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.

I was hoping you’d say a bit more about what the mental
means to you , taken as a cause. I agree there’s a lot of disagreement within psychology about the nature of the mental ( the subjective , consciousness, the feeling of what it’s like, etc). Yet I dont agree with your claim that “this is an area of inquiry where there is a great amount of disagreement—an area that seems to be getting less, not more unified each decade. On the contrary, I suggest there is emerging a general consensus among active inference and 4EA researchers in cognitive neuroscience concerning the embodied , embedded and non-representational nature of consciousness and affectivity. I wonder how your thinking about the mental as cause relates to or differs from this consensus, which also integrates important facets of phenomenonological philosophy.

If the mental NEVER has causal efficacy then it can never affect behavior and so natural selection can never select on the contents of phenomenal awareness. At the same time, "mental phenomena," would apparently be the lone, totally sui generis thing in our universe that exists but is causally insignificant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is it you are envisioning as the structure of the mental? Does it have parts, elements, sub-components?
Are you defining it in terms of a neuro-cognitive organization? If so, then question comes down to whether the global neural organization can have top down effects on its components, and the answer is yes. Not because of any special status allotted to the mental, but because of the non-linear properties of living systems.

But how would the defeat of physical cause and effect by a mind so detached from the world it knew nothing in itself, set one free in the physical world? — Fire Ologist

You don’t need a mind detached from reality to defeat physical cause and effect. You can get to the same goal by looking at the non-linear dynamics of self-organization in living systems. Efficient cause doesn’t apply here.

Sure events are rewritten in partisan histories, time travel stories and human memories. I've never seen it in a chemical reaction; thus remain unswayed. — Vera Mont

Looking at the level of detail of a chemical reaction will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

Given this, we can conclude we could have acted differently for the simple reason we are not limited to only one act.
— NOS4A2

In any given situation, you are, quite literally limited to only one act. — Vera Mont

What distinguishes reductive determinisms from those that allow for the evolution of freedom is whether an effect is determined by a cause in a unidirectional manner, or whether the nature of the cause reshaped by the effect. This is how complex dynamical systems operate. Put differently, in complex systems the past is changed by the present that it functions in.

But what happens when you realize that everything we construct today will utterly change and be wiped away? What happens to the “objectivity” that is derived from the shifting sands?

It never was more than an illusion. Intersubjectivity only becomes objectivity by convention — Fire Ologist

Changing is not the same thing as being ‘wiped away’. I’ll give you an example. In the shift from Newton physics to relativistic and quantum physics, was the Newtonian description of macro phenomena ‘wiped away’? No, it continues to be useful. Non pomo-oriented philosophers of science will say that we continue to understand the Newtonian concepts in an unchanged form, and merely correct or supplement them when dealing with sub-atomic phenomena. Postmodern thinkers argue that when in using the Newtonian concepts today, we alter the sense of meaning of this system of terms ( terms like mass and energy), but in ways that are subtle enough that it appears for practical purposes as though we are accessing their original meaning. I think this is a good example of how our concepts evolve and change in ways that are subtle enough that we can move back and forth between the older and the newer senses of meaning in ways that are useful to us. Progress may change our older concepts , but it also depends on them, references them, builds on them. It just doesn’t do so in a cumulative, linear, logical manner. We can agree with Kihn that a new paradigm is better than an older one, that it makes progress over the older one, by solving more puzzles But we can also agree with him that assuming a linear , cumulative progress in thinking is really no progress at all, because it just recycles the older concepts and adds to them. Real progress requires real change in ideas, and real change in ideas demands qualitative , gestalt shifts in the axes of meaning within which empirical concepts get their sense.

The fact that our schemes must be turned on their heads from time to time doesn’t mean that they aren’t in touch with a real world , as though only the schemes changed but the world remained the same. We can say the same thing about the world around us, the real, material world that we interact with , that matters to us, as w can about our schemes. That real world is constantly turning itself on its head as well. We as human knowers are qualitatively changing our understanding in conjunction with and in relation to a world which is changing its relation to itself, and to us, over time.

It’s subjective any way you go.
— Tom Storm

Then why speak? It’s all babble. No one will ever truly know anyone or anything if it’s all subjective any way you go. Nothing is left to share among people in discussion. Anything shared would be objective. — Fire Ologist

It’s actually intersubjective , at least with regard to empirical truth, and the intersubjective intertwines itself so inextricably with the subjective that it is only in a move of abstraction that we can claim to separate them.
And given that the objective is a product of intersubjective coordinations and material practices, the objective does not come before the other two but is derivative. What comes first is a world which is always intelligible and understandable in some form, due to the social and linguistic practices that we share. You don’t need a god or a notion of absolute truth to explain why we understand each other. The question is not why we understand each other, but how are systems of values and knowledge formed through interaction , and how do they change over the course of history, such that communities of divergent intelligiblity arise? Once we have embarked on this line of inquiry, the search for the ‘really real truth’ may come to be seen more and more as a way to freeze the progress of inquiry in its tracks, rather than as the best way to enhance our ability to get along with each other.

If Nietzsche's "atheistic revaluation" really worked, why doesn't the suicide prevention hotline use it to give hope to their clinically depressed users? — Tarskian

Nietzsche often considered suicide due to his physical suffering. It was his philosophy which rescued him. But as you said, any approach only works if one believes in it. Or more precisely, one can only absorb a philosophy to the extent that it is relevant to and consistent with their way of life. Any therapeutic approach can help someone in distress if it resonates with their outlook, which is why a suicide helpline can encourage one person’s atheism and another’s religious faith without compromising its mission of saving lives. . Of course an idea can change the way we look at things, but even here, we must be ready to integrate what it has to teach us in order for it to benefit us.

The biggest cause of depression and despair is breakdown in interpersonal relations. Our self-worth, and the meaningfulness of our world, are dependent on our ability to form bonds with others and successfully navigate conflicts with people we care about . This requires insights into why people do things that surprise, disappoint or anger us, why trust and loyalty breaks down. If we leave the answers to these questions to our gods, we will not develop the skills to discover the perspective of the other from their vantage. Getting along with others is the most difficult challenge in life, and making progress at it is our responsibility, not the gods.

