This gave me the opportunity to outline some of the ways that language is special — Deacon

Michael Tomasello argues that rather than there being something called language as a special phenomenon in itself differentiating humans from other animals, what separates humans from animals is a cognitive complexity that leads to the sophisticated social interaction making language possible.

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.
— Joshs
I'm afraid I couldn't detect how what you said was a deconstruction. There must be something earlier that I missed or have forgotten. Can you explain or refer to your explanation? — Ludwig V

I discussed it here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/923347

Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice?
— Joshs
Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.
— Apustimelogist
You both seem to me to have got this the wrong way round. You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary. But we can only interpret rules because we have learnt to do so - from other people. No doubt it is a complex process, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that it is develops by trial (responses of whatever kind) and error, coupled with positive and negative reinforcement — Ludwig V

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.

Perhaps there is a neurological element to it. For someone who went through a great crisis, everyday life will often be a high. For those however who have dwelt forever in mundane mediocrity, life is like a constant barely-worse-than-average experience. — Lionino

'Every activity as such gives pleasure' -say the physiologists. In what way? Because dammed-up force brought with it a kind of stress and pressure, a state compared with which action is experienced as a liberation? Or in that every activity is an overcoming of difficulties and resistances? And many small resistances, overcome repeatedly, easily, as in a rhythmic dance, bring with them a kind of stimulation of the feeling of power?

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . .(Nietzsche)

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows.
— Janus

Yes, we can say the same for all word meaning, I mean! — Apustimelogist

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules? Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice? How is consulting an intuition different from consulting a reliably stable internal picture of meaning, the use of Kantian reason to make sense of sensuous intuition?

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.
— Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules. — Apustimelogist

As you probably know, Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s solution to the skeptical paradox is controversial, and even Kripke admitted that Wittgenstien may very well not have approved of his interpretation. There’s no reason to reject his approach merely on this basis. After all, there’s far from a general consensus among Wittgenstein scholars as to how to read him. All I would like to do here is illustrate how far apart Krpike’s take on the later Wittgenstein is from writers whose perspectives I find more consonant with P.I. and other later works (Cavell, Braver, Antony Nickles).

As I understand it, Kripke’s argument begins with the skepticism that ensues from rejecting a classical realist approach to the factual justification of meaning interpretation. There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year. The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm .

The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)

Let me summarize the key points that I want to contrast with my reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. For however long a period of time a particular meaning survives, it causally determines its use. The skeptical problem arises because the meaning can shift over time, and along with it the rules of its application. We can’t discern from the user’s disposition facts that will tell us how they meant to use a word. Put differently, Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. Kripke’s solution involves comparing the picture of one member of a community with the consensus picture of the community as a whole to see if there is a match between interpretations of meaning.

How does my reading of Wittgenstein differ from Kripke’s? For starters, the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture. What allows for the relatively stable normativity of social use of word meanings is the stability of language games. A language game doesn’t lock down a determinate definition of meaning, it provides a framework of relative consistency of sense, within which the specific meanings of words constantly slide and shift in subtle ways without causing a crisis of intelligibility. Because we are always ensconced within one language game or another, the issue of skepticism never comes up for Wittgenstein. For Kripke , language games, and the normative ‘agreements’ that he claims they produce, accommodate themselves to already formed picture-like word meanings within individuals. Since this agreement occurs after the fact of creation of word meanings within individuals, it must undo a skepticism born of the indeterminacy of individually formed meanings, which in turn results from the assumption of a gap between how these meanings were formed and how they are interpreted within a community. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, word meanings are not created by the individual first and then submitted to social interpretation , they only emerge out of discursively formed language games , and thus never suffer from the interminably that Kripke’s model presupposes.

