↪Joshs Your point, again, eludes me. What is the "constructionism" in your quote - it is introduced without explanation. — Banno

Didnt have a chance to finish the edit.

Then I will say again that your PoMo blade does not have a grip, that it cuts the hand the wields it as much as that against which it is wielded.
— Banno

It protects all wielding hands, by inviting coordination among indefinite multiplicities of would-be sword wielders . Let me rearrange your thought a bit with the help of Ken Gergen: — Joshs

Then I will say again that your PoMo blade does not have a grip, that it cuts the hand the wields it as much as that against which it is wielded. — Banno

It protects all wielding hands, by inviting coordination among indefinite multiplicities of would-be sword wielders . Let me rearrange your thought a bit with the help of Ken Gergen:

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

Once these rules arise the context would no long be new and immature. It would have morphed into the sort of discursive system that Derrida is talking about
where norms of discourse are intelligible.
— Joshs

So the moment there's a discernable rule it's wise to apply it? — Isaac

We do t first have rules that just sit there waiting for
us to apply them. As Wittgenstein argued , a rule only exists in the moment of its application. The sense of a rule is its immediate, contextual use. To apply it is to create its sense. Before we choose to apply rules, we already find ourselves ‘thrown into’ a particular discursive world, as Heidegger put it.

A new , immature context is internally inconsistent, shifting, confused
— Joshs

Uh huh. What would be the problem with applying rules from such a system (as and when they arise)? — Isaac

Once these rules arise the context would no long be new and immature. It would have morphed into the sort of discursive system that Derrida is talking about
where norms of discourse are intelligible.

Why would an unstable (perhaps new, vibrant, but immature) interpretative context not be a better one to invoke the rules of? — Isaac

Because by its nature an unstable interpretive context has no consistent ‘ rules’. A new , immature context is internally inconsistent, shifting, confused. It offers no discernible pattern. One could argue that personal experiences of emotional crisis exemplify the slide from a stable to an unstable interpretive context. Fear, anxiety and anger are crises of intelligibility, a poorly structured territory of experience where our anticipations fail us.

If postmodernism is presented as just skepticism, there would be no reason to have standards of truth. — Jackson

Skepticism says there’s a real world external to our conceptions but we have no way of verifying the fidelity of our conceptions with that reality.
Postmodern authors say that we are always directly in touch with reality in the form of changing contextual webs of relations in which we participate. Within these webs there can be relative stability of intelligibility and ‘truth’.

[quote="Isaac;

712199"]Then you're arguments are missing an important detail. Why? If it's not that the way you see the world is true, then why would I want to see it that way, what's in it for me?[/quote]

To be fair to various postmodernists, it is not all conceptions of truth that are suspect, but truth as a human relation to context-independent , intrinsic facts.

For instance, Derrida is famous for asserting that there is nothing outside the rest, by which he means nothing outside some context or other. Yet he holds onto a purely context-dependent notion of truth.

“For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”

I've a mesclun salad mix in punnets ready to plant, and garlic on order that should be here soon. I also plan to grow carrots in rotation. — Banno

now I’m hungry

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is of little use in iPhone design. Sure, some engineer might find it enlightening in such a way that they are able to produce a smaller antenna, or some such; but the Book of the Dead will not replace Maxwell's equations in antenna design. — Banno

The Tibetan book of the dead is of little use in iPhone design for the same reason that it is of little use in the design of Cartesian or Kantian philosophy, because it belongs to a discursive space of reasons that does not produce the kind of intelligibility that makes iPhone design possible. On the other hand , the space of reasons that frames iphone design includes not only Maxwell’s equations , but the fundamental philosophical architectures that make Maxwell’s applied work , and digital technologies in general intelligible. This takes us back to the rationalistic era of Leibnitz. No rationalism, no digital revolution and no iPhone.

The iphone has nothing in it of Hegel or post-Hegelian thinking. Look to the next technological revolution for those kinds of devices (already envisioned by Dennett and other post-Hegelians) followed by Nietzschean and postmodern devices. There’s always a long lag time between the laying of the philosophical foundations and the final instantiation of those ideas in the form of machines, so it will be a while before we see them on the market.