I consider everything else that Nietzsche wrote on the matter to be his personal rebellion against the absurd. He clearly knew that there was a problem. He thought that he had found a possible solution, but he hadn't. Rebellion against the absurd only brings false hope. Salvation will never arrive. Not in the form of alcohol, or drugs, or any otherwise meaningless atheistic revaluations — Tarskian

Is the only alternative to a dead determinism, a determinism of assigned causes and effects that we invented for the convenience of building stuff, a spirit of some kind? Is life meaningless simply because it doesn’t have some ULTIMATE meaning, purpose or truth? Is this what really causes feelings of despair, hopelessness and absurdity? Isn’t t a feeling of meaningless in a present situation that leads to such overblown philosophical conclusions about the pointlessness of it all? It is a hallmark of severe depression that the present hopelessness draws into itself the part and future, so that it becomes impossible to envision any change from one’s current state. One ceases to be able to remember or anticipate any hopeful state of mind.

We spend most of our lives ensconced within one value system or another which imparts a sense of meaning and purpose to life . It is this participation on the part of individuals in shared cultural practices of meaning and value that allows us to communicate with each other and make the world intelligible. Nietzsche doesn’t deny this. His point is that nihilism results from trying to freeze in place a particular cultural notion of truth or ethical goodness. Doing that eventually kills off the meaning of the values we co-create as a society, like repeating the seem word over and over until it loses all sense. To remain within meaning, we must continually renew and transform our understanding of ourselves and the world, not for the seek of some ultimate goal, but for the sake of going with the flow, being one with the process of transformation, enjoying the value systems which give us meaning and delighting in overthrowing them when they have outlived their usefulness.

In line with what Nietzsche predicted, western civilization is now in a constant rebellion against the absurd, frantically trying to avoid the inevitable final outcome, which is that it will spectacularly commit suicide. — Tarskian

This is not what Nietzsche predicted. Nihilism is not the inevitable result of atheism. In fact , Nietzsche argued in his later works that religion and spirituality are nihilistic, because they represent a negation of life, as does the metaphysical notion of free will. He believed that only an atheistic revaluation and overturning of all religious, ethical and scientific values, such as the value of truth and goodness, can stave off nihilism.

'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts'
— Wayfarer

I haven't the foggiest what that is supposed to mean. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Not everything that matters is calculable.

It took many centuries for the idea to emerge that that Universe might be purposeless, it is one of the realisations (if it is a realisation) that is born out of the mechanical philosophy of Galileo and Newton. I suppose the idea that the Universe is animated by reason is a thread that is common to nearly all traditional philosophy. It’s only with the advent of modernity that this is called into question. — Wayfarer

Can the Universe be ordered without being animated by purpose? Do you see the difference? Purpose and reason seem to suggest A purpose and A reason. That is , a realism in which things works according to a certain scheme , a particular content of meaning. By contrast , it could be that the universe is ordered in the sense that it changes with respect to itself in a way that is profoundly intimate. What makes this unfolding ordered is not an assigned purpose, but the lack of arbitrary content violently polarizing its movement in one direction or another. For instance, psychologist George Kelly wrote:

The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.

Kelly says all events in the universe are interlocked via temporal succession. What does he mean by interlocked? He says “all its imaginable parts have an exact relationship to each other”, but by ‘exact' he doesn't appear to mean an objectively causal exactitude, even though he describes it as all working “together like clockwork”. The order of material causality is dictated by the empirical content, which is inherently arbitrary. A car engine's parts have an exact causal relationship with each other, but not an inferential one. If one part were removed, the others would retain their identity, even if the engine no longer worked. By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is quite different than saying they are externally, causally connected via the representational relation between subjective knower and objective world.

Whereas mechanisms are assembled piece by piece from different parts, each with its own already fixed properties, that are all externally related to each other, living wholes are made up of internally related ‘participant parts'. That is, instead of being structured into wholes by being all joined together by third entities (such as glue, nails, etc.) into unified structures, the ‘parts' of a living whole do not already have a fixed character, nor are they fixed in place by ‘glue' or ‘nails’.

Unlike for Vervaeke, ‘getting the universe right’ doesn’t mean capturing some particular contentful purpose or reason or scheme that we can nail down as the ‘truth’. It means that through discursive and practical niche construction, organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration. Over time , this process of mutual reconfiguration can reveal itself to us as Kelly’s profoundly interconnected and intercorrelated movement of a universe. We dont need the universe to be purposeful in order to reveal a reality in which human behavior can be understood as ethically benign. In fact, purpose, by implying a right path and a wrong path, gets in the way of such an understanding.

“Johnny is doing his best,” is a statement about the effort that Johnny is applying to some activity, and humans can apply different levels of effort. Step 1 is assessing the level of effort, which is a matter of fact. This step is like using the radar gun to determine the car’s speed. Contrary to your moralizing worldview, the assessment of effort is not yet a normative or moral matter. Step 2, the normative step, only arises when we want to judge how much effort Johnny should be applying to the activity. — Leontiskos

What devices akin to a radar gun measure effort? I assume you want to focus your attention on the brain and what is taking place inside of it , rather than on other parts of the body. A decrement in bodily ‘effort’ can be due to many things, such as fatigue, injury, disease , aging. But we’re taking about mental effort, right? So do we use electrodes on the skull? An mri? The observations of a community? And don’t we want to distinguish physiological causes of performance decrements in the brain (physical fatigue, illness, lack of food or drink, excessive hate or cold) from those having to do with intent and motivation? Don’t we want to focus our attention where we believe a person uses physiological issues as an EXCUSE for not trying their hardest?

It seems to me that this ‘mental’ effort, the decision to try or not to try as hard as one can , regardless of one’s amount of sleep or nutritional status, is a matter of engaging in a game whose rules are familiar to one, and then choosing to dial down one’s effort. So arent there two normative dimensions involved here, the criterion of success at the game, and the criterion of optimal vs suboptimal effort? For instance, let’s say the game I opt into is driving my car to work as fast as I can, because I’m running late. My goal is to shave off at least 10 minutes relative to my usual pace. It will be very clear to me whether I have succeeded in this normative goal. But whether I succeed or fail does not in itself say anything about how much effort I put into the game. That’s a different game, with its own norms. Although you have said we don’t always know whether we were trying our best, at least some of the time we know it, and in those cases maybe the simplest way to measure our effort is to use a verbal scoring system: On a scale of one to ten, how hard were we trying?

Now , I have been claiming that we are always trying our best at something, so I reject the premise behind this scoring system. I would put it this way. We are always putting our effort into some game or other , but the criterion of success changes with changes in the game. When I am late for work, and I choose a game of speed, my criterion of success is different than when I am not playing the game of speed. There are times when I am in no rush, when I am in mood for a game of touring. The aim of this game is not to drive fast , or slow, but to drive in such a way that I am maximizing my engagement with the countryside around me. This can mean speeding up, slowing down, pulling over, changing route. I’ll know how successful I was at my game of touring by how satisfying the trip was for me, not by how fast I was going.

