only if taste in art and taste in science similar enough to justify the remark. I think they're not. One agile and capable of pivot on a dime, the other entrenched and not easily subject to change.

The most general view of science concerning the absolute presuppositions of the science - that which is given in order for the science to have the shape it has. These not a matter of taste, nor agile, nor ephemeral. Not, then, of taste. — tim wood

Kuhn speaks of the then-accepted view of the difference between artistic taste and scientific change.

“The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn goes on to critique the above view:

“Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

Accepting a conclusion predicated on mere taste, is just lazy, wouldn’t you agree? — Mww

Would it be fair to characterize changes in embraced style, approach and sensibility over the history of the arts a matter of change in taste? If so , then Kuhn’s argument comes down to claiming that the history of science is a matter of changes in taste.

I still don't understand the "therapy" label--I mean I barely get what it is actually supposed to mean, but I do see it as a condescending, dismissive term and also don't see how my reading has anything to do with that interpretation, as I sorta see it. — Antony Nickles

I assumed you were comfortable with the therapy’ label because it seems to have been embraced by a community of Wittgenstein interpreters that I associate with your approach.


“ The central claim of  the so called therapeutic turn of Wittgenstein, articulated by Stanley Cavell (1979), Cora Diamond (1991) and James Conant (1991), consists in finding Wittgenstein’s originality not so much in his philosophical arguments but – performatively – in the effects his philosophy is supposed to have on its readers. Not by chance Cavell calls philosophy “education for grown ups”, an activity aiming not at growth but at change or transformation (1979, p. 125).”


“The New Wittgenstein (2000) is a book containing a family of interpretations of the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, those associated with this interpretation, such as Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and James F. Conant, understand Wittgenstein to have avoided putting forth a "positive" metaphysical program, and understand him to be advocating philosophy as a form of "therapy." Under this interpretation, Wittgenstein's program is dominated by the idea that philosophical problems are symptoms of illusions or "bewitchments by language," and that attempts at a "narrow" solution to philosophical problems, that do not take into account larger questions of how the questioner conducts his life, interacts with other people, and uses language generally, are doomed to failure.”

I only meant ‘therapy’ in the way that it is being used by these writers. Would you agree that in their hands it is not meant as condescending and dismissive?

Indeed. I would say Antony is borrowing Witt for some side interest. — Joshs

I meant to say ‘I WOULDNT SAY’

“ Baker's post-1990 ‘position’ is that Wittgenstein's method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve mental cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem — Joshs

the goal of Philosophical Investigations was to understand our desire for seeing everything in one way (word-object). This is not the "therapy" of us (our "mental cramps"--or language's bewitchingness) — Antony Nickles

That wasn’t my phrasing , but from Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read.

Kuhn? Really? :roll: — 180 Proof

He’s my bud

Kuhn used theory and paradigm interchangeably. — Joshs

I just made that up. Don’t tell 180 proof. But I’m
reading through Structure of Scientific Revolutions and found this:

‘a paradigm is used to describe a set of concepts within a scientific discipline at any one time.’

“To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory
must seem better than its competitors…”

“ Acquisition of a paradigm and of the more esoteric type of research it per­mits is a sign of maturity in the development of any given scien­tific field.”

Also found this secondary source.

Paradigms and theories go hand in hand to explain concepts in science and assist academics in their work to define different phenomenon. The theory explains the phenomenon based on certain criteria while the paradigm provides the background or the frame that allows a theory to be tested and measured. A paradigm can have a number of theories within its framework and the paradigm acts as a reference point for the theory

So apparently a paradigm is kind of a metatheory.

I’m curious. Has Charles Peirce played any role in your thinking? I also
think I recognize some Deleuzian language, although I may just be reading that in.

Mouths shake the air, hands smear liquids on solids or scrape shapes in stone. Cloth is sewn so that it can be waved prominently, guns are fired to start a race. — hanaH

What is the genesis of these associations? Did these events just so happen to be fortuitously paired in temporal proximity at one point and then this created an association between the two? Or was there a pre-wired inherited association in some cases?

'Rules' are discovered out there in the world by looking. It's not chess but sociology, linguistics. — hanaH

I don’t think rules are discovered out there in the world. They are enacted. This is a different concept.

If our marks and noises get their "meaning" from the world at large (something like the role they play in it as worldly objects among other worldly objects), then it should be no surprise that we don't "really" (exactly) know or control what we are talking about, anymore than a dog can give an exhaustive account of how the wagging of its tail will affect other dogs — hanaH

No, but a dog has expectations of what will ensue when it barks in a particular way or gestures with its paw.

