimilated norms but believing that norms exist as the sharing of unambiguously intelligible meanings in the first place.

Rousse misreads authenticity as a self-reflexive self's becoming aware of what it has introjected, ‘taken in' from culture and its attempt to take responsibility for, or embrace its own alternative to, those norms. But for Heidegger what the self discloses to itself in average everydayness is not introjected meanings from a community. The self never simply introjects from an outside to an inside. The radically temporal structuration of Dasein makes such introjection impossible.

Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)

What is this genuine self, this genuine understanding, this originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, this “getting to the heart of the matter”, these primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, that idle talk conceals?

To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.

Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with what Heidegger calls the ‘present to hand‘ the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as' structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down' of that wider experience.

Even as Zahavi mistakenly critiques Heidegger for giving precedence to “plural self-awareness,” over the distinction between yours and mine, Zahavi's I-Thou model of sociality falls under the scope of Heidegger's formulation of Das Man.

Zahavi(2012) says “The I and the you are prior to the we”. The I-you relation “is a reciprocal exchange of address and response that affects and transforms the self experience of the participating individuals... we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and norms”.

This makes individual behavior in social situations the product of narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints. The presupposition here is that my own subjectivity always functions as a harbor in the reception of social signs . Intersubjectivity is characterized by a reciprocal cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Zahavi assumes these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.

In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by, introjecting and internalizing an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. This is self-alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.

“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”(Heidegger 2010)

Zahavi's belief that socialization is a direct introjection and internalization from an outside marks it from Heidegger's vantage as an inauthentic and confused self-understanding, even if we assume with Zahavi that the subject is an active participant in what it takes in from others( I-Thou).

World-understanding as Dasein-understanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world. (Heidegger 1982)

We saw earlier how for Husserl the alterity and foreignness of other egos is constituted as a variation of my own thematics, via aperceptive transfer. Heidegger understands thematic mineness through the Care structure. Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein's therefore being merely conditioned by others.

My being-with-others originates primordially as ‘my ownmost' being-with , relative to my significant aims and goals, to what matters to me. As the inauthentic mode of average everydayness communication become flattened, leveled down into the vagueness of a ‘we' understanding, but this average everydayness does not eliminate but only covers over the originary ‘mineness' of the Care structure of primordial temporality.

The ‘solitude' of the mineness of the self of Dasein is disclosed most fundamentally for Heidegger in the authentic mood of angst. Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”

As much as it is the case that Heidegger's being-with-others is not the precedence of anonymous plural self-awareness over Dasein's ownness, it is equally true that Dasein's self-belonging is not a retreat from the immediate contingency of world-exposure, not the choosing of an idealist self-actualization at the expense of robust being with others. Gallagher and Gadamer's readings of Heidegger appear to fall prey to such a solipsist interpretation.

Gallagher(2010) says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer(2006) writes:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”

Zahavi, Gallagher and Gadamer are right and wrong in their readings of Heidegger. Gallagher and Gadamer are right that Heidegger makes their notion of primary intersubjectivity a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. But they are wrong to interpret Dasein's self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. Zahavi is right that Heidegger places being-with as prior to Zahavi's model of pre-reflective self-awareness, but Zahavi is wrong in treating Das Man as an anonymous plural self. As a referential differential it is a more intimate notion of self- relation than Zahavi's present-to-hand oppositional subject-object structure.

Heidegger's ‘ownmost' shows that a profound irreducible intimacy of relation between self and world reveals itself once idealized binaries like inside-outside, internal-external, the meeting of an in-itself and a for-itself have been deconstructed. A central implication of this thinking for the understanding of intersubjectivity is that while our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar self-belonging and ownership. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person reciprocities. We may identify to a greater or lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence.

I can only shape my actions to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized grammatical forms to the extent that those goals or forms can be understood by me as relevant to my ongoing experience. Even then, what is understood by me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the totality of relevance of my perspective; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already tylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their strategic language moves are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their speech community.

