Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Kuhn, Rorty, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Wittgenstein
— Joshs

Name five contributions from any of those philosophers that have significantly advanced philosophy. Then we can argue about what constitutes a significant philosophical advancement. — Merkwurdichliebe

You would first have to have read and understood these writers, or those contributing today to the leading edge of empirical research who find the work of these philosophers indispensable to their investigations. My simply naming contributions, which I could easily do, would make no sense otherwise.

So that must mean there must have been very few significant scientific advances in the past 100 years.
— Joshs

I disagree. I would be interested to see how you came up with that meaning from what i wrote. — Merkwurdichliebe

You assume science advances but philosophy hasn’t in the past 100 years. I am arguing that all scientific paradigms are examples of philosophical discourse , worldviews rendered into a more conventional language.

So the advance of science presupposes the advance of philosophy. Furthermore, in any historical period one can find cross-over writers who move back and forth between a scientific and philosophical form of exposition, showing the rest of us the relevance of philosophical work to science. Today there are numerous such writers working on important advances in psychological theory pertaining to everything from neuroscientific modeling ( Varela, Thompson) to schizophrenia, ptsd, autism, depression , grief, models of emotions , skilled action, perceptual recognition, psycholinguistics, consciousness studies and empathy (Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe , Andy Clark, Michel Bitbol, Dan Zahavi, Jan Slaby, Alva Noe, Thomas Fuchs, Hanne De Jaegher). We can add to this list philosophers of science like Joseph Rouse.

These writers have written often of the crucial importance to their work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, the American Pragmatists, Heidegger, Kuhn, Wittgenstein and others I mentioned.

I haven’t even mentioned current physicists who recognize the vital relevance of philosophy for the sciences:

I’ll end with this quote from Lee Smolen:

Philosophers of the past “sometimes understood the problems we face more deeply than many of my colleagues today. For example, Leibniz was, to my understanding, the first to struggle with the main question that we face in trying to make a quantum theory of gravity-how to make a background independent description of a closed universe that contains both all its causes and all its observers. And Peirce was the first to articulate and try to solve the puzzle at the heart of the current debates in cosmology and string theory: what chose the laws that govern our universe? And what chose the initial conditions?”

“… in many cases philosophers are working on the same questions I work on-and developing ideas related to the ideas I hope to establish-but from a bracingly different perspective.”

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does. — Art48

Or perhaps this is merely what WE do.

There have been very few significant philosophical advances in the past 100 years. At this point in history, philosophy is definitely not advancing. — Merkwurdichliebe

So that must mean there must have been very few significant scientific advances in the past 100 years. Either that or your knowledge of philosophical advances over the past century(Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Kuhn, Rorty, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Wittgenstein) is poor.

Copernican heliocentricity?
Newton's gravity?
Darwinian evolution?
Germ theory of disease?
Boltzman's thermodynamics?
Einsteinian Relativity theories?
Hubble's Red Shift (expanding universe)?
Heisenberg's quantum uncertainty?
Universal Turing Machine?
Shannon's Information Entropy?
Frick and Watson's double helix? — 180 Proof

There have been theses written about the philosophical underpinnings of all of these scientific advances, such as the association between Newton and Descartes, Einstein and Kant, Darwin , Hegel and Schelling, Nietzsche and Freud, Watson and Peirce, Turing and Leibnitz.

Assume for a moment that science is a huge ocean liner moving slowly through a deep sea. Where do you see philosophy in this picture? — jgill

That’s a hard picture for me to swallow. I prefer to think of the history of science as a succession of different crafts , each more complex and sophisticated than the previous. The succession of crafts does not simply represent changes in the theoretical content of science, but also changes in the self-conception of scientific practice and method( e.g. hypothetico-inductive vs deductive).

Now let us imagine this historical succession of crafts not as a single line but as a series of parallel lines. Each craft can see similar boats on the port and starboard sides.

What makes the parallel boats similar is that they express variations on a common philosophical theme that marks the unity of an era of science and philosophy. What makes them different is that the language they use to express these ideas can be more or less conventional, operational, instrumental. At one extreme is a boat expressing the grand philosophical narratives of the era. At the other extreme is a boat expressing the applied technologies of the era. Each is a variation on a common theme.

I think there has been progress in philosophy.

Not too much, and the steps of progress are hindered by counter-arguments, but the hindering is done mainly by lay philosophers, not by professional ones.

Steps I know of: — god must be atheist

It might be a lot simpler just to list the paradigm shifts in empirical science over the past 400 years. If you examine the changing presuppositions underlying these shifts in scientific understanding closely enough you will realize that you are looking at none other than the history of progress in philosophy.

somebody answered the topic's question, and it got no attention. — god must be atheist

What was the answer?

One difference between philosophy and science is that philosophy insists on logical certainty, which is a category error when applied to the empirical world. This is why progress is so scant. — hypericin

Only certain approaches to philosophy are concerned with , or believe in , the value or coherence of logical certainty. On the whole the history of philosophy runs in parallel with the history of science , so if one progresses, the other must also. They are joined at the hip.

