I mean that the insistence of ideas like, one cannot conceive of a thoughtless world, retain all of their authority. — Constance

But where do they get their authority from , for the later Wittgenstein? I would suggest only through a particular language game in which that sentence is being used. Its authority would thus be contingent and pragmatic.
The above sentence , for instance, would be a tautology that doesn’t actually tell us anything new but can still have a specific and variable use in contexts in which it is uttered. We can’t ‘conceinve ’ what is ‘thoughtless’ just restates the already understood equivalence in meaning between conception and thought. So why do we utter the sentence? There can be widely various contexts in which we may want to make explicit what is implicit

my point stands re anthropomorphizing, and we are apparently in agreement about knowledge outside human experience being impossible. — Janus

I should note that for writers like Heidegger, Derrida and some of the phenomenologists, the notion of the human is presupposed but is instead a derived abstraction. From their vantage framing metaphysics in terms of what is within or outside of human experience is already anthropocentric because it begins from the notion of the human subject. nModern empirical science, including physics, is anthropocentric for this reason. The transcendental starting point for these authors is not yet a human subjectivity Even though it is a kind of subject, it does t lend itself to a dichotomy between what is experienced from a human point view and what is outside of it.

Do you have a reference? I'd be interested in reading more. — T Clark

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5972154/

Babies have to learn everything about the world and how to put it into words. In particular, emotions have to be expressed in socially specific ways. What we call "anger" isn't just one thing, it's a whole bunch of related but significantly different things. That's something else I've experienced directly. — T Clark

Are emotions just expressed is socially significant ways or, as Wittgenstein shows , is their very sense created via these contextual engagements? Putting into words wouldnt merely be relating symbols to already formed meanings but allowing the worlds to form the sense of a meaning.

As I understand it, the picture theory of language was abandoned, but the insistence of logicality was not. For me, no one has ever convinced me that idealism of some kind is wrong. — Constance

I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Wittgenstein’s language games are a kind of idealism, but what do you mean by ‘logicality’? The ‘S is P’ propositional structure? Belief statements?

You may not, but traditionally metaphysics was understood according to that definition. — Janus

Not anymore , or not since Nietzsche( and Husserl, Heidegger , Derrida ,etc)

In "How Emotions are Made," Lisa Barrett describes how children learn concepts, names, of emotions by observing their own internal states, other people's emotional expressions, and the use of words for emotions — T Clark

This is true. I dont agree with the predictive processing f model of emotions, because it hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than pp recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.

Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist, but that the manner of its existence is unintelligible apart from the perspective brought to it by the observer. We can’t get ‘outside’ that perspective, even if we try and see the world as if there’s no observer. (Sorry for the length of this post.) — Wayfarer

This still seems to imply a factual status to the pre-human world. I prefer the idea that we could imagine a perspective within a pre-human universe, but even from
that perspective we find no neutral fact of the matter , but instead the same problem we faced when dealing with human interpretation of the world. That is , any facet of a world taken as what it is ‘in itself’ implies not only a relation with an environment to define what ‘it’ is, but a relation that produces it uniquely , and only in that moment, and only from ‘its’ perspective in that moment. A world creates and recreates itself , but in a way that is not accessible to a neutral
overview, because the nature of its fecundity is inherently perspectival. This is why matter is already value-laden

Young children experience emotions, but they have to learn what they are, what they mean, what they are called. — T Clark

I don’t think they have to learn what they mean in a fundamental sense. What they mean is inherent in their very expression as emotions. An emotion is a kind of appraisal of one’s situation, a way of interpreting its significance, whether one has a word label for the emotion or not.

Recently watched an exchange between Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson, titled Enlightenment and the righteous mind. I think it relates to some of the issues raised in the OP. — universeness

It certainly does. Unfortunately I strongly disagree with the positions of all three of those thinkers. None of them have a grasp of what I consider to be the most important ideas in 20th and 21st century philosophy.