. There's a passage in Nietzsche that's similar. So-called 'free will' is perhaps best understood in terms of norms of responsibility. We aren't 'truly' or 'perfectly' free. The strong poet is only ever relatively self-created or novel, relatively path-breaking. Does this not remind you of Heidegger? — Pie

So I’ve been in the awkward position these many years of, on the one hand , applauding the social constructionists, post-structuralists and post-analytic types for exploding the myth of the autonomous subject in favor of the socially embedded and linguistically-saturated actor. On the other hand I’ve been trying to show how we can go further in the direction that these postmodern ideas have pointed us ( Gendlin’s did the same with his ‘Beyond Postmodernism’ arguments). Gendlin and Heidegger, I claim, make temporality more fundamental than the social understood as languages interaction. I am beyond myself, exposes to an outside , before and beyond extant cultural
formations. This isnt a retreat back to a form of subject-centered solipsism , but a more radical notion of the social than between person dynamics.

Heidegger, for instance, makes the
average everyday ness of idle talk derivative of a more primary self-understanding of Dasein. He doesn’t say that we interject meanings from a community, but that we convince ourselves that is what we do. In contrast with social constructionism , he doesn’t consider socially imposed conventions a robust form of meaning, but a failure of understanding

What's your favorite Gendlin text? — Pie

I think his magnum opus is ‘A Process Model’. It’s hard to get through; could have used an editor. But I think it’s important stuff and hasn’t been discovered
yet.


I downloaded all his papers. One of my favorites is ‘The Responsive Order-a new empiricism’.

‘Greed’ is a convenient label we slap on others ( and sometimes ourselves) as a way of blaming them for our own failure to understand their behavior more insightfully.
— Joshs

Well I give you points for radicality here. — Pie

I was going to mention that my take on ethics is pretty out there , but it does have many links to postmodern approaches like Ken Gergen’s social constructionism.
He attributes most ethical arguments to rely on what he calls the assumption of the bounded self, which holds individuals morally responsible for their actions.

“…the concepts of subjectivity and agency form close companions to the presumption of moral responsibility. While the individual is fundamentally free to chose, such choice is accompanied by a responsibility for action that will not injure or unjustifiably constrain others. Each individual may thus be held responsible for his/her actions, and may be penalized or rewarded by dint of his/her conduct toward others. The ethical or humane society thus rests on the moral responsibility of the individuals composing that society. Yet, as we have explored the problematics of consciousness, individual agency, and liberty, we also find the justification for moral responsibility rapidly dissolving. How indeed is one to be responsible to oneself, when there is no private, unaculturated self to offer guidance? How could the morally advanced individual generate a set of personal moral principles, except from the repository of cultural intelligibilities at his/her disposal? And, in matters of moral deliberation, if one does hearken to the cultural installation within, then which of the voices should be favored?

For are we not all, in a Bakhtinian sense, akin to polyphonic novels, speaking in multiple voices, reflecting multiple traditions? If we inherit a pluralism of moral intelligibilities, on what grounds could we select among them - save from the standpoint of yet another inherited intelligibility? And, finally, if moral deliberation is inherently cultural, then in what sense are we justified in holding individuals responsible for the humane society? Isn't individual blame thus a mystification of our condition of interdependence?“

“As we find, tendencies toward division and conflict are normal outgrowths of relational life. Prejudice is not, then, a mark of a flawed character—inner rigidity, decomposed cognition, emotional bias, and the like. Rather, so long as we continue the normal process of creating consensus around what is real and good, classes of the undesirable are under construction. Wherever there are tendencies toward unity, cohesion, brotherhood, commitment, solidarity, or community, so alienation is in the making.”(Relational Being Beyond Self and Community)

I take us to be basically or mostly in the same world, at least among those with whom we share an everyday culture. — Pie

I think thats a huge mistake. By different worlds I don’t mean hopelessly my worldview and yours are incommensurable. I mean that every time you blame someone , including yourself , you are failing to see the contextual validity in the course of action that you condemn or judge.

The notion of rationalization links motivation and cognition directly. Folk psychoanalysis is part of our shared background. — Pie

Psycho analysis ‘links’ motivation and cognition by treating the former as a mechanism imposing itself on cognition from without. In most other approaches to motivation within psychology , affect shapes , conditions , reinforces intentionality as a partially external influence.