- if anything goes then everything stays. If all narratives are to be treated the same, then the conservatives in the U.S. liking to say that the facts of nature don't care about our feelings is as valid as your own account of feelings. Your account suits the right as well as it suits the left. You will be aware of the discussion as to the extent that PoMo underpins some of the intellectual defences of Trump's lies. — Banno

All narratives are valid in the sense that they mark a necessary moment in the development of culture and science. This is different than saying all narratives should be treated the same, and that we should have no preference for one over the other. One won’t have an adequate understanding of any narrative if one doesnt know how to place it within the context of an overarching historical development. This means seeing it as subsuming a more traditional narrative and being subsumed by a more complex and intricate narrative. We will always prefer what we consider to be the narrative that subsumes all others, because it allows us to see the older narratives as valid while being able to transcend their limitations. Trump’s thinking harks back to early 20th century politics in the U.S. Thus it is valid in that historical context, laying the groundwork for the more progressive thinking that followed and depended on it , and would have perhaps been considered progressive by the standards of that era . It has since been subsumed and superseded by more complex thinking, in the opinion of many of us , so now we demonize it. We can attempt to coax Trumpists to progress beyond the limits of that moldy narrative , but there are limits to how far any of us can move within and beyond a worldview that we inhabit. Best to politically separate Trumpists and post-Trumpists rather than trying to punish, threaten , cajole , bribe or harangue them into moving in our direction

we can say whatever we like, yet not just anything we say will do. The world places strictures on our narratives.

And again, I don't think you disagree with this.

So what is it you want here? — Banno

Things we say or theorize, and actions we perform that ‘won’t do’ change our circumstances in ways that make it possible for the theories that ‘will do’. This was an important point of Nietzsche , Heidegger, Deleuze and others. Negation and contradiction are treated as failure, lack, accident by the philosophical tradition up to Hegel and Marx. Dialectical progress is supposed to transcend lack and contradiction.
But this implies that the right way corresponds to what is true and the wrong way is simply error and mistake.
Postmodernists argue that what is important about scientific and philosophical progress is not that we get on track with what ‘will do’ and discard as a waste what
won’t do’ , but that all change in thinking
‘ does it’ in some sense. That is, contributes to moving us into new realms of scientific and philosophical practice.

It’s not that the world places strictures on our narratives, it’s that our incipient ventures into new
territories of interchange with our world necessarily have the character of vagueness and confusion. We initially don’t seem to be able to make our way around in the new world we create for ourself because we haven’t yet found a way to articulate its larger dimensions in concrete terms, even if we can generate what seem to be clear propositional statements. We call this ‘error’ and discount its value.

If we point to Einstein’s formulas as an example
of ‘getting it right’ we picture a world external
to us that is shaped in a very precise way that the theory fits perfectly like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
But if I were to suggest that Einstein’s formulas are just elaborations and translations of Kant, then the metaphor of puzzle piece becomes less powerful.
If you might accept this idea just for the sake of argument, then the question is , can we view the move from Descartes to Kant to Hegel as threading the needle just so, crafting a puzzle piece that fits ever more tightly onto the puzzle of nature? In my view , every outlook by every human being on the planet correlates with some
figure or other on the developmental trajectory of philosophy. There are no outliers, no individual
with a ‘wrong’ worldview , an outlook that ‘won’t do’. All outlooks are valid in their own way , are useful in their own context, and belong to the larger developmental history. Nature doesn’t produce strictures , only opportunities for personal change that at some points is muddled, confused , incoherent and at others crystallizes into clarified notions. The development of ideas feeds on itself, is self-reflexive, complexifies and diversifies itself at the same time as it becomes more intimate with itself. The world is self-reflexive, not correlational. Strictures and sayings that ‘won’t do’ are not wrong paths , only phases of the right’ path, the only path , the historical path toward increasing integration and intricacy of intersubjectively produced experience.

