As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous.
— Joshs

Is this the statement of an unchangeable fact? — jas0n

It is a construct that must expose itself to potential invalidation by events at every moment that I make use of it. It only continues to be ‘true’ to this extent. If in some way the world as I interpret it suddenly no longer appears to me to change relative to the previous moment , then I would have to attempt to alter my axes of understanding. In the meantime I would have to suffer through the experience of confusion and disorientation in a world that has become less structured for me.

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.
— Joshs

You are trying to make a point using logic, yes? That feels like taking 'for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.' — jas0n

This isnt formal logic. It is the logic of construing not conceptualization in the traditional sense of the term. The difference is that the presuppositions that are in play in the above paragraph aren’t assumed to be sitting there statically in some mental conceptual file, to be drawn on and placed within a propositional logical form. Instead, the presuppositions (imperfection implies a standard or norm) are formed afresh, and only mean what they mean within the specific context of the argument I am presenting to you. They work freshly within the current context of meaning. Do I believe these freshly working constructs are ‘correct’ or the ‘norm’? They are normative in that they are a way of organizing new events on the basis of likeness with respect to previous events. That is, they allow me to recognize patterns within events. But the constructs which organize events into such patterns only retain their ‘primacy’ to the extent that new events dont invalidate them. That is to say , as long as they retain their effectiveness in anticipating new events. So the world tells me when my constructs are valid or invalid. But this ‘world’ that fits or doesn’t fit my expectations is world that comes already pre-interpreted by me It is my version of the world that can reward or disappoint me. So there is a radical circularity here, what I believe Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle.

But rational inquiry (philosophy, science) seeks for some kind of truth about our shared situation. To deny this is to demonstrate it, for what can such a denial mean if it does not pretend toward the truth of our shared situation. — jas0n

This is my model of the aim and capability of science. It is a relativistic pragmatist way to keep a certain notion of progress without assuming a ‘real’ world independent of our construals of the world.

In my view , the aim of truth is anticipative
consistency. As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. We could then say this is teleological, that over time our revised constructions of the world produce anticipations that allow us to anticipate events as more and more intricately, multidimensionally and assimlatively consistent with our precious knowledge. Note her that this is not a mere mirroring of intransigent external
world but a continually refashioning of the world in more an more self-consistent ways. The way the world appears is always exquisitely responsive to the ways we construe it. So the only assumption being made here about some a priori nature of reality is the at it is endlessly amenable to reconstruction in more and more intimate ways.

'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons. — jas0n

Priority, status and don t forget power. In fact, let’s focus on the concept of power that has become so fashionable and makes its way into all sorts of political discussions. Most of the left who are wielding that term as a weapon are understanding it moralistically, within a totalizing empirical discourse. Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)?

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences.

If you want to talk about culture as 'really' just being the performance of bodies, I guess you can. If a room is dancing the Charleston, though, you might want to focus on the form of the dance, 'imperfectly' realized by each dancer. If you allow the dance to slowly mutate, then you have a metaphor for culture. — jas0n

I’m not sure what a ‘body’ is in general. I get that in this example ‘body’ is point of view. I like
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body of embodiment as a gestalt figure-ground ensemble.

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm. But if , as I am arguing , there are only ever individual interpretations of the norm or
standard, then there as many Charlestons as there dancers of it. Which isn’t to say that one cannot aim to improve one’s performance of the dance, only that the standard one is aiming for is still one’s own version of the ‘correct’ Charleston.

You have a dangerous metaphor for culture of
you assume that the mutation of the dance need not be understood from the point of view of each dancer. Otherwise you will fail to understand why there are so many micro-cultures within a larger culture , and why a the red states and the blue states are at war even though they are all supposedly part of the same larger 21st century western dance.

I like psychologist George Kelly’s view of shared culture.

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”

Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.