Whereas for Kripke we understand how someone means a rule by looking for a picture within their words that corresponds to our own, for Wittgenstein we do not rely on previously formed normative interpretations of the meaning of rules , either individual or collective, to understand each other (Kripke says the members of a speech-community agree to use “plus” in specific ways). Rather, within actual contextual discursive situations we transform the sense of our past history of word application This is what it means to use a word, and what it means for a word to have a meaning. According to Braver, Kripke’s grounding of word meaning in individually formed pictures which change their meaning over time is a “virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation.”

As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.

Wittgenstein writes:

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)

Joseph Rouse argues:

..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.

If there is a car crash, again one needs to identify the fault; sometimes it might be the brakes, and sometimes it might be the driver. There was one recently in which a child was killed - the fault was in the driver, but it was not alcohol, but epilepsy. The driver was unaware of their epilepsy because they had not been diagnosed. They were found not guilty of causing death by dangerous driving.
— unenlightened
1h — Leontiskos

It seems to me that if you’re going to apply the concept of forgiveness to this particular example you’re stretching its meaning well beyond the way it is commonly used.

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts — Apustimelogist

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. What Merleau-Ponty wrote about the organism applies equally well to Wittgenstein’s view of social relations. One might even say that the normative organization of perception is akin to a the normative nature of a language game.

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly. — Apustimelogist

Braver’s point is that Kripke’s solution is no solution. Whereas Wittgenstein’s starting point is radically social , deriving individual subjectivity from sociality, Kripke tries to explain intersubjective objectivity on the basis of the combined activity of individual subjects. This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). Kripke then tries to repair this gap with a theory of the activity of the subject which can then be applied to social relations. Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?
— Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently — Apustimelogist

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment.

As I say, I am not a big fan of the term forgiveness. In relation to the OP I would suggest that the issue is more likely to be one of needing a new way viewing oneself rather than needing to forgive. If we recognize that we are imperfect beings who sometimes make mistakes and inadequate choices, we can roll with challenges and mistakes more readily and improve our approach.
@Tom Storm

Your posts make me think you do not understand forgiveness, as they are replete with false dichotomies. For example, you here diminish forgiveness and promote the recognition of imperfection. And yet, without the recognition of imperfection forgiveness is utterly impossible. Recognition of imperfection is not an alternative to forgiveness, it is its prerequisite. This is but one example of the odd dichotomies I see — Leontiskos

There are many forms of imperfection, including decisions that seemed to be optimal at the time they were made but in hindsight, with the benefit of knowledge not available during the original decision process, now appear imperfect. I don’t forgive someone for mistakes they make due to understandable limitations of knowledge. Only a particular sort of imperfection is a prerequisite for forgiveness, and that is blame. We learn and grow by doing what Tom Storm described as modifying our ways of interpreting events. Each of us differs in how much emphasis , if any, we place on imperfections that deserve a judgement of blame, and thus provide an opportunity for forgiveness. When it comes to making sense of the imperfections of others, It sounds to me like blame and forgiveness are more useful concepts for you than they are for Tom.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy — Apustimelogist

If a rule must always be applied in a specific context of use in order for it to have meaning , does that indicate that the meaning of a rule is therefore ‘indeterminate’, or that it is precisely determinate , but in a way that is unique to each use? It seems to me that to characterize this particularly of use meaning as indeterminacy presupposes what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to get beyond, the picture theory of meaning whereby exposing an ambiguity within ostensible definition indicates a failure to lock down epistemological meaning rather than a self-imposed grammatical confusion originating in the concept of ostensive definition. Lee Braver cites Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein as a symptom of this misunderstanding.

Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:

“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49

The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:

“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50

When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”

Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.

“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56

Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains. — Apustimelogist

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is meant to prevent us from being tempted to subsume the particular within the general, to define the instances of ‘life’ on the basis of the category ‘life’ in such a way that we presuppose a centrally defining meaning of the category which can be understood independently of its instances.
Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essence common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses. But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule' also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule', that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule'?I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essence common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

Also, the argument in the quote from Grayling in the OP is pretty much the argument Davidson presented in "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme". Davidson's triangulation of speaker, interpreter and truth comes in to play here, at least as a first approximation.