Then introduce Cartesian dualism and you have fundamental elements of the framework of the early modern worldview which was thought to be theoretically infinite and potentially all-knowing. But the problem with it is, there's no actual place in it for humans, as the observing mind has already been tacitly excluded from consideration. — Wayfarer

There is a place for the mind in Cartesian models , but as outside agent, for Descartes the divinely directed rational organizer of data, and for Kant the divinely directed organizer of ideas. If we bring the subject into more intimate relation with science, we run the risk of not going far enough , by retaining the divine origin of the contribution of consciousness to the nature of the world.
This keeps subjectivity at a distance from natural objects and thus remains a dualism.

To truly transcend dualism, we need to see perspectival relationality and valuative difference as inherent in nature at all levels, not just as emanating from ‘mind’.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it, presenting, as true, a theory about how the world is which within it claims that there are no absolutely true theories about how the world is. — Isaac

The old anti-postmodernist , anti-relativist chestnut rears its head:
‘How can the radical relativist claim that there is no objective truth, when their own claim is a truth claim?’

As a postmodernist , I am not saying forms of realism and naturalism are not ‘true’. They of course are true. That is , they discern intrinsic, context-independent objects , forces or forms. The world as they see it does indeed correspond or cohere with this model. Their model is true, correct , adequate to the terrain. As long as there is such a thing as a terrain , an intrinsic content, form , law, one has the chance of being true to it. But what if one believes, as do postmodernists like Deleuze, that the terrain is what it is by being the same differently? That when we utter the word ‘true’ and mean ‘correct’ , ‘adequate’, we are riding down a river, looking at the changing scenery and seeing this flow only as a fixed object? A simple correspondence between map and territory is revealed to be the product of a synthetic activity that ties together a multitude of changing differences and calls it ‘this fact’ over and over again even as ‘this fact’ continues to be the same differently.
It turns out that the territory is itself an endless series of maps.
At any rate, the question for the postmodernist who believes this insane idea is, what does it mean for you to believe it? Is it ‘true’? If truth needs a territory , a ground, an intrinsic , context-independent fact of the matter, then what does the postmodernist need?

The postmodernist doesn’t state a proposition about the world, they don’t mirror or represent. They perform a bit of theater, they enact, produce , transform. They utter words from within the interstices of assemblies of differentiating differences, rather than representing or observing from some vantage outside the multiplicity of differences. A conscious experience is shaped by, participates in and changes a multiplicity which is at the same time linguistic , unconscious, biological , social, political , physical and many other things.

The question the postmodern is asks is not ‘what is true’, but ‘what remains and what changes moment to moment’? The answer has to be repeated every moment as a performance. The answer for Deleuze , Heidegger and others is that the present is a an intersection of past and present such that the past appears as already changed by the present it enters into. My world from
moment to moment is foreign and familiar at the same time , familiar because it is a cobbling of my remembered history and the way the present changes it. It is also foreign in that it never reproduces a past.
Why can’t I say that I affirm this relation between memory and change as a metaphysical truth? The traditional concept of truth would seem to run afoul of an affirmation of the world that locates no fixed content of any sort , only a continually changing structure of past-present-future. Nothing remains settled , but must be reaffirmed , and reaffirmed differently, every moment. In one sense, the only thing that is true is the formal structure of past-present. In another sense, every content , every moment , is true in that a new ‘fact’ is produced, o my lasting for the moment of tis appearance as a new difference.


The postmodernist doesn’t tell the modernist their truths are untrue , they invite them to turn truths into theater, performance, to see the flow underneath the facts. The world is indeed as ordered as the empirical truths declare it to be , but it can be seen as even more intricately ordered than this. Belief in arbitrary intrinsically fixed facts hide that richer , more intimate order from us.

not just any convention will do. Only some of what one might say actually works. There is a way in which reality does not care what you say about it. Believe what you will, you cannot walk through walls.