“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”

It is true that each party's participation in interaction changes the other's way of being, but the question is whether there is not an underlying thematic consistency that is maintained in each person throughout all their interactions , a self-consistency that resists being usurped by a larger self-other ‘system'. For Kelly a mutuality, fusion, jointness cannot be assumed simply because each party is in responsive communication with the other. One party can be affected by the interaction by succeeding in subsuming the other's perspective and as a result feeling an intimate and empathetic bond with the other. At the same time, in the same ‘joint' encounter, the other party may become more and more alienated from the first , having failed to subsume the first party's way of thinking and finding the first party to be angering, upsetting and threatening.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my ways of thinking; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

The world as a whole is entrained to the dynamics of the laws of thermodynamics. We exist both by and for our evolved ability to break down barriers to entropy production. So to understand the human situation, we must be able to place ourselves correctly in nature. We must start with the core or fundamental imperative that drives us, and thus shapes our sociocultural mindset, our generalised and collective view of the world. — apokrisis

I guess this is the heart of the structuralism, the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. What does such a structure entail? If not particles then certainly objective relations of forces that are describable through geometry and other forms of mathematics. So this structuralism points to objective , mathematizable properties and attributes. Quite specific and quite powerful. It’s like a specifically shaped piece of a puzzle (of course we’re not talking about an object but a principle guiding a multi-dimensional system of relations) that constrains and organizes the whole. It could be otherwise but it s not . It’s thermodynamics and entropy, and that means that our most personal and intimate experience is most fully understood via this fundamental ‘puzzle piece’.

…. it is quite possible to step back from the human condition and see the whole story laid out. — apokrisis

Because of its primordially as objective structural source and center , everything else in the world, including all of human history , can be judged by way of correctness and conformity relative to this constraining structural center, where and how things have gone right or wrong.

….It is only when you get down to this level of science-informed modelling that you can clearly diagnose where things have gone wrong for us.


The fourth level of modelling - the one based on numbers that wants to treat nature as a machine - isn't doing so well. Or it has over-performed on the entropy production, under-performed on the material recycling.

So for the scientist who understands the reality of organismic being, the inadequacies of the machine model, all this as plain as the nose on your face. — apokrisis

The semiotic structuralism of Thermodynamics and entropy may not be an atomistic machine but it is still a RubeGoldberg-like machine to the extent that it claims to stand outside of time to reveal the whole story rather than determining and redetermining history from out of the here and now.

if philosophy was up to date, it would be presenting fine arguments about what it really means to be an organism - at the noosphere scale.

Instead, we have this stale nonsense - this warmed over Romanticism - about the human individual and the pluralistic struggle against totalising discourse. — apokrisis

Can’t get around the laws of thermodynamics and entropy and all of our personal hopes and dreams and feelings are beholden to these. Sounds a bit totalizing to me.

I dunno. I prefer to think history is reinvented every moment. But then I’ve never been very good at obeying laws, even the laws of thermodynamics.

The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”
— Joshs

This may be so, and one can also go in the direction of 'art mysticism' and insist that concept is wrong way to grasp 'Reality' in the first place. On the other hand, it's a move away from a critical and exoteric inquiry/articulation and back into the darkness of intuition and the ineffable. I'm not immune to the charms of the aesthetic or even the mystical. As Nietzsche might say, it may be only those who are secretly sustained by 'dark forces' who can indulge in reckless and thorough criticism — jas0n

There is nothing ineffable and mystical here. It’s stating a fundamental concept common to Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty , Derrida , enactive embodied approaches in cognitive science and Pragmatism that when we intend a meaning we intend beyond what we intend. Cognition is fundamentally anticipative.

I think we both need to be careful to distinguish between body and 'symbolic' ego. At times I've preferred an 'external' view, watching bodies learn to emit the token 'I' appropriately. A body is trained to emit tokens interpreted as a self-description internal realm. A body is trained that such a narrative features a single protagonist. This perspective, admittedly one among others, takes 'culture'-coordinated bodies navigating a shared world as primary — jas0n

How does a body know what is emitted ‘appropriately’? Via social reinforcement , shaping, conditioning? How is it that each of us emit what is socially ‘appropriate’ in unique ways , with unique senses that doesn’t simply correspond to the ‘ norm’ but contributes its own variation on the ‘norm’? Isn’t a social ‘norm’, ‘convention’, ‘shared practice’ merely an abstraction derived from what is in fact always ways of sense-making unique to individuals who particulate in those ‘shared’ spaces? Doesn’t this make the ‘shared’ space derivative and the personalistic space primary?
Isnt what you are describing precisely Heidegger’s concept of Das Man of average eveydayness , where we all share the same appropriate meanings?