I think you are talking about the past, and in fact quite far back. I will quote myself from an earlier post: "Science started to be a separate subject a long time ago, even before the term "science" was formulated in the 19th century, acquiring such names as "epistemology" in early 16th century, etc. So, today they are two different fields of knowledge." — Alkis Piskas

I saw your quote , and I am not talking about the past. There have been , and always will be empirical accounts that are or less philosophical, more or less theoretical , more or less applied. Science doesnt differ from philosophy in terms of method , such as objectivity or testability, given that there are no universally shared methods among scientists. It is a matter of the conventionality of the language, how deeply the presuppositions underlying one’s account are explicitly articulated in the account.

Every major historical advance in the sciences is paralleled (and usually preceded) by a corresponding advance in philosophy. If science and philosophy were on independent tracks this could not be the case.

Philosophy's job is not to answer the 'big questions' and progress is not to be measured by any answers given. Philosophy's job is to provide the tools to innoculate us against the mystification caused by deep grammatical trickery. — Cuthbert

I assume you’re paraphrasing Wittgenstein. That was not always the way that philosophy understood its job. And Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy did not originate with him. He was part of a movement in philosophy that goes back at least as far as Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. Is philosophy’s job as Witt understands it compatible with science’s job as it understands it? That depends. Wittgensteinian philosophy is critical both of traditional views of science and of philosophy. But what of postmodern science( yes, there is such a thing)?
I suggest these newer approaches to science, coming both from philosophers of science and scientists themselves, internalize your description of the job of philosophy as Witt sees it.

The endpoint of philosophy is confusion aka aporia. W — Agent Smith

Since when?

Science is advancing. This is very obvious. But is philosophy? — Alkis Piskas

If science is advancing, then so is philosophy. There is no way to categorically distinguish between what science is and does, and what philosophy is and does. The history of science and philosophy is completely entangled and interdependent.

His "equanimity" is only apparent, just good PR for the benefit of Wall Street investors; we (the public) know nothing about his psychological or ethical state. IMO, Bezos is living neither an Epicurean nor an Aristotlean "good life". — 180 Proof

I agree with that. As far as we know, Bezos could be as much of a psychological mess as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. It may come with the territory.

Objectivity is not limited to static pictures. You can describe an event objectively as well. Objectivity is simply a description of how things are and is independent of other people's agreement or disagreement with you. Are you not telling us how things are for everyone even if we don't agree with you? — Harry Hindu

I appreciate that there are differing definitions of objectivity. My notion of objectivity, consistent with writers like Putnam, is not just the way things are independent of social consensus. It must assume intrinsic properties, substance , attributes associated with an object.To be an intrinsic property, it need not be permanent but only measurable, which means it must endure as self-identical for some period of time. Of course , properties of natural objects tend to be relational ( mass, spatial dimensions , energy, etc). Here we can say that the properties of objects are intrinsic to the system of relations producing them, which are therefore objective.

But if we were to say that the nature of objects is not only relative to human subjects before whom they appear, or relative to systems of relations with other objects, but that neither these objects nor their systems of relations have any intrinsic properties or attributes that can be measured, then these objects are no longer ‘objective’. They are events that only appear once as what they are and then change into new objects which only appear once ( and an object is itself only an instantaneous differential change). As Putnam says , “the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental di­chotomy between "intrinsic" properties of things and "relational" properties of things makes no sense.”

Objectivity then becomes a human conceptual process attributing intrinsic self-identical properties to events that never reproduce any aspect of what they are identically from one moment to the next. It is we who create the abstractions of intrinsically and reparable self-identity that we then attribute to an ‘objective’ world.
Natural events are changes in relations of change. When we interact with the empirical world in order to represent it , we are further changing this web of changes. As I said, even if we could
talk about what something ‘is’ in itself , independent of our interaction with it, we still cannot locate any object , process, system of relations in the world that simply ‘is’ what it is as a repeatable set of intrinsic properties, attributes, laws.

Subjectivity is a category error where you confuse some aspect of the world with some aspect of yourself.

If truths were subjective then what reason would you have to share your subjective knowledge with someone else? After all we would subjectivity interpret your scribbles on the screen so there is no true or false way of reading the scribbles. No one can ever be wrong if truths are subjective, which is one reason some people find solace in believing in subjective truths - so they can avoid the stress of being wrong. — Harry Hindu

As with objectivity , there are differing ways of understanding subjectivity. You seem to be thinking of it in the traditional sense of a kind of object , an inner substance with its own intrinsic properties partially insulated from the objective world. This inner substance is divided from , and places itself opposite objects of an outer world, It can represent this ‘objective’ world accurately or falsely, rationally or irrationally , subjectively or objectively.

My understanding of subjectivity comes from phenomenology, which dispense with this divide between inner and outer, subject and object. Subjectivity for them is not processes inside the head, locked away from
the world. Subjectivity is the zero point of an interactive process in which who and what I am , what I think and how I perceive the world, is remade every moment in some small fashion in the act of perception. Body, mind and environment make up one inseparable unity of continual reciprocal interchange and feedback. As subjectivity , I am this interactive environmental
system. To separate off an inner subject from its environment misses the point. There really is no such thing as a subject in this sense.

You say no one can ever be wrong if truths are subjective, but if subjectivity is a system of interactions between miind, body and world , it is a also a normative system. Think of an organism that is embedded within an environmental niche. The organism’s own behavior produces that niche by having certain aims and goals that define. what matters to it. The niche for an ant is irrelevant to that of a jaybird. Within the niche that an organism produces with its behavior, there are eight and wrong ways of functioning. There must be a continual effort at adjusting and adapting between organism
and niche for it to continue to survive, that is , to maintain it’s way of functioning.