I suspect you do not disagree with this. — Banno

Conservatives in the U.S. like to say that the facts of nature dont care about our feelings. All I would add to this is that this logic extends to feelings themselves, and to what we say about things. Put differently, our feelings dont care about our feelings, and what we say about things doesn’t care about what we say about things. Let me parse this seeming gibberish. ‘Not caring about’ refers to a certain independence. In a very general
sense, objective empirical models of the world don’t allow us to posit absolute independence of natural objects form each other. On the contrary, a causal interdependence reigns at all levels, from the quantum to the cultural. But alongside this interrelationality, empiricism posits facts internal to objects or forces, properties or attributes that survive the changing relationships among objects and forces. These inhering properties must be assumed to survive such interactions, because they determine the nature of the relationships , what kinds of patterns are possible. For an empiricist, this is as true in human psychology as in physics. Thus, ‘my feelings don’t care about my feelings’ means that empirical models of neuro-psychological function that rely on concepts of internal computation and representation believe that feeling and linguistic conceptualization are constrained and determined by intrinsic features of the brain that do not themselves change along with ( don’t care about) minute to minute changes in feeling or discursive understanding.
They may be context-sensitive but also are fundamentally context-independent. The underlying neurological principles of language and feeling don’t care about the contextual changes in feeling and linguistic expression.

This assumption of the context-independence of the facts of empirical psychology has important ethical implications. It justifies the politics of blame( irrationality, madness, bias, cognitive dissonance, sociopathology, brainwashing).

In differently ways, writers like Wittgenstein , Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault focus on the empirical assumption of intrinsic properties that survive contextual changes in relationships.

What they propose is that every contextual relationship changes the ‘inherent’ properties of the elements that enter into the interaction. So
in a sense there are no inherences, no properties, only differences that make a difference, both to other elements and to themselves.

My aim in the following paragraphs is not to get you to agree with this , but to try and see if we can avoid the common objections to this ‘radical relativism’.

The first objection is that it is an attempt to deny or undermine science and its claims to effectiveness. Planes dont fall out of the sky , so science works, is one response.

The postmodern claim that intrinsic facts deconstruct themselves is not a critique of science in any traditional
sense of critique. It is not contradicting, denying , refuting, disproving or invalidating the assumption of internal properties , laws, forms. What is it doing is saying that our sciences already take into account the instability and movement at the heart of its intrinsic facts without knowing that it does so. If i point out a rock to you and tell you to stare at it for a while, you may tell me that it remained a rock for the whole time you were staring at it. What you don’t pay attention to is your changing eye movements, posture , attention, etc. Your behavior evinces the effects of an experience that is constantly changing, but in ways that are so subtle that they dont disturb the concept of ‘this same rock’.
Postmodernists argue that scientists are absolutely right when they say that there is a way that reality doesn’t care about how you model it, that reality is composed of
rocks , or forces, or laws with an intrinsic content that survives the contextual changes they enter into.

Postmodernists are just saying that ‘intrinsic’ , context-transcending content continues to be what it is the same way that the rock I stare at continues to be what it is, by changing continuously but very subtly.

So postmodernists are not really touching the results of the natural sciences, their predictions and laws. What they are doing is suggesting that the way of scientific progress is not via the fixing of laws and intrinsic properties bit of arranging and rearranging patterns of human relationship with the world in more and more
intricate ways. Yes, some of our attempts will work better relative to our goals than others, but the attempts that fail also contribute to this progress. The tendency of empiricism to nail down an arbitrary , intrinsic, irreducible, context-independent basis for natural objects and forces, those facts which dont care about the changes taking place around them ( or because of them), are the least interesting and least valuable aspect of science. This is what always threatens to turn science into dogma. Its most valuable quality is its ability to see process and relation within the arbitrary, the intrinsic , the lawful and the fixed.

The second objection to postmodern approaches to
science is that they destroy the usefulness of prediction by trying to rid the world of its stable foundations. But in the example I gave of staring at the rock, the subtle but continual shifts in the experience of something that we categorize linguistically as ‘this rock’ likely aren’t threatening to most scientists, except as a metaphysical curiosity. So what if every physicist who makes use of Einstein’s equations interprets their sense in a subtly different manner. As long as it doesnt affect their math, who cares? The language of physics handles this insignificant ambiguity in interpersonal understanding more than adequately. ( Of course , some within physics are pointing to new directions for the field that takes this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug).