I hesitate to agree. I suggest we look at relative intensities of essentially neutral drives. Sexual desire is a good thing until it's not (as when I flirt inappropriately or am unfaithful). Seeking material comfort and security is a good thing until it's not (as when I don't pay taxes and vote against the greater good or simply steal from others in a crude way). It's not so much what we want but whether we know how to share and respect boundaries. I will grant a few motives which themselves are vilified, such as sexual desires without any legal expression and a desire to wound or kill others...though the last could be useful in a soldier. I guess suicidal motivation is mostly forbidden too. — Pie

You’re treating ‘drives’ as such external shapers of thought. But thought is intrinsically self-motivating. It doesn’t need arbitrary mechanisms slapped onto it from outside it , to tell what what to like and what it to like. Pleasure and pain are just other ways of talking about the relative success or failure of our attempts to anticipate events via our constructions of them. Affectively negative
experience ( anxiety, fear, hostility, joy, guilt) IS the relative incoherence of a situation for us.

The past leaps ahead for a project in the way it handles the present ? — Pie

I like the way Eugene Gendlin put it:

“…the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”.

There's an industry of criminals who trick the elderly out their money posing as IT. Is it not safe to assume that they are motivated by greed? Perhaps also by envy ? — Pie

‘Greed’ is a convenient label we slap on others ( and sometimes ourselves) as a way of blaming them for our own failure to understand their behavior more insightfully.

Why would basic judgments like right/wrong and good/bad not be crucial to such sense-making ? Are we not beings who desire and fear? — Pie

right/wrong and good/bad are not separate categories from sense-making. They express nothing other than the organizational dynamics of sense-making. We are wholly oriented toward anticipating events , and negative emotions , especially of the sort that motivate our moral sentiments, reflect a partially chaotic scene from our vantage of construing. We can’t fathom why the other chose to act in the way they acted , because we don’t know how to step out of our world into theirs. So we assume the problem lies not with a difference in sense-making but with a difference in motivation, which we treat as separate from cognition.

nMost philosophies and psychologies make blame irreducible. That is, they blame wayward behavior on intransigent, irrational, arbitrary, pathological motives. Blame and anger are thus closely allied. Look at the synonyms for angry blame:

These include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal.

They also include supposedly ‘non-emotional’ assessments of culpability.

These assessments of blame do not point to facts of theatre concerning true object of their blame , but their own failure to effectively comprehend the rationality behind the others behavior. This is because we mistake content for process. The content of thought doesn’t really have very much to do with either ethics or rational cognition, except as a place mark for the anticipatory organizational processes of sense-making.

I think we can try to take a god's perspective on the great stage of fools and say so.

But does this not cut back against itself ? Aren't I just as rational as you then ? From what lofty perch can you criticize or instruct me ? If not from one implicitly higher and better ? — Pie

I believe all worldviews are equally valid , moral and rational. I also believe that worldviews evolve along with, and in response to, the progressing feedback from the materially and linguistically constructed niche that we inhabit. i don’t think this development should be understood via binaries like truth-nontruth and rational-irrational but along an axis of anticipatory sense-making. I cannot impose my worldview on you but offer it to you and see if you find it intelligible and pragmatically useful relative to your perspective.

The culture is literally being destroyed as we speak because meaning is use, and language is useless unless it tells the truth. Cue Orwell, cue Kant.
— unenlightened

I'm on a nearby wavelength. Rationality is normative. Truthtelling is fundamental. Irrationality is antisocial. — Pie

If rationality is normative, then mustn’t irrationality also be normative? Put differently, isn’t one person’s irrationality simply another’s rationality? If falsehood is the opposite of truth telling, isn’t a lie motivated by a prior breakdown in communication that it is an attempt to rationally cope with?

It has been said that postmodernism plays into the human predilection to give into irrationalism. Supposedly, even those on the right who claim to despise everything postmodernism stands for can be contaminated by its pernicious irrationalist impetus. As the argument goes , if the other side can invent any rules they want , so can we.

While conservatives and modernists debate which side is rational or irrational, and what foreign(French) influence to blame for it, postmodernists assert that it is not irrationality that leads to fascisms and totalitarianisms but rigid or one-dimensional notions of the rational and the true.

What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity (or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration.
— Joshs

The situation might be described as an intergenerational dialectic, with science advancing one funeral at a time (if the old dogs refuse to learn new tricks.) Along with reason's autonomy and self-criticism comes endless dynamism, an endless revolution in the memes of seduction. — Pie

We are using different notions of temporality. Rouse’s temporal externalism doesn’t deal with spans of time (generations) but temporality itself thought more radically. The dialectic begins the moment I interact with others, as a dialogic back and forth that reshapes the sense of both of our conceptions in subtle fashion in continually. Heritage and sedimented habits are remade ( even as they remain recognizably the ‘same’) in this dialogic time.