The human cultural world is differentiated into many niches and subniches. Your subjective functioning and my subjective functioning represent interacting and overlapping subniches within larger cultural niches. So the way you interpret meaning will not duplicate
mine but they can and usually do interact closely enough for us to be able to form agreements and mutual
understandings. Science represent a widely shared niche within which we can come to agreement on practices of behavior. The essence of truth is in the relative stability and pragmatic usefulness of agreed upon conventions of practice , rather than in conformity of our representations with ‘intrinsic’ objective features of a world. Put differently, we cannot say that truth is conformity with intrinsic feature of an objective world when that world only exists for us as a niche that is co-defined by our own normatively organized interactions with it. The niche , like truth , is neither objective nor subjective in the traditional sense, but a dynamic interaction between the two poles.

I like Woody Allen’s take on reality:

“Can we actually 'know' the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out there? And why? And must they be so noisy? Finally, there can be no doubt that the one characteristic of 'reality' is that it lacks essence. That is not to say it has no essence, but merely lacks it. (The reality I speak of here is the same one Hobbes described, but a little smaller.)”

Question: What's the Nmax for our universe? — Agent Smith

Why? Are you planning on investing in real estate?

Then your posts are objective because your posts are fixed descriptions about sone aspect of nature or reality, like the relations between writers, readers, words and what they represent. — Harry Hindu

Another variation on the ‘ postmodernists are self-refuting because they make truth claims against objective truth’ meme.

Here’s the difference between an objective truth claim and a postmodern assertion. The former invokes a picture of the way things are. This picture consists of a specific, arbitrary content. The postmodernist is not offering a picture containing an arbitrary content. They argue that we are constant moving from one picture, one value content to another. It is not the particular claims, schemes, worldviews , objective definitions that the postmodernist is interested in describing , but the movement. And saying that they are ‘describing’ something is not quite accurate, as if they stood outside of this flow. Rather, the postmodernist is enacting change and movement in talking about it. Their assertions are self-reflexive, already caught up in and changed by the flow.

If there is anything a priori in what the postmodern is offering ( other than transformative movement
itself) it is that this flow can be faster or slower. We can become relatively stuck within a theoretical value system , and this is associated with alienation. fragmentation and unintelligibility. Or we can find ourselves in the midst of more fluid transformation in which new options and directions can become available to us. A postmodern philosopher is more of a salesman than a theoretician. They’re not presenting a contentful doctrine they are inviting us to enter into accelerated movement and see if we like it.

I’ve heard this many times. Where on earth do you get the idea that it is the far right in the U.S. that believes truth is something made up?
— Joshs

Kellyanne Conway denies Trump press secretary lied: 'He offered alternative facts' — Michael

Do you honestly think Kellyanne Conway is a postmodernist? What she said is what is called ‘spinning the truth’. Lies, half truths and manipulations are perennial elements of political discourse on both sides of the aisle. We do this to mislead the other side when we know they will not agree with our views or actions. I can assure you both Conway and Trump have very fixed core beliefs about the world very, very far removed from postmodernist thinking. But they’ll say whatever they need tot to fool you and keep you off the track. It may be better from their vantage if you buy into the idea that they are radical relativists, and you seem to be taking the bait.

You've denied any objective truth as correspondence, but now you say there is some sense of real truth, a "deeper notion of truth", but you haven't given any indication of what it is. Is it a subjective truth? If truth is simply "intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other", then the way I understand my relationship with you and the world is completely different from the way that you understand this relationship, and truth, it appears, would be completely subjective. Or do you propose some objectivity to these relations? In which case, I think we're back to what you denied above. — Metaphysician Undercover

I’m proposing an idea of truth as intersubjective , not simply subjective. Yes, each of us enters into relations of communication with others bringing with us our own personal perspective , but the ever evolving ‘intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other’ I described allows for a gradual convergence among personal perspectives , but not the complete disappearance of subjective perspective. Think of this subjectivity within intersubjectivity as variations on a common theme. They would be no basis for communication with anyone else if our inner perspectives were all at all times completely different from each other.

Intersubjectivity is different than objectivity. The former is a dynamic pattern of interconnective relationality that cannot be captured by a formula or rule capturing the whole. The latter looks for a rule, law , fixed description applying to some aspect of nature. Objectivity tries to ground fluid self-organization on some content external to it which is not fluid.

Your Trumpian friends can reply to you with the very argument you wish to use: they to will pretend that there are no facts of the matter. If all you have is coherence, you've already lost. — Banno

I’ve heard this many times. Where on earth do you get the idea that it is the far right in the U.S. that believes truth is something made up? I mean, it’s one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. I’ve heard it said the right is living in a post-truth world. My response is that one could not a find a group of people more wedded to a doctrinaire and almost fundamentalist concept of truth.Talk about facts of the matter. The Trumpian right fetishizes and reifies facts with a religious zeal. Unfortunately they reduce scientific facts to simple causal relations. It is this Ayn Randian mentality toward rationality that makes them unable to appreciate ambiguities and complexities of the sort that crop up in climate change and covid science. The continual
on-the -fly adjustments in medical recommendations in response to new study results over the course of the pandemic do not fit the simplistic image many Trump conservatives have of how science was supposed to operate. As a result , they lost faith faith in the veracity of what they were being told.