The point isn’t just that the kind of instability postmodernists are pointing to within the founding facts and laws of the natural sciences doesn’t prevent science from working. It is that postmodern ways of thinking reveal what would be called the natural world to be less arbitrary and more intricately ordered than is seen within empirical approaches. This interrelational order was always the case, but science alters it to make it increasing more intricate. Planes don’t stay up in the air because of fixed facts of nature that were always the case before humans entered the picture. They stay up in the air because nature , which was always already finely ordered ( but not in a mathematically causal way) , continues to become more intricately relational because of the way humans change it with their science. Science is a human construction that achieves its effect by conceptually and physically altering the environment. We don’t simply find the order in nature, we manufacture it, in increasingly powerful and intricate ways. There are absolutely no fixed facts within or before the history of nature to make this possible , other than the recursive self-differentiating nature of nature.

truth only makes ense with regard to a particualr convention. After all it is statements that are true or false, and statements are conventions of language. You can say whatever you like, but only some of what you might say is of use. — Banno

Use is not necessarily the same thing as true. If a statement is a convention of language , then truth is a particular kind of conventional statement, which may differ from what is merely useful. A statement can be considered useful because it is true in the sense of corresponding with a state of affairs, or corresponding with facts supposedly external to the statement. Or it can be useful because it provides a way of organizing experience that is amenable to prediction and control. The predictive success of the statement, thanks to its underlying machinery of assumptions, need not be assumed to correspond to a state of affairs entirely external to it. Any particular statement and associated underlying paradigm may be assumed to be one of a potentially indefinite array of predictive vehicles, each of which may be ‘true’ of the same given event, that is , predictive, but in different ways. The different ways that a statement can be true would be a matter of HOW it organizes a set of events rather than a simple matter of correspondence between statement and event.

quote="Banno;711733"]the "convention" is what allows you to find your location with your iPhone. It's more than just a convention.[/quote]

The Einsteinian convention allows you to find your phone in a particular way. It works , not simply as true , but as true in its particular way of working. One could come up with a different way for a gps to work. This way wouldn’t be more true than the Einsteinian way, it would be a different way of being true.

I'm about half-way through the readings at this point. I only get to this stuff when I have the energy after getting life done, so I move at snails pace. Plus I'm a slow reader, anymore. — Moliere

Here’s something to add to your reading, Postmodernism
and our understanding of science. It’s a solid summary of one of the best representatives of postmodern philosophy of science, Joseph Rouse.


https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hennie-Loetter/publication/281652523_Postmodernism_and_our_understanding_of_science/links/55f33b3508ae63926cf23bda/Postmodernism-and-our-understanding-of-science.pdf?origin=publication_detail

The GPS on my iPhone uses the equations of special relativity. Is that just a "linguistic convention and set of shared practices"?

That is the conceit of idealism: that all there is are such conventions. It disengages our narratives from the world. But it is only in their engagement with the world that these narratives are true or false. — Banno

True and false only make sense within a particular convention, that of truth as correctness and adequation with respect to a fixed external referent.
The concept of fixed external referent isnt a fact, it is a foregone conclusion and thus a starting point for most approaches to empiricism.
In other words, there is a hidden circularity at work here. It is the engagement of narratives with a world already articulated via such narratives that produces instances of truth and falsity. For alternative accounts of science practice, the aim of empirical investigation isnt truth as adequation but pragmatic usefulness in relation to the accomplishment of specified goals.

An airplane is designed to fly on the basis of specific aerodynamic engineering principles. Does this mean that only these principles will allow the plane to fly? If we were to imagine a history of flying machines extending indefinitely into the future and studied the evolution of their underlying engineering principles over the course of that history, what kind of pattern of change would we find? Would it be cumulative , with the earliest knowledge base being conserved and carried over into the subsequent modifications and improvements? Or would the evolution of the knowledge of flight be more like the periodic global realignment of an intricate tapestry or network of relations, maintaining a relative dynamic self-consistency in its overall form even as it undergoes continual mutations and transformations escaping any formula or algorithm?

You're saying that in this, our Age of Mechanism, we give precedence to the physiological, and treat first person data like some sort of foam on top?