Right but what is a view without sentience? Besides using Wittgenstein to just say, "This is nonsense!" is there any other good responses here? — schopenhauer1

I think sentience as it is conventionally understood is a confused notion, as if to be sentient is to be possessed of some special substance or ineffable property in addition to how we understand physical stuff to interact. The problem is the way we wall off what we think of as the subject from the object. On one side is value, feeling and will, and on the other is dead content. No wonder we have a ‘hard problem’ and mystery of the gap between the in-itself and the for-itself. We created it with this artificial separation. Going the panpsychism route just reifies the split, and turning everything into information still assumes some sort of totalizing metaphysics. I like Nietzsche’s approach.

“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –).

We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life? – In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it. Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go (– ad absurdum, if you will). This is a moral of method that cannot be escaped these days; – it follows “from the definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we recognize the will as, in effect, efficacious, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do (and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself –), then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is.

“Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –“

He knows that to have an idea at all in mind is to have logic in play already. One can't imagine a logic-free "world". — Constance

Are you getting this view of logic from the Tractatus?
The Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations seemed to treat logic very differently

“… the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of ‘logical form' that.played such a central role in Wittgenstein's
early thought.”” During his first six months back in Cambridge in 1929, as he wrestled with the difficulties about logical form that Ramsey had raised, he fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the very notion of logical form had to be abandoned.”(Ray Monk)

But my question also included ideas of localized interactions. Whitehead proposed atomic "occasions" of experiences. That still seems odd to me. I mean it's as good a conjecture as any, but doesn't really get beyond being conjecture. — schopenhauer1

Whitehead goes some distance toward what I’m getting at in claiming that an observer alters what is observed in the act of observing it. As a result, perspective is something added onto a pre-perspectival reality, but constitutes it by producing it as something new.

He rejects Newton’s “doctrine of ‘simple location’ and ‘external relations’. “The rejected Newtonian doctrine of simple location dovetails with the conception of space and time in terms of external relations, that is, the conception of space and time as absolute ‘immovable’ containers external to and unaffected by the things located in space and time (see Newton’s Scholium cited in PR 70). By understanding spatiotemporal relations as external relations, Newton develops a “ ‘receptacle’ theory of space–time” (PR 70)—which, for clarity’s sake, should not be confused with Whitehead’s later notion of ‘the Receptacle’. Understood as such, space and time are ‘empty’ forms (PR 72) that merely ‘accommodate’ bodies, without affecting or being affected by what they accommodate. Mirroring the two inseparable aspects of the doctrine of internal relations, Newton’s externality of space and time entails, first, that bodies enjoy an independence from their spatiotemporal relations and are ‘simply located’, and, two, that space and time remain unmovable and unmodified by the extension of bodies.
Rejecting Newton’s doctrine, Whitehead takes precisely the opposite stance; Of the ‘Receptacle’— which in Adventures of Ideas is his concept referring to “the general notion of extension” (AI 258; see also AI 192)—he says: “It is part of the essential nature of each physical
actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the
Receptacle enter into its own nature.” (AI 171) In other words, the fact that “the relata modify the nature of the relations” (AI 201) entails that extension as the “primary relationship” (PR 288) between actual occasions, is modified by these occasions.

Try to remove the human temporal perspective, so that there's no "now". Y — Metaphysician Undercover

When you say ‘human’ do you have in mind an a priori ala Kant? To be human is then to be possessed of a prior categories. This makes humanity a divine notion.

1

I am not sure what that means. How is perspective "a contribution to the production of the universe"? — schopenhauer1

A perspective is not a passive observation from a certain vantage, it is the creation of something new from
a certain vantage . Any ‘observation’ alters not just what it relates to, but also that which is doing the observing.

What say you? Is this the era of the Third World ("era of undeveloped, impoverished, unstable and violent nations"). — Ciceronianus

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says this is the era of stupid and he blames it on social media elevating the political fringes, which thereby bully everyone else into submission. Thus, cancel culture and Trumpism rule.

WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

But what is a perspective free universe. One without sentience? Planets planeting? Particles particling? What is being without perspective? I get there is no neutral perspective but I’m asking what is a universe without a perspective at all, neutral, relative, or otherwise? — schopenhauer1

I dont think there is being without perspective. Every facet of the universe produces its own changing reality via its relations with its environment. So you have a universe continually developing , but not in some perspective free sense, because a perspective isn’t simply an observation for a point of view, it’s a contribution to the production of a universe. If every facet of being produces what only exists from its vantage, the it makes no sense to speak of the absence of perspective. If you take away perspective you also take away the very facts that make up a universe.

a worm, a termite, a pig, and a human all have a perspective. No perspective would seem privileged as to evaluating truth. Yet a worm can’t discern electromagnetism, nor scientific insights, mechanical theory etc., but humans can. But there is not supposed to be a Great Chain of Being. Yet humans at least act as though we have a privileged perspective to being close to what is “really going on”, more than other animals at least — schopenhauer1

For those who say that the direction of scientific knowing is an asymptotic progress toward
truth, what grounds perspective isn’t some ‘really real’ view from nowhere. Rather, dialectical relation is irreducible. There is no perspective-free reality to be uncovered prior to dialectical perspective. Instead, the structural form of the movement of the dialectic itself is the ground.

if your son turned out to be a very effeminate gay man I would assume you would
recognize that you and he could no more change that behavior significantly tha you could change yourself
from masculine to feminine. — Joshs

↪Joshs Still not sure I understand what does it have to do with the topic at hand? — stoicHoneyBadger

Just curious if that scenario would impact your advice to your son on how to be a man, and if so, how.

If biology and hormones can create masculinity and femininity, why can’t they create hybrids or intermediate forms of these behaviors?
— Joshs

Well of course it does, like less masculine man, but what's your point? — stoicHoneyBadger

That your son could be one of these ‘intermediates’. For instance, if your son turned out to be a very effeminate gay man I would assume you would
recognize that you and he could no more change that behavior significantly tha you could change yourself
from masculine to feminine.

↪Joshs Biology, i.e. probably hormones, of course — stoicHoneyBadger

If biology and hormones can create masculinity and femininity, why can’t they create hybrids or intermediate forms of these behaviors? Think of these as the behavioral version of hermaphroditism. Whatever biology can do, it will do, even if it is a mutation that lies outside the norm.

↪Joshs Traditional understanding of the word gender is based on chromosomes, so it can be either male or female.

It has nothing to do with how the brain is wired or what caused it. — stoicHoneyBadger

I am asking you what causes male dogs to behave differently from female dogs, or if you are denying that they do behave differently. And I am asking you what causes masculine and feminine behavior in humans. Is it something we just make up we go along , or is there some basis in our biology?

recognizable behavioral differences between the genders in dogs and cats?
— Joshs

I did not work with lots of dogs or cats, but probably there are, same as in humans. — stoicHoneyBadger

I understood your response to mean that you acknowledge that female and male dogs and cats have gender-specific behavior that appears at birth. That means such behavioral differences are dictated either by chromosomes or by the hormonal environment in the womb. In either case , one cannot explain such gender-specific behaviors without assuming differences in brain structure produced either by chromosomes or hormonal factors in the womb.

But then you wrote this, which seems to contradict your first response:

Do you accept this as a reasonable biological hypothesis?
— Joshs

Certainly not. Gender is determined by chromosomes, not by how one's brain is wired. — stoicHoneyBadger

Doesn’t gendered behavior in animals stem from brain wiring , and isnt brain wiring produced either by chromosomal coding or hormonal factors in the womb? If the brains of male and female dogs are not structured slightly differently, how do you explain their gender-related differences in behavior? Or are you now disagreeing with dog breeders and experts who recognize such clear gender-related behavioral
differences? Where does masculine and feminine behavior come from in humans? Do we just make it up as we go along, or is there some basis in brain structure?