Forms of life cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world. So despite not being able to speak Chinese (an increasingly inappropriate example for all sorts of reasons) we will recognise a Chinese builder or grocer by their activities… Forms of life are fastened together by all of them occurring in the world. — Banno

If I can’t persuade another to take on the form of life necessary to make my actions intelligible to them, then don’t those actions continue to appear incommensurable with their form of life? Do forms of life simply occur in a pre-given world , an objective world for all, or do different forms of life develop the world in different directions? Is there not a sense in which worlds are intersubjectively constructed through forms of life?

It seems to me one can dispense with theism, recognize that More is Different and that humans have more cortical neurons than any other species, and thereby have a basis for recognizing a uniqueness to humans. — wonderer1

Ah, but the devil is in the details. To what extent, if any, does this difference in degree between the neurons of humans
and other animals translate into a difference in kind? Think of all of the historical assumptions concerning brain-based qualitative differences between human and animal behavioral capabilities that have turned out to be wrong-headed:
Only humans have language
Only humans have heritable culture
Only humans have cognition
Only humans have emotion
Only humans use tools

Perhaps more isnt so different after all.

↪Antony Nickles

But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

I don't think Wittgenstein shows this at all, as evidenced by the extremely diverse directions this thread is taken in by different Wittgensteinians. He leaves this incredibly vague; vague enough that a common take is that rationality just bottoms out in cultural presuppositions that cannot be analyzed. This view in turn makes any conflict between "heterogenous cultures" or "heterogenous language games," either purely affective/emotional or else simply a power struggle— i.e. "fight it out." This is especially true if the individual subject is just a nexus of signifiers and power discourses — Count Timothy von Icarus

The differences between language games are neither purely affective, as though pure affect could be separated from conceptual meaning, nor are they merely a matter of blind power. Convincing someone to change their perspective is not a function of coercion but of persuasion, and this is simultaneously affective and rational.

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: "That's how it must be”. (On Certainty)

To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.
— Joshs

What are we communicating to ourselves? — Lionino

When we speak to another we have certain expectations concerning the response, which will never be precisely fulfilled. Likewise when we think to ourselves we are communicating with an other, since the self returns to itself slightly differently moment to moment. We always end up meaning something slightly other than what we intended to mean.

Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When — Apustimelogist

It depends on how narrow your view of language is. Wittgenstein’s analyses of language were focused on contexts of interaction between persons. His was a ‘phenomenology’ of the intersubjective. If we want an analysis of perception, and thus of thinking,
we have to turn to the phenomenology of perception. In the work of Merleau-Ponty we find an account of perception that I think dovetails nicely with Witt’s intersubjective focus. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is ‘languaged’, but this cannot be understood in terms of a split between thinking and communicating. To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world. Language isn’t simply a tool that we use to access concepts , in its very instantiation it uses us to transform the sense of our concepts and percepts by enacting them in the world. We dont think language, language thinks us.

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. — Constance

The simplicity Henry is after seems to depend on belief in a pure self-affecting ipseity. Zahavi is sympathetic to this stance, as he also argues that there can be no meaning without subjectivity and there can be no ground for subjectivity without an ‘I’ which comes back to itself as identically the same in its self-affection. As he says:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

This is where Henry departs from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, who all insist on the ecstatic nature of self-awareness.

I personally think Wittgenstein never fully got away from Russell and Hume's influence re causation. That is, the influence that made him write:

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Part of what helps cement rules though is causal consequence. Bad applied math results in bad consequences regardless of what the majority thinks for instance — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think Wittgenstein is closer to the phenomenologists and poststructuralists in his critique of efficient causation that he is to Hume or Russell. The contextually sensitive, unreflective kind of skilled behavior he is pointing to in actual rule following behavior involves reciprocal causality, a back and forth adjustment of meaning sense between the unfolding matter and one’s conceptually informed response to it. Efficient cause ignores the shifts in sense that contextually unfolding situations produce. The shift from one language game to another is merely a more exaggerated kind of reciprocally developing change in sense than what occurs in any interchange.