In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
— Joshs

Plausible but vague and hard to do anything with. Something is gestured at. A Romantic poet might talk of the chains of rigid conceptuality scraping the incomputable flesh of a most elusive goddess. — jas0n

We see the importance of the future defining our present in Heidegger, too. Heidegger describes the proposition ‘S is P’ as ‘seeing something as something’. He calls this the ‘as’ structure and it is the fundamental basis of perception, cognition , affectivity and theoretical knowledge.

“...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc.
The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.”

In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as’ structure. In so doing, it “takes apart’ the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to it from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what
is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a freshly modified totality of relevance. It is produced rather than discovered.
"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth
what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "

Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf? — jas0n

But that’s the whole underpinning of ‘the ‘becoming-based’ thinking that took off after Hegel. That the barf of one age is replaced by the barf of the next is the basis of Nietzsche’s eternal rerun of the same, an endless parade of value systems with no ‘progressive’ direction.

Let me put it this way. Before Hegel, getting it ‘right’ in philosophy meant producing a scheme that conformed to the way things really, really are. While Kant deprived us of the ability to claim to know things in themselves, he assumed there was a real order independent of us that we could asymptotically approximate. But after Hegel , ‘getting it right’ was no longer about accurately mirroring and representing the furniture of the universe and their relations. Instead it became about capturing the nature of the becoming structure of experience. For Hegel this becoming structure could be totalized as a dialectical progression. Becoming was a ‘good’ progress with a specific logic that explained why things should get better and better as history unfolds, why social, moral, political and economic systems necessarily move towards improvement, why science can progress , even if not linearly. So there was still an element of ‘getting it right’ here , not in the capturing of the supposed fixed organization of a real universe , but in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress.

Nietzsche was the first to jettison the idea that there was anything to ‘get right’ about the structure of becoming, because he dumped the idea of a ‘good’ progressive direction to history. With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze)
one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’. Instead, one can only do a genealogical analysis that sees any philosophical or scientific point of view as valid just as it is. That is, they all, in different ways, perform Husserl’s transcendental reduction. This leaves intact any system of values, beliefs , theoretical postulates, and burrows beneath it to reveal presuppositions and conditions of possibility hidden from those who espouse them. This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways.

I would argue that we are past the era in which philosophy needs to make claims with a ‘truth status’ meant to conform to the way things ‘supposedly ‘really are’.

When people ask ‘how does a radical relativist know they are getting it right?’ they confuse what the relativist is doing with. They are inviting you to take a ride with them on a boat down the river as they act as guide. Everything you see from the boat, including yourselves and the boat , your guide will take as an example
of something that you might want to take as a fact, an empirical object , something that can be explained on the basis of laws and regularities. As guide, he doesn’t want to dissuade you from these claims , only to invite you to see if you can experience a mobile flow of change underneath your claims, not invalidating them but embellishing them in such a way that what you previously took to be simple, solid and self-identical now shows itself as harboring within itself a vibrant flow of change. Either you see this added downtime within the laws and facts or you don’t. If you don’t , your view is still valid and useful from the relativist’s perspective.

So a little boy talks to himself before he talks to mommy and daddy? — jas0n

He talks to them as the others to his self-othering monologue, a compounding of otherness. Of course , he will only discover their otherness by their failure to respond to him in as anticipatable a way as his body responds to himself.

There is no ‘interior monologue’.
— Joshs

Well, sure, but this concept remains legible. I am criticizing a subjectivism that would construct the world from the idea of such a monologue ( — jas0n

But by the same token there is also no meaning of signs absolutely ‘external’ to the subject. Hypostatizing the social simply swings the pendulum from an excessive subjectivism to an equally excessive empiricism.

Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic?
— Joshs

I would say that yes. I am making a claim about human nature, postulating a permanent structure in human experience. — jas0n

So this dialectical scheme is a kind of logic of becoming?

the meaning of signs is external to the subject — jas0n

But it is not external to the Dasein , the self-world relation, or Derrida’s differance, which is the temporalizing
differential that can be understood as the self’s relation to itself from one thing to moment. To say that the meaning of signs is ‘external’ to the subject is not to say that there is no pragmatic intimacy and belonging in meaning to say something. What I mean is always in a relation of a mattering, relevance and significance in relation to my ongoing concerns.

The subject is an effect of language' — jas0n

Eugene Gendlin disagrees with you. Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s, and also with Derrida.

Gallagher claims that:

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.

Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.

Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.

“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”

“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”

The 'interior monologue' is something that can only come after being a little we-blob. 'The subject is an effect of language' and 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Even if these are overstatements, they at least balance an old philosophical prejudice...the lonely subject, imagined as that which is most primary, most given, most secure... — jas0n

There is no ‘interior monologue’. Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social. My ‘internal monologue’ is therefore not internal but an exposure to alterity , and this happens BEFORE my engagement with other people.


“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other in the form, precisely, of the eternal return. I love what I am living and I desire what is coming. I recognize it gratefully and I desire it to return eternally. I desire whatever comes my way to come to me, and to come back to me eternally. When he writes himself to himself, he has no immediate presence of himself to himself. There is the necessity of this detour through the other in the form of the eternal return of that which is affirmed, of the wedding and the wedding ring, of the alliance.

From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”

“… how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)

Derrida is not saying that the subject is the effect of language seen as socially imposed norms. It is the effect of differance , writing , the mark, the trace.
The social intervenes already within myself, before my exposure to other persons.

Derrida critiques Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl on the primacy of corporeal intersubjectivity.

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection. That is a motif to which Husserl remains particularly and fiercely faithful.

... at the moment when it is a matter of orienting Husserl and making him take the other into account in a more audacious way (the other who is originarily in me, or for me, and so forth)-at the expense of a Husserl who is more classical, more ego-centered, and so forth-there is a risk of the exact opposite resulting. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism of immediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my own most properly proper-and in one blow, doing without appresentation, indirection, Einfohlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of the other more surely, more blindly, or even more violently than ever. In this respect Husserl's cautious approach will always remain before us as a model of vigilance. (P.191)

Even between me and me, if I may put it this way, between my body and my body, there is no such
"original" contemporaneity, this "confusion" between the other's body and mine, that Merleau-Ponty believes he can recognize there, while pretending he is following Husserl-for example, when he follows the thread of the same analysis and writes: "The constitution of others does not come after that of the body [with which Husserl could agree, but without inferring what follows.-J. D.] ; others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy. The corporeality to which the primordial thing belongs is more corporeality in general; as the child's egocentricity, the 'solipsist layer' is both transitivity and confusion of self and other" (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 174; my emphasis-J. D.). This "confusion" would be as originary as the "primordial thing" and would make possible the substitutions (that we have noted are impossible) between the other and me, between our two bodies, in what Merleau-Ponty unhesitatingly terms "the absolute presence of origins. " In another example, he writes:

“The reason why I am able to understand the other person's body and existence "beginning with" the body proper, the reason why the com presence of my "consciousness" and my "body" is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person, is that the "I am able to" and the "the other person exists" belong here and now to the same world, that the body proper is a premonition of the other person, the Einfuhlung an echo of my incarnation, and that a flash of meaning makes them substitutable in the absolute presence of origins.” (Merleau-Ponry, Signs, p. I75)

And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193).

Thinking/meaning is historical, more software than hardware, more 'we' than 'I. — jas0n

As I mentioned earlier, even though I think Gallagher and Gadamer misread Heidegger , they at least recognized that he was not dissolving the self into an interpersonal ‘we’ .

Gallagher criticizes Heidegger for not making what MerleauPonty calls ‘primary corporeal intersubjectivity’ primary. He says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer(2006) writes:

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

Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s.

Gallagher claims that:

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.

Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.

Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.