One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
— Heidegger

This part is key : the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness.

Or: I am my past in the mode of no longer being it — Pie

You introduced me to this passage from Heidegger’s early work, for which I am grateful. I went on to incorporate it in a paper that makes the opposite argument from the one you think Heidegger is making concerning time.

A present time pervaded by interpretedness is the vulgar time of public interpretedness, otherwise known as the average everydayness of Das Man. What Heidegger is pointing to here is not the fundamental nature of time for Dasein but ways of thinking about time that we fall into. We convince ourselves that the future that arrives is a duplicate of our past.

"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)

Being-affected always addresses and modifies all of ones prior experience as a whole. Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying' every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground, which Heidegger says is the essence of feeling, is at the same time the productive seeing of an intentional object.

“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)

Heidegger(1994) refers to this ground-laying as displacement, because the act of laying a ground is the displacing of a previous ground.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Regarding "rule-following and its limits":

"there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”." (201)

Again, there is no unknown here. Of course, there may be borderline cases of rules, just as there can be "blurred concepts" (71), but this does not make them any less the rules that they are — Luke

You and I had a discussion about a year ago concerning the relation for Witt between a rule and the use of a rule.
I suggested that you stand on one side of a rift between Wittgenstein interpreters who support Hacker’s understanding of this issue and those , like the later Baker , Cavell, Conant, Hutchinson and Rouse, who reject it. I think this rift colors your debate with Antony concerning the ethical in Wittgenstein’s thinking.


What Rouse had to say concerning
“Wittgenstein's well-known remark that requests for justification of a practice must eventually en-counter a stopping point at which one can only say, "This is what we do" (1953, par. 217), supports Antony’s contention concerning the creative, enactive, and, yes, ethical reaponsivity of language use.

When he comes to the end of his justifications, then his "spade is turned" and he has stopped digging. There is nothing more he can do in terms of explaining or justifying why he follows the rule as he does; that is just how he does it. This is his response to the sceptic's unreasonable demands for further justification - at some point there is just how we act. It is not that W's justifications or what he does are unknown, and neither is it the beginning of some unknown situation (except only, perhaps, for the misguided sceptic) — Luke

We are inclined to say this to the student. We do not have to; it does not show that our action is our explanation. What it demonstrates is that the relationship between the student and teacher is more important than justifying the explaination. We can simply judge the student as wrong and stop the conversation, or start again, ask more questions, move to other examples, etc. The skeptic assails us with questions and doubts; Witt is trying to give them reasons in order to understand how to continue with them, with that part of them in us. — Antony Nickles

“Wittgenstein is often read as appealing to a social regularity, but his remark can instead be heard with the inflection with which a parent tells a child, "We don't hit other children, do we?"

Such statements or rhetorical questions do not describe regularities in children's actual behavior. On the contrary, parents make such comments precisely because children do hit one another. Parents do so, however, in response to or anticipation of such "deviant" behavior in order to hold it accountable to correction. Children's behavior in turn is only partially accommodating to such correction: sometimes obeying, sometimes challenging or circumventing corrective responses, some-times disobeying and facing further consequences, and so forth.

Remember that 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.”(Rouse)

Presumably you want this very point to be understood and to be right about something that applies or matters to both of us — Pie

My wanting to be right will also involve a re-articulation of the very sense of being right. What matters to both of us in this will never be more than partially shared, and thus always ahead of us to be achieved more fully.

An inferential semantics explains how claims are intelligible in terms of the inferences that are and are not allowed. "He closed his umbrella while it was raining, because he wanted to stay dry." This is confusion or nonsense, without some context that rescues it. We can't know one concept without knowing many. To cash out the rational in the rational animal, we emphasize inferential. — Pie

What inference is or is not allowed only exists in its actual use.

“… 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.” (Rouse)

What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity ( or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration. The norms continue to exist the same differently through their use, and their use re-defines their relevance and sense.

“Representationalist conceptions identify scientific understanding with some position or set of positions within the space of reasons—that is, as a body of knowledge. I instead locate scientific understanding in the ongoing reconfiguration of the entire space. The sciences continually revise the terms and inferential relations through which we understand the world, which aspects of the world are salient and significant within that understanding, and how those aspects of the world matter to our overall understanding.”