When the two are actually bound by their relationship in the opposition? — Tate

I’m saying what we call third personal , like physiological concepts, and ‘inner’ concepts like sensation, are the same ‘stuff’, and by stuff I don’t mean substances , either objective or mental. What I mean is that all experiences are interactions that are neither purely subjective nor objective They are inextricably both perspectival and about something. Every experience is a performance or act that is personally situated as relevant to me in some way , and the introduction of an outside element.

How bout:

Sensation, physiologically, involves nervous system function.

Sensation, as the content of awareness, has properties that are absent from the physiological description. — Tate

Or:

Via intersubjective discourse, we construct concepts like physiological, biological, physical. Even though we treat them as though all traces of our conscious experience could be removed and they would remain as independent facts, they are inextricable from first personal experience.

Meanwhile , we treat concepts like the consciousness of sensation as though they were purely inner and ineffable substances or properties, the purely inner and subjective complement to the purely outer and objective physiological facts, a special seasoning added to objects.

The US conducted a protracted global holocaust in the wake of 9/11. There is no chance that that mindless murder does not work its way back in the form of children shooting other children in the face in school, en masse, among other things. — Streetlight

It can just as well work it’s way forward.

What's wrong with: brain activity is sensations? — bongo fury

The ‘is’ seems a little problematic to me, as if we were talking about absolutely equivalent senses of meaning. How do we know we are dealing with a brain? Brain implies a biological substance that we can experience together as a third person entity, and activity furthers specifies a functional, as opposed to anatomical, study of it though third peso. techniques of measurement. Sensation, on the other hand , is a first person experience of consciousness. We could try and correlate the third and first personal such as to come up with some sort of monism, but that ends up eliminating aspects of one or the other of the two vantages. If we were to say that the brain is a third personal concept that is generated within first person experience we could arrive at a way of keeping what is implied both by sensation and biological brain. Going in Dennett’s direction, on the other hand, and reducing sensation to third person brain process leaves out the situated perspectival basis of third person concepts like ‘brain’.

I just find it odd that rather then being seen as a resolution of a potential error (seeing the ship's length as a feature of the observer), Einstein's work is so often held up as proof that this is the case. — Isaac

Einstein’s work should neither be held up as the resolution of an error nor as proof of an error. Rather, it should be seen as an invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices.

You can only explain how things are - that is what one does (with language). And that is how things are. What we are all doing here is trying to explain how things are. Even in saying, "it's what one does" is explaining how things are. What is "It's" in the sentence, "It's what one does" if not "How things are is" what one does. — Harry Hindu

One can think of how things are in terms of dead physicalistic nature independent our interaction with it and interpretation of it , or how things are in terms of the way that we interpret things in relation to current context, the particular pragmatic sense and relevance a meaning has for us in relation to our present goals and circumstances. This second, pragmatic notion of how things are is dependent on what we do with things. How things are is a human constructive , productive, creative process, an activity , a doing, an interaction. Science from this vantage is forward looking production via discursive practice rather than backward looking knowledge and epistemology, a becoming rather than a mirroring and representation of pre-existing nature.

From my side, Banno's main influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Austin et al, who are influential in analytical philosophy. You could say they're the mainstream. My influences are more counter-cultural and (I think) more existential. I — Wayfarer

It depends on how Wittgenstein and Austin are read. Banno shies away from more ‘countercultural’ interpretations of these authors. Compare his readings, for instance , to that of Anthony Nickles. I would say that your existentialism is of a conservative religious variety , as opposed to the later Wittgenstein’s or Sartre’s
existentialism.

Here is a well-regarded book, The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga, which analyses many of the themes explored in this thread. ( — Wayfarer

Alvin Plantinga? :gasp: :grimace: :rage: :mask:

I ignore posts with wiki. — Jackson

Good for you. Then ignore the wiki quote and pay attention to my comments. My comment is that Lloyd is offering an interesting blend of determinism and indeterminism. What is deterministic about his model is that he begins from determined laws of physics to produce indeterminism. That’s why the predictions are probabilistic rather than inferential. Lloyd , like Turing, is subject to Wittgenstein’s critique.