Metaphysics attempts to escape one’s worldview or form of life in order to latch onto something that transcends all perspectives, something that can rule on and rule over all individual views; but the entities posited as
transcending all systems, such as Truth or Reality in-itself or God are, like Hegel’s thing-in-itself-for-us, posited by and only function within systems. These systems or games can be incommensurable, with no possibility of common measurement or neutral judge, a Great Umpire in the Sky. “Some­body may reply like a rational person and yet not be playing our game.”
We should say no more than that their behavior is just not what makes sense to us: “there’s only one thing that can be wrong with the meaning of a word, and that is that it is unnatural . . . unnatural for us. . . . We just don’t go on in that way.”182 While we cannot take up a wholly external point of view, we can inhabit ours critically, without the illusions of metaphysical grounding.

This incommensurability also means that we cannot get the players of strange language-games to start acting normally (that is, as we do) simply by reasoning with them, since the very thing we’re trying to teach them is
our way of reasoning. Just as a child isn’t rationalized through arguments— were she susceptible to arguments, she would already be rational—but through training, so bringing others to think as we do happens through
nonrational means. Supposing we met people who did not regard [the propositions of physics] as a tell­ing reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language­ game as a base from which to combat theirs? (Lee Braver)

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not that we forget what we have learned concerning how to follow a rule, it’s that the initial information is always inadequate to continually follow it. Wedon’t apply a rule like a picture, we USE it in contextually changing circulate that require us to go beyond the original instructions. Lee Braver explains:

Take the example of telling someone to follow a rule, say, repeatedly adding two. It isn’t that when we teach this procedure to her we don’t know what we want her to do, but that this knowledge shouldn’t be mod­eled on the picture of a mind encompassing the range of the function “Add two” in its gaze, even though our reflexive correction of a wrong answer makes it appear as if we were comparing the series coming out of her mouth
with a written list.
“When I teach someone the formation of the series . . . I surely mean him to write . . . at the hundredth place.”—Quite right; you mean it. And evidently without neces­sarily even thinking of it. This shews you how different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think.” And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling
meaning a mental activity! The interlocutor here argues that since we know that 1,002 should follow 1,000 when we issue the order “Add two,” a sequence not explicitly consid­ered at the time the order was issued, something queer must be plugging us into the entire series. Wittgenstein reverses the polarity of the argument.
We know what should follow 1,000 and the humble cogitative actions we find do not consciously anticipate every step—so understanding the rule must enable us to correct immediately without explicit thoughts. The mirage of the meaning-object’s containment of all future applica­tions shimmers into existence here to supplement the woefully underpow­ered act of comprehension.

In most situations, we simply follow a rule without reflection. It is only when an unexpected consequence ensues that we shift from unreflectively following a rule (or unreflectively observing someone else following it) to analytically dissecting it.

Lee Braver discusses the unreflective following of rules:

The standard view has the PLA resting on verificationism: the objection is that the private linguist cannot reliably verify the recurrence of the same sensation, since all he has to go on is his feeling that the present instance is of the same type as the previous one. Without an external check on my reidentification of the Gorignak, I cannot satisfactorily determine whether I have applied the term correctly or not, that is, whether this entity here now is a token of the same type as the one previously so baptized. My attempts to evaluate the consistency of my own applications cannot suffice because, being at the same level as the acts of identification themselves, they provide
no justification of these acts; on my own, I’m just buying multiple copies of a given newspaper to check the headlines of the first. Without such an external check, then, the difference between merely believing I am following a rule correctly and actually doing so collapses, taking the very notion of a rule, and that of language in general, with it.