Do you actually....believe this ? Do you endorse this as a claim that I should take seriously ? — Pie

Do I believe what, that there is a familiar epistemological conception of us as believers? Sure. What I invite you to take seriously is Rouse’s articulation of the relation between belief-justification and the space of reasons within which any such claims are intelligible.

— Pie

My point is that belief is only one of myriad ways of sense-making , and far from the most important.
— Joshs

I agree there are lots of ways to make sense. That belief is far from the most important is so far a mere claim. I tend to think it's central for philosophy anyway. — Pie

Perhaps I can get philosopher of science Joseph Rouse to make my point better than I can.

“A familiar conception of science emphasizes its role in justify­ing belief; we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as believers who formulate and accept representations of how things are. The meaning and justification of those beliefs would then be the primary target for philosophical explication and assessment. Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others within this tradition suggest a different concep­tion of ourselves, which also changes the central tasks for science and philosophy. We are concept users who engage others and our partially shared surroundings in discursive practice. The primary phenomenon to understand naturalistically is not the content, justification, and truth of beliefs but instead the opening and sustaining of a “space of reasons” in which there could be conceptually articulated meaning and justification at all, including meaningful disagreement and conceptual difference.

This “space of reasons” is an ongoing pattern of interaction among our­selves and with our partially shared surroundings. As Ian Hacking once noted, “Whether a proposition is as it were up for grabs, as a candidate for being true-or-false, depends on whether we have ways to reason about it” (2002, 160). The space of reasons encompasses not only the claims that we take to be true or false but also the conceptual field and patterns of reasoning within which those claims become intelligible possibilities whose epistemic status can be assessed. Any determination of the con­tent, justification, or truth of beliefs emerges from that larger process of ongoing interaction. Whether conceived as second nature (McDowell 1994), discursive practice (Brandom 1994), constituted domains (Hauge­land 1998), or a functional linguistic pluralism (Price 2011), the space of reasons cannot be reduced to the various contents expressed or express­ible within it. The familiar epistemological conception of us as believers, who might ideally share a common representation of the world in the scientific image, thus conflates particular moves within discursive prac­tice or the space of reasons with the space or practice itself.”

I really am open to what you say, but my theme lately is that...here we are public with only words to trade. I don't know how else to settle belief rationally. — Pie

My point is that belief is only one of myriad ways of sense-making , and far from the most important. Furthermore, the code cost of belief is not itself unitary.

As Ray Monk explains:

“In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had investigated one form of language: the assertoric sentence, or 'proposition'. His defence of this was to say that other forms of language, questions and commands, can be regarded as modified assertions, so that a common core to all three can be identified (e.g., from The door is shut', we can derive 'Is the door shut? and 'Shut the door!"). Thus, by investigating the logical form of propositions, we can legitimately claim to be investigating the structure of our whole language. Using the notion of a language game, Wittgenstein now exposes this view to a merciless attack:

“But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? -There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call 'symbols', words', 'sentences. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)
Here the term 'language game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them- Describing the appearance of an object, or giving itsmeasurements Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) Reporting an event- Speculating about an event Forming and testing a hypothesis- Presenting the results of an experiment in tables anddiagrams- Making up a story; and reading it Play-acting- Singing catches- Guessing riddles Making a joke; telling it- Solving a problem in practical arithmetic Translating from one language into another Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.”(P.I. #23)

When we try to parse the cat's belief in propositional terms, we're confusing the contents of our report with the content of what we're reporting upon.
— creativesoul

It need not be confusion. What if we tried to understand aliens who seemed to have a language ? Less confusion there, intuitively, but we are still trying to model behavior using postulate internal entities ( attributing human-like beliefs to a non-human, probing for explanatory/predictive power.) — Pie

I feel like the alien or the cat. i’m not sure I know what a human-like belief , or a proposition is. I don’t think it’s simply my own ignorance, but the fact that when concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘proposition’ are analyzed rigorously in terms of their conditions of possibility, we find no ‘there’ there. As Witt would argue ‘belief’ has a near infinity of potential senses, tied together not by an overarching categorical frame , but by family resemblance, which is not at all the same thing as a pre-existing rule or category. The logical form of a proposition S is P presupposes a pragmatic act of taking something AS something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance.