“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”

“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our
bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue. — jas0n

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames:

“Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar.” (Heidegger 2010)

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.” (Heidegger 1995)

I agree that interaction will probably be primary. 'Wet' may not matter. Why should moisture matter? My money is on stuff-independent structure. — jas0n

It cannot be ‘stuff-independent. The stuff is the particular embodiment , which cannot be separated from the nature of sense-making. Stuff-independent cognition only makes sense if we are remaining within the computationalist representationaliat model, but ones and zeros conceal the nature of embodied thought.

Yes, that's how I see it, and that's maybe my fundamental gripe about the transcendental ego, at least inasmuch as it's involved in constructions of the world from images given through peepholes. — jas0n

But Heidegger’s Dasein is involved in constructions of the world from a totality of relevance given beforehand.

Ah, but who would dream it was static? We project/discover 'motionless' patterns in the motion (project being on becoming.) — jas0n

Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic?

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience. — jas0n

What does. it mean to say that the repetition. of change is ‘eternally present’? There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present. If the now is a formal
structure, then it is one that is always filled with a different content. This is why Heidegger says that time is finite rather than infinite, becuase it is about an always unique meaning rather than a countable sequence.Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
moment t a new way of being. And what about the alternatives to this notion of temporality within modern philosophy? They all posit , in different ways , an objective time associated with movement. This is also an ‘eternal’ notion of time, but conceived as an infinite succession of punctual nows.

Another line of thought might be, in your opinion, is the capitalist free market economy 'superior' to the Epicurean commune? — universeness

Only to the extent that the larger background philosophical knowledge that a capitalist free-market economy depends on( Enlightenment thought , Adam Smith, etc) was not available to the Epicureans , so they did not have the option of choosing a modern free market system , whereas we moderns, being the consequence of older thinking like Epicureanism, have the requisite knowledge to choose to set up an Epicurean commune if we want. We could say that many today who are familiar with ancient history ( certainly not all) prefer modern capitalism to an Epicurean commune , but we can’t say the Epicureans preferred their model to modern capitalism, because the ideas did not exist for them.

No, in my opinion, such are not superior as they are a consequence of — universeness

Shouldn’t it be the case that they are superior precisely because they are a consequence of ? Isn’t that the whole point and value of advancement in understanding , that you take with you but build upon the old knowledge? The latin root of superior is ‘above’. There cannot be an above without a below, a foundation, a ground. The above is consequent on the below

A car can always be faster and have more functionality and more efficiency than an earlier model but that does not necessarily make it 'superior,' as I'm sure classic and vintage car enthusiasts will attest to. — universeness

The know- how required to build the new model was not available for the earlier model The new know-how is superior to the old know—how in that one’s newer knowledge gives one the option of building a replica of the older model but the earlier era of technology in which the older model was built did not have the option of building the newer model.
Similarly , in the era of modern and postmodern art, we have the option of recreating older style of art , but renaissance and Romantic artists did not have the option of creating modern or postmodern art. The newer era is superior in having the advantage of being the consequence of the older era.

I want to be clear that what I’m saying isn’t that newer painting or cars are necessarily aesthetically superior or prettier than the older versions , but that the newer ways of understanding art or car technology are superior to the older because they stand on the shoulders of the old ways and provide more. choices. The classic car enthusiast certainly isn’t averse to making use of the
newer technologies to help to preserve the old car , to make it run longer , to make it safer, to protect it better from rust and use better quality oil, gas, paint, tires than were available when the car was built.

To me, the term 'new science,' can be often be portrayed, by some, as in some way 'superior,' to 'old science. I simply defend against that. — universeness

Is modern physics superior to Newtonian physics? Is Darwinian biology superior to pre-Darwinian biology? Do they subsume and transcend their older versions , giving us more options in dealing with the world than the older models? In other words , the modern physicist can shift back and forth between a Newtonian and a quantum description , whereas the Newtonian only has one option.
Isn’t this true in many other areas of culture , from the arts to psychology and moral theory, that the new is superior to the old to the extent that it subsumes and enriches the old, giving us the option to choose from among a variety of ways of thinking ( including the old) that the older approach could not?

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. .) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real. — jas0n

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention. All three of these phases belong to the immediate now.