Some commentators have denied that this argument appears in Witt­genstein’s discussion of PLA at all, but I find it expressed too clearly in too many texts to dismiss it entirely. However, as has been pointed out, this kind of verificationism clashes with many of his other ideas, in particular his frequent claims that we neither have nor need justification to carry out many rule-governed activities perfectly well, a claim that, in fact, often appears within his discussions of private language. For example: “‘but when I in my own case distinguish between, say, pretending that I have pain and really having pain, surely I must make this distinction on some grounds!’
Oddly enough—no!—I do distinguish but not on any grounds.” Wittgenstein believes that every interpretation must bottom out in some unjustifiable immediate reaction in order to escape the infinite regress of interpretive rule-following, so demanding an overt justification for the correct recognition of sensations even to be conceiv­able seems odd. I believe that Wittgenstein uses verification to indicate the purposelessness rather than the intrinsic incoherence of private language­ games, as clearly stated here: “you have to remind yourself of the use to get
out of the rut in which all these expressions tend to keep you. The whole point of investigating the ‘verification,’ e.g., is to stress the importance of the use as opposed to that of the picture.”

I guess I can get this gist of the joke from the general context. I don't remember much about the movie. Was that an actual scene, or something that you imagined? — Ludwig V

Given this, it would make sense to pick popular religions and try them out, learning as much as you can, and giving each a chance to display their truth to you. When you find a religion you think contains truth, you practice it but remain skeptical, still searching other religions for more/more relevant truths.
— Igitur
I'm puzzled about what you mean by trying religions out — Ludwig V

I’m picturing Woody Allen trying out Christianity by eating Wonder bread with mayo in Hannah and her Sisters.

However, I do agree that the "bedrock" metaphor doesn't challenge foundationalism itself, and that's always puzzled me. The radical issue is whether foundations are always necessary. After all, it turned out that there are no foundations of the planet. — Ludwig V

I think it does challenge foundationalism, which is why Lee Braver named his book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger ‘Groundless Grounds’. Take this quote from On Certainty:

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.

I interpret this to mean that bedrock assumptions are like the river bank. They change along with the river itself, but more slowly.

there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new rules so long as he is alone, and any continued rule following can only be judged by an absent community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There seem to be a number of issues involved here. First, what takes place when we use words to communicate with each other? Second, how does this compare with what happens when we use words by ourselves? We could go down the rabbit hole of the private language argument of private pains and beetles in boxes, but I would rather argue that both private language and public language involve
the use of words to enact new senses of meaning. In social
communication this takes place as a result of the mutual
affecting among the participants. In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke.

." For example, the claim that a man who washes ashore on desert Island loses his ability to make and follow rules, but then regains this capacity when a second person washes ashore later. Obviously, a great many Wittgensteinians (as well as people generally) find this to be somewhat absurd. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why would the man who washes ashore lose his ability to make and follow rules? He would bring with him from
whatever culture he was raised in a background intelligibility of linguistic practices. When he is alone , thinking to himself, he would draw from that background. He would bring those practices to bear on his engagements with a second person on the island. Rouse’s point isn’t that we dont draw from that background, it is that the rules it brings it with don’t bind us in the new situation.

Language and mathematics are rule governed. Games are also rule governed.

These rules are developed socially and change over time — Count Timothy von Icarus

As to this the following:

We cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances. (Joseph Rouse)

Do you think this idea is commonsensical?

↪Joshs I don't think either H or W are regurgitating, but that they've had an influence upon philosophical thinking to a point that anyone whose read philosophy knows these points, even if they are hard to articulate -- especially because they're enigmatic, rather than logically valid.

Not a bad thing, at all. I think the Witti Heidegger comparison holds pretty well, tho I prefer to say Derrida-Wittgenstein is the true duck-rabbit of western-philosophy — Moliere

The way I see the heritage , Heidegger comes after Witt, and Derrida after Heidegger. That is, Witt is the least radical of the three. I wish you were right about their ideas having by now been thorough assimilated within philosophy. If that were true it would make my work a lot easier. My experience has been that there is a small community of thinkers who grasp the most radical implications of Heidegger and Derrida, and a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas.