The proposition is an artificially worked -up idealization and abstraction derived from this pragmatic intentionality.
From this vantage, it is this primordial functioning of human language as person, situation and context-specific use that we need to compare with the perceptual and conceptual activities of other animals. Some argue that human intentionality is continuous with animal intentionality, more a matter of difference of degree than of kind.

I'm curious what this other 'aspect of feeling' could possibly be if it's a bodily sensation that is not concrete, not bodily, and not a sensation. Looks like nonsense to me. — creativesoul

This other aspect of feeling is not a bodily sensation.


Here’s more from an article I wrote:

Social feeling is the very core of so-called conceptual and perceptual thought, merging narrative-thematic consistency and global self-transformation, the subjective and the objective, the felt and the understood, in the same gesture. The presumed partial independence of rationality and affect vanishes, and the distinction re-emerges as aspects inherent in each event. The inter-affecting of context and novelty which defines an event simultaneously produces a fresh, particular modulation of change (empirical aspect) and a unique momentum (hedonic component) of self-transformation. From this vantage, the valuative, hedonic (the perceived goodness or badness of things), aesthetic aspect of experience, underlying ‘non-emotional' appraisals as well as our sadnesses, fears and joys, simply IS our vicissitudes of momentum of sense-making through situations, rather than arising from causal feedback loops. Affective valences are contractions and expansions, coherences and incoherences, accelerations and regressions, consonances and dissonances, expressing how intimately and harmoniously we are able to anticipate and relate to, and thus how densely, richly, intensely we are able to move through, new experience. If we can believe that a unique qualitative moment of momentum, ranging from the confused paralysis of unintelligibility to the exhilaration of dense transformative movement, is intrinsic to ALL events, then perhaps there is no need to attribute the origin of aesthetic pleasures and pains to the functioning of a limited class of entities like bodily affects, even if it is understandable why this kind of assumption has survived for so long in psychology .

From the standpoint of verbal expressivity, what has traditionally been called emotion often appears to be a minimalist art, because it is the situational momentum of experiencing slowing or accelerating so rapidly that feelings seem to distill meaning down to a bare inarticulate essence. When the momentum of our reflective thought shifts in such dramatic ways (acceleratively enriched in joyful comprehension, impoverished in grief, ambivalent in fear, alternately disappointed and confident in anger), such so-called emotional events may appear to be a species apart from conceptual reason, a blind intuitive force (surge, glow, twinge, sensation, arousal, energy) invading, conditioning and orienting perceptual and conceptual thought from without as a background field. It is said that such ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, passive, something we are overcome by. At other times, situational change may be intermediate, just modulated and gradual enough that content seems to perpetuate itself in self-cohering narratives. Such situations have been called rational, voluntary, factual, reflective, stable, conceptual, propositional, rational, logical, theoretical, non-aesthetic. However, as I have said, these dichotomies: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus pre-reflective bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as reciprocally causal innate or learned associations between perceptions and body states; they are relative variations in the momentum of a contextually unfolding process which is always, at the same time, within the same event, intentional and affective.

what is concrete is what has immediate affective impact phenomenologically speaking, what affects us predominately in terms of being a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a bodily sensation, regardless of whatever story we might tell about the underlying machinery. — Janus

Right, this is what I’ve characterized as the concreteness of bodily felt sensation. I think we’re taking about the same thing. What I’m claiming is that, in addition to this bodily sensation there is another aspect of feeling which is not concrete, not bodily and not a sensation. This more fundamental aspect of social feeling or emotion is what makes bodily sensations coherently meaningful as emotions. The concrete body sensations act as symbols for the abstract feelings. We tend to treat the body sensations of emotions the same way we treat other sensations , as simple concrete immediate sensations , without recognizing the existence of the more fundamental aspect. We substitute the simple and concrete for the abstract because then abstract component of feeling is invisible to us. Fundamental social emotions do not need to be accompanied by any concrete body sensations whatsoever in order to produce their meaning for us, just as abstract word concepts can produce their meaning in the absence of any specific concrete imagery.

This notion of affect is consonant with Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, ways of being in the world.

What is it about Hacker's translation that led you to caution me? — Fooloso4

Hacker’s reading of Witt( which influences his translations) has been strongly critiqued
by certain quarters.