Notice that it doesn’t make sense to say that , while touring, I wasn't trying my best at making time. The concept of speed didn’t come up for me because I wasn’t thinking along those lines at all. My point is, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that in understanding the relation between effort and performance, it is necessary to identify not just what we are not doing, but what we are doing. There are a nearly infinite variety of games we can opt to play, and we switch among them all the time. When we naively assume another is continuing the play the game we believe they are playing, we may not notice this shift in games. So we only notice their failure to perform within the rules we assume they are abiding by, and we fail to notice that they are already involved with a different game. The are still doing their best, but their effort is applied in a completely different direction, with different criteria of success.

↪Joshs You're still not addressing how Aristotelianism fetishizes intent over sense-making. OK, then. — javra

What I mean by fetishizing intent is the assumption that intent can be ethically incorrect, that one can want what one shouldn’t, in addition to success or failure at intelligible sense-making.

Is any of this sense-making - both on the part of the consciousness involved and on the part of their own unconscious mind which stands in opposition to their conscious will - in any way independent of some form of intent ... and, thereby, non-intentional in quality?

If not, then I don't understand how Aristotelian-ism "fetishizes intent over sense-making" ... this since the later is then fully contingent on the occurrence of the former — javra

As I wrote to Philosophim in another thread, addiction is so powerful because the rewards are immediate and the detrimental effects are more gradual. The drug makes one sicker and sicker, pulls one of out of social world and into isolation more and more completely, but one also knows that the immediate effect of one more fix or hit or drink is to make one forget about all anxieties. One has to learn to see immediate repercussions of the long-term harm, immediate repercussions that are so powerful they override the immediately gratifying effects. They used to call this ‘hitting bottom’ in alcohol addiction , but many never hit bottom.

, are you here arguing that at least some sense-making is non-intentional (be it either conscious or unconscious)? — javra

If it matters to us, if it is important to our goals, then we are implicitly aware of it, even if we don’t know how to articulate it explicitly in words.

, I think you can make a much stronger case for the result of Ellie's decision (no matter which it is) promoting her eudaemonia, her overall well-being. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn't, and can't, make us happy, though we may see that it is the right thing, and will work toward our eventual good — J

My objection to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as eudaemonia, and this whose ethical theories are influenced by it, is that it conflates the hedonic and the cognitive aspects of experiencing. As a result, it fetishizes intent over sense-making. One can allegedly ‘want’ suffering , pain or misery instead of pleasure and happiness. We make decision all the time between short term reward and long term benefit, between the thrill of the moment and an ‘eventual good.’ But in doing so, we are not dealing with different forms of the hedonic, but different ways of making sense of the situations that will produce happiness. In other words, it is the cognitive aspect of goal-seeking that is involved when we choose none route to happiness over another. Choosing the longer term benefit over the immediate reward requires construing this far off reward within the immediate situation.

When we get what we want, doesn’t that automatically make us happier than we would have been had we not achieved that thing that we wanted?
— Joshs

This is a psychological question, not a philosophical one, I would say. For what it's worth, my answer is No. All too often, as I know from my own experience, getting what you want can be a bitter disappointment (and bad for you too!). — J

It’s both a psychological and a philosophical question. It would be strictly a psychological question if I were looking only for an empirical explanation. You said getting what one wants can lead to disappointment. Understood in terms of temporal sequence, I begin with a desire, which already has in mind its object, at least in a vague way. What I have in mind is a source of happiness for me in the instant I imagine it. If I achieve that desire, if what I actually get reasonably matches my expectation, it will make me happier in the instant I get it, just as generating the image of it in my imagination does. What you’re talking about is a situation where what I actually achieve doesn’t reasonably match my happiness-producing expectation. The ‘real thing’ doesn’t stack up against what my expectation produced in my imagination. Your point seems to be that reality often falls short of our dreams. I dont disagree with this. I’m simply saying that, strictly speaking, it is not the case that we dont want to feel happy, since the feeling of being happier is built into the very concept of desire. Desire is the expectation of obtaining an object or achieving a goal that will make us happier than we would be if we didn’t obtain that object.

. possibly I've hung out with the wrong people but the idea that "humans necessarily want to be happy" is extremely implausible to me. Here, for instance, is a person named Pat. Pat suffers from a variety of psychological, physical, and spiritual maladies that produce a kind of chronic frustration, depression, resentment, and lack of ease -- in short, what we mean by "unhappiness." If you ask Pat if they "want to be happy," the answer you will get is: "Nonsense. What you call 'being happy' is for sheep. I operate on a higher plane. Of course I'm miserable, but that is what happens when a person of true intellect sees the world aright. — J

I’m trying to distinguish ‘ happy’ from want, desire, preference. When we get what we want, doesn’t that automatically make us happier than we would have been had we not achieved that thing that we wanted? Is it possible to will misery, or is that a contradiction in terms? I recognize that some believe consistent happiness is impossible , or that no growth comes without pain and suffering, or that misery brings with it its own insights, but that’s not the same thing as wanting unhappiness as the immediate goal of a desire.

when determining the guilt of someone in a court of law, someone might say of the accused - 'It feels like he's guilty to me.' - and determine guilt based on this emotion rather than any facts provided about the crime. I suspect we wouldn't want important decisions made based on how it 'feels' to any given person at the time. Would we not want to use differnt tools? How do we determine which approach to privilege in the light of what you write about emotion — Tom Storm

Great question. What kind of mental processing is taking place when we have an intuition, a gut feeling? How often do experts in a field, such as surgeons, pilots, tightrope walkers, rely on the felt sense of a situation to guide them? Are they ignoring the facts that they have learned over the course of their careers or, on the contrary, holistically drawing from that reservoir of knowledge to arrive at a decision? I think what makes that decision ‘felt’ rather than laid out as a logical structure is that it is too fresh an insight to articulate is such developed terms, not because it is lacking conceptual substance.

To be rational, we must often go against ourselves — Philosophim

And by what criterion do we ‘go against ourselves?’ What higher motive intervenes against ‘emotion’ except another emotion? Let’s say I derive pleasure from playing video games all day. Then I decide it is getting in the way of my accomplishing more important goals. In both instances, the pleasure motivates my actions. The video game provides pleasure by challenging my skills. and giving me a clear measure of my progress. When it occurs to me that I could be using my time better elsewhere, this is motived by the potentially greater pleasure associated with those other activities. Perhaps they are even more challenging , or challenging in a more multi-dimensional way. In each case, pleasure is intimately associated with creativity, and constitutes the measure of what is intellectually challenging.

Emotion here goes hand in hand with intellectual development. Why should we want to be reasonable unless knowledge were intrinsically rewarding? Why would knowledge change our mind about anything, causing us to ‘go against ourselves’, unless reason were its own reward? Addiction is so powerful because the rewards are immediate and the detrimental effects are more gradual.

I don't even think most anti-realists believe the position themselves, even if they think they do, since they generally end up pointing to some standards as the benchmark of the good. Even pronouncements about how such anti-realism can enhance freedom or "fight fascism," presume that freedom is good and fascism is not. And indeed, they often make this the standard that justifies everything else. So, I don't even see myself as that far from them in the end. I too put a premium on freedom, I just think they badly misunderstand its essence by only considering it terms of potency/power. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are positions that purport to go beyond the realism-anti-realism binary. I’m thinking of poststructuralists
like Deleuze, Focault, Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that of course there are standards of right and wrong, true and false. These are like the banks of the river , which maintain their stable shape against the changing flow of the river. But they point out that the bank eventually erodes and changes, just like the river itself, but much more gradually. Perhaps the changes in the bank are so incremental that we don’t notice them, ignoring the drift of sense over time of our formulations of moral goodness. What allows societies to function is not an unchanging foundational basis of the good, but shared intelligibilities and values within a contingent culture. One could say that mutual intelligibility is a foundational good , but the substantive content on which that intelligibility is based is contingent and relative.

Todd May is among those who claim that such thinking sneaks in ethical grounds through the back door:

What I would like to argue here is that despite themselves, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard predicate much of their political work on several intertwined and not very controversial ethical principles. The mistake, made by Deleuze and Foucault in avoiding ethical principles altogether and by Lyotard in trying to avoid universalizing them, is that their avoidance is itself an ethically
motivated one. In the conversation cited above, where Deleuze praises Foucault for being the one “to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,” he is laying out a principle of behavior that it would be unimaginable to assume he does not think ought to bind the behavior of others. In resisting an essentialism about human nature, there may
have been a resistance to telling people not only what they want but also what they ought to want.

Where they must form an ethical commitment, and this is a commitment in keeping with poststructuralist political theory, is at the level of practice. Some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable.” “…claims to ethical truth can be seen as no more problematic than factual claims to truth, claims made in the cognitive genre.” Ethical claims also possess a universal character. Claims that one ought to perform action X in circumstances C, or that killing is wrong, or that it is ethically praiseworthy to help those who are oppressed by one’s own government are not made relative to a cultural context… It is precisely because ethical claims mean what they seem to mean that they are universal; and if they are true, they are binding upon everyone.” The difficulty attaching to ethical discourse derives from the difficulty, given the possibility both of competing values and principles and competing descriptions of the circumstances one finds oneself in, of articulating a correct ethical position. Were ethics to be situation-specific, there would be no such thing as ethics,
because there would be no generalization.”

What May and other critics don’t appreciate is that criteria of acceptability are contingent products of differential relations within a community. The challenge for Deleuze and Foucault isn’t to determine what constitutes an acceptable ethical content but to avoid getting trapped by any qualitatively contentful ethical principle.
“…what is at issue here is not how to promote the correct arrangements but how to assess whether an arrangement or practice, once promoted, is indeed active or reactive. In other words, the question is not one of how to achieve a goal, but one of deciding which goals are to be achieved.”

The ethical question for poststructutalistsm is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how we manage to think beyond justice understood as singular traditions of the good, so that we can focus on enriching our traditions with alternative intelligibilities, thereby expanding the inclusiveness of our relational structures.

No, this is just another person trying to justify fulfilling their emotions and elevating them in importance as something approaching rational thought. It is not. Emotions are snap judgements with what we perceive at the time, and nothing more — Philosophim

Would you be amenable to the idea that it is just as a convenience that we separate affective and rational aspects
of thought into district categories? What if we just treated the rational and the affective , the hedonic and the cognitive, as two inseparable components of all thinking? Affect would be more than impetus, like a reinforcer that points the way and retires to the corner while rationality does its work. At every turn in a rational argument the aim we are driving toward acts as a guide and criterion for what constitutes the correctness and relevance of our thinking. It not only constantly tells us how we are doing , but whether we should continue to do what we are doing. It sets out and adjusts what is at stake and at issue for us at every moment of rational thought.

Emotions are for children and animals. They are guides and impulses for doing, not thinking. Rationality is contemplative. It considers all sides. It looks for outcomes. Then you have to decide if you want to act on that rational outcome, or your emotion — Philosophim

I know this won’t convince you, but I wanted to counter your comment with Robert Solomon’s view of emotion:

“I didn’t mean it; I didn’t know what I was doing. I acted without thinking; I acted irrationally. I was emotionally upset.” How often we hear that! And, without attempting a refutation, we sense its falsity, the hollow desperation that accompanies a feeble and halfhearted excuse. “I was emotionally upset”; that is the touchstone of a cop-out plea of momentary insanity. But we know better; not only did you “mean it,” but that single ephemeral “lapse,” as you call it, was more full of meaning than the years of labored inhibition that preceded it. You knew exactly what you were doing. You seized the precise moment, and you went straight for the most vulnerable spot. You knew exactly where to cut deepest, how to manage the most, and you knew exactly what the consequences would be. You had planned it for years, brooding and in fantasy, privately rehearsing and envisioning its effects in quick forgetful flashes.

And yet you think the seeming spontaneity of that instant negates those years of strategy and rehearsal. “Irrational”? Nothing you have ever done has been more rational, better conceived, more direct from the pit of your feelings, or better directed toward the target. That momentary outburst of emotion was the burning focus of all that means most to you, all that has grown up with you, even if much of it was unacknowledged. It was the brilliant product of a lifetime of experience and knowledge, the most cunning strategy, and it had the most marked sense of purpose of anything you have ever done. Despite the consequences, can you really say that a you wish you hadn’t done it? And yet we hear, “emotions are irrational”—virtually a platitude. The emotions are said to be stupid, unsophisticated, childish, if not utterly infantile, primitive, or animalistic—relics from our primal past and perverse and barbaric origins. The emotions are said to be disruptions, interfering with our purposes in life, embarrassing us and making fools of us, destroying careers and marriages, and ruining our relationships with other people before they have even had a chance to take hold. “It was fine, until you got involved,” “it would be all right if you didn’t feel so guilty about it,” or “it was a fine triangle until he got jealous and spoiled it.”

The emotions are said to disrupt our thinking and lead us astray in our purposes. This what I call the Myth of the Passions: the emotions as irrational forces beyond our control, disruptive and stupid, unthinking and counterproductive, against our “better interests,” and often ridiculous. Against this platitude, “emotions are irrational,” I want to argue that, on the contrary, emotions are rational This is not only to say that they fit into one’s overall behavior in a significant way and follow regular patterns (one’s personality”), and that they can be explained in terms of a coherent set of causes according to some psychological theory or another. All of this is true enough. But emotions are rational in another, more important sense. Emotions, I have argued elsewhere,1 are judgments, intentional and intelligent. Emotions, therefore may be said to be rational in precisely the same sense in which all judgments may said to be rational; they require an advanced degree of conceptual sophistication, including a conception of self and at least some ability in abstraction.

They require at least minimal intelligence and a sense of self-interest, and they proceed purposefully in accordance with a sometimes extremely complex set of rules and strategies. In this sense, we may well talk of the “logic” of the emotions, a logic that may at times be quite difficult to follow but a logic which is, nevertheless, never merely an emotion’s own. Even the most primitive emotions, fear for one’s life of love of one’s mother, require intelligence, abstraction, purpose, and “logic” in this sense.

The topic was how to rationally approach suicide. I didn't state you wouldn't be emotional. I stated don't make decisions due to emotion. That's irrational — Philosophim

I have a quibble with the way both of you have been opposing the rational and the emotional in this conversation. Are either of you familiar with the affective turn in the social sciences and philosophy that took place a few decades ago (Antonio Damasio’s work is one exemplification of it)? The gist of it is that emotion is the cradle within which rationality rests. It is what gives the rational its coherence, intelligibility and relevance. Without emotion rationality becomes dysfunctional and useless. I understand what you mean when you refer to situations where persons dealing with illness and death become lost in a fog of confusion. Last year my mother starved herself to death as a result of advanced dementia. My brothers and I had to support my 101 year old father in making difficult decisions concerning whether and to what extent to intervene in my mother’s actions ( feeding tube vs home hospice vs nursing home). The issue of agency becomes critical as people we love get older and their mental functions are compromised. Earlier in my mother’s illness, I fought with one of my brother over whether to sneak antidepressants into her regimen of pills to counteract her depression and agitation. I remembered that prior to the onset of her symptoms , she was opposed to the idea of anti-depressants. My brother was convinced that her alzheimer’s made her incapable of making that decision any longer, as though there was no core sense of self left there.

Health care workers have undoubtedly been influenced by studies showing that those with advanced dementia perform poorly on emotion recognition tests. But these studies can easily be misinterpreted as indicating that people advanced dementia lose their ability to understand emotion, which can lead to under-appreciating their agency and humanity in this regard. By the same token, opposing emotion to rationality by treating the former as ‘irrational’ leads to dismissing the traumatized person’s communications as deranged. That is, we blame their confusion on their ‘emotions’ rather than on the unfamiliar new situation they have been thrown into. All I’m saying is that rather than couching the issue in terms of rational vs emotional , you might consider it in terms of breadth of perspective. Those dealing with profound trauma and loss lack the conceptual anchors to process their situation, since familiar intelligibility is precisely what has been lost, not rational capacity.

Science can collect 'observations' and data. Knowledge on the other hand requires a definition to be provided and a theory of meaning to be defended.

I for one am privy in favor to demoting knowledge in part to be the socially special sorts of beliefs we possess. Knowledge as merely a subset of belief of a privileged sort by some pragmatic/social means of justification — substantivalism

Have you read any Heidegger? Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe captures Heidegger’s approach to the objectivity of science below:

Goals, projects, and networks of purposes play a constitutive role in science, just as they do in the case of artifacts…
I suggest that background networks of projects, values, and teleologies do not merely constrain and focus scientific inquiry. As with artifacts, they also serve to constitute the very sense of the entities under investigation. For example, Dupre ´ (1993) argues that background goal structures and projects result in different modes of classification, effectively constituting different sortals which serve to classify and, more important, individuate entities.

Consider a rock on a mountain side. The rock is observed over some considerable time by a number of different parties who are all eventually asked whether it is still the same rock. A tour guide says that it is not, because a lightning strike knocked the rock from a conspicuous location which made it a famous landmark that functioned as a guide for tourists. Its significance as Beth's Rock is therefore no more. A geographer agrees with this interpretation. However, a physicist disagrees and explains that it is the same rock because it is the same ‘lump of stuff' that has endured through space-time; it is constituted from the same matter and retains the same shape. But the resident chemist disagrees with the physicist and points out that it is not the same rock. The original rock was made from element x which has been subject to fast atomic decay.

All of element x has broken down to element y and hence it is no longer a lump of x so how can it be the same rock? An artist chimes in to say that it is the same rock because it retains the same unique blend of surface textures, shadows, and exquisite patterns that have made it such a popular choice among painters over many years. Needless to say we could go on and find many more projects, values, and functions which serve to constitute our sense of the extant; a thing's essential ‘whatness', ‘whereness', and ‘existence'. Again, teleological webs seem not only to constitute objects by selecting different sortals, relative to which x is individuated, but also to constitute the sortals themselves. To claim otherwise would be to commit oneself to a near infinite variety of possible sortals from which our interests select, which amounts to much the same claim in any case.

To the unspiritual rationalist, the foundations of our universe are irrational and meaningless. There is simply nothing that allows him to conclude differently. From what premises would be be able to do that? — Tarskian

You claim that rationality leads to the conclusion that the universe is absurd, irrational and meaningless, and that therefore spirituality is the only alternative to despair and desire for suicide. It seems to me you are forced into this assertion by a conception of rationality that is abstractive, narrow and rigid (the same conception of the rational that led Enlightenment and German Idealist philosophers to posit the need for a god) . It leaves out a deep range of ways of producing intelligibility , meaning and understanding that are more fundamental than abstract, derivative modes of thought like formal logic and mathematical calculation. There are more intricate and robust forms of order, continuity, consistency and relevance available to thinking than that of the stultifying and stifling forms of rationality you have in mind.

I completely agree with you that rationality as you understand it is profoundly arbitrary in its foundations, but what you forget is that it is a human invention, one method among many possible methods we concocted at a certain point in history to organize our world. And , as you have discovered, it is a limited and ultimately inadequate way of making sense of the universe. But you make the mistake of blaming the universe for one crude and inadequate way of making sense of it that human beings happened to become enamored of at a certain point in our cultural development. Instead of replacing this clunky device you call rationality with a more adequate way of organizing events, you hold onto it and supplement it with ‘spirituality’, which is just your clunky rationality in another guise, a guise which allows you to fill in the holes of you logical analyses with whatever attributes you think it leaves out (the origin of purpose, love, meaning). Instead of filling in your failing ‘rationality’ with an equally inadequate ‘spirituality’ , I suggest you dump both sides of your dualist ontology in favor of a more useful and productive method of understanding and meaning-making.

If you want to to convince people (and maybe you don't, but surely most people don't think the explanatory gap has been solved) it might be helpful to lay out the core premises and how the conclusion is supposed to follow from them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think one’s explanatory toolbox is limited by the choice to translate philosophical concepts into a naturalistic vocabulary. I’m sure you’re aware that the pansemiotic empirical notions involved in this discussion draw heavily from Peirce’s unique synthesis of Kant and Hegel. Assuming your familiarity with their work, would you say that Peirce or Hegel offer a solution to the explanatory gap?

Bayesian mechanics is about how brains minimise the environment's capacity to surprise us.

It has all the energy. We have all the smarts. We learn to make it a predictable relation. And that is how we insert an "us" into "our world". That is how a modelling relation arrives at its biosemiotic Umwelt — apokrisis

I’m thinking of Merleu-Ponty’s position, where he states:

“the 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”

It seems to me that this deviates a bit from a modeling relation, in that it relies less on symbolization and coding , directed from organism to world, than to patterns of making changes in a world whose features are defined by the nature of that normative activity. Producing a world doesn’t mean coding a world but performing one.

The irony is that these stories are dripping with blame and reproach, attempting to guilt-trip me into buying into your irrational system. "How dare you tell poor little Susie that she wasn't doing her best! You monster!" I do think that guilt-tripping on the basis of fictional shame-porn is a problem. :roll: I would imagine you could do better, especially given the fact that your strange accusation-based strawman followed my distinction between an assessment and an accusation ("The person in question need not even be told") — Leontiskos

But you’ll notice in the story you were right about Susie not trying her best. It was just that she knew what was going on with her and the reason for it. I’m not blaming or reproaching you. But I will insist that
claiming someone is not doing their best is an accusation, regardless of how you sugarcoat it. All forms of blame (including concepts like narcissism and laziness) are based in hostility, and as such are accusations, even if they masquerade as affectively neutral rational judgements. Hostility has no choice but to remedy a violence against the moral with a corrective which itself must be violent, a battle against a bad will. I don’t blame you for blaming, because I believe you’re doing the best you can, given how things seem to you, and your blameful approach is the best way for you to make progress on your thinking. I don’t mean your were determined by causes, I mean you have put a lot of work into thinking through issues of morality, and what you currently believe undoubtedly represents an achievement with respect to your younger self. I would say the same of the larger culture that embraces moral guilt and blame. They are moving in the right direction, so I encourage rather than blame them. My approach isn’t right for them until they’re ready to embrace it, on their own terms.

I drove into town yesterday. Was I doing my best when I was driving? Of course not. Was I attempting to not-do my best? Of course not. Nor was I self-consciously aware that I was not doing my best. If I can drive well enough without doing my best then I will do that, because it requires enormously less effort. — Leontiskos

How did you know you weren’t doing your best? What kind of information should one look for to tell them where they stand with respect to ‘their best’? What aspect of a task seems effortful to us, and why? Does it depend strictly on the features of the task, independent of our own attitude toward it, or is the feeling that something requires too much effort a function of our interest in it? How many times do we say to someone, ‘wow, that task looks very hard, it must have required quite an effort’, and have them respond, Nah, I was enjoying myself so much it felt effortless’?

Where we choose to focus our energy and attention, and our perception of the effort involved, is a in large part a function of what aspect of our situation we feel we can immerse ourselves most completely into. We choose to devote less effort in one direction in order to focus on another, more fulfilling one. From a skilled coping point of view, motivation can’t be defined in quantitative terms. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mindfulness who study skilled coping argue that one is at one’s best not when one applies a plan and then accelerates one’s way through its performance by increments of degree ( I am doing better and better, trying harder and harder, because I am going faster and faster). The measure of doing one’s best from the vantage of skilled coping is about total attentiveness and immersion within the contextual changing demands of the task at hand, a ‘going with the flow’ rather than trying to force the flow into a pre-designed trajectory and endpoint. It’s about being responsive to the changing nature of the task rather than ‘forcing’ our will on it.

When someone regrets something and says, "I shouldn't have done that," they are very often acknowledging that they were not doing their best — Leontiskos

No, they are acknowledging that how things seemed to them at the time they made their choice, and how things seem them now , has changed. Often, new information comes to light that wasn’t available at the time one decided, and one berates and blames oneself for not having known this information earlier. Guilt is about second-guessing oneself: ‘I should have , could have’. It is 20/20 hindsight. But they were doing their best when they acted in a way that they now regret, and they are doing their best in now reflecting on that original decision in light of the new information which shows that their former self to have made a mistake.

The world you are proposing is one full of narcissists who believe they are not at fault for anything and are beyond criticism. — Leontiskos

I didn’t say guilt isn’t useful. I said that we can transcend the notion of guilt as self-blame and moral culpability. As long as human beings constantly transcend their circumstances, constantly unfold new outlooks and cultural identifications, they will continually re-assess their relationships with others, and this will lead to feelings of guilt. While guilt is most often associated with our sense that we have sinned, at its core , it alerts us to the fact that , as we grow and change, we find ourselves dislodged from previous ties and loyalties. For instance, one can feel guilty for unintentionally betraying close friendships with co-participants in a fundamentalist religious community once one no longer embraces the religion’s credo. The feeling of guilt forces a new decision; do we try and conform, fit ourselves back into the social role that we have become dislodged from, or forge ahead and find ways to mend those broken bonds of trust by creating a new social role for ourselves, and friendships based on new dimensions of mutual understanding?

Bayesian mechanics models that modelling relation for us. We build a world of intent and expectation in our heads so as to feel we are in control of the world instead of the world being in control of us. We insert our being into the world as the new centre of its being. Consciousness is the feeling of standing apart in ways that subjugate material reality to our mental whims. A difference between us and the world is what must be constructed so that there is then an us that can be deeply engaged in the flow of the world — apokrisis

Do we build a world of intent and expectation ‘in our heads’ or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? What’s the difference between a model and a representation, and the difference between both of these and the enacting of a world through sensori-motor coupling with an environment? Isnt normative point of view (intent and expectation) the hallmark of all living self-organizing systems rather than just conscious ones?

Eg., - what does this mean? Can you do it in a sentence?

The boundary of the self that we care about , and whose enrichment motivates our actions, isn’t physical or spatial , but functional. That is, we naturally embrace into the self all of the world that can be assimilated on enough dimensions of similarity. If we didn’t have this filter, our world would be an indecipherable chaos, as would our ‘self’.
— Joshs — Tom Storm

The self is just a way of integrating experiences on the basis of compatibility or similarity. It is a continually evolving point of view or perspective that only maintains its unity by changing in a self-consistent manner as it incorporates and organizes new experiences. So the issue isn’t that of self vs other persons , but the limits of my ability to assimilate experiences that are too alien relative to my system of understanding. Sometime my own behavior appears alien to me , and i become unrecognizable to myself. By the same token. I can empathize so closely with those I love that they become part of my self.

aybe you should start a thread (if there isn't one) on how we pursue moral quesions using the kind of approach you prefer. I can't see how it would work except as theory, given how society currently functions. What would need to change for such ideas to gain traction in a substantive way? — Tom Storm

The beauty of this way of thinking is that it can make our life profoundly more satisfying regardless of whether a single person besides ourselves embraces it. Unlike something like Marxism, its value doesn’t come from changing the world, but from changing our own interpretation of the intent and motives of others (and ourselves). Most of why we suffer from the actions of others comes not from their actions in themselves, but our inability to fathom why on earth they found it necessary to behave in ways that cause pain to those around them. We throw up our hands and resign ourselves to the idea that humans can be arbitrary, capricious, irrational, at the mercy of narrow instincts, drives, social influences. But this leaves us with profound stress and anger.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you argue that ‘not doing one’s best’ generally requires that the person who is the target of such an accusation be aware of the fact that they are not doing their best, that they deliberately desired and chose to underperform relative to what they knew they were capable of?
— Joshs

No. That someone has not done their best only means that they have not done their best, not that they must have known it. Note too that an assessment that someone is not doing their best need not be an accusation. The person in question need not even be told. If you stop using words like "accusation" you will draw some of the emotion out of this debate, and we might actually come to a considered answer — Leontiskos

Are you saying that Susie might not be consciously aware that she is not doing her best? Are you imputing some sort of unconscious psychodynamics here? I thought the morally responsible agent must be acting from free will? Are there two wills at play , a conscious one and an unconscious one, and if so , how can our choices be free if they are made beneath our awareness? I imagine this dialogue between you and little Susie:

You:” I know you haven’t been doing your best lately with your
piano lessons, but don’t take this as an accusation. I love you and I only want what’s best for you.”
Susie looks crestfallen and replies:
“What do you mean? I’ve never worked so hard at anything in my life. How can you say that?”

You: “You may think that, but I know better , and so does your teacher.”

Susie: “ No she doesn’t. She takes what I say at face value, because she knows I’m a sincere person.”

You:
“ It has nothing to do with sincerity. You have a little demon whispering in your ear not to try as hard as you can, but their voice is so soft, it only penetrates to a deep subliminal level of your psyche.”

Susie: “Then how can you hear the demon?”

You: “ Um, I can’t. I just know you , and what you’re capable of.”

Now Susie calls up her Kellian psychotherapist( Susie is very precocious.She also has a lawyer, so FYI) , who quotes Kelly directly on this point:

“We do not use the conscious-unconscious dichotomy, but we do recognize that some of the personal constructs a person seeks to subsume within his system prove to be fleeting or elusive. But of this we are sure, if they are important in a person's life it is a mistake to say they are unconscious or that he is unaware of them. Every day he experiences them, often all too poignantly, except he cannot put his finger on them nor tell for sure whether they are at the spot the therapist has probed for them.

Now Susie has a confession to make.
“Maybe you’re right. I did try hard to embrace piano like I have my artwork, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just didn’t want to disappoint my teacher, and especially you, since I know it meant a lot to you that I become a pianist like my sister.

The central question still looms: is your position a priori or a posteriori? Is the proposition you assert necessary or contingent? — Leontiskos

I could give a glib answer and say that I believe that my position is necessary only because I have never encountered a situation that invalidated it for me. But that would be a kind of agnosticism , as though my mind could be changed by a counter experience. But my position is a priori, resting on the belief that the concept of immoral intent and motive, which includes not trying hard enough and laziness, is a confused notion.

I'm interested. Is there more? — Moliere

Oh yeah. The golden rule, like the 10 commandments, pre-supposes what it should be putting into question, that we harm , disrespect and oppress each other because we desire such outcomes, that is, that we find satisfaction in instigating or allowing them to happen. So we have to be reminded ‘ don’t do that, it’s not nice, even if it feels nice’. My critique is connected with what I wrote you in a previous post about the psyche being a community of selves, such that the idea of being self vs other-directed doesn’t make much sense. We don’t have to be told to be other-directed or empathetic. Our skin doesn't define the boundary of our intrinsic self. The boundary of the self that we care about , and whose enrichment motivates our actions, isn’t physical or spatial , but functional. That is, we naturally embrace into the self all of the world that can be assimilated on enough dimensions of similarity. If we didn’t have this filter, our world would be an indecipherable chaos, as would our ‘self’.

The golden rule, rather than appreciating our need to make our world recognizable before we can assimilate it ( and this applies especially to the values and thoughts of others unlike us), blames ‘bad intent’, as though we already understand others and still desire to disrespect them (because we’re ‘evil’ or ‘pathological’ or ‘selfish’.) So it perpetuates violence by generating its own violence through anger and blame. Those miscreants who ignore the golden rule deserve to be punished, or at least ostracized and condemned. Can you imagine a world where most people believed that? It would look exactly the same as the world we live in now, where everyone believes in the golden rule and everyone points fingers at each other, throws stones at each other, shuns each other.

What part of the golden rule is dissatisfying, do you think?

Asking since you said "perhaps"

For myself I at least like a commitment to honesty with self and others'. But it's merely a preference. — Moliere

Nobody asked me, but I hate the Golden Rule. It perpetuates the very violences it is designed to pre-empt, by assuming that morality is a matter of motivation and intent rather than understanding.

I want you to think about why it is that someone who is doing their best is not responsible for immorality and for bad effects that might result. A central question here is whether "everyone is doing their best" is supposed to be a contingent and synthetic truth, or a necessary and analytic truth. On my lights it only makes sense as a contingent truth, because the question of whether someone is "doing their best" relies on an investigation into how they are doing what they are doing. In everyday language when someone says, "Johnny is doing his best out there," the presupposition is that it is possible that Johnny might not be doing his best. In doing his best he is doing something that he need not be doing.

On this account, "Johnny is doing his best," is a bit like, "The Corvette is going 100 mph." The claim about the Corvette is not a necessary truth, and therefore in order to verify its truth condition we must examine the speed of the car via the speedometer or a radar gun or something of the sort. Only once our examination is complete are we justified in confirming or denying the claim about the Corvette. — Leontiskos

Let me split up this issue of ‘doing one’s best’ into what I see as its different aspects. Let’s take as an example little Susie and her piano lessons. Susie has only had about 10 lessons so far. When she practices for her lesson, is she doing her best? I have argued that desire is always tied to anticipatory sense-making, to expanding possibilities of intelligibility, and that this is intrinsically reinforcing. There is therefore nothing from a motivational point of view that stands in the way of our ‘going for broke’ in terms of pushing our creative imagination to its limits. And what are its limits? Well, no one expects Susie to perform a Chopin sonata after 10 lessons. Not just the range of possible innovations of individuals , but also of cultures is constrained and defined in relation to how we already understand our world. The lone genius is a myth. Brilliant thinkers arise out of milieus (Classical Greece, Renaissance Northern Italy, 19th century Germany).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you argue that ‘not doing one’s best’ generally requires that the person who is the target of such an accusation be aware of the fact that they are not doing their best, that they deliberately desired and chose to underperform relative to what they knew they were capable of? Bringing this back to little Susie, dont we need to surmise that she simply didn’t feel like putting all her effort into practicing? It wouldn’t be a question of aiming a radar gun at her speed of playing, since this wouldn’t tell us anything about her performance relative to her potential unless we compared the results over time and discovered that she was moving in the wrong direction. Even this wouldn’t take us very far without asking her whether she thought she was losing interest in the piano, or alt least losing interest in exceeding her previous level of skill, for whatever reason.

As you can see, I’ve moved the terrain of the issue of ‘doing one’s best’ away from that of a variability in performance given an unchanging ground of positive motivation (intrinsic reinforcement) to push the limits of one’s ability and understanding, and toward connecting variation in performance directly to shifts in intent and motivation. Now things become complicated. Let’s say the teacher calls Susie lazy. What does laziness mean? Does it mean that Susie has decided not to push her creative potential to its limit, and that my claim that such a directedness toward expansive knowing is not intrinsically motivating? Or does it mean that Susie continues to actively expand her curiosity and inventiveness, but not in the direction her teacher wants her to direct it? There are all kinds of reasons we hold back in performance situations. We may be entering a crisis of commitment, where we discover that our time is better spent elsewhere. Perhaps our daydreaming which gets in the way of a current task lead us to our true calling. The question , then, is whether laziness reflects a failure on the part of the accused or a failure on the part of the accuser to recognize that the lazy person is in fact doing their best, but not in a way that conforms to the accuser’s expectations. Perhaps your perception that the other is not doing their best indicates an inability to see past the normative expectations through which you judge their motives. You see what they’re not doing, but not what they are doing.

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly wrote:

When a teacher complains that her pupil is ‘lazy’ and the psychologist encourages her to observe what the child does while he is being ‘lazy’; when a social worker complains that her client is ‘shiftless’ and the psychologist suggests that she observe and describe the persistence and ingenuity with which he maintains his indigent status; when the psychiatrist complains that his patient is too ‘passive’ for therapy and the psychologist urges him to delineate the variety of ways in which the patient utilizes his ‘passivity’; when a fellow psychologist describes his subject as ‘unmotivated’ and one urges that self-expression be more carefully observed—all of these are examples of the application of the psychology of personal constructs to the analysis of spontaneous activities.

When we find a person who is more interested in manipulating people for his own purposes, we
usually find him making complaints about their motives. When we find a person who is concerned about motives, he usually turns out to be one who is threatened by his fellow men and wants to put them in their place. There is no doubt but that the construct of motives is one which is widely used but it usually turns out to be a part of the language of complaint about the behavior of other people. When it appears in the language of the client himself, as it does occasionally, it always-literally always appears in the context of a kind of rationalization apparently designed to appease the therapist, not in the spontaneous utterances of the client who is in good rapport with his therapist.

One technique we came to use was to ask the teacher what the do if she did not try to motivate him. Often the teacher would insist that the child would do nothing -absolutely nothing - just sit! Then we would suggest that she try a non-motivational approach and let him "just sit." We would ask her to observe how he went about "just sitting." Invariably the teacher would be able to report some extremely interesting goings-on. An analysis of what the "lazy'" child did while he was being lazy often furnished her with her first glimpse into the child's world and provided her with her first solid grounds for communication with him. Some teachers found that their laziest pupils were those who could produce the most novel ideas; others that the term "laziness" had been applied to activities that they had simply been unable to understand or appreciate.

There simply is no evidence that things will get better. It does not exist. Still, the only way to sit out a bad patch, is to believe it anyway in spite of having no evidence. The rational person will reasonably give up, while the spiritual one keeps going. This phenomenon seems to be enough to explain why atheist societies do not last long enough to actually make it into the history books — Tarskian

Some of the most famous atheists ( Sartre, Marx, Derrida, Nietzsche) believe that rationality evolves or becomes, so that today’s evidence becomes tomorrow’s superstition. By the same token, spirituality and doubt walk hand in hand. Perhaps these atheists have a more reliable approach than the faithful.

There cannot be an intersubjectively valid metaphysics worth rational consideration which is not consistent with, and coherent within, the terms of science. That is not to say you are not free to believe whatever seems right to you for living your own life. We all have that prerogative, just don't expect such beliefs to be universally relevant, as science is — Janus

All scientific paradigms rest on an underlying set of metaphysical presuppositions, but it is not job of the scientist to make this metaphysics explicit. Occasionally we get a scientist who is up to the task of pointing to these philosophical presuppositions (Heisenberg, Bohm, Smolen, Prigogine). When a new paradigm replaces an older one, the underlying metaphysical framework changes , along with criteria of what constitutes evidence, proper method, and many other aspects of scientific conduct. The idea that there is only one scientific method, and that science is superior to philosophy because it relies on validation of evidence, is in itself a metaphysical presupposition.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science translates its metaphysical assumptions into a conventionalized language of empiricism, whereas a philosophy fleshes out its underlying assumptions within a less conventionalized language. Neither domain, neither philosophy nor science, is superior to the other in terms of arriving at new metaphysical positions and thus new paradigms. They just use different conceptual vocabularies to get there.

Often, philosophy will produce a new set of grounding assumptions before the sciences get there (Descartes and Spinoza vs Newton, Kant and Hegel vs Einstein, 19th century neo-Kanrianism vs cognitive science. As Jerry Fodor puts it, "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.").

Translating the metaphysics into the language of a science may make it accessible to a larger percentage of the population , and therefore more ‘universally relevant’, but by that same criterion the translation of a basic science into technological devices is more relevant that the basic science by itself. In any case, naturalizing and empiricizing it doesn’t make it more “intersubjectively valid” , it just makes the terms of its philosophical validity intelligible to a larger community.