Wittgenstein, much like Heidegger, ends up not being particularly radical or different from commonplace positions when you force yourself not to think using their specialised terms as a privileged vantage point upon philosophy, language and the world… His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger. — fdrake

I’d love to hear what ‘commonplace positions’ you think these writers are regurgitating. What do you suppose their commonplace critiques of the ‘logical validity’ you obviously prize might look like? Do you think Ratcliffe would agree with you that they are not offering anything significantly new, given that his ideas are strongly indebted to both of them?

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to. — Apustimelogist

In the spirit of Wittgenstein, we should keep in mind that we are not talking about an ‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world. The system includes brain, body and the intersubjective, linguistic environment in an inseparable reciprocal interaction. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Forms of life are the intersubjective practices that we enact in actual contexts of social relation . The use of words are our doings , normatively constrained by the possibilities and limits of intelligibility produced by the enacting of particular language games. Regardless of whatever rules and criteria of meaning have previously been laid down, these are open to contestation in each actual
use of words, as each party to communication re-assesses what is at stake and at issue in the interchange.

Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with ‘iterability’ and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes subject and object, cause and effect. This grammar assumes that quantitative changes in a process are subservient to qualitatively determined identities constraining the sense of those quantitative changes. The qualitative nature of a cause is not allowed to be changed by the effect, it is transcendent to what is immanent to it.

I am offering a prize of $10,000
— Dan

Yeah, that is bait to get people to do free work on your theory. — Lionino

You think he’s counting on reaping the rewards in terms of career advancement? Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash.

Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. — Constance

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound — Constance

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.”

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity.

It can be said, in a certain sense, that nominalism becomes absurd if it is carried to its ultimate consequences. For it would deny the very possibility of identity as repetition and permanence. We need time and permanence in order to distinguish and identify. Identity and difference imply each other — JuanZu

Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself..it is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition... Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”

Nietzsche arrived at a similar conclusion:

“Just as mathematics and mechanics were long considered sciences with absolute validity, and only now does the suspicion dare show its face that they are nothing more and nothing less than applied logic on the strength of the particular, indemonstrable assumption that 'identical cases' exist ­and logic itself is a consistent notation based on that assumption (that identical cases exist) being carried out…

Deleuze explains the meaning of Nietzsche Eternal Return in the following way:

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which
is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of
that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the
different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the
unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return.”(Difference and Repetition)

the assumption that "seeing" is somehow magically contained in the development of the eye is actually conditioned by elements external to the eye (e.g. the light that the eye needs for vision, and this is evidently external to the eye, it cannot be said that light belongs to the teleological identity of the eye); but mainly it is never demonstrated a priori, only a posteriori — JuanZu

Reminds me of Nietzsche’s analysis of ‘purpose’:

“… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp…the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.”

I'd trace the problem here back to Kierkegaard booting theoretical reason from a determinant role in freedom (Nietzsche too). No longer is determinism seen as in a way conducive (or even essential) to freedom, in that it allows theoretical reason to give us a sort of "causal mastery" of the world through techne (e.g. Leibniz's invocation of PSR in defense of free will). Instead we have to keep retreating posterior to the findings of theoretical reason (the sciences) to defend freedom (a freedom which is increasingly contentless). — Count Timothy von Icarus

You probably have in mind thoughts like these from Nietzsche:

The 'external world' affects us: the effect is telegraphed into our brain, there arranged, given shape and traced back to its cause: then the cause is projected, and only then does the fact enter our consciousness. That is, the world of appearances appears to us as a cause only once 'it' has exerted its effect and the effect has been processed. That is, we are constantly reversing the order of what happens. - While 'I' see, it is already seeing something different.