We know what we are talking about to the same extent that we know what any of our behavior is about. Aboutness is presupposed by the normative functioning of a self-organizing system. We always behave into our world on the basis of ongoing concerns , aims and goals. That makes us sense-making creatures. Sense-makers are anticipative, not simply reactive. This is what makes the world recognizable to us, and means that grunts barks and hisses are motivated and emerge out of a background context of anticipations.

Why not 23,546 categories? Why not a grammar for each word, for each finite sequence of words? Are you cutting nature at the joints here? Or is this just a handy improvised system, heuristic and traditional?

As I see it, the map will never do justice to the teeming territory. — hanaH

I don’t think Witt ( or Antony) is interested in cutting nature at its joints. This notion of nature implies an extant empirical realm that we ‘map’. It s a representational approach to determining sense.
But for Witt lamguage isnt about adequating one’s understanding to a world or ‘territory’ by mapping it , but about producing or enacting a world.

I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accounted for in the sciences. — Marchesk

I don’t know about that. Zahavi reads Husserl as saying that the ‘something it is like’ is a ‘for-meness’ present in all experiences. Essentially Zahavi is claiming that for Husserl the subjective pole of every subject object relation has its own ‘feel’, as if each of us has a kind of affective signature that accompanies all our experiences, the feeling of being ‘me’.
I don’t think this is what Husserl is saying. He is instead arguing that they is a certain normative dimension to all my experiences. They are organized by me on the basis of likeness , similarity, commonality with respect to my previous knowing. So this ‘feeling of being me’ isn’t a static intrinsic quality at all. It is just the perspectival nature of each of our encounters with the world.
Wittgenstein recognizes this personal, perspectival , situated basis of experiencing. I don’t think he and Husserl are all that far apart.

Change the goalposts all you like, but the answer remains: it is incorrect to describe scientific theories as "belief systems" just as it is incorrect to describe toolkits (or machine systems) as "belief systems". — 180 Proof

It may be correct or incorrect. I won’t know until I get a clear sense of what the distinction is for you between ‘theory’ and ‘belief system’. An algorithm is just syntax. mathematics is syntax. Theory is semantics. That’s why Kuhn used theory and paradigm interchangeably.

Experimental algorithms (i.e. toolkits).
3h — 180 Proof

Tools get their meaning from how they are used , and that requires that they belong to a larger framework of relevance, otherwise known as a belief system.

All I'm saying is that there are fictions (institutional truths) that are based on social agreement (rational) rather than social delusion (irrational). — praxis

What kind of situation would be an example of irrationality and social delusion and what about it does not make use of social agreement?

I don't know how the scientific method could be construed as having a privileged role among all cultural disciplines. I don't know how scientific theories could be construed as belief systems — praxis

If scientific theories are not belief systems then what are they? Are they attempts to represent the way the real world is? if so, are there any other cultural disciplines you know of that can approximate the way the world is with the precision and potential for making progress toward truth that science can?

It seems we are borrowing the Wittgenstein avatar for different projects. Yours reminds me of a therapist. I'm not objecting or mocking. — hanaH

Indeed. I would t say Antony is borrowing Witt for some side interest. He is putting forth an interpretation in which ‘therapy’ is absolutely central to ( although not the only thing) what Wittgenstein is doing. This is the reading of Wittgenstein I embrace alongside writers like G.P. Baker:

“ Baker's post-1990 ‘position’ is that Wittgenstein's method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve mental cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem; radically so in that how this aim is achieved is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent.”

believe in countless institutional truths and it's not delusion but practical agreement. Money, for instance, is one the most widely accepted fictions there is — praxis

What are you contrasting delusion and fiction with? Tell me what gives the opposite of those notions its justification.

Well, in my own estimation, ritual and community are indeed the only truly beneficial aspects of our modern theistic religions, the rest amounting, to echo Dawkins, simply to the reinforcement of delusion — Michael Zwingli

The irony is that Dawkins’scientistic approach to empiricism makes his thinking religious in a broad
sense. If a belief system is ‘delusional’ , an existential ‘falsehood’, that implies a correct truth, and the scientistic way of thinking puts scientific method in the privileged role among all the cultural
disciplines of arbiter of truth as ‘correctness’. Belief systems, including scientific theories , arent true or
false in realism to some fixed standard, they’re useful in relaton to our aims.

Cough up what can be categorized as the token "hello, "and expect the same in return or a synonym. — hanaH

Is the token ‘hello’ something we could call a member of a category? Where does the category have its existence? Expecting the same or a synonym is a move in a language game. But there are many possibilities. The other person could fail to return the hello, and thus lead to all sorts of further developments. Did they misunderstand? Were they upset about something? Did they fail to hear? Or we could say hello with no expectations of a reply, depending on the circumstances.
Or we could say hello in a context of hostility, expecting it to irritate the other. In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello.