With regard to the Übersichtliche Darstellung quote, for example , Beth Savickey argues that, contra Hacker’s implication,

“Nowhere does Wittgenstein suggest that he is
mapping (or even attempting to map) the landscape, nor that a map (understood as an overview or surveyable representation) might address or resolve philosophical problems.”

Here’s the full essay:

https://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/download/2300/pdf/

PPF is not about ethics or morality either, but about the philosophy of psychology. — Luke

I have tended to read Antony’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as consonant with that of the ‘new school’.

Rupert Read’s new book ‘Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy:Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations’ exemplifies this approach:

“In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein ‘school’, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.

Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy….Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others.”(Routledge blurb)

We can see a similar line of thinking in Wisnewski’s
‘Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry: A Defense of Ethics as Clarification’:

“Wisnewski correctly understands ethical inquiry, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, as aiming at clarification, particularly, conceptual clarification, and not at constructing an ethical theory. … Wittgenstein is not a quietist. In fact, he wants us to speak morally as long as we do not attach something else to our moral judgments, for example, what is constitutive of our empirical propositions, of our descriptive language-games.

To clarify what morality is really all about is a worthy task for philosophy. More importantly, it can show us how we can live better by, for example, showing how to reach peace of mind when all metaphysical pseudo-problems are explained away. Conceptual clarification has intrinsic value and may accomplish something (pace 'critical theorists'' such as Marcuse's misunderstandings of Wittgenstein's work): it must change the way we live and such changes are Wittgenstein's main philosophical goal.”

A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.

The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)

I did not want to get into the problem of translating übersichtliche Darstellung.At this point I think it would just muddy the waters.

In any case, the quote is from Anscombe's translation — Fooloso4

Ok. Don’t mean to nitpick , but this is Anscombe’s
quote:


“A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. -- Our grammar is acking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.

The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a Weltanschauung?)”

This is Hacker’s:

“A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. -- Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.

The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a Weltanschauung?)”

Copernicus reoriented man's place in the world. It goes to the heart of how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Darwinian evolution did much the same. We are not the pinnacle or culmination of the fixed order of life. In both cases we are freed from a picture that held us captive. A point of view given to us and protected by Christianity. A point of view that was regarded as not only ordinary but true. — Fooloso4

We are freed from one picture only to get stuck in a new picture. That is the case if we look at paradigms as maps or representations of a world. If we look at the participants in a paradigmatic community not as scientists applying a normative framework but as engaging in partially shared interactive practices that constantly determine and redetermine what is at stake and at issue in their practices, then we can see how the terms of a paradigm can be subtly put into question even as it continues to guide the participants. By the same token, paradigm shifts and Copernican revolutions continue to be indebted to the paradigm they overthrow. Even what is revolutionary is embedded in the ordinary. As Heidegger said, the world is always already familiar to us at some level.

I agree with the first part of this, but complete clarity is freedom from the entanglement in language that philosophy can lead us into. As I quoted previously (PI 122) it is about having an übersichtliche Darstellung:

A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.

The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?) — Fooloso4

This seems to be Peter Hacker’s translation. Careful
you don’t mistake Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein for the correct reading.

The OP is confused. There is no peace in death. There is nothing. What the OP wants is peace in life. To get to a moment where they feel peace. You have to live to feel peace. They would prefer a life where they feel peace then a life where they feel pain. Death does not give peace. It gives nothing. There is no chance to find peace. — Philosophim

I agree with this , and would add that the fantasy of peace in life that is the OP’s longing for ‘death’ is , like all experiences of peace or relief, a contrast or transition from a prior state. No state of mind or mood sustains itself in perpetuity because experiences are relational and contingent. An experience of peace will inevitably be followed by a new experience that addresses and transforms it. Peace can become trepidation, struggle, mourning , elation. More importantly, these transitions in attitude and mood change US. In a sense , with every shift in mood and outlook , the particular self that we are are at any given time is born of a previous self and dies as it is replaced by a new self. Even in just longing for and fantasizing about the ‘peace of death’ , we are briefly achieving this feeling of peace. The old ‘we’ who was struggling has died and briefly become the new ‘we’ who is at peace. Soon this new ‘we’ will pass over into yet another ‘we’ who is beset with a fresh situation and attitude. This is all that death will ever give you. It is not death that is eternal but the contingency of desire.