Overwhelmingly, we agree as to how things are. What disagreement there is, tends to how we want things to be. — Banno

Agreement on how things are , in the way that you mean it , deals primarily with the sorts of broad abstractions that we use in the natural sciences and technology , or in talking about everyday objects in certain very general ways. I think you would agree that this agreement has to do with anticipating how another will behave in response to our using scientific or everyday concepts. We know we have agreement if they respond as we anticipate they should if their conception is the same as ours. We ask for the chair and when they give it to us , we have verification of our assumption that we agree.

But there are other kinds of anticipations that I would argue are much more central to our lives than what can be articulated as true-false propositions.

I am among those who believe that the central core of our emotions is cognitive assessment, and that this assessment is , as free energy neuroscientists argue, a predictive endeavor. That is, we feel anxiety , guilt , anger when our predictions concerning the way we anticipate others ( or ourselves) to act is disappointed, surprised , violated. One could say that whenever we feel a negative emotion , there is disagreement between ourselves and another, or between ourself and ourself. Our prediction does not agree with the situation at hand with regard to the other’s behavior, attitude, ideation. We have been let down, or let ourselves down , with a violation of expectation.

So do we overwhelmingly agree as to how things are in our interpersonal relationships? Given the fact that for most of us emotional stability, much less happiness, is a tentative achievement at best, I would say that based on the very sensitive measure of our emotions , rather than the very broad and generic measure of propositional truth statements, we struggle all the time to find agreement between our expectations concerning the behavior of others and their actual behavior. We struggle with low self-esteem, we wonder what others think of us, we become terrified of embarrassment in speaking before a group, we need to keep secrets , even from those closest to us, we are kept up at night with gnawing guilt over something we didn’t say or should have said, we are consumed with anger over the disregard a colleague or former friend shows us. These are all failures of agreement , expressions of the gaps which separate us from others.


You might be tempted to argue that human behavior is fundamentally arbitrary, and so we cannot expect to achieve the sort of predictability in interpersonal relations that we can in modeling other aspects of the natural world. In other words, we can agree that human emotions and motives are capricious , irrational or arbitrary whereas other aspects of the world are predictable and thus subject to agreement. This we are i. overwhelming agreement. concerning what it is possible to agree on, given the facts of nature.

But are our failures to anticipate the behavior of others the fault of human capriciousness or our beliefs that humans. behavior is capricious? That is , the inadequacy of our models of human behavior rather than bedrock facts about human behavior? I think the kind of model that simply labels scientific , ethical or political attitudes as simply correct or incorrect is part of the problem rather than the solution. What you are doing is blaming the other’s ‘irrationality’ for your failure to understand the basis of their thinking. This does not at all mean that you cannot prefer your understanding or behavior to theirs. It is possible to see the rationality and validity in their actions at the same time that you find your approach superior. Rationality can evolve.
We can subsume the other’s simplistic thinking within our own, allowing us to understand why they did what they did without invalidating it ,while allowing us to determine ways of moving them closer to our direction. That way we dont up with a schizoid dualism between ‘overwhelming agreement on the way things are’ and hopeless resignation when it comes to anticipating each other’s actions. Unfortunately. the first sort of ‘overwhelming agreement’ isnt worth a damn when it comes to 90% of what makes our lives worth living, relating intimately , empathetically and insightfully with others. Do we really want to write off possibilities of achieving more of the second kind of agreement by claiming that we already see the world the same way and simply want different things from it?

One of the tools you will have used in your counselling is some variation on the "reality rub", where one gently points to beliefs that are incompatible with the facts. — Banno

You’re referring to the old Cognitive therapy and rational emotive therapy programs , which were reality-based forms of psychotherapy. There have been modifications to this objectivist way of thinking within psychotherapy that replaces the notion of inaccurate or false beliefs with unadaptive beliefs , and an emphasis on useful narratives rather than factually true conceptions.

Well Joshs, I don't understand this post at all. I don't see how truth could be a masking. I think it is more the opposite, an unmasking. So I think your explanation is a movement away from truth, toward deception, rather than toward truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Truth as correspondence with what is out there independent of us is one sort of attempt to discover ordered relationships. When I say this way masks something, I mean that it treats a complex series of intricate relations as one single sort of relation. Why does it do this? Because these more intimate dynamics within the abstraction that we call a fact of the matter are too subtle to be noticed. The generalizations that truth produces reflect what seems obvious to us: there are real objects out there in a real world, whose features are subject to conceptual interpretation but whose existence does not dependent on our concepts. What I am arguing is not that the real world is actually fake or imagined. I am arguing that this real world is not a conglomeration of objects, laws and forces that are what they are independent of us. We and the world form a single integrated web, and each human perspective contributes to the evolution of that web. Knowledge doesn’t passively represent, it changes, builds and creates within this web. The notion of objective truth assumes parts of the web of reality just sit there waiting for us to capture what they are and do. But no aspect of the web of reality remains unchanged by what changes in any other aspect of it. The world is a moving target for our scientific inquiries, and our participation in its transformation through our investigations of it change its rules, laws and facts in subtle ways. But this reciprocal
dance between us and world we call science gradually makes the world more intelligible, and thus more ‘true’ , by allowing us to build more intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other. The world becomes more anticipatable in its behavior over time this way. This is a deeper notion of truth than that of simple correspondence between concept and object.