I did not work with lots of dogs or cats, but probably there are, same as in humans — stoicHoneyBadger

So if you accept that masculine and feminine behavior is controlled by brain wiring in humans that is in place at birth, then as someone who has an understanding of how biology works, you should also be open to the idea that there can be in-between form of inborn gender , just as there are intermediate forms of all kinds of other phenotypic phenomena. As a result , there can be humans who display in-between forms along a masculine-feminine scale. For instance, some biological males were born with a perceptual-affective style that is more feminine than masculine. Just as is dogs and cats, this style can impact a wide variety of behaviors. It can affect manner of speech, posture and gestures, aggressiveness , as well as which sex they are attracted to. In some cases, very feminine. Do you accept this as a reasonable biological hypothesis?

It is also fun sometimes making libs short circuit by asking 'what is a woman?' , they know, but are terrified to answer. — stoicHoneyBadger

You know what’s also fun? Asking what is a male or female dog or cat. Mor specifically, what causes make and female behavior in animals? For instance, dog breeders and experts can quickly determine the difference between a male and female simply on the basis of their behavior. It seems that make and female dogs have subtly different brain ‘wiring’. I call this perceptual-affective style , because it has to do with a a certain way a dog or cat perceives sensations and affects that is gender related and independent of individual differences in personality. Would you agree that there are such consistent , recognizable behavioral differences between the genders in dogs and cats? Would you then agree that there are also such robust inborn gender differences in behavior between male and female humans?

Keeping a past record seems little more than archiving. If we want to know what's moral according to divine rule we'd be statistically better off consulting the current crop of religious cults than the written record of the previous c — Isaac

All my favorite philosophers are dead. Their accounts of the source of morality are more satisfying to me than those put forth by living writers. I would think Wayfarer could make a similar argument.

Certainly science evolved in philosophical frameworks. But I think apart from logical structures science is no longer philosophical. Just the way I see it as a a non-philosopher. Once the technicalities of an idea require extensive specialized knowledge that idea becomes speculation by the scientists involved. I consider string theory to be speculative science as long as there is the faintest possibility it can be experimentally verified. If it were clearly shown to be non-verifiable, well, that's a different thing. — jgill

Are you defining philosophy and metaphysics as dealing with phenomena which cannot be proven?
How about the idea that metaphysics is the condition of possibility for understanding the theoretical
framework within which proven facts make sense in the first place? Based on that definition , all proven facts within all sciences are elements of larger theoretical
frameworks, and those larger theoretical frameworks belong to larger metaphysical worldviews.

The conclusion is that science has never ceased being ‘philosophical’ in the sense that theoretical frameworks represent a naive metaphysics.

, if you can't trust your senses then how do you know that you read Husserl correctly because words on a page are part of the 'real' world. You are making a special pleading for ink marks on a page that you are not making for everything else that you experience. How can we communicate if we can't trust our senses? — Harry Hindu

You can’t trust the contingent content of your senses, such as ink marks on a page, to the extent that they link to meanings that are relative to individual interpretation. But are all aspects of meaning contingent and relative , or are there certain universals that one can be ‘apodictically certain’ of, as Husserl puts it, like Descartes’ Cogito?

Husserl uses a method he calls eidetic variation to allow the contingent aspects of meanings to drop out and revel to us these unchanging primitives. So what are these grounding principles of phenomenology? They have to
do not with the specific content but with the formal
structural form in which all objects are given to a subject. Specifically, they deal with the universal
temporal structures of retention, presentation and protention which are presupposed by all sensory experience .

If in my mind I have already sweetly struck the tennis return, the only thing worth noting is that there was this "I" that imposed its will on nature. It is only when I then turn out to have fucked up the shot that instead the world exists in contrast to this "me", this locus of all will and meaning.

That is when "I" point to the divot that caused the bad bounce, or curse the small distracting noise in the crowd, or whatever else can take the blame, and so "other" the fuck-up as something external to my ego. — apokrisis

Seems to me the distinction you’re pointing to here is between volitional and non-volitional self -awareness , not between an event lacking a component of ‘self’ and one that includes it ( or creates it). If ‘self’ is merely the thread of minimal continuity in ongoing experience that allows the world to be recognizable moment to moment as familiar in some fashion with respect to previous expereince, then deliberate vs accidental , willful vs passive , agential vs non-agential are just different modes of this ‘self’- continuity. Even the most narrow focus on an event , seemingly to the complete exclusion of all reference to a self , presupposes a hierarchy of interlinked background meanings supplying the event with a sense of relevance and intelligibility.

Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke. — jas0n

Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment, and link this thinking with phenomenological work on intentionality and being-in-the -world by Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger. This same autonomy defines it as a sense-making cognizing system. Sense-making is intrinsically affective because it is normative. Behavior and sense-making is oriented on the basis of purposes and goals that define this autonomy. Events matter to a sense-making creature , which means its ‘self’, its ongoing synthetic identity, is not dissolvable into a reciprocal mesh of socially distributed discursive practices any more than its body is dissolved into a reciprocal interchange between it and its environment. Sense-making is embodied ina body which is embedded in a world. That mean that sense-making cannot be separated from body and world. But neither can body understood apart from world and from sense-making. The three aspects are indissociable, but assymetrical in favor of the embodied cognizer.

“Living as sense-making in precarious conditions is systemically generated, with living beings enacting environments that pull them along into certain rhythms, behaviours, and internal transformations. (This point becomes especially important when we remember that the environment is always an environment of other living beings—bacteria do not live in isolation but in microbial communities.) The organism enacts an environment as the environment entrains the organism. Both are necessary and neither, by itself, is sufficient for the process of sense-making.

But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living be-ings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.

Cognition is sense-making in interaction: the regulation of coupling with respect to norms established by the self-constituted identity that gives rise to such regulation in order to conserve itself. This identity may be that of the living organism, but also other identities based on other forms of organizationally closed networks of processes, such as sociolinguistic selves, organized bundles of habits, etc. Some of these identities are already constituted by processes that extend beyond the skull. But in any case, cognition is always a process that occurs in a relational domain. Unlike many other processes (e.g. getting wet in the rain) its cognitive character is given nor-matively and asymmetrically by the self-constituted identity that seeks to preserve its mode of life in such engagements. As relational in this strict sense, cognition has no location. It simply makes no sense to point to chunks of matter and space and speak of containment within a cognitive system. Inspect a baby all you want and you'll never find out whether she's a twin (Di Paolo)

Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined). — Harry Hindu

It exists as the experience of something in a certain. mode of givenness, as recollection, fantasy , perception, etc. These are distinctions between what is directly and what is indirectly experienced. But even what is directly experienced in perception doesn’t tell you very much about the ‘real’ world, because it only exists as what it is for the instant of its appearance. We don’t see chairs and tables and quarks , we see a constantly changing flow of senses of the world. We construct out of this changing flow what we call real objects. But Husserl says this ‘real’ world of spatial things is relative and contingent. It could always turn out to be other than what we construct it to be. So the external world thought of as the empirically natural world of real objects does not exist for Husserl as an irreducible fact, only as a conjecture.

Its been stated that successful philosophy becomes the sciences. Philosophy is sort of like a proto-science who's ultimate goal is to destroy itself. — Philosophim

It was likely stated by a scientist. Only commoditized and conventionalized philosophy becomes the sciences. Science is sort of like an unself-aware philosophy who's ultimate goal is to overcome its worldview through a philosophical gestalt shift. Good philosophy continues to stay a step or two ahead of the sciences.

The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). — jas0n

So something like this from Merleau-Ponty:

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413))

Or this from Shaun Gallagher on ‘socially distributed cognition':

“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.”

“Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities."

Or this from Gabrielle Chiari:

“In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”

Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational. — jas0n

That’s because you’re noticing a very strange paradox or seeming contradiction in my thinking, an apparent move on my part to dissolve and deconstruct subjectivity while at the same time maintaining a peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity.
How can one possibly claim the latter features as irreducible to ongoing experience without supposing an ideal , rationalist , solipsist, foundational internal gyroscope operating behind the scenes to accomplish such an order? Isn’t this the very essence of a Cartesian Subject?