Heidegger argues:

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is
in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger’s unification of the components of time.
“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37)

I don't really subscribe to old ways or new ways of thinking, especially on a website that is forever quoting from ancient thinking and thinkers. — universeness

Do you feel the same way about old science vs new science? Does science advance, such that ignoring the distinction between old and new theories in physics or biology is hard to justify?

A better source on this for you might be Kenny's book, in which the similarities and differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations are set out explicitly. Much of what is in the Tractatus remains fundamental to logic; the suggestion that the "logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down" is... unsound. Logic proceeds apace, to the greater clarity of language. — Banno

We each get to choose our own Wittgenstein. My Wittgenstein is the Wittgenstein of Cavell , Diamond, Conant and the later Baker(and Anthony Nickles too) , who are hostile to readings of him by Kenny, Peter Hacker, P.F.Strawson, Pears and Hans-Johann Glock and who do indeed believe that the ‘logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down’.

Note, my friend, that you still don't deal with the problem of the substrate. I think you grant a plurality of subjects? Is there a world that precedes or contains them in any sense? If not, how do we communicate without the synchronization? (I dream that I wave at you and you dream that I wave at you at the same time, etc.) — jas0n

There is a world , but not a static one that sits there waiting for us to represent it faithfully with our science. The world is a continual development , and we participate in this development via our behavior. To know is to change the object of one’s knowledge. Through intersubjective discourse and culture each of us contributes to the evolution of the world. Our sciences produce new worlds in the form of knowing.

Consider what I take to be Heidegger's view, that one is primarily 'one' or the generic/default layer of habit/interpretation of a generation (and class and gender, etc.) — jas0n

There are many conflicting interpretations of what Heidegger means by language and how he sees the relation between self and culture. This is from a recent paper of mine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance, Rousse(2014) says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gadamer(2006) writes:

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

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

My question would be whether there's any reason why improved algorithms, more compute, and more/better data won't eventually result in machines being as good as humans at translation? — jas0n

Algorithms, computation, representation and ‘data’ are part of the ‘old’ way of thinking about what brains do. Affective, Enactive, embodied, auto-poetic, self-organizing , embedded and extended point to the new ways of conceiving behavior in living systems. A designed entity that can rival humans at translation will likely be along the lines of a ‘wet-wear’ creature that we interact with rather than ‘program’.

This vision seems to require either some kind of 'divine' synchronization of our video games or a substrate of some kind (what some thinkers have probably meant by 'matter'). — jas0n

Let’s look at how Husserl grounds the empirical
object.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

But this ‘object’ is not yet the empirical object. In order to attain that notion of objectivity we must be able to recognize other egos as being like us. We do this not simply by constructing some sort of internal model of how we think others think. Rather , we directly perceive them as ‘alter-egos’ as beings like us but also different from us. Again, this is not our imaging of the other from
behind a wall of solipsism. It is a direct perception of them as other. As such, we can accept their own perspectives on objects which differ from our own, and take on a new attitude such that now our own experience of objects becomes a mere ‘appearance’ of the consensually perceived ‘empirical’ object that is the same for all of us. But meanwhile , this ‘empirical’ object is one which none of us actually directly sees.

So o hope you can see that this complex and intricate subjective and intersubjective system of reciprocal coordinations is anything but a ‘ divine synchronization’.
It is instead the actual way that we jointly build up a shared world.

I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness? — jas0n

Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view.

d you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what? — jas0n

What would be private here if every moment of experience subtly remakes this ‘private’ realm? Where is the inside , the dream, the subject , the solipsism if the inside is always redefined by its outside? In order to have a solipsism there must be something , some intrinsic , immanent content lurking at the origin that protects itself from transformation as it encounters a world There is absolutely nothing of this in what I’m suggesting. On the contrary , I am suggesting a radically temporal and radically mobile and transformative notion of subject-object relationality. For me the origin is the difference, the in-between, the differential , neither subject nor object nor just a cobbling together of the two.

I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is.

If one assumes that an ego is 'given' or 'primary,' then perhaps one can cast everything else as an appearance for that ego. But I don't think this story is plausible. To me it makes more sense to take the ego and the world as 'equiprimordial' or conceptually independent. — jas0n

Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness.