No, rightness is where the world and language meet, and rightness is not about truth and falsity but coherence of fit. What fits and what does not , and in what way, depends on lour purposes.
— Joshs

So, where do we find truth then? — Metaphysician Undercover

We find truth all around us, whenever we participate in forming broad abstractions that mask the interpersonal differences in purpose and perspective that accompany our social engagements. These broad abstractions can take the form of propositional truth statements producing the picture of objects existing independently of human conceptualization, and are true facts for all of us.

This works well when our generalizations produce such things as physical objects and laws, but when we attempt to apply such broad abstractions to more complex phenomena, like human relationships and behavior, it can be disastrous. We end up wielding truth as a weapon of conformity.
In dealing with human behavior ( ethics, politics, etc) what we need isn't the notion of an objectively true world, but ways of relating to each other in more and more intimate ways. Abandoning talk of a single real world doesn’t mean anything goes, it means becoming sensitive to the contexts of persons’ ways of understanding their world and opening ourselves up to multiple ways of being.

I want to know what you mean by "fact" and "convention". Is a convention a fact, or a state of affairs, or what is the case? How humans use scribbles and utterances are themselves a state of affairs, or what is the case. — Harry Hindu

I agree that how humans use language is a state of affairs, but is there an ultimate arbiter of the truth of certain statements about the world, for example about the truth of empirical propositions? Are there objective
truths about physical nature, or are these truths relative to contingent and conventional linguistic states of affairs?
Is the claim that dinosaurs existed before anybody talked about them incoherent? What if we instead say that SOMETHING existed before language-using communities named and defined them, but we can’t say that they were dinosaurs , since that is a conceptual convention?

Or would you agree with Nelson Goodman?

“Is it a consequence of Goodman's philosophy that we made the stars?” Goodman answered that while there is a sense in which we did not make the stars (we don't make stars in the way in which a brickmaker makes a brick), there is indeed a sense in which we did make the stars. Goodman illustrated this by asking us to consider a constellation, say the Big Dipper. Did we make the Big Dipper? There is an obvious sense in which the answer is no. All right, we didn't make it in the way in which a carpenter makes a table, but did we make it a constellation?
Did we make it the Big Dipper? At this point, perhaps many of us might say yes, there is a sense in which we made “it” the Big Dipper. After all, it is hard to think of the fact that a group of stars is a “dipper” as one which is mind independent or language independent. Perhaps we should give Goodman this much, that we didn't “make” the Big Dipper as a carpenter makes a table, but we did make it by constructing a version in which that group
of stars is seen as exhibiting a dipper shape, and by giving it a name, thus, as it were, institutionalizing the fact that that group of stars is metaphorically a big dipper.
Nowadays, there is a Big Dipper up there in the sky, and we, so to speak, “put” a Big Dipper up there in the sky by constructing that version. But—and Goodman is, of course, waiting for this objection—we didn't make the stars of which that constellation consists. Stars are a “natural kind”, whereas constellations are an “artificial kind”.

But let us take a look at this so-called natural kind. Natural kinds, when we examine them, almost always turn out to have boundaries which are to some degree arbitrary, even if the degree of arbitrariness is much less than in the case of a completely conventional kind
like “constellation”. Stars are clouds of glowing gas,glowing because of thermonuclear reactions which are caused by the gravitational field of the star itself, but not every cloud of glowing gas is considered a star; some such clouds fall into other astronomical categories, and some stars do not glow at all. Is it not we who group together all these different objects into a single category “star” with our inclusions and exclusions? It is true that we did not make the stars as a carpenter makes a table, but didn't we, after all, make them stars?

Now Goodman makes a daring extrapolation. He proposes that in the sense illustrated by these examples, the sense in which we “make” certain things the Big Dipper and make certain things stars, there is nothing that we did not make to be what it is. (Theologically, one might say that Goodman makes man the Creator.) If, for example, you say that we didn't make the elementary particles, Goodman can point to the present situation in
quantum mechanics and ask whether you really want to view elementary particles as a mind-independent reality. It is clear that if we try to beat Goodman at his own game, by trying to name some “mind-independent stuff”, we shall be in deep trouble.”

. Truth would simply be what is the case and what is the case is independent of our having articulated what is or isn't the case. — Harry Hindu

And is this your belief about the nature of truth? Do you agree with Hilary Putnam that “while there is an aspect of
conventionality and an aspect of fact in everything we say that is true, we fall into hopeless philosophical error if we commit a "fallacy of division" and conclude that there must be a part of the truth that is the "conventional part" and a part that is the "factual part””, and that "this dichotomy between what the world is like inde­pendent of any local perspective and what is projected by us seems to me utterly indefensible."?

Or do you prefer David Lewis , Donald Davidson or San Dennett’s attempts to hold on some form of separation between fact and convention?

Does it really need to be said that you're massively oversimplify the enculturation of multiculturalism in the political north by tying it to the work of a philosopher obscure even among graduates of philosophy? — fdrake

I agree that your last comment didn’t really need to be said.

Discursive
conventions are what allow us to come to agreement on ethical , inter social and scientific issues.
— Joshs
But that is twaddle. What allows agreement is that we share the same world. "Discursive conventions" are our agreeing, they are what our agreeing consists in. — Banno

Then I guess Trump supporters and liberals
in the U.S live in different worlds, as Goodman says, given that they disagree profoundly on ethical, political and scientific issues. No pointing to the true facts , while castigating our foes for their laziness, stupidity or malevolent motives, will change this situation.