So the assumption here is that the kind of order depicted by ongoing pragmatic ‘self-similarity’, or as Derrida says, continuing to be the same differently, must originate in a fat content specifying the basis of this order. If events of meaning are claimed to be self-similar, they must be similar in the basis of conformity to an extant context of meaning that dominates and dictates this order. That’s what Cartesian subjects do, they reify content. Put differently, they arbitrarily specify a certain content as the basis of a rational order. So there would seem to be a direct relation between the ‘fatness’ of a grounding content and the violence and dominating , arbitrary force and power it is assumed to harbor.
When we deconstruct classic notions of subject and object, we divest these concepts of their arbitrary, dominating , polarizing ethical power.

In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.

The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality?
Such a question led Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin to make the turn from language to temporality.

The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space? — jas0n

Different positions that are synthetically correlated to
produce a unitary image in 3 dimensional depth.
The self is a synthetic achievement, not an a priori. The self can be lost though depersonalization, schizophrenia, etc.

Sounds to me like a longwinded description of a target domain ('the one situation') and a source domain ('a use-family, a great many situations.') Roughly the source is...the past. — jas0n

Remember , for Gendlin and Heidegger, the o my past that we have access to comes to us already changed by what it occurs into, that than sitting there occupying a slot we call a ‘source domain’ or a ‘past’.

Imagine knowing what will happen for most occasions, and having to dread through the unbearable moments with agonizing, slow gnawing, suffocation and despair. — chiknsld

I hold a paradoxical view of boredom, the basis of your thesis on repetition of events. Rather than expressing the lack of change, it indicates the incipient movement into uncharted waters. Boredom and monotony are symptoms not of the too-predictable, but of a previously mobile, fluidly self-transformative engagement with the world beginning to become confused and disoriented. Boredom is the first stage of creativity. We can’t become bored until change has already knocked at our door.

. And the time spent today is the same time spent yesterday, the same time will be spent tomorrow and so on. — chiknsld

One can never experience events in time as identical , since time never doubles back or exactly reproduces events. One only experiences them as similar. And this experience only becomes traumatic , restless, boring , despairing if it ceases to be familiar, if it instead droops us into a hole of chaos.

Curious that you would answer me in this roundabout fashion. — apokrisis

Didn’t mean to ignore you. Was dreading the task of simplifying Derrida’s verbiage.

I see nothing but a web of organisation dynamics that has the usual social complexity of any game. PF has some kind of rules of conduct, some kind of shared spirit and mission, to which all its participants would contribute in terms of their own contingencies of personality, experience and habit.

Even on PF, which is as about as informally structured in terms of “how to productively behave” as it gets, some larger pattern of engagement emerges over time. And the expectations and agendas of participants are reciprocally shaped by that. — apokrisis

But it seems to me that the shared agreed on rules and shared spirit only really exists as it is animated and redefined each actual engagement at each moment of time by individual participants. It is not that the interchange that is now taking place is constrained by norms that it is placed inside of, but rather my overall sense of the identity of PF is reshaped as the current interchange unfolds. What the forum stands for may change for me in a good way or a bad way, making me more or less enthusiastic about wanting to continue participating, or may inspire me to change my strategies of argumentation, or become more or less intense or serious. I may become more or less
focused on politically or empirically or spiritually oriented topics on here due to the unfolding interchanges. Other participants, meanwhile, are forming their own changing attitudes and interests. Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective?

Garrett Travers was more fun

Take a course on Philosophy of Science.... — Nickolasgaspar

Why don’t we conduct a course on philosophy of science right now? First lesson; a survey of the history of philosophy of science.
You have represented a certain philosophical position on the nature of science, but let me ask you this. How would
you characterize the philosophical approaches to science offered by philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Joseph Rouse? This is a legitimate question if you are going to represent yourself as someone who has a thoroughgoing knowledge of science studies in philosophy. No decent survey course on this topic would leave out the authors I mentioned above. Also , the position Xtrix has been putting forth in this thread is generally consistent with their perspectives on science. So maybe instead of accusing Xtrix of being unfamiliar with the philosophy of science, you should instead simply state that you dont agree with the views of the authors I mentioned. I suppose you could also claim that these writers are not legitimate philosophers of science, in which case you may want to encourage them to take a course on philosophy of science.
Or you could claim that Xtrix is misinterpreting Kuhn, Feyerabend et al, in which case I’d be glad to go over with you what they have written and match them up against what Xtrix is claiming.