By "concrete" I have in mind what is experienced by us as immediate and tangible. By "abstract" I have in mind what is lacking such immediacy and tangibility, but may of course have associations, more or less attenuated, with the immediate and tangible. Some — Janus

Immediate and tangible….Of course, when we read abstract philosophy, each concept is grasped immediately, but I don’t think you mean it in this sense. I’m picturing instead the concreteness of simple sensations of touch, visual imagery, sounds that physical objects make. We consider these more direct somehow than abstract concepts, as if the features of concepts like democracy were without shape , edges , sharpness.

Autistics are predisposed to gravitate toward interactions with the world at such a concrete level, because they have difficultly processing the rapidly unfolding, highly abstract engagements typical of verbal social interaction. Intense immersion in concrete , repetitive visual, auditory and movement patterns are typical of many autistics. High functioning autistics and Asperger’s individuals learn to use language, but at a delay.

Significantly, just as autistics have great difficulty with the dynamically changing nature of verbal social interaction, they have equal difficulty with identifying and understanding the meaning of social emotions.
Why is this so? It is because social affect and feeling (sadness, anger, trepidation , love, angst) are nothing other than the vicissitudes , the consonances and dissonances , the acceleration and deceleration of the flow of abstract thought. All thinking , whether verbal or non-verbal, concrete or abstract, takes place as a textured flow, and feeling is this aspect of it. The textures of concrete perceptions of simple , direct , tangible things are felt as the attractiveness of colors , the harshness of bright light , the pleasant symmetry of moving visual patterns, the agony of physical pain or delight of a caress. This is concrete feeling, the analogue to concrete perception.

The textures of abstract verbal thought are what we call the social emotions. It is not that a feeling of anger or sadness or joy is devoid of verbal conceptualization. On the contrary, social feelings would be impossible without abstract conceptualization , because they are the very textured undulations of the progress of abstract thought. There cannot be social feeling in the absence of abstract conceptualization. And there cannot be abstract thinking going on unless that thinking unfolds in time. Its unfolding IS feeling.

When we think of emotions and feelings, we tend to think of concrete sensations like the feeling of the tightening of the chest and rapidly beating heart in anxiety, flushed fact in embarrassment, clenched fist in anger. But these concrete sensations are merely the response of the body in support of the social feelings
that trigger them and in preparation for action. The social feelings themselves are not these sensations. In most circumstances, social feelings are verbal. That is, they are the changing flow of verbal conceptualization. The intensity of social feeling is the rapidity of the flow of verbal conceptualization. It is this rapid sequential
flow produced by abstract verbiage ( social feeling) that autistics have such difficulty processing. The progress of conceptualization in experiences of felt enlightenment and excited creativity is too fast for us to stop and identify each verbal symbol that contributes to the constructing of big and bigger ideas. In order to consolidate the gains made by the enlightened train of thought-feeling, we must slow down the rate of abstractive progress by further defining , clarifying and adding to the original verbiage.

In sum, the relevant analogue to the distinction between concrete perception and abstract verbal conceptualization is not the difference between conceptual thought and feeling. It can’t be. This notion is incoherent once we realize that abstract as well as concrete experiencing is a flow, a progression, and feeling IS the vicissitudes, undulations, consonances and dissonances of the progress, not as a separate system intertwined with verbal meaning (this system is only the concrete bodily sensations that are the response to social feeling) but as as aspect of the essence of verbal meaning itself.

So there is concrete perception and concrete feeling , abstract verbal thought and abstract social
feeling. Instrumental music , dance and painting are slightly less definitive modes of abstract symbolizarion than verbal conceptualization, but considerably more abstract than concrete perception, given that they produce a wealth of social emotions.

The big accident was then that a serial constraint on hierarchical motor planning could be turned into a new level of semiotic encoding. — apokrisis

Isn’t the notion of semiotic encoding an atemporal
concept? Does a code transcribe its pattern identically? And if not , must not the code itself persist self-identically in order for it to function as code?
If we begin with a pattern, an ensemble of elements organized with a particular relationship one to another, and observe this pattern transform itself as a new whole from one moment to the next such that each new configuration is similar but not identical to the previous pattern ( and each element has also changed its sense and role with respect to the ensemble), can this be considered a semiotic process?