What one also learns from Nietzsche is that the external world is not a deterministic mechanism, but continually changes its nature. If we supplement Nietzsche with the phenomenological insight that the intentional act perceives the givenness of what appears to it along dimensions of similarity in relation to what has been seen before, we can give human freedom a teleological, anticipative aspect. But this teleological vector is free in the same way as the ‘external world’ that appears to it. That is, not as theoretical reason but as contextually engaged sense-making.

n a similar way we can see ourselves: "I am I and my circumstances" (Ortega y Gasset), "Existence precedes essence" (Sartre). The end of our existence is never prefigured and is always about to happen, and it is to the extent that we develop in our circumstances that we become what we are. Nietzsche entitled one of his books as follows: "Ecce Homo: How one becomes what one is". We can say of ourselves that to a large extent we become what we are. We become. Which means that the end is not at the beginning (as teleological thinking presupposes) — JuanZu

Excellent point.

Have you never felt that someone purpoted to be doing philosophy puts forth a position not because he thinks it is truthful but because it appeals to his political prejudices? — Lionino

I’m a philosopher, and that makes me a bit biased. I tend to think that whatever area of thought one purports to be involved in, one is appealing to one’s philosophical prejudices. But I dont see that as a bad thing, given that for me truth comes down to nothing but a philosophical prejudice. What matters to me isnt whether an assertion accords with the way things ‘really, really are’, but what use we can make of it.

These theories are also often in conflict to some extent.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I would hope they would be in conflict, just as is the case with contemporary philosophical positions. It’s nice to have so many alternatives to choose from. But that diversity seems to bother you, as though you need a consensus of significant size in order to take a theory seriously.

In a mature fields, people don't announce a new paradigm shift every year or so—evolutionary biology for example has one major power struggle that has slowly built around the same lines for decades now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Evolutionary theory has undergone a number of significant transformations since Darwin presented it, no less so than cognitive science, which has evolved from its origins in the 1950’s. Enactivism is one of its most recent incarnations. But all ‘ mature sciences’ must start somewhere. Are you suggesting that we ignore scientific approaches that aren’t ‘mature’? Do you think their maturity protects them from eventual replacement? Since you’re borrowing Kuhn’s term, you might take a page from his philosophy, which holds that the maturity of a science says nothing about its truth in relation to the way things really are, only that it generates productive research for a period of time.

TBH, I think the isomorphisms are more due to everyone working off the same suggestive research findings than all of these sharing some sort of deep connection. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not true of the leading figures of enactivism. Writers like Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe, Hanna De Jaegher, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Thomas Fuchs, Dan Zahavi, Jan Slaby and Anthony Chemero all agree on the importance of phenomenology, hermeneutics and pragmatism in structuring the concepts of enactivism. One can find such shared philosophical commitments as well among the leading lights of active inference.

while I find this area interesting, I'm not sure it's a particularly profitable way to analyze freedom. I think it's enough to point out that an explanation of consciousness where our experiences and volitions have no causal role in our behavior faces a host of issues and shouldn't be assumed. Attempts to describe awareness in terms of neurology themselves seem prone to slipping into the mistake of positing that "brains = minds," which in turn abstracts the enviornment out of the analysis. But brains won't produce any conciousness if placed into the vast majority of environments that exist in the universe (e.g. the bottom of the sea or the surface of a star). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suggest it would be a more profitable way to analyze freedom if you could take the lead from the enactivist writers I mentioned above and see how they integrate scientific naturalism with the phenomenology of perception that Merleau-Ponty , Heidegger and Husserl introduced. Slipping into the mistake of positing that "brains = minds”is precisely what enactivism does not do. As Thompson writes:

Mental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head.

I didn't say it doesn't. Within the article you find philosophy that is evidently politically motivated. Replace it with any other valid example that comes to mind — Lionino

What’s the difference between philosophically informed politics and politically informed philosophy? Can’t we trace all political frameworks to underlying philosophical presuppositions?

, I would just hope that the "philosophy" being done does not turn out to be politics dressing up as philosophy. — Lionino

Not sure how what you linked to doesn’t count as philosophy. I’m familiar with two of the authors mentioned, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Their work is rigorously philosophical.