Or you could say that you haven’t read the work of these authors, in which case I would respond…yep, you guessed it:go take a course in philosophy of science.


Here’s your first reading assignment for this course:

“From the 1960s on, sustained meta-methodological criticism emerged that drove philosophical focus away from scientific method. A brief look at those criticisms follows, with recommendations for further reading at the end of the entry.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) begins with a well-known shot across the bow for philosophers of science:

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. (1962: 1)

The image Kuhn thought needed transforming was the a-historical, rational reconstruction sought by many of the Logical Positivists, though Carnap and other positivists were actually quite sympathetic to Kuhn’s views. (See the entry on the Vienna Circle.) Kuhn shares with other of his contemporaries, such as Feyerabend and Lakatos, a commitment to a more empirical approach to philosophy of science. Namely, the history of science provides important data, and necessary checks, for philosophy of science, including any theory of scientific method.

The history of science reveals, according to Kuhn, that scientific development occurs in alternating phases. During normal science, the members of the scientific community adhere to the paradigm in place. Their commitment to the paradigm means a commitment to the puzzles to be solved and the acceptable ways of solving them. Confidence in the paradigm remains so long as steady progress is made in solving the shared puzzles. Method in this normal phase operates within a disciplinary matrix (Kuhn’s later concept of a paradigm) which includes standards for problem solving, and defines the range of problems to which the method should be applied. An important part of a disciplinary matrix is the set of values which provide the norms and aims for scientific method. The main values that Kuhn identifies are prediction, problem solving, simplicity, consistency, and plausibility.

An important by-product of normal science is the accumulation of puzzles which cannot be solved with resources of the current paradigm. Once accumulation of these anomalies has reached some critical mass, it can trigger a communal shift to a new paradigm and a new phase of normal science. Importantly, the values that provide the norms and aims for scientific method may have transformed in the meantime. Method may therefore be relative to discipline, time or place

Feyerabend also identified the aims of science as progress, but argued that any methodological prescription would only stifle that progress (Feyerabend 1988). His arguments are grounded in re-examining accepted “myths” about the history of science. Heroes of science, like Galileo, are shown to be just as reliant on rhetoric and persuasion as they are on reason and demonstration. Others, like Aristotle, are shown to be far more reasonable and far-reaching in their outlooks then they are given credit for. As a consequence, the only rule that could provide what he took to be sufficient freedom was the vacuous “anything goes”. More generally, even the methodological restriction that science is the best way to pursue knowledge, and to increase knowledge, is too restrictive. Feyerabend suggested instead that science might, in fact, be a threat to a free society, because it and its myth had become so dominant (Feyerabend 1978).

An even more fundamental kind of criticism was offered by several sociologists of science from the 1970s onwards who rejected the methodology of providing philosophical accounts for the rational development of science and sociological accounts of the irrational mistakes. Instead, they adhered to a symmetry thesis on which any causal explanation of how scientific knowledge is established needs to be symmetrical in explaining truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality, success and mistakes, by the same causal factors (see, e.g., Barnes and Bloor 1982, Bloor 1991). Movements in the Sociology of Science, like the Strong Programme, or in the social dimensions and causes of knowledge more generally led to extended and close examination of detailed case studies in contemporary science and its history. (See the entries on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge and social epistemology.) Well-known examinations by Latour and Woolgar (1979/1986), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Pickering (1984), Shapin and Schaffer (1985) seem to bear out that it was social ideologies (on a macro-scale) or individual interactions and circumstances (on a micro-scale) which were the primary causal factors in determining which beliefs gained the status of scientific knowledge. As they saw it therefore, explanatory appeals to scientific method were not empirically grounded.