Modern phenomenology got its start with Husserl's assertion that stripping away the layers of historically acquired philosophical and scientific dogma via the reduction, in order to get to ‘the things themselves', reveals to us an irreducible primitive of immediate present experience. But rather than this primitive subsisting in an objectively present ‘now' point appearing once before being replaced by another in an infinite series of past and future punctual ‘nows', Husserl proposed the ‘now' as a tripartite structure composed of a retentional, primal impression and protentional phase. In doing so, he replaced a temporality justifying objective causation with the temporality of the intentional act. Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense.

But this ‘someone’, understood most reductively , is just this empty zero point. So what is essential here is the idea that every experience is an intending beyond itself , and an exposure to an alien outside that remakes the nature of the ‘ego’ . Both the subjective and objective poles of an intention are remade by the act.

I've been reading Popper's Logic, and I was surprised how flexible P was, probably because people like to paint papa Popper as the grinch who stole Christmas. He liked an alternative view (conventionalism) but defended his own. I think it's wrong to frame such a decision in terms of 'could not accept,' as if he was a child afraid of thunderstorms — jas0n

The key for me is that Popper believed that determination of anomalies and the impetus of scientific revolutions were rational affairs, making use of settled method. Kuhn disagreed with this rationalism.


“If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.

This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).

The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.”
( Stanford Encyclopedia)

If other subjects exist, then so does the world? Yes? — jas0n

I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed as variations on an ongoing theme.

The plausibility of the thesis that the world is my dream depends upon common-sense experience of myself as a social animal who understands that sense organs can be damaged so that this or that human is shut out from a realm of color or sound. The very notion of an ego seems dependent on other egos. The notion of truth-telling seems to depend on some kind of community in relation to a shared world. — jas0n

He does not believe the word is my dream, but that we don’t represent , mirror, or correspond to
an indepdentlt existing world. He , like Derrida , Nietzsche and Heidegger believes that a world is enacted , produced and continually transformed through my perceptual and intersubjective engagement. My anticipations of events are subject to continual validation or invalidation from an outside which is always already co-defined by my interpretations of it.

Yet it also seems that the flexibility of Popper's system is often overlooked. 'Convention' is a surprisingly prominent word in The Logic. The point made above about basic statements reminds me of passages from On Certainty. — jas0n

Popper rejected Hegelian dialectic in favor of a Kantian notion of an assumption approach of science toward truth He could not accept the notion that all aspects of thought, empirical theorization and methods and practices of scientific verification are contingent. They belong to communities of research which, when they undergo change , displaces not only the former theories but the accepted methods of proof that were tied to theories. Wittgenstein agreed with Kuhn, against Popper, that scientific change is like change in the arts , a matter of aesthetic shifts rather than an asymptomatic approach of truth through falsification.

He literally set out to create a ‘science of consciousness’. That is all. He was not dismissive of science merely critical of the physical sciences encroaching upon psychology and such - rightly so imo. — I like sushi

Firstly, this ‘science of consciousness’ was based on radically different principles than that of empirical
science. Thus , he was not attempting a study of consciousness using methods that have anything whatsoever to do with what you would associate with empirical science. Second, his transcendental method , which is what he means by science of consciousness , doesn’t just apply to consciousness, it also applies to the natural empirical sciences, critiquing their limitations of self-understanding and grounding them in transcendental subjectivity.

I like Husserl, and he's clearly pro-science. He sees the problem too, which is the clash of two 'obvious' realizations: (1) there is a world that precedes, outlasts, and contains me and everyone else and (2) only my functioning nervous system and living body allows me to be a me who is aware of is. — jas0n

Husserl is not an empirical realist. He does not believe it is coherent to make the claim that a world precedes, outlasts and contains me and everyone else like some kind of container. On the contrary , the natural ‘ world’ is constituted via progressively more advanced intentional acts, and cannot be assumed as ha i g an existence out side of these acts. The ‘world’, understood most primordially, has its origin in the subject-object structure of time consciousness. That is to say , the transcendental subject is only what it is as a constantly changing flow of associative syntheses that is every moment exposed to and changed by an outside. But this is. it an outside of worldly objects as empirical naturalism would have it.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine?

Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

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

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