An animal shits, an animal fucks, an animal cries in the proximity of a predator. Or an ant chases the gland of another ant. — hanaH

But what would it mean to suggest that the shitting, fucking and crying is always a different sense of these terms? That is , not examples of a larger category called shitting or fucking in general, but events that share a family resemblance without there being any category to hold them? I’m looking for the contextual specificity that is the true and only site of what these terms do. It would help if we could talk a little more about what materiality and physical action are supposed to be about.
Materiality suggests to me a notion that is at least partially independent of context.

But what is "refer" supposed to refer to? I feel as if I am trying to define a bark with a hiss and a growl. — hanaH

When you use the words ‘bark’, ‘hiss’, ‘squeak’, ‘buzz’ and ‘growl’ do you mean to convey the idea of meaningless in themselves utterances which only take on sense when they interact in particular ways with other such utterances? But isn’t this notion of a meaningless-in-itself utterance an example of a beetle in a box? Beetles in boxes don’t only have to do with what is supposed to be hidden inside a subjectivity. They can just as well be about things in the outside world or social realm. What makes them beetles in boxes isnt where they are located ( inner subjectivity vs social world)
but that they mean something in themselves (empty signal) before or outside of their relations within a discursive matrix.
So for instance , if you intend ‘hiss’, ‘bark’ , squeak’ ,’buzz’ and ‘growl’ as meaningless in themselves, you defeat your own purpose, because ‘meaningless in itself’ works in the context of your aims as a specific pragmatic but confused sense. It intends to point to a picture of an in-itself, a growl or hiss which only later becomes linked to meaning.

I think Wittgenstein was trying to critique behaviorism.
Hutchinson points out that the American pragmatist versions of pragmatism , while similar in a general sense , failed to overcome empiricism.

“But such similarities are superficial when one acknowledges the empiricism at the heart of pragmatism (and they are what led some Pragmatists, unlike Wittgenstein, toward behaviourism).”

Very thorough, thanks . I got the etymology from Oxford Languages:


Middle English (originally in the sense ‘life under monastic vows’): from Old French, or from Latin religio(n- ) ‘obligation, bond, reverence’, perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind’.

‘Repeated convergence’ can work for me , not just in the sense of a convergence of individuals, but a convergence of thinking, which is a kind of binding. It captures my idea of religion as a faith ina moral constancy, a coming back repeatedly to a principle of belief.

Nagel was arguing there is a subjective aspect to perceiving creatures which is not captured by objective descriptions. — Marchesk

I think that’s true. I should note that at least for Zahavi it is not the sense object that is the source of the ‘feeling of what it is like’, not the echolalic input for the bat, but a aubjective component that is paired with that imput. So for example, tie people could both be experiencing the same semantic content in almost identical ways , and yet there would still be a subjective ‘feel’ of mineness that is unique to each of them which also belongs to the experience.

The idea here is that when we relate to the world there is both an experience of what the world is like for us and at the same time an experience of the self that is having the experience.

Zahavi(2005) says “Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)

“Normally, the “what it is like” aspect is taken to designate experiential properties. If, however, our experiences are to have qualities of their own, they must be qualities over and above whatever qualities the intentional object has. It is exactly the silk that is red, and not my perception of it. Likewise, it is the lemon that is bitter, and not my experience of it.” (Zahavi 2005)

But Zahavi doesn’t mean to make the self into a static entity. It is only a pole of the subject-object relation.

“Although these two sides can be distinguished conceptually, they cannot be separated. It is not as if the two sides or aspects of phenomenal experience can be detached and encountered in isolation from one other. When I touch the cold surface of a refrigerator, is the sensation of coldness that I then feel a property of the experienced object or a property of the experience of the object? The correct answer is that the sensory experience contains two dimensions, namely one of the sensing and one of the sensed, and that we can focus on either.”

Is the falling in the same path the recognition. The memory? — GraveItty

The memory as we experience it is always a reconstruction , a reinterpretation of what was. It is a cobbling together of what is new in our situational comportment with channels of interaction with the world already carved in our bodies out by habits of behaving.