A late, and largely unexpected, criticism of scientific method came from within science itself. Beginning in the early 2000s, a number of scientists attempting to replicate the results of published experiments could not do so. There may be close conceptual connection between reproducibility and method. For example, if reproducibility means that the same scientific methods ought to produce the same result, and all scientific results ought to be reproducible, then whatever it takes to reproduce a scientific result ought to be called scientific method. Space limits us to the observation that, insofar as reproducibility is a desired outcome of proper scientific method, it is not strictly a part of scientific method. (See the entry on reproducibility of scientific results.)

By the close of the 20th century the search for the scientific method was flagging. Nola and Sankey (2000b) could introduce their volume on method by remarking that “For some, the whole idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-year’s debate.”

I don't think so. I'm with Witt & Gadamer on this. We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. Metaphors, pictures, myths. Is there a system without some unjustified master concept, some kind of grand narrative that's true for no reason? Look for an image of their hero, their ego ideal, their proposed what-we-should-all-be. I've never met/read anyone, including myself, without holes in their story, things they take for granted without noticing it, a roleplay of some version of the hero. — jas0n

Why are they in our way? How do we know they are i.our way except when we are ready to replace them? Aren’t these prejudices what Nietzsche called value systems? Heidegger says “ The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.”
Shouldn’t we hold onto the framework until it begins to fail us? It’s not as if there will be no warning signs. Thats what our emotions are for. Our anger, anxiety and confusion express in vivid colors our ability to function effectively within a crumbling frame of intelligibility.

Unless of course you believe we are just ‘conditioned’ to interpret events via a certain framing narrative. In that case our most deeply held beliefs would be arbitrary, unjustified, true for no reason. But don’t truth and justification follow upon pragmatic usefulness? Isn’t there a kind of reasonableness within pragmatic relevance, or is relevance itself the mere product of arbitrary conditioning?

We need the same dead metaphors that trap us. We are snakes climbing out of our skins, Neurathian rafts of metaphors clusters. — jas0n

Maybe the metaphors arent as dead is it might seem:

According to Gendlin, following Wittgenstein, an event(whether conceived as conceptual or bodily-physiological) is itself, at one time and in one gesture, the interbleeding between a prior context(source) and novel content(target). Gendlin(1995) says, in such a crossing of source and target, “each functions as already cross-affected by the other. Each is determined by, and also determines the other(p.555)”.

All events are metaphorical in themselves, as a mutual inter-affecting of source and target escaping the binary of representation and arbitrariness.

Gendlin(1997a) explains:

Contrary to a long history, I have argued that a metaphor does not consist of two situations, a "source domain" and a "target domain". There is only one situation, the one in which the word is now used. What the word brings from elsewhere is not a situation; rather it brings a use-family, a great many situations. To understand an ordinary word, its use-family must cross with the present situation. This crossing has been noticed only in odd uses which are called "metaphors"...all word-use requires this metaphorical crossing(p.169).

But signs have their meaning only differentially (in relation to other signs), and the entire context/system drifts, so that the 'same' salute or secret handshake is not quite the same, anymore than the 'same' knight on a chessboard maintains some constant 'meaning' as the game advances. — jas0n

Kind of , except that I’d say there no ‘entire context’ for Derrida. That’s a structuralist notion, the idea of a centered structure, or distributed operating system, a dance of elements a camera could
capture as some overarching logic. Context for Derrida begins and ends with the singular mark. The drift originates with time, not interpersonal language , from one element to the next to the next. What differentiates Derrida’s thinking of sign from authors like Foucault is not the differential relation between signs , it’s the spilt within the sign. The sign is already an in-between, a transit , even before it’s relation to other signs.

Let’s translate this into something more concrete. Using your metaphor of the dance or a distributed system, how would we parse the ‘dance’ that takes place on this philosophy forum among its participants, or just between you and me in the present discussion? Is it a dialogical ping-pong game, with your words affecting , shaping and changing my experience as I read them and my response doing the same for you? Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread?

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective.