For me it's not even there to begin with, not when it comes to the grand terms. (I can more or less intend to say thank you and accidentally say you're welcome.) It's as if even our complicated metaphysical statements are still just complex animal sounds, merely determinate enough in their "meaning," and far from crystalline. — hanaH

What’s missing here is the absolutely vital
relation between what has been and what is being intended. For both Derrida and Heidegger a profound pragmatic belonging co-exists radoxically alongside a relentless self-othering. The world continues to be the same differently, it has a thematic continuity , a belonging to a totality of relevance, as Heidegger would say. This is different from Ryle’s causal-based model
of motivation.


Ryle suggests that ‘John knows French’ is a warrant which gives us the right to infer that John understands what he reads in Le Monde or that he is communicating successfully when telephoning in French

If you read Wittgenstein through Ryle , that may explain our disagreement. In a previous thread , I distinguished between the Oxford school interpretation of Wittgenstein ( Peter Hacker, Ryle, Malcolm) and that of Cavell, Diamond and Conant.

To me this is drifting in the wrong direction, from the unhidden back to the hidden, from public doings back to the pseudo-explanatory entities of the metaphysicians — hanaH

Notice now Antony has been attempting to articulate the difference between my relation to my own thinking and sensing vs my participation in a language
game with others. You mentioned Wittgenstein. For him word use is person-relative and occasion sensitive. What happens to the notion of person-relative if the ‘unhidden” is defined in relation to an overarching group, norm, convention?

You also mentioned Derrida. He was asked this question about the shared , the unhidden and public in relation to
the temporal self. I read his response as grounding ‘unhidden’ in the temporalizing self.

“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public': , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation' : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.

Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here. I quote you: “If one thinks back to the Wittgensteinian debates again, it is clear that there are substantive issues concerning the alleged normativity of meaning and the role of a community in sustaining the practice of a language-game which involves other minds rather more than other times. “ I would immediately agree on the level of the normativity of meaning. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn't call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .) This is obvious. And, again, I would say that it is true even for animals, for animal societies. They form a community of interpretation. They need that. And some normativity. There is here some 'symbolic culture‘.

But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely other ). So 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)

I agree that we alter context as we speak. Is the intended sense ever fully present? This is the heart of Derrida for me — hanaH

For me too. For Intended meaning to be present to itself it must come back to itself , and in doing so, it already means something other than what it intended. Heidegger conveys something similar with his notion of temporality.

Please explain objectivity in phenomenology. We know what is objectivity in epistemology. — Caldwell

Here’s a summary of Husserl on the origin of the ‘real’ object:

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological philosophy, attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.

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 constantly 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.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

Yes, we can talk and act when we are alone in ways that end up changing the way we talk and act around others. But unwitnessed actions (including speech acts) don't seem unlikely to change signaling conventions/habits directly — hanaH

But do not these group habits and conventions themselves originate as person, context and perspective based? If everyone , in their ‘private’ experience, is continually, incrementally changing the sense of the language they share with a larger community, then one could say that the shared language is already changing even before any specific language interaction among people. Certainly if there were a severe and prolonged enough breach in communication among participants ina community, then the shared norms would break down.
So there seems to be a reciprocal relation between private and public language.

Derrida talks about this stuff. Writing has tend to be cast as a dead thing, as opposed to speech which is living. But, as you mention, speech is not so pure in relation to writing. In both cases we have repeatable tokens. In our different handwriting we can write the "same" letter or word. — hanaH

Yes, according to Derrida the logocentrism plaguing Western philosophy for centuries has fiven preference to speech over writing. Speech was supposedly immediate and a direct conveying of intended meaning. Writing was seen as mediated, indirect, and thus prone to distortion and contamination.
As you point out, speech is designed to be repeatable. In fact, a meaning conveyed in speech must be repeated in order to continue to exist. And as soon as we repeat a meaning we subject it to contextual alteration, which destroys the purity of its intended sense.

Toothaches" and "God" and "justice" and "truth" are, in my view, tokens, just like the cries of the vervet monkey, albeit caught up in a far more complicated system. It might be helpful here to think of individual social organisms as relatively closed systems that signal one another "materially" (as opposed to a telepathy of rarefied concept-stuff.) As I see it, the point is synchronized behavior. So looking inside a single organism for meaning seems misguided, though one might naturally inquire how the sign system is "stored" as it is learned, etc. — hanaH

What about the idea that my talking and thinking and sensing to myself is already a form of sociality that submits my sensations and thoughts to contextual
alteration? From this vantage , there is nothing ‘closed’ about an individual social organism , even when it is reflecting ‘privately’ on its own experience. This is the basis of a phenomenological analysis of perception. Not the solipsism of a closed system but a continuous exposure to and being affected by an outside.

I recommend Mind and World

Have you read McDowell?

Is this reading of Heidegger unusual or well established? — Tom Storm

It’s consistent with Derrida’s reading of him and Eugene Gendlin’s. Gendlin bases his whole approach on the body, but it’s a different notion of embodiment than most of those floating around in embodied cognitive science.
Those approaches rely on reciprocal causality, whereas Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida abandon causal thinking in favor of a radical understanding of temporality.

Phenomenology as metaphysics and ontology: Heidegger presents something similar, with the addition of historicity and hermeneutics. Do you think Heidegger's critique of Husserl for neglecting the two Aitches is sound?

And what about Merleau-Ponty's correction of Heidegger's (and Husserl's?) neglect of the b — Janus

Husserl begins from perception, but he connects this back to the subject’s history of prior intentions such that one is always encountering the world in relation to pre-acquired habitualities and tendencies. So there is always a context of larger goals and concerns that are involved when we see the world of perceptual objects.

What Heidegger did was to radicalize the pragmatic, goal-oriented aspect of experience. We don’t see a tree and then connect our perception back up with prior concerns in a series of additional acts. Rather, an perception is immediately a taking something with respect to how it matters to us in a global way. This being ‘for the sake of which’ is what makes Heidegger’s work historical and hermeneutic.

As to the body, I think Heidegger did something more radical than M-P and this results in the notion of body playing an odd and seemingly secondary role in his work.

But phenomenology is another thing. If one wants to speak of experiences and consciousness, I need more than enumeration of subjective descriptions. I want to be able to say, so we have this, what now? Where is the challenge to this? Everyone has it. — Caldwell

It sounds like you are reading phenomenology as subjective introspection. That’s a common misperception.
Phenomenology is just as much about objectivity and intersubjectivity and the way they are inextricably bound together with subjectivity such that no science can escape the fact that its grounding and condition of possibility leads empiricism back to phenomenology.

For you, is M-P an enhancement of Husserl's work or a heretical adaptation of it? — Tom Storm

Good question. Here’s the intro to a part I wrote comparing the two authors:

“ In recent years, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have become valuable sources of inspiration for philosophers and psychologists embracing embodied approaches to consciousness. A common tendency within this scholarly community is to judge the success of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology by how closely it aligns with Merleau-Ponty's project. Some believe that Merleau-Ponty nudged phenomenology further along in the direction that Husserl was aiming toward in his later years, the implication being that Merleau-Ponty's project is a more radical one than Husserl's and that Husserl was not able to overcome a tendency to fall back into transcendental solipsism, subjectivism, Kantian idealism. Others claim that a reading of the entire Husserlian ouvre including unpublished manuscripts reveals Husserl to have escaped these charges of Cartesianism. In either case it is Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology that is often used as the yardstick by which to measure Husserl's account.

The thesis I will argue here is that a crucial dimension of Husserl's philosophy is being missed when we read Husserl using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception as a normative frame of reference. Instead, I offer a reading of Husserl that shows him to have undertaken a deconstruction of Merleau-Ponty's starting point in the structuralism of gestalt corporeality. Following from this, Husserl's approach offers a decisive alternative to Merleau-Ponty's explanation of the role of alterity in one's relationship to one's body as well as intersubjective engagements.”


I find it interesting that , although French was his native language, Derrida ignored M-P till late in his career, except to critique his interpretation of Husserl. In contrast , Derrida’s first works focused heavily on Husserl. One can only speculate why this was so, but my belief is that M-P’s approach, while consonant with the ideas of many other phenomenologists, fell short of the radicality of Husserl from Derrida’s vantage. Those who dislike Derrida may see his preference for Husserl as an affirmation of M-P’s superiority.

Here’s a Derridean critique of M-P’s reading of Husserl:

“ 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. And when he says "without introjection," indeed, this is not to qualify our access to the other's living body, but the access that others have-that they have, just as I have to their own proper bodies ("without introjection") . But this access that others have without introjection to their bodies, I can have-to their own proper bodies-only by introjection or appresentation. Husserl would never have subscribed to this "It is in no different fashion . . . [ce n'est pas autrement . . . ] " ("It is in no different fashion that the other's body becomes animate before me when I shake another man's hand or just look at him" [Signs, p. I68] ) , which assimilates the touching-the-touching [Ie touchant toucher] of my own proper body or my two hands with the contact of the other's hand.”(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.190)

Husserl writes: "Since here this manifold expression appresents psychic existence in [carnal] Corporeality, thus there is constituted with all that an objectivity which is precisely double and unitary: the man-without 'introjection'" (Husserl, Ideas II, p. I75) .

"Without introjection": these words do not describe my relation to the other's carnal "corporeality" (Leiblichkeit) , which, as Husserl always says unambiguously, is present for me only indirectly and by way of analogical "introjection," which is to say appresented, as this passage clearly puts it. However, what this appresentation delivers to me is another man, and what for him is inscribed-in his phenomenon, which he has, for his part, and which will never be mine-is an originary relation, "without introjection, " to his own proper body, which is the relation I have with my body but will never have with his. There we can find the appresentative analogy between two heres. Husserl had continually insisted-be it only in the two preceding pages-on indirect appresentation and even on the fact that the other's hand, such as I see it while it is touching, "appresents to me his solipsistic view of this hand. " (Let us be quite clear that without this unbridgeable abyss, there would be no handshake, nor blow or caress, nor, in general, any experience of the other's body as such.)

“... 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).

As I understand it, phenomenology is non-committal on questions of metaphysics or ontology. It takes the self and world at their word; how it all seems is to be unearthed and examined with a richly metaphorical eye, prior to any metaphysical commitments based on this or that assumption about the nature of reality. — Janus

“Our monadological results are metaphysical, if it be true that ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical. On the other hand, what we have here is anything but metaphysics in the customary sense: a historically degenerate metaphysics, which by no means conforms to the sense with which meta­physics, as "first philosophy", was instituted originally.”(Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

...it seems beside the point to posit persisting self-identically for the objects that are not currently being used by me.
— Joshs

And yet it is what you and I do; here, you in looking for the reply you now read; me in writing it with an expectation that it reach you. Beside the point? What could be more salient here, now than your reading this? — Banno

Yes, our anticipating into the next moment is absolutely central to what salience, mattering and pragmatic
use are all about. Maybe I’ve been reading too much phenomenology , but when I think about the spoons being where I look for them , I don’t have in mind the persistence of a thing , but an expected new variation in a an ongoing performance. The performance is the enacting of a body-environment interactive cycle.
The spoon isn’t an independent element that just happens to participate in the performance. It ‘drops out of’ the performance as a derivative biproduct. If a ‘spoon’ is only a slot in an ongoing narrative and body-world performance, then the looking for and finding of a spoon just demonstrates that as self and world feed back into and modify each other moment to moment , there is a referential continuity to this creative
becoming that gives our experience ce a thematic consistency and predictive utility. One could say the objects of our experience self-persist as returning to themselves and to us differently but recognizable in relation to what we want to do with them. The world talks back to us , but only in response to our formulations. It’s feedback changes
those formulations , which then trigger a newly modified talking back from the world. The aim of all this back and forth between formulations and the changing feedback it triggers from the world is to coordinate the interaction in more and more intimate and intricate ways, choreographing the dance between changing self and changing world in the direction of seamless movement through new events.

When you put the spoons back in the draw, they do not cease to exist — Banno

Kind of like the beetle in the box? We can of course say the spoons still exist outside of our interaction with them, but saying so is meaningless outside of some use such an utterance serves relative to our pragmatic purposes. Notice that claiming use-independent existence is meaningless is quite different from claiming that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Kantian Idealism isnt denying the existence of a world of use-independent givens. Wittgenstein and phenomenology, however , are arguing that such assumptions are pointless and don’t do anything for us, except to the extent that they emerge as relevant out of some ongoing project. It’s interesting to note that a spoon can be meant as a cultural object as well as a physical object. When Im hungry and look for my spoon I’m searching for an implement to feed myself. When I look to see if there is object permanence to a physical object called a spoon, my aim is different. Or I could be looking for the last entry in the book that I am writing. When I find it I can say that it existed when I wasn’t there. But does it exist for others, too? Something certainly exists for them if they locate my words on a laptop. But I know they don’t understand the words the way I intend them. So what they find is not the same for them as what I find.
And when I find my previous words , I notice that they seem a little different than I remember them when I typed them. Just the act of going back to them changed their sense in some subtle way. Is this experience so different from that of locating physical objects that I have put away?
Is there no interpretive change in the sense of what the object is for me as I return to use it day after day? So yes, I could say that the spoon continues to exist without me , but now I’m realizing its existence WITH me is one of a continually contextual shift in sense over time. So if that’s what underlies the so-called self-identical persistence of the object when I’m using it , then it seems beside the point to posit persisting self-identically foe the objects that are not currently being used by me.

Each of us has our own perspective on things . No one else can share this identically. It is what makes each of us unique. That doesn’t mean we can’t agree on many important things , but this requires that we start from
where the other person is at rather than from assumed objective standards. Those standards are just an averaging of all our individual differences. Kind of like 98.6 fahrenheit is just an average of many bodies. We don’t demand that everyone be at the same temp.

You don’t need a therapist who cares in sense of being emotionally involved. That’s counterproductive. The therapist needs only to care about achieving a positive outcome for the client. What is more critical is that the therapist accepts the client. In order to be accepting the therapist must not just have the desire to be accepting , they must must be able to relate non-judgementally to the client’s world as they see it.

I agree but people can also come up with horrible ideas that can end up doing more harm than good which is why it’s important to have a method that can detect problems in advance if possible — Average

You’re looking for a shortcut, the idea that there is an objective, consensus-based correct path. The major religions think this way. Maybe you should consult the clergy. i dont believe there is such a thing as objective truth about the important matters one’s life. You can grab onto some authority if it would make you feel better to conform to someone else’s idea of
what to do.

But the fact is , each of us create our own version of reality to guide us in the world. Since our world is constantly changing , we have to change our thinking from time to time to keep up with it.
Your own emotions are the the most important indicators you have that your ways of coping that used to work are starting to fail you.
When you start feeling confusion, self doubt and anxiety that means it’s time to get experimental and start
trying out new ways of approaching things. Your own feelings will tell you if you’re on the right track or not.

The argument is that Mary's experience is new knowledge.

She has knowledge of something that isn't physical — frank

Or you could say that she has knowledge of something that isn’t couched in physicalistic terms. But one could
claim that physicalistic accounts share with the experience of color a dependence on subjective process. One could then conclude that the personalistic is more
fundamental than the physicalistic, that physicalism is just a derivative abstraction that we convince ourselves is primary. This trick we play on ourselves makes subjective experiences like color seem to be either an illusion or an ineffable product of a realm outside the physical. We then may start babbling about God or panpsychism.

This is an argument for qualia, and against physicalism. — frank

Not all arguments against physicalism assume qualia. Approaches which see the conceptual-subjective and the empirical-object as inextricably interdependent will reject both physicalism and qualia.

The science will settle the issue. Subitizing is not just pattern recognition, but involves counting.

Edit: Just to make my point clear, your claim was that subitising is just pattern recognition. In this study it was shown that pattern recognition showed up in groups of four or less, and also in groups of more than four. That is, pattern recognition was found in both subitising and counting. It has a part to play, but is not the whole of the story. — Banno

You can throw together brain imaging studies of cognitive tasks , add to this reaction time measurements, recordings from groups of neurons and other such quantitative readings associated with particular behaviors, and get consensus of a large group of psychologists over the accuracy of these results. But raw empirical data and interpretation are two different things. Mirror neuron studies and theories of empathy is a good example. Almost all psychologists involved in this area agree on the specific neurological findings , but there are at least four distinct theoretical camps in the explanation of how mirror neurons contribute to human and animal empathy. These camps differentiate themselves along philosophical lines.

So the raw data will give us guidelines concerning the meaning of , and difference between, enumeration and subtizing, but the science won’t settle the issue of what counting , subsitizing and their distinction is without you picking philosophical sides first. I will say this. There seems to be more and more convergence these days among Wittgensteinian, phenomenological and neuropsychological approaches to cognition in general.

Which leads me to wonder what we’re debating here, if anything. I read Isaac’s posts and found them very helpful. I don’t see that anything in it contradicts Husserl’s analysis. Of course , his is conducted at a different level from the neuroscientific studies. But I think there is agreement that effortful enumeration is one category ( or maybe a series of related
categories) of mnemonic process , and subitizing can reasonably be linked to a different class of processing that bypasses the intense demands on working memory by drawing from learned patterns in long term memory and using them to fill in ( Isaac would say pattern match).

Let me throw in a little more detail foe the heck of it. Described at a phenomenological level, effortful enumeration involves separating out, identifying and counting each individual dot in a pattern of dots. Each isolated individual must then be assigned a numeric value. To do this one relies upon a pre-learned mnemonic sequence that one must keep in mind during every stage of the counting. This menomiic allows us to quickly recall any number name by its learned association with a lower number. the name ‘two’ cues ‘three’ and three cues four , and so on. This is similar to the way we remember the sequence of letters
of the alphabet , or song lyrics or melodies. The effort comes in when we have to make sure that we are not recounting previously counted dots.
This means we have to use a strategy ( finger pointing, blocking off segments of the pattern) to remember what we’ve already counted as we go along.

Subitizing frees us of this short term memory effort by bringing up from long term memory an almost identical version of the shape of the whole pattern we are trying to count. We may still have to begin by enumerating a small number of dots before we can access the pattern as a whole. This may be analogous to reading words. Our prior expectations allow us to rapidly fill in rather than having to process each letter individually. But we likely begin with a rudimentary analysis of lines and curves before letters pop into view. I wouldnt be surprised if this preliminary sequential processing of simple , isolated lines didnt make use of the same area of the brain as enumeration.

I’m reminded of George Miller’s famous paper of the 1950’s , 7+_2. He wrote that we can only keep in short term memory around 7 unrelated items( which is why such things as phone numbers are about that length). In order to recall any larger number of items we have to ‘chunk’ them, find a way to link them together as a unity that can be recalled all at once. The key is they have to be associate meaningfully. There are all kinds of well known mnemonic techniques that achieve this, such as the pegword method. Take a list of unrelated words, like a grocery list , associate each one with some object on a well trod path of yours, such as walking through the rooms of your house. Imagine each word in some humorous, shocking or ridiculous concrete way with the refrigerator, the front door , etc.

Notice that our number system is constructed for easier recall Take Roman numerals. Rather than just an increasing series of vertical lines, the sequence of numbers is ‘chunked’ at regular intervals. III becomes IV instead of IIII. Similarly , 0 through 9 becomes chunked at 10 , and then regularly thereafter. So we don’t actually do a lot of counting. We mostly use shortcuts to avoid having to count.

Do you have any objections to the assertion that both effortful enumeration and subitizing are constructive cognitive activities that are common to a range of phenomena( assigning letters of the alphabet
to individual dots) of which number is just one example?

You seem to be comfortable, as I am , in determining number in Wittgensteinian terms as a wide variety of use-dependent senses. Furthermore , there is nothing ‘pure’ about number , either from a realist or a platonic perspective.

What you see in a die is irrelevant. As are Husserl's armchair musings. — Banno

Here’s some more armchair musings from Husserl. You’re going to have to refute them with your own arguments. Let the show begin.

In Chapter XI we treated in detail the problem of how immediate appraisal of groups comes about without the actual carrying out of the relevant psychical activities - those of individual appre-hension and collection. A unitary intuition is given to us, and in one glance we judge: a group of balls, coins, and so on. To explain this peculiar fact we referred to the figural Moments of the unitary group intuitions which enter into an association with the name and the symbolic concept of the multiplicity - mediating the reproduction of the latter, and thereby making possible the immediate appraisal of the phenomenon as a group. Immediate number estimation presents a quite similar problem and the means referred to completely suffice for its solution.

The matter stands forth most clearly in examples, as is abundantly illustrated in play at dice, dominos and cards. Each surface of a die possesses a characteristic fixed configuration of dots which enters into an association with the number name (or with the symbolic concept of a certain number named by it). If several dice are thrown simultaneously, then either there occurs a rapid quasi-summation utilizing the tables of addition - in which, of course, the mere number words intervene - or else, given long practice, the number word corresponding to the sum of dots is reproduced immediately by means of the figural character of the total complex phenomenon.

The number of configurations to be impressed upon us for this is in fact only a limited one. The same holds true for play with dominos, and it is well known what a knack experienced players have for instantaneous estimation of numbers. They often can count up to forty dots in one glance. In the examples considered up to now the configurations were of a fixed type, or even more so, were closely related in type. In order to explain the latter case it should be pointed out that a die surface, for example, in each change of position through rota-tion, receives another figural character, and that it therefore must basically be the corresponding generic character that establishes the association [with the number]. This observation makes it clear that the difference between the cases considered and others where wholly arbitrary distributions of objects are estimated as to number is not so great as it might at first appear. However three cleanly separated objects may be distributed in the field of vision, they together form a characteristic configuration -presupposing that they can in general fuse into an intuitively unitary appearance of a group.

The various three-point configurations which arise, depending upon the varying relative positions of the objects, are indeed well-distinguished in intuition. But they possess so much striking analogy that the character common to them all can mediate with certainty the reproduction of the number three (or, more precisely, of the name "three," along with the symbolic concept of a specific number named by it). A some-what more essential difference is exhibited by the figural character only in cases where the three objects come to lie in a straight or approximately straight line: a boundary case whose quite noticeable special character makes possible the association of the number. It is similar with groups of four objects. Here the configuration exhibits either the familiar quadralateral type, or else other characteristic types show up - as when all four or any three of the objects lie in a row, or when one object falls within a triangular figure formed by the three remaining ones. And so on. The more objects the group includes, the greater is the re-spective number of intuitively distinct figural types, and thus it becomes understandable why in reliable number estimation we usually do not get past groups of five members - unless by means of constant, methodical practice. Preyer, who did experiments on this, is of the opinion that in the latter case the attainable limits may lie, on the average, at twenty. Nevertheless, the famous calculator Dahse could instantaneously estimate some thirty arbitrarily distributed objects.”


“…after repeated enumeration of many types of object distributions, the number names enter into fixed associations with their typical figural characters. Moreover, I would hold it to be quite well possible that even someone completely ignorant of enumerating could bring the number names into association with those figural characters, and develop into a skillful domino player, for example.”

Tell me what you think is going on when someone instantly recognizes the number 4 in a pattern of 4 dots. Or for that matter , when a savant reads off pi to 100 decimal places , because the two skills are closely related( Daniel Tennant described how he did it. He visualized the numbers as a landscape.It had nothing to do with a calculative skill )

Recognizing 4 dots as the number 4 is just pattern recognition , not a mathematical ability.
— Joshs


If that were so then the position of the dots would make a difference.

It doesn't. — Banno

We can also learn to immediately recognize a patten of 5 or 6 dots as their corresponding numbers. The more dots that are involved , the more important the placement of the dots is. My own experience with dice is certainly that way. I instantly know what ‘5’ looks like because I’m familiar with their placement on the dice. Change that pattern and I guarantee you there will be a slight lag before I process it as 5.

“In playing dominoes, for example, we grasp groups of ten to twelve dots with one glance. Indeed, we even assess their number with total immediacy. It must be observed, however, that in such cases we can speak neither of an actual colligating nor of an actual enumerating. The number name is here directly associated with the characteristic sensuous appearance, and is then recalled on each occasion by means of that appearance without any conceptual mediation. With groups that large, as everyone can test, a direct and authentic collection and enumeration is an impossibility.” (Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic)

there is something temporally persistent there which is reliably appearing as a door to both animals and humans. Sure animals don't conceive of it in human language, in English for example as a door; but, judging from their behavior, they certainly see it as a kind of affordance, as something like a "to be walked through". — Janus

Maybe we can agree that what is
‘temporally persistent’ doesn’t have to mean temporally self-identical in order to give rise to the appearance of enduring objects. But keep in mind that whatever it is that appears immediately before us and other animals in perception is just a small part of what we actually experience as actually present. The rest comes from memory and is fused with that small bit of stimulus that comes to us from outside.

We can see how important this synthesizing filling in becomes when we think about how much of our human environment consists not of simple physical entities but of cultural value objects. In our homes , for instance, chairs , appliances, cupboards , couches , computers , these are all objects for us based on how we use them. A chair is for sitting, a cupboard is for storage, etc. How we look at such things , how we interact with them, even our ability to see them as single, unified objects , is dependent on our understanding of what they are for.
Does a dog see a computer a s a single entity? How could it? A desktop computer is a mouse, maybe a tower , a monitor , maybe a printer. But to a dog they are only objects to the extent it can grab them in it’s teeth and move them around. The same is true of a three dimensional carving of a chinese word symbol. To the dog and to the human. who doesn’t recognize it it is a random pattern of lines and curves. Are they seeing the same thing as the person who can read it ? No, that person has synthesized something more complex. Is the symbol less real than what the animal sees?!Not if we propose that an ‘object’ is a way in which an organism interacts with an aspect of its world. Almost all
of the culture objects in the human world are objects that don’t exist for other animals because their interaction with their world is so much simpler.

Piaget never renounced the notion of the real , but said that human individual and cultural development was a process of embedding the real within more and more differentiated schemes of relation. He said we were always on the way to the object, that objectivity was an asymptotic limit towards which human knowledge progressed. What he meant was that the reliability you associate with persistent objects like rocks and doors , only is really attainable as we create more and more complex schemes of reciprocal
relation to allow us to predict and anticipate the changes in our world in more and more adequate ways.


Persistence and self-identicality don’t add up to meaningfulness , reliability and usefulness if they are meant to pertain to what something supposedly is in itself outside of its role in an organism’s functioning.

At about age four or five a child stops having to count the dots and sees four.
— Banno

But that is due to the innate ability which is unique to human children. Some animals can recognise up to about 2-3, but I think the point stands. In any case it's a very simple illustration, humans can recognise all manner of complex symbolic relationships, something which to some extent is learned by experience, but unless the innate capability existed, then they would have no chance of learning it. — Wayfarer

Recognizing 4 dots as the number 4 is just pattern recognition , not a mathematical ability. This is no different than recognizing a bunch of lines as a house. The pattern of dots on the dice begin to look like a picture of something , in this case a particular number, when the concept 4 is paired with the pattern of dots enough times. This is not unlike a dog associating the sight of a food dish and the sound of a crinkling package with the image of food.
What is innate is simply synthesizing new levels
of sense on the basis of what appears similar to something else. The similar becomes fused in our mind with what preceded it and we then have a néw unity. Animals do this too, but their synthesizing abilities fall
far short of ours, which is why their language capabilities are so rudimentary.

I like the rest of your post.

Why wouldn't it 'drop out', like a boxed beetle? — Banno

Because it matters greatly when we get to the higher level of political, ethical, scientific and personal conceptualization. At these levels, ‘dropping out’ the acknowledgement that such frameworks of understanding, like simple perceptions, are not inner representations of pre-existing data but constructions which generate the criteria for the evidence that appears within them leads to political and ethical
violence, interpersonal conflictual and conformity rather than innovation. The important doorways in our lives are not geometric but metaphorical shapes. These are constantly shape-shifting, and we end up being barred from many opportunities to pass through new portals of
understanding because of our assumption that the empirically true is what persists in itself. independent of our conceptions. goals and aims.

Only what is derivative can drop out. Phenomenology is the condition of possibility for such notions as identical self-persistence, so one can bracket off what is empirically real as objectively present and not lose any of what is essential to experience
Boxed beetles drop out precisely because they become meaningless without their connection to contextual use. So what should drop
out isn’t the phenomenological analysis but the classical empirical assumption of self-identical persistence.
Heidegger makes such a point when he says that pointing to a door as simply an objectively present object rather than as part of a contextually relevant activity for us is failing to understand as it any more.

“ When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand ­it any more.”(Being and Time)

Do you deny that it seems obvious that there are temporally persistent objects? Is the door always where you expect it to be or somewhere else? Your front steps? Your driveway? Your car? — Janus

Let’s talk about what we actually experience as we make our way toward that door that we remember being there. As we approach it there is absolutely nothing about the visual scene that reproduces itself
exactly from moment to moment. The lighting, our angle , speed and style of approach and the accompanying perspectival view, howour eyes and neck and body turn in relation to the door, and how we need to move our body to open it and get through it. The classic empirical argument is that it is just the appearances that change, not the object itself. The phenomenological argument , however , is that we make the mistake of grounding the appearances on a notion of the identically self-persisting object which is itself constructed by us out of changing appearances.

So is there really a door there or is it just a subjective and intersubjective construction? The answer is both We dont make up or imagine the door.
We perceptually construct a reliably consistent unity by cobbling together memory, a continuing flow of new sensation, and based on this , expectations of what is to come next. This peceptual cobbling is what we see as this door. As we approach the door , we arrive with a rich web of perceptual expectations of what what we are about to encounter. As we begin to see it, what we see forces our perceptual system to rapidly adjust these expectations to the novelties of the current perspective. We don’t generally notice this adjustment taking place , and instead simply say we are seeing the ‘same’ door. We are indeed seeing something similar , and we only notice the discrepancies if they are pronounced ( under certain lighting conditions it may no longer look like a door ) or with certain brain injuries that interfere with our ability to make perceptual adjustments between expectation and reality. What we can never have , is evidence of temporally self -identical persistence of objects that doesn’t presuppose what it claims to prove.

You could legitimately argue that for all intents and purposes , making the classical empirical claim that objects persist over time as self-identical vs making the phenomenological argument that we construe self-identicality out of self-similarity leads to the same experience of the world and of science. I think this is true at the perceptual level , and with regard to the natural
sciences , but the classical view becomes limiting when we continue to apply it in the social sciences, particularly to psychological phenomena like empathy, affectivity and psychopathology.


“ For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122).

Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition.”(Dan Zahavi)

Are you familiar with Wilfred Sellars’ Myth of the Given? That would seem to apply to your OP. It states that:

“Sellars contends that our first-order awareness of such sensible qualities as Lewis’s “redness or loudness,” however immediate, always already embodies an implicit categorial ontology, whether this be (the particular list here is not important): (a) a “manifest” naïve realism that represents such qualities as constituent-characters of physical objects (as Sellars argues is in effect the case with our evolutionarily inherited, “innate” way of (partially mis-)representing the world); or (b) such qualities or qualia or tropes as might be claimed to be reflectively isolated in a philosophical sense-datum theory; or (c) in the form of intrinsically recognizable Lewisian nonconceptual qualia-repeatables; or (d) in a nominalist “pure process” metaphysical recategorization of such repeatables (cf. Sellars 1981b, FMPP II); or (e) in a scientific-metaphysical recategorization and “relocation” of such sensible qualities as adverbial states of sensing in the perceiver’s central nervous system; and so on. Sellars’s contention is that Lewis’s ostensibly categorially neutral account of the nonconceptual sensuous qualia-given, which officially abstracts from all conceptual interpretation, has in fact implicitly categorized such allegedly intrinsically recognized repeatables in a way that itself represents a categorial choice among such alternatives as those just mentioned.“

In simpler terms, one can isolate no concept-independent features of the environment ( pure stimulus) that are not already pre-interpreted conceptually.

Let's furthermore suppose that Jane has an inverted spectrum wrt you; and Joe is a protanope. Then by definition, you, Jane, and Joe all see red when you look at 750nm. But your experience is quite different than Jane's and Joe's; and Joe cannot see that big of a difference between 750nm and 550nm. So what exactly is "what it is like to experience red"? — InPitzotl

And this is just the beginning. Color perception depends on a lot more than just rods and cones at the outermost level of neural receptivity to the environment. Like all perception color is the product of layers of processing that integrates feedback from body movement with sensory activity. Color implies a surface , and surfaces need to be constructed developmentally along with self-persisting objects. So color is no more a direct response to 750 nm than C sharp is the direct product of a sound wave.

What is red? It's the eye's way of perceiving 750 (nm). It's like a way of looking at something, a perspective if you will. The ears perceive of 750 (Hz) differently. Translations, back and forth, between languages (of the senses — TheMadFool

If I translate the word red as rouge or rojo, what am I doing? I am taking a presumably equivalent meaning and changing the syntax. Of course, one has to be careful here , because there are any number of senses of a word like red. If i use it metaphorically or idiomatically I may have to translate it according to the specific sense of the idiom. The point is , one translates between close
semantic equivalencies. The presumed semantic equivalence of color here, or one we can agree on for the sake of argument, is 750 nm of light directed toward a person who is consciously paying attention it and processes it perceptually in a certain way. that we call red. This is the semantic meaning that is being translated from red to rojo to rouge. Notice that the translation preserves this complex structure involving interaction between wavelength emission and conscious perceptual processing. But look how different this act of translation is from comparing my thinking about a wavelength of 750 nm in itself and the complex process I described above. There is clearly much more here than a simple change of syntax. ‘Red’ is only a translation of 750 nm once I abstract away from the meaning of red its most immediate semantic association. For most people this immediate sense will not involve wavelengths at all but a qualitative feel ( or any number of other things).
Red only translates directly to 750 nm when one is taught specifically to associate the two. But then one has changed the sense of the word ‘red’. You could just as well use a made up word here becuase you have taken ‘red’ far away from its common usages.

So unlike red, rojo and rouge , red as 750 nm is not a translation in the sense of a minor variation in what is otherwise a near identical semantic meaning. But doesn’t the eye translate light energy into color? No, it transforms
light energy into patterns of firing that are a long way away from ‘color’. By the time
one has perceived a color, a complex series of processing stages are involved. Sseing red is the product of the relation between the figure and its background, not just pure wavelength. Red can appear orange depending on the brightness and color of the background. The important point is that, unlike a ‘translation’ , there is nothing of the meaning of 750 nm in the perception of red. 750 nm is an abstraction we learn as we get older and then we apply it retroactively to the color ‘red’ Ony then does it make sense to say we translate from 750’nm to ‘red’. Red is to 750 nm as light is to photosynthesis. In case we have an organism dependent on light energy to create something new. In the case of photosynthesis light energy is transformed into chemical energy, in the case of red, light wavelength begins a process that ends in a perceptual
performance.

So in answer to the question as to whether the woman in the room learns something new, the answer is she learns a wholly new sense of the word red. It becomes
essentially a completely new word for her.

Alternatively, which I rather think the case, it might refer to the concept of "will" posited by Schopenhauer, who seems to have had a significant influence on Nietzsche's philosophical development, and so "a ceaseless, endless striving". O — Michael Zwingli

Schopenhauer certainly influenced Nietzsche, but I think in the case of the will, Nietzsche departed significantly from Schopenhauer’s notion. All notions of
will for Nietzsche are variations of will to power, and i’m the quotes below you get a feel for how ‘willing’, like ‘thinking’ is not a unitary phenomenon, but a multiplicity of tensions.

“There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object.”

“ Philosophers tend to talk about the will as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice. Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word – and this single word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers might take. So let us be more cautious, for once – let us be “unphilosophical.” Let us say: in every act of willing there is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feeling of this “away from” and “towards” themselves.

But this is accompanied by a feeling of the muscles that comes into play through a sort of habit as soon as we “will,” even without our putting “arms and legs” into motion. Just as feeling – and indeed many feelings – must be recognized as ingredients of the will, thought must be as well. In every act of will there is a commandeering thought, – and we really should not believe this thought can be divorced from the “willing,” as if some will would then be left over! Third, the will is not just a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affect of the command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey: “I am free, ‘it' must obey” – this consciousness lies in every will, along with a certain straining of attention, a straight look that fixes on one thing and one thing only, an unconditional evaluation “now this is necessary and nothing else,” an inner certainty that it will be obeyed, and whatever else comes with the position of the commander. A person who wills –, commands something inside himself that obeys, or that he believes to obey.

But now we notice the strangest thing about the will – about this multifarious thing that people have only one word for. On the one hand, we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one who obeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelings of compulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generally start right after the act of willing. On the other hand, however, we are in the habit of ignoring and deceiving ourselves about this duality by means of the synthetic concept of the “I.” As a result, a whole chain of erroneous conclusions, and, consequently, false evaluations have become attached to the will, – to such an extent that the one who wills believes, in good faith, that willing suffices for action. Since it is almost always the case that there is will only where the effect of command, and therefore obedience, and therefore action, may be expected, the appearance translates into the feeling, as if there were a necessity of effect.

In short, the one who wills believes with a reasonable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he attributes the success, the performance of the willing to the will itself, and consequently enjoys an increase in the feeling of power that accompanies all success. “Freedom of the will” – that is the word for the multi-faceted state of pleasure of one who commands and, at the same time, identifies himself with the accomplished act of willing. As such, he enjoys the triumph over resistances, but thinks to himself that it was his will alone that truly overcame the resistance. Accordingly, the one who wills takes his feeling of pleasure as the commander, and adds to it the feelings of pleasure from the successful instruments that carry out the task, as well as from the useful “under-wills” or under-souls – our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls –. L'effet c'est moi:?? what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out of many “souls”: from which a philosopher should claim the right to understand willing itself within the framework of morality: morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon of “life” arises.”

— T Clark

profundity and importance tend to be synonymous with a certain notion of difficulty , dont they?
— Joshs

Absolutely, positively, completely, indubitably no. — T Clark

Give me an example in your life of stumbling upon a fresh scientific idea that was profoundly important to you , and tell me why there was ‘Absolutely, positively, completely, indubitably’ no difficulty or labor leading up to you’re being prepared to recognize it.

Most of the exciting concepts in science I learned ( Darwinism, Newtonian and relativistic physics) unfolded this way.
— Joshs

As I noted previously, science is different from philosophy, with the exception, I guess, of logic. — T Clark

I think you mean that, FOR YOU, science and philosophy differ this way. Which may explain why you don’t wax enthusiastic about philosophy. For me, there is absolutely no difference between the ‘eureka’ moments I have experienced while discovering scientific concepts, and those experienced reading important philosophy( or , for that matter , some literature). Why should
there be? What is it about philosophy that could
possibly prevent such an experience?

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly said, “the brilliant scientist and the brilliant writer are pretty likely to end up saying the same thing.”

How could an understanding of reality nailed down to concrete human behavior and understanding be obscure. — T Clark

Because it makes meaning relative to situational use , and therefore is an inherent ‘obscurity’ in that there is nothing any longer of truth to ‘nail down’ outside of pragmatic use. The problem with nailing things down is that , as a pragmatist, you can’t separate the meaning of what it is that is being nailed down from the contingent purpose for nailing it. As the purpose changes, so does what is nailed. James wasn’t prepared to go quite this far in his pragmatism, but Rorty and Wittgenstein were.

But I don't think the expressions he uses easies understanding. We'll have to disagree on that part. — Manuel

I will say this about Husserl’s concepts. Many of his terms fly in the face of conventional understandings. For instance , his use of soul, spirit , ego, intention. As is the tendency among Continental philosophers, he dipped into older uses of such words , going back as far as the Greeks. We in the Anglo world prefer to work with the most contemporary and most narrowly technical uses of words in our philosophies. This often leads to trouble. The translation of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams for American audiences wiped out all of the vital literary-philosophical context of terms like Ich and Esse and substituted narrowly psychological meanings( Ego and Id). It really distorted the overal character of the work

So you do have to learn essentially a new vocabulary with Husserl and Heidegger, but once you have done so, you may come to realize that it is actually a much richer use of concepts than the flat and narrow technicalization of them that we see in analytic writing.
Unlike the latter , it connects and integrates new concepts with an unbroken heritage of literature , philosophy and theology going back thousands of years .

Reading through all the responses on this thread, it strikes me there are people who don't think a philosophical idea can be profound or important unless it is obscure or difficult. Maybe to them the effort required to figure something out is related to its value. — T Clark

Well , profundity and importance tend to be synonymous with a certain notion of difficulty , dont they? When the light bulb goes on and there’s a ‘eureka’ moment, in that moment it all seems so easy, so effortless. But how often do such moments occur without long, hard preparation and struggle, reading the same sentences or formulas over and over without clarity? Most of the exciting concepts in science I learned ( Darwinism, Newtonian and relativistic physics) unfolded this way.

As far as obscurity is concerned, the word implies something hidden, veiled, unclear. For centuries , the obscure was the enemy of philosophy. It was the murky and deceptive veil of appearances that it was philosophy’s job to clear away. Philosophy’s handmaiden, the sciences , reinforced the idea that obscurity was the enemy of truth. But then scepticism began creeping in with Hume , and Kant’s attempt to salvage the old
verities forced him to let obscurity in via the unattainable thing-in-itself. This was still an obscurity beholden to and dominated by apodictic truth. The door to obscurity was opened wider with Hegel’s dialectic of becoming. Kant’s categorical and moral certainties could no longer justify themselves. But the path to scientific truth via falisification was opened up.

Obscurity only made its way into the heart of truth with the post-Hegelian relativisms of Rorty, Kuhn and Feyerabend, Wittgenstein,Nietzsche, the phenomenologists , the Pragmatists, the social constructionists and the postmodernists. If one is still
wedded to Kantian or Hegelian notions of truth, then reading the above works may lead to a different experience of obscurity. That is, they may
simply appear incoherent, inconsistent and deliberately obfuscating . One may never get to what they are trying to reveal and see only an inadequate style.

. I was only speaking about prose style.

On the other hand, to your credit, you tend to express yourself quite clearly, not in the convoluted way Husserl did. You can say that that's because he was ahead of his time. Maybe.

But then there are people, like Zahavi, who do explain Husserl very clearly. — Manuel

I don’t think prose style can be separated from the content of one’s ideas. I can’t imagine Husserl
writing his phenomenology in any other way , without it changing the very substance of the work. Zahavi writes ‘clearly’ about Husserl. He is also a lightweight in comparison to Husserl who I think misses vital features of Husserl’s work.

I write in a certain way on this site in an attempt to co-ordinate with where I think others are at in their thinking. I write very differently when I am elaborating my own philosophical ideas without such constraints and compromises.

With regard to Russell vs Husserl, I also think the notion of clarity is connected with how one views the nature of facts and truth. Russell is old
school , holding onto what Wittgenstein called a picture theory of truth. Being clear for Russel thus meant presenting pictures to others as cleanly as possible. I but Husserl , like Wittgenstein , was ‘post-picture’ in his thinking. Truth becomes a constantly evolving self-referential process rather than directed toward pictorial representation. This is why Husserl considered himself
to be an eternal beginner, always on the road to full clarity but approaching it by endlessly starting over.

You don't think there's a qualitative difference in writing quality between Husserl and Russell? — Manuel

That’s a toughie. I can’t stand Russell, and am allergic to most analytic approaches to philosophy in general. To me they come across as terribly thin, utterly unable
to dig more than a millimeter or two beneath the surface of a thought. The few exceptions I found were Putnam and Rorty, and I suppose that’s because they were distancing themselves from the analytic style. It took me decades to penetrate Husserl, and that’s because he leapt so far ahead of his contemporaries that every sentence he wrote was like a thesis unto itself.

All written in perfectly clear and unpretentious language. — Olivier5

There’s that word ‘clear’ again. I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, other that that you understand someone’s prose. With regard to Popper, what you call ‘clear’ I call lacking in depth, which leads me to the conclusion that clarity is in the mind of the beholder.

I had in mind rather the kind of authors who say the nonsense featured in Sokal and Bricmont's “Fashionable Nonsense”. — Amalac

To be fair , if your only exposure to ‘postmodern philosophy’ is Sokal’s book, you really need to read primary sources , or at least notable interpreters of such sources. I should mention that I don’t find Irigaray to be a significant philosopher , and I share with Derrida a distaste for Lacan’s sloppy style. The ‘postmodern’ writers I particularly admire are Derrida , Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger ( yes, I consider him to be postmodern) , and Wittgenstein.

unlike with people like Derrida and Lacan (excluding his psychology, about which I haven't read enough to make a judgement). I bet their “ideas”(if you can even call them that) will not have any importance in the next 200 years. — Amalac

I read Derrida’s ideas as being in close proximity to Heidegger’s but venturing just a little beyond him. So as long as Heidegger remains relevant , so will Derrida.

perhaps you could give me a brief explanation of how Heidegger's work helped or is contributing to scientific progress. — Amalac

Matthew Ratcliffe is one of the leading writers on cognition and emotion. Here are two articles showing why he considers Heidegger’s work on affect and mood so relevant to current theorizing in psychology. Ratcliffe is not alone here. Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson , Dam Zahavi, Thomas Fuchs and many others in psychology are turning to his work.

https://www.academia.edu/458309/Why_Mood_Matters

https://www.academia.edu/458222/Heideggers_Attunement_and_the_Neuropsychology_of_Emotion