Check out this article:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ke-Kaehler/publication/226320095_Body_Memory_and_the_Unconscious/links/00b7d52de303902b6d000000/Body-Memory-and-the-Unconscious.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=-vtNULO_M3o6Zx9sUSjbcyfbi8-GlW6jzJ3E2-02gHFGMo8_VOea9-ValkxIVdn_wDcJ_dMfb-h77FFQyChp9A.oM_YRUKFqpoHtZd0n054eONWcUutPPUXt3Rz42idLm4ikfcu7rki-CKH0oKaHG7c6wzsgpcQdmJ3QoZ3ELMfHQ.-_uh8OHaZ-pI3tb_JZETCTiZBBPrEmo6WSNCKLUy0Q6N6lxLHKUL4is8kxwZhPJ2bRlFWWdMCvqEet_r_p0Zvw&_sg%5B1%5D=bbOZK7ElMthHLlbxM9hLqmnFGwFcdMfO9vYrxL8ZsupDjXAS5IFFAwKi-YfPK5emYDCoGp-BKmkTFTx2FDx5t4e9GZDLk_eVVnY0LM1AeqQR.oM_YRUKFqpoHtZd0n054eONWcUutPPUXt3Rz42idLm4ikfcu7rki-CKH0oKaHG7c6wzsgpcQdmJ3QoZ3ELMfHQ.-_uh8OHaZ-pI3tb_JZETCTiZBBPrEmo6WSNCKLUy0Q6N6lxLHKUL4is8kxwZhPJ2bRlFWWdMCvqEet_r_p0Zvw&_iepl=

I think we need to distinguish religion as a structure of group rules, practices and rituals from religion as a theoretical enterprise, that is, as theology or metaphysics.
My impression is the OP’s sense of religion focuses on ideas, not the group rituals that many on this thread have pointed to. As an idea, we can look at religion as it has been understood in different historical eras, but I think it may be helpful to see how the most forward thinking contemporary supporters of a religious outlook articulate the religious impulse. Liberal theology today takes many forms :the death of god, heretical Christianity, Caputo’s
religion after religion , Mark Taylor’s atheology. They
have dispensed with so many of the accoutrements that people associate with traditional religion ( God as a Being , the trinity, miracles ) as to be almost unrecognizable as ‘religious’. So what makes them so? Religion has its root in religio, which means binding. I think what keeps today’s radical theologies from crossing over into atheism
is that they bind humanity to a notion of the Good that cannot be deconstructed away.
With this in mind , we can’t say that philosophy as an enterprise gives us an alternative to religion.In fact, up until a century ago all philosophy was religious in its metaphysics, and that includes Hume. Not into Marx’s era do we see a thoroughgoing challenge to a religious pint of view , and at that Marx allows a certain faith to slip in through the back door. It was Nietzsche who most radically questioned the stability of the notion of the Good that justifies the religious impulse. Nonetheless, it continues to hang on in the most approaches within philosophy. There are religious variants of phenomenology , postmodernism and existentialism.

I get the sense, Jack, that you don’t want to abandon religion entirely, but are looking for a ‘reasonable’ sort of spirituality.

I'm not looking for a scientific explanation. I already have one. I'm looking for a philosophical one. — GraveItty

Thomas Fuchs incorporates the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau Ponty in his model of memory and the bodily unconscious:

“In body memory, the situations and actions experienced in the past are, as it were, all fused together without any of them standing out individually. Through the repetition and superimposition of experiences, a habit structure has been formed: well-practiced motion sequences, repeatedly perceived gestalten, forms of actions and interactions have become an implicit bodily knowledge and skill.” (Fuchs 2011)

“From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the unconscious is not an intrapsychic reality residing in the depths "below consciousness". Rather, it surrounds and permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning.”

“Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person's space of potentialities produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the continuing progress of life.”

Code-> stand for, summon
Type-> set, group of things that are similar in some way — Olivier5

Do you see in the following from Hutchinson and Reid a critique of the reading of Wittgenstein that sees words as relational codes and as types?

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world“.

They all code for an idea of a thing, for a type of things, not directly for a thing. The word "apple" codes for the idea of apple. — Olivier5

What do ‘code’ and ‘type’ mean here? That there is a referential link between word and category of thing?

I am thrown into a world of handshakes, salutes, and stop signs which are on the same "plane" as ice cream, parachutes, and mustaches. I thrive by acting on correlations prudently (sifting out "causation" or the more reliable ones.) — hanaH

What happens to those handshakes, salutes and stop signs as we move from contextual situation to situation? what can we say about the way that they change, or what about them changes and what doesn’t? What I have in mind here is the idea of pragmatic sense. The sense of meaning of handshakes , salutes and stops signs can be understood in an infinity of ways, depending on the way we are using these terms in the context of our dealings with others.
As you say, they don’t appear out of thin air but are inherited, which I take to mean that we are embedded in cultural practices which shape our expectations. But how exactly do these linguistic entities as pre-existing memory and practice function in actually present situations to exert their influence on our understanding? This is where I think there is an important schism in Wittgenstein interpretations. The radical Wittgenstein that I embrace says that the pre-existing memories and practices are changed by the situations they participate in. In a way, we can say that they only exist in their being changed by actual use. This applies to any notion of the material or the physical.