According to Wiki,
— Joshs

don't care about wiki — Jackson

You think this is not what Lloyd is claiming? Would take me probably a half hour to confirm that this is exactly what he is claiming. Should I waste the half hour or do you think what I quoted sounds quite consistent with what you quoted from Lloyd?

From Seth Lloyd, a few years ago: "the only way to figure out what's going to happen in a computing system is to go through the computation." — Jackson

According to Wiki,

“In his 2006 book, Programming the Universe, Lloyd contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well. Lloyd states that we could have the whole universe simulated in a computer in 600 years provided that computational power increases according to Moore's Law.”

This is an interesting blend of deterministism and indeterminism. It is a determinism in that the laws of physics can be understood ‘completely’.

↪Joshs
Ok, but just tell me how the distinction helps us answer the question of free will? — punos

I tend to associate the term ‘free will’ with conservative approaches to moral philosophy like that of Peter Strawson ( or ). What Thompson has in mind is not this theological concept of free will. It is closer to Nietzsche’s view of the will:

“Consciousness doesn't cause itself, Will is neither free nor a Determinism: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity's excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen's, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law”.

It seems to me that Evan Thompson (never heard of him, will look him up) is just making arbitrary distinctions between in this case a scientific model and a metaphysical proposition. I don't necessarily see anything particularly "wrong" about it, but i'm not sure how much the distinction helps in answering the question of free will. Perhaps you can help me understand how it does if you think it does. — punos

This isn’t an arbitrary distinction, it’s a crucial one when it comes to the issue of free will. He is saying that classical determinism is a social construction, rather than telling how nature ‘really’ operates.

↪Joshs
The apparent novelty that we see develop in macro states of organization was determined at the moment the seed pattern emerged from chaos. All the implications are inherent in that original pattern. All it takes is time to develop or evolve through pattern mutation and environmental selection. — punos

Would you agree with this by Evan Thompson?

“…it is important to distinguish between determinism as a feature of a scientific model and determinism as a metaphysical thesis about nature. According to the metaphysical thesis, all physical properties in nature are definite and determinate, and the evolution of the natural world is fixed uniquely. (The complete and instantaneous state of the world fixes its past and future with no alternatives.) This thesis hardly follows from the fact that we can construct nonstochastic dynamic-system models of observable phenomena.

Science has barely begun to chart this vast sea of nonlinearity and stochasticness. Within this context, "deterministic" seems best understood as describing certain nonlinear analysis techniques (those in which there are no noise terms), not as an ontological characteristic of nature (in a classical observer-transcendent sense).”( Mind in Life)

Yes, anything above the quantum level is classical and deterministic. At least that's how i see it. — punos

It has been argued that classical determinism is an arbitrary scheme which doesn’t allow for any true change or novelty. If evolutionary transformations are just outcomes of a template that could be run on a computer, they don’t address the nature of novelty. Insteadthey turn it into data spit out by a machine.

At any point in this chain had free will agents emerged then it would have disrupted the entire enterprise of higher order complexification. Things would deviate from the main pattern of evolution and fall into eventual catastrophic failure. Evolution is still doing it's work on us and we are not the final product, we are still larval at this stage, and any free will interference would compound into abnormal and imbalanced systems. — punos

Can this process of biological and cultural complexification be modeled in terms of the deterministically causal motions of objects in space (evolutionary arrangement and rearrangement of molecular patterns)?

So is free will.
— Joshs

Which is why I do not find debates about free will very enlightening. — Jackson

Me either. I like the approach of my favorite psychologist, George Kelly:

“…determination and freedom are two complementary aspects of structure. They cannot exist without each other any more than up can exist without down or right without left. Neither freedom nor determination are absolutes. A thing is free with respect to something; it is determined with respect to something else.
The solution proposed for the problem of determinism and free will provides us with the pattern for understanding how persons can vary and still be considered as lawful phenomena of nature. A person’s construction system is composed of complementary superordinate and subordinate relationships. The subordinate systems are determined by the superordinate systems into whose jurisdiction they are placed. The superordinate systems, in turn, are free to invoke new arrangements among the systems which are subordinate to them.
This is precisely what provides for freedom and determination in one’s personal construct system. The changes that take place, as one moves towards creating a more suitable system for anticipating events, can be seen as falling under the control of that person’s superordinating system. In his role identifying him with his superordinating system, the person is free with respect to subordinate changes he attempts to make. In his role as the follower of his own fundamental principles, he finds his life determined by them. Just as in governmental circles instructions can be changed only within the framework of fixed directives, and directives can be changed only within the framework of fixed statutes, and statutes can be changed only within the framework of fixed constitutions, so can one’s personal constructs be changed only within subsystems of constructs and subsystems changed only within more comprehensive systems.”

If free will exists , then does evil exist?
— Joshs

Evil is a theological concept. — Jackson

So is free will. Advocates of free will generally believe in some form of evil. Exceptions include
Daniel Dennett, but his notion of freedom, as laid out in his book Freedom Evolves, is compatible with that of many determinists and incompatible with that of typical free will advocates.

Yes. Which is always how I've lived my life. The deterministic model never made sense to — Jackson

If free will exists , then does evil exist?

I guess it does , but doesnt it substitute probabilistic for deterministic measurement?
— Joshs

Yes. Which is always how I've lived my life. The deterministic model never made sense to — Jackson

Does Quantum Mechanics Rule Out Free Will? According to this article, physicists are split on the issue.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-quantum-mechanics-rule-out-free-will/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%20quantum%20mechanics%2C%E2%80%9D%20she,Superdeterminism%20returns%20us%20to%20determinism.%E2%80%9D

What are these alternatives called? And again what is the basic concept in these alternatives that enable free will? How does that happen, is there an alternative to determinism and indeterminate randomness or chaos? Is there a third or fourth option that i'm not aware of? — punos

I’m thinking of such approaches as enactivism, phenomenology, postmodern perspectives like poststructuralism and hermeneutics.
Determinisms accept empirical models of causation based on determined characteristics or properties of objects. The post-deterministic approaches are radically interactional, meaning that there can be no such properties of objects that remain self-identical.

“Although modernists in psychology have attempted to cast the free will/determinism dilemma as either settled or irrelevant, it continues to enfeeble theory, therapy, and practice. The primary reason for this continuing enfeeblement is the modern dualistic framework for this dilemma: Either the will (choices, decisions, motives) is dependent on antecedent conditions and thus is determined or the will is independent of antecedent conditions and thus is free. This framework, however, is not supported by current research and practical experience, indicating that the will is inextricably connected to the past but is not determined by it.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022167800401008

In essence my point is that free will is illusory. I — punos

Neither free will nor determinism adequately describes the human situation. Both options in fact cling to kinds of determinism.
Free will metaphysics assumes a self-consciously knowing subject whose choices are determined by this unitary ego. What you are calling determinism makes choices the product of causal laws. In both cases, the autonomous freely willing subject and the determined subject, the determinism is based on a preconceived notion of the self or the world.
Alternatives to the freedom vs determinism
binary assert that while we are determined by our history, both personal , biological and social, these don’t dictate future behavior in a strictly causal way because the future rewrites the past.

the brain's pain-pleasure system is, to some extent, uniform with respect to what induces pain and pleasure. — Agent Smith

The brain’s pain/pleasure system is correlated with the success or failure of anticipatory sense making. So the question is, how uniform is sense-making? The answer:

their antecedent causes differ from people to people, culture to culture, individual to individual — Agent Smith

I suppose what is happening here, Joshs, is the discussion where the idealist insists that it is words all the way down, while the realist points out that the words are about something that is not just words.

My own suspicion, in line with Davidson, is that both are roughly true. So my favourite quote from the very end of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme:

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary — Banno

If you like Davidson you might be interested in the work of Joseph Rouse, a rising star in the Pittsburgh school of philosophy. He begins with the Sellarsian distinction between the manifest image ( subjective conceptualization) and the scientific image ( empirical data) , and shows them to be intertwined in a more radical way than seen by Davidson, McDowell and Haugeland. His most recent book is Articulating the World:

“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.”