Truth is where the world and language meet. Some of our beliefs are true, some not. Not just anything will do. — Banno

No, rightness is where the world and language meet, and rightness is not about truth and falsity but coherence of fit. What fits and what does not , and in what way, depends on lour purposes. We can ignore the particularities of our participation in social activities on some occasions , such as when we create broadly general categories of purpose that abstract
away all of these particularities. Technology and physics are examples of this abstractive generalizing of discursive meaning, allowing liberals and conservatives to agree on why planes stay up in the air even as they cannot agree on much else. Only because we can construct such broad generalities can what seem like the ‘same true world’ appear as shared by an entire community.

What's the problem with the rational common in a cultural relativist's view? — Enrique

There is no problem with it for postmodernists. Discursive
conventions are what allow us to come to agreement on ethical , inter social and scientific issues. But if we try and fix in stone any particular set of conventions as based on a true external reality we deprive ourselves of the ability to forge new and perhaps deeper agreements as the world continues to change. There must be a continual
back and forth between living within a given rational
common and the transformation of the schematic basis of rational conventions. This means assuming that all of our scientific and ethical beliefs are ultimately contestable.

Science explains nature (i.e. transformations of phenomena, facts-of-the-matter, states-of-affairs) with testable models and philosophy interprets – describes, infers – the conceptual ramifications (i.e. presuppositions, implications, extrapolations) of science, no? My point is that I understand that 'science is primarily an object-discourse and philosophy a meta-discourse' (à la Tarski). Also, that this 'meta-discourse' consists of an implicit conciliance, or convergence (à la Peirce), of Sellarian "manifest" and "scientific" images of human existence (pace Heiddeger, and other anti-moderns). — 180 Proof

Joseph Rouse attempts to move the Sellarsian relation between manifest and scientific image in the direction of Heidegger, Kuhn and Rorty , as well as toward newer biological accounts of niche construction, by
showing them to be reciprocally determinative. Facts of the matter, states of affairs, objects of discourse ( the scientific image) respond to our inquiries ( space of reasons) in the same way an organism’s niche is shaped by its behavior in relation to that environment. The continual discursive back and forth between space of reasons and objects of scientific discourse reciprocally modifies both via a dance of mutual coherence and fit, just as the organism’s goal-oriented behavior defines , adjusts and is reciprocally shaped by its environment.
This back and forth between hypothesis and test describes philosophical as faithfully as it does empirical inquiry. Differences between philosophical and empirical approaches lie in the conventionality of the terms employed rather than in any fixed distinction in method of inquiry.

I agree that a philosophical meta-discourse addresses
both the manifest and scientific images, but not by restricting itself to the conceptual space of reasons (which would be impossible). Rather , its investigations enact the reciprocal dance I described above between the concept and the object, just as does empirical inquiry, and that makes it impossible to categorically separate science and philosophy on any basis.



“ In contrast to traditional efforts to establish the epistemic objectivity of articulated judgments, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others rightly give priority to the objectivity of conceptual content and reasoning. They nevertheless mis­takenly attempt to understand conceptual objectivity as accountability to objects understood as external to discursive practice. A more expan­sive conception of discursive practice, as organismic interaction within our discursively articulated environment, shows how conceptual nor­mativity involves a temporally extended accountability to what is at issue and at stake in that ongoing interaction.”(Rouse, Articulating the World)

What we actually get: Violence as a necessary evil - under existing circumstances, renouncing violence is madness/stupidity/both. — Agent Smith

Why do you think violence is a necessary evil?

This is a similar point, to my understanding, as Levinas' ethical charge against Heidegger - too much focus on ontology makes you forget the world. By highlighting that Levinas perhaps had an inadequate understanding of the ontological aspects of Heidegger's ontology in response to someone highlighting a political implication of his ontology, it looks to me like you're making a similar move to the one criticised. — fdrake

Those philosophers who are most sympathetic to Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s ontology tend to be theologically oriented. When they accuse Heidegger of privileging ontology over ethics, by making ontology a neutral concept, what they really mean is that Heidegger follows Nietzsche beyond good and evil.
Their beef with Heidegger extends to all ‘radical relativism’, because whereas
Levinas holds onto a traditional religious notion of the Good as that which transcends all contingent contexts , for the atheistic postmodernists there is no such role
for the Good.

Reading the relativists this way, they fear the latter excuse totalitarianisms by sanctioning an ‘anything goes’ posture. I’m not sure if this is what you had in mind by ‘fascism’.

There is a commentary concerning the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics that I o
find meaningful, by the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin.

“Gandhi, Marx, Dilthey, Buber, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, McKeon, and many others taught me deeply. But so did three writers whose politics were highly objectionable to me: Jung, Dostoevsky, and Heidegger.

Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World Wars.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side. Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human. To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

it was Heidegger who pioneered a thinking beyond logical universals, beyond the thin, abstracted commonality categories. He pioneered the thinking which consists of situatedness (Befindlichkeit). He said that situational living is already an understanding. He said that understanding is always befindlich. "Understanding always has greater reach than the cognitive can follow." He called it "dwelling" (see Gendlin, Conference Proceedings, 1983). He also called it "indwelling" (einwohnen). He thought its more-than-logical creativity limited within historical soil and nation. To him non-rational meant non-universal.