I think objectivity in this sense doesn't fit with Husserl's explanation of spatial objects. Because as much as he or any other phenomenologist wants to make his narrative as objective as possible, he inadvertently implicates his own explanation, thereby exposing his own idealization of the phenomenon. They should not have started with the denial of objects in itself and the denial of access to other minds. — Caldwell

You might want to check out some of the recent work on perception in cognitive science(Noe and O’Regan) or the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. You will see that many empirical researchers in perception find the work of Husserl and Merleau-Pontu extremely relevant and valuable to their work.

The topic is The Essence of Wittgenstein. Let's stay focused? — hanaH

For me , the best way to focus on a discussion with someone is to obtain as detailed a sense of their background assumptions and philosophical
worldview as possible. Sometimes it can save a lot of time to find out that the other person is interpreting the subject of discussion through a particular lens. In this case, it could allow me to zoom in on what may be the essence of the matter, which may be the following:

“ There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

The authors (Hutchinson and Reid) are critiquing Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein. Hacker, like Ryle
and others, understand ‘type of use’ as a category, rule, grammar or criterion of use that come into play when we use a word. But the authors argue that such types and categories are remade in actual
word use, so they are not protected from the contingency of situational use. I think this is
relevant to the issue of the understanding of sociality. You talked about language being essentially just complex
animal sounds, but that seems to me to veer closer to a behavioral approach than to Wittgenstein. Sense
isnt just arbitrary associations between tokens, it is always relevant in some way. I’m not trying to talk about beetles in boxes, I’m trying to show that a reading of Wittgenstein that consists of behavioral
linkages between arbitrary signs relies on a beetle in box picture.

It is relies on, is constituted by, defining a closed off region of the "self", then, by fiat, declaring this self to already be public, which - and this is the real problem - is apparently then all the more reason to discount the actual public — StreetlightX

If one understands this move properly, it isn’t a question of ‘discounting’ the ‘actual’ public but of deriving it, It will only appear as primary and actual if you have already presupppsed it to be so.

The issue isn't with an original sociality as such, the issue is that by constantly making a hard and fast distinction between original sociality, and socaility in the normal sense (and then constantly retreating back into the shell of the former, as a pristine, self-enclosed space), is to not take seriously enough the idea of an original sociality, which ought to contaminate - in the Derridian sense - this very distinction. There is an original sociality. But it can in no sense be "proper" to the self without the supplement of society writ large. — StreetlightX

I’m not making a hard and fast distinction between two kinds of sociality. Just as Derrida contaminates the assumed hard and fast distinction between speech and writing by showing them to be complicit in all experience, I am showing that causal conditioning models of sociality presume an opposition between an inside and an outside. Not an inside in the sense of a private subjective interior, but in the sense of temporary entities, bits, objects, materials that interact in a public space of coordinations. Like Derrida and Heidegger, and in some sense Husserl, I am deconstructing this opposition that is implied by all
causal conditioning approaches to sociality. The temporal models of these philosophers accomplish this co-contaminating of the inside and the outside.

Frankly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around your enthusiasm for Michael Devitt. You really find his overall thesis about realism to be satisfying? I ask because I find him to be a long, long, long way away from any of the authors that I follow, starting with Wittgenstein.

I read all of them through all of them, when I can manage it (all of them that I've gotten around to, that is, and within the limits of memory & interest.) — hanaH

I guess the question I have is, are you aware of this split among Wittgenstein interpreters, can you articulate what it consists of , and which camp do you prefer?

this is still just talk about the occult interior. In this context it doesn't seem relevant. What you make of my prioritizing bodies in the world, using signals to work together? "Sign" might already be misleading here inasmuch as we tend to think of the sign as the envelope of a letter. — hanaH

On the contrary, it is the notion of ‘body’ and materiality’ as causal conditioning agents that presupposes an occult interior. More specifically , as Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl have shown, such a discourse begins from a notion of body or object or material or sign as a self-identical presence ( even if it only exists for an instant).
It is a mode of reciprocal coordinators and interactions among a multitude of temporary entities.
By contrast , Derrida et al dont begin with temporary bits that interact and condition each other. They dont generate change and difference from the behavior of bits. They derive bits from transition. This is the radically temporal approach.

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.