But with his own books, and through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and many others, it was he who opened the way to our kind of thinking---the kind that now dwells universally beyond the rational common---although it is only beginning to say how. To work on that is our problem. He contributed enough for one human.

Heidegger must be credited for a great share in that very development because of which we no longer feel the old either/or: either the deeply human historical particular with its political savagery and sadism, or the merely rational commmon.

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.” Eugene Gendlin

I believe Leibniz was the first to conceive the universe as a computing machine — Jackson

yes indeed

↪Joshs I'm with Witty: philosophy describes discursive features and usages while leaving "everything as it is". On the hand, physics endeavors to explain how transformations of states-of-affairs into other states-of-affairs are possible with high-precision models that are experimentally testable. Philosophical elucidations are used in constructing physical models the way grammars are used in novels and histories; they do not explain anything but rather make explicit, or describe, as you say "interconnections, correlations and coherences" implicit in concepts or discourses such as physics. To the degree physicists find 'philosophical contributions' add to the efficacy of their theoretical and research practices, they deliberately use philosophy; otherwise it – speculation for speculation's sake – is mostly (again, efficaciously) ignored. — 180 Proof

You make it sound like philosophy constructs grammars and clarifications after the fact , by looking at the explanations of physicists and then making explicit what the physicists have already created. But the leading edge of philosophy always beats physics to the punch. It is physics that ‘fills in the details’ years after a philosophical approach produces a new architecture of thought, and then has to reconfigure anew all those details when philosophy ( or a philosophically attuned physicist) subverts the old architecture.
Each era of philosophy, from Descartes to Leibnitz to Kant to Hegel to Wittgenstein, anticipates an era of physics. Newtonian physics is compatible with Descartes but not with Kant, Hegel or Wittgenstein. A 19th physicist who had read and understood Kant would likely recognize inadequacies in Newtonian physics that would be invisible to Newton. Similarly, a 21st century physicist who understands Hegelian and post-Hegelian concepts will find it necessary to reconfigure the axes around which central ideas in physics revolve. Lee Smolen is an example of such a physicist today. He writes:

Philosophers of the past “sometimes understood the problems we face more deeply than many of my colleagues today. For example, Leibniz was, to my understanding, the first to struggle with the main question that we face in trying to make a quantum theory of gravity-how to make a background independent description of a closed universe that contains both all its causes and all its observers. And Peirce was the first to articulate and try to solve the puzzle at the heart of the current debates in cosmology and string theory: what chose the laws that govern our universe? And what chose the initial conditions?”

“… in many cases philosophers are working on the same questions I work on-and developing ideas related to the ideas I hope to establish-but from a bracingly different perspective.”

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

The fact is physics does not make significant progress without regularly going through revolutions in its basic assumptions. When speculation for speculation’s s sake is ignored by physicists there isnrelative stagnation in the field.

But we throw the baby out with the bathwater if we make these rigid compartmentalizations. Better to break free of it. Life is messy — Xtrix

Yes, I don’t think there is any categorical way to distinguish the philosophical, the scientific-empirical , the technological, and the literary or artistic for that matter. They interpenetrate each other in complex
ways.

Physics IS philosophy.
However, philosophy IS NOT physics (i.e. not theoretical, or does not explain any aspect of nature). — 180 Proof

If the job of explanation is to reveal interconnections, correlations and coherences among what had formerly been taken to be disparate phenomena, then both physics and philosophy explain. I think it’s a matter of how conventional and generic the explanation is. If empiricism takes as its role the explanation of what can be objectively measured , this is because it takes as its starting point the already conventionalized idea of the object. A philosophical explanation can burrow
deep within the unexamined pre suppositions forming the condition of possibility for the conventionalized notion of the physical object. Physicists explain objective nature, while philosophy explains the nature of the construction of the idealization physicists call objective nature.

If the explanation lies outside our capacities, or outside of naturalism, then we need to accept it or broaden our fundamental concepts of existence. — Xtrix

Good point. I would say the explanation lies outside of the approach to naturalism that one finds in today’s physics.

Multiple universes seems to push the question back, much like God. Who or what created God? What created the universe or the multiverse? Etc.

Human beings aren’t omnipotent. This could be a question we just can’t answer, and perhaps demonstrates our cognitive limits. — Xtrix

Or perhaps the way we are forced to formulate these questions when we stick to the confines of physics’ scheme of thinking keeps us from noticing an entirely different, and I would argue more productive, way of approaching origins, time and space that is already available to us in philosophy.

I think it only make sense in philosophy to talk about what has already been established in physics and not to extrapolate non-evidentiary, or inexplicable, counterfactuals that philosophy is ill-equipped to establish. My point is: given the physics we philosophers have to work with, time before – independent of – spacetime doesn't make any sense; besides, a speculative fiat of "other spacetimes" is unparsimonious as well. — 180 Proof

This was Quine’s position, that pragmatism’s relativism must ground itself in the realism of physics, a notion referred to as scientism by Putnam.

Physics IS philosophy. That is , it is an applied language of philosophical thought. The problem is that the forms of metaphysics that today’s physics depends on may be ‘already out of date’ when it comes to effectively addressing questions concerning the nature of time, space and genesis. We philosophers don’t have to limit ourselves to the theories the physicist has to work with. We have at our disposal, if we are willing to make use of them, a host of more powerful conceptual tools to deal with these issues beyond a physical account of spacetime.

Davidson quite happily sets truth-conditional semantics as a part of meaning as use, then asks: if you have the truth conditions for a sentence, what more do you want?

It's not a rhetorical question. — Banno

And the non-rhetorical answer is that truth conditions play only a minor role in determining the rightness of meaning , due to the fact that rightness is predominately a matter of fit between habit and what appears. Fit is relative to purpose, and there are no things in the world that are external to all purposes.

As Nelson Goodman puts it:

“Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He is unconcerned with the trivial truths he could grind out endlessly; and he looks to the multifaceted and irregular results of observations for little more than suggestions of overall structures and significant generalizations. He seeks system, simplicity, scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors truth to fit. He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates. Truth, moreover, pertains solely to what is said, and literal truth solely to what is said literally. We have seen, though, that worlds are made not only by what is said literally but also by what is said metaphorically, and not only by what is said either literally or metaphorically but also by what is exemplified and expressed-by what is shown as well as by what is said.”

"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" would thus be a perverse and paralyzing policy for any world- maker. The whole truth would be too much; it is too vast, variable, and clogged with trivia. The truth alone would be too little, for some right versions are not true-being either false or neither true nor false-and even for true versions rightness may matter more.

What I have been saying bears on the nature of knowledge. On these terms, knowing cannot be exclusively or even primarily a matter of determining what is true. Discovery often amounts, as when I place a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, not to arrival at a proposition for declaration or defense, but to finding a fit. Much of knowing aims at something other than true, or any, belief.

An increase in acuity of insight or in range of comprehension, rather than a change in belief, occurs when we find in a pictured forest a face we already knew was there, or learn to distinguish stylistic ditterences among works already classified by artist or composer or writer, or study a picture or a concerto or a treatise until we see or hear or grasp features and structures we could not discern before. Such growth in knowledge is not by formation or fixation or belief, but by the advancement of understanding. Furthermore, if worlds are as much made as found, so also knowing is as much remaking as reporting.”

“ Briefly, then, truth of statements and rightness of descriptions, representations, exemplifications, expressions-of design, drawing, diction, rhythm--is primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization. The differences between fitting a version to a world, a world to a version, and a version together or to other versions fade when the role of versions in making the worlds they fit is recognized.”

To me this is the key point. We gain nothing by assuming a set of facts about the world supposedly existing independently of all versions, purposes and uses. Such an assumption is completely vacuous. It has no work to do.

Consider two camps: in mine, everything is metaphysics. In the other, everything we call metaphysics is nonsense. For me, it is clear: all basic level inquiry leads to indeterminacy, whether is it about quantum physics or my cat. Ask me what my cat is, where it is, how old it is, if my cat exists, properties my cat has, etc., and I will show you the road to deconstructing my cat into oblivion, referring to all knowledge claims that make cats cats and fence posts fence posts. Time seems particularly fragile because it falls apart so readily. Yesterday? You mean that-which-is-not-this-occurrent-event? Something outside "outside" an occurrent event? No sense can be made of this. Such a thing is unwitnessable. — Constance

There are two other sorts of camps. In one, indeterminacy is a failure of knowledge, the breakdown of certainly that leads to a skepticism , alienation or even nihilism. In the other camp, it is the determinacy associated with certainty that leads to lack of intelligibility, alienation and fragmentation, because understanding and meaning are functions of relevance , and relevance is a function of the structure of time , whereby the present occurs into a past history such that the world a always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. Meaning , understanding , determination and relevance require a dance between past and present in which the past is adjusted to the present, while the present bears the mark of its past. To determine a present is to produce it. If rather than a making, we think of determinism as a finding of what was already there, we have been lured into confusion.

the whole argument of Davidson's "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" assumes that translation leaves the language into which we translate unaffected.
— Joshs

I don't think this is so. Davidson's description is of an ongoing and growing conversation.

So do you have an argument for this? — Banno

I’m going to cheat and use Putnam again:

“The word "meaning" and its relatives may be used in a sense closely connected with linguistics (counting lexi- cography as part linguistics). of Using the notion in this way, we ask what a word means, and expect to be given, if not a synonym, at least a paraphrase of a kind that any native speaker of the relevant language might give, or if the para- phrase is in a different language, one that counts as a reason-able translation. This is the notion of meaning that concerns Donald Davidson, my predecessor in the Hermes Lectures. In this sense of "meaning," the criterion as to whether two expressions have the same meaning is translation practice. But there is another, perhaps looser, notion of meaning made famous by Wittgenstein, in which to ask for the mean- ing of a word is to ask how it is used, and explanations of how a word is used may often involve technical knowledge of a kind ordinary speakers do not possess, and may be of a kind that would never appear in a lexicon or be offered as translations. In short, there is a difference between elucidat- ing the meaning of an expression by describing how it is used, and giving its meaning in the Davidsonian, or narrow linguistic, sense.”

“Conceptual relativity, as I already in-dicated, holds that the question as to which of these ways of using "exist" (and "individual" "object," etc.) is right is one that the meanings of the words in the natural language, that is, the language that we all speak and cannot avoid speaking every day, simply leaves open.”