May I ask where you got your understanding of Kant? I assure you it's upside down and backwards. — tim wood

These were my main points:

1) Kant asserts ideal categories of mind that make it possible to experience space , time ,causality and other features.
Hegel and those after Hegel agreed that the participation of subjective form is necessary for the possibility of what we call empirical objectivity, but Kant’s categories are not metaphysical a priori as he thought, but empirical psychological phenomena.

2)Kant believed that even thought the thing-in-itself was out of reach , empirical reality could be understood progressively more effectively through trial and error. Popper was greatly influenced by Kant when he proposed his falsificationism, the asymptotic achievement of complete understanding of empirical reality. This model of science has been rejected by those who follow Kuhn, who was greatly influenced by Hegel. They reject it because it implies that even though Kant said we only have indirect access to reality through our categories of understanding, nevertheless he believed that our models are an attempt to correspond with an external world whose particulars are not affected by our efforts at understanding. In this sense, it is a static world in a formal sense.

Am I getting these points wrong?

some have simply taken a different path from a different starting point. Hegel an example of that. — tim wood

By that reasoning , Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger were also simply taking a different path from a different starting point. But all of them offered direct
critiques of Kant, so I would have to say that their different starting points were, by their own acknowledgement, built upon Kant while leaving him behind at a certain point.

no one has either displaced or replaced him. Or even, far as I know, thought any of his thoughts better than him. But many, not understanding him, have straw-manned their ideas of his ideas and claiming to have negated his, have only negated their own, his not even present for the battle. — tim wood

For the philosophers I mentioned , and certainly for those following after Nietzsche , it’s not a question of ‘negating’ Kant’s thoughts, but of burrowing beneath their presuppositions to unearth a more primordial
ground. This bot leaves intact his claims and makes them derivative of something more originary that he couldn’t articulate.
Have they thought his thoughts better than he? Why should they? They were his thoughts. These philosophers stand i. the same relation to Kant as Kant did to Descartes, Aquinas Aristotle and Plato. They stand on his shoulders. As for displacing him, I would simply say that the most exciting things I see happening in psychology today would not have been possible without his groundbreaking thinking, but they also would not have been possible if they had remained strictly within the orbit of his thinking, any more than Kant’s groundbreaking ideas would have been possible if he had remained within the orbit of Descartes.

An engineer, piqued at being told that 2+2=4, responded that 2+2 could approach six, for large values of two. — tim wood

You won’t find any postmodern philosopher worth their salt denying that 2+2=4. They would instead point out that mathematical facts are empty without the qualitative relationships they apply to. The way we understand the genesis and nature of these relationships is the determinant of what reason is , how it functiona, and what it’s limits are. This was Kant’s argument also , and so in this sense all philosophers alter Kant are Kantians.

Kant was content to show that particular facts get their meaning only in relation to larger wholes, and these in relation to even larger wholes. The rationality of the details of the empirical world can only be grounded absolutely by knowledge of the total frame, which must be approached as an asymptotic limit. Hegel agreed with Kant that the rationality of particulars only emerge from knowledge of their role in larger relational schemes, but wondered why Kant settled for a static total frame rather than setting that frame into motion. Is the world of reality something that statically IS ( exemplified by physicists making time superfluous to physical
processes) or is its essence it’s being-in-transformation?
Why not rationality as the logic of a dialectical evolution of becoming rather than a single schematic Being?

Nietzsche pushed Hegel’s took of being as becoming even farther by asking why a single dialectic logic had to be assumed. Why couldn’t there be a becoming of dialectical logic, an evolution not totalized in advance by some declared scheme of development?

The interesting thing is that as philosophy moved farther and farther away from Kant’s one-dimensional
model of rationality , it was able to reveal more and more intricate orders of relationships hidden within the confines of Kant’s schematics.

For instance, do you buy lock stock and barrel Kant’s metaphysics of moral reasoning?
— Joshs

I do, though I make no claim in the direction of complete or entire understanding. Where exactly would you fault me for my purchase? — tim wood

What I dont like about Kant’s moral imperative is that it makes a problem of something that isnt one. Specifically, he presumes goals of the self are split off from the greater good and require a method to transcend selfish desire in the direction of moral duty to selfless social goals. But much of recent philosophy and psychology points toward an inability to tease out the selfish from the selfless , due to the fact that personal
desire is inextricably associated with, shaped by and dependent on social aims. The problems with our culture are not the result of selfishness and narcissism , but selflessness oriented around social goals that fail to grasp the ways of thinking of outsiders within and outside of that culture. This failure is tied up with a notion of the rational that is tone deaf to changes in senses of meaning.

the only possible way to do that, is by means of pure practical reason. — Mww

Do you ever critique any aspect of Kantianism from the vantage of more recent philosophers, like Hegel, Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer? For instance, do you buy lock stock and barrel Kant’s metaphysics of moral reasoning?

Our primate ancestors bequeathed to us both the physically bound emotions (the limbic system) and the capacity to think--about the physical, the abstract, the past, the future... The emotions are not reasonable, but they motivate reasoning. Of the two, the emotions usually have the upper hand. — Bitter Crank

“… we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe our-selves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment — “thoughtless” — connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system, ” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain, ” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best-seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don't have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows. “Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly, ” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates. ” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.”

“ Antonio Damasio, in his bestseller Descartes’ Error, observes that a mind requires passion (what we would call affect) for wisdom. He documents that people with damage to their interoceptive network, particularly in one key body-budgeting region, have impaired decision-making. Robbed of the ca­pacity to generate interoceptive predictions, Damasio’s patients were rud­derless. Our new knowledge of brain anatomy now compels us to go one step further. Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it’s also irrevocably wo­ven into the fabric of every decision.”

(Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)

That's quite appealing, but terribly abstract. There are constraints on or expectations about what sorts of resemblance you generate, and the generating itself, and the agreement — Srap Tasmaner

It is abstract, and no substitute for great secondary literature from the likes of Cora Diamond , James Conant and Phil Huirchinson fleshing out this position.

There are indeed constraints on our expectations, but I dont think we can assume that such constraints operate behind the scenes. The best way I can put it is that the situation co-produces the constraints along with the new sense. Put differently, the past is changed by what occurs into it.

I would say that there must be something in common in all particular cases of following a rule correctly, otherwise there could be no such thing as following a rule correctly. — Luke

This is the crux of the matter. I claim that Wittgenstein is giving us a way to treat a notion like ‘correctness’ that doesn’t depend on the reproductive representation of an alleged ‘essense’( the essense of what cases have in common). Correctness would not be conformity to a categorical essense, but the fresh generating of a resemblance that produces the possibility of agreement, among other things.

. Family resemblance may (or may not) be concerned with the concept “rule”, but I don’t believe that family resemblance relates to particular applications of, or the following of, a rule. — Luke

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essense common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses.

But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule’ also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule’, that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule’?

I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would
otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essense common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

I recognize that the ideality that Hacker imparts to norms, rules and grammars is far removed from approaches to language based on naive realism. Rather than assuming pure relations between sign and referent, Hacker treats rules as contingent , pragmatically based guideposts. He nevertheless retains a restricted notion of ideality.

I’ll repeat my Hutchinson quote because I think it captures so well what I think Hacker is unable to let go of from Kantian idealism.

“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-V 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.”

Shared behavioural propensities (looking in the direction pointed at) and common responses to teaching and training (learning the sequence of natural numbers) are presuppositions for the possibility of having such shared rules at all; not the bedrock of justification but the framework for its very possibility. The bedrock is the point at which justifications terminate, and the question ‘why?’ is answered simply by ‘Well, that is what we call “...”.’
— Baker and Hacker, exegesis of PI 217

Wittgenstein is pointing here to "extremely general facts of nature" (PI 142) - such as our shared form of life and our natural human reactions - as the "framework for the very possibility" of having shared rules. You and Cavell have it backward in reading Wittgenstein as talking about the end of justification. Witt is not talking about the end of justification, but its beginning; its possibility. — Luke

Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories.
Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

If the precondition for the sharing, commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents language use from being captured within such frameworks, then one could say that the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.

65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.—For someone might object against me:
"You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language ­games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."

And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,— but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language".

If the precondition for the sharing , commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents
language usage from ever becoming captured by any framework, then one could say the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—
And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way.
Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation­ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con­cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words.
One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

having worked with those afflicted with prodigious narcissism - to the point where others suffer greatly - I have to accept it contains truth of a sort — Tom Storm

Let’s take Trump as an example, since to many he seems to evince an excessive self-infatuation and self-obsession. You may perhaps agree that his ‘narcissism’ is not likely motivated by high self-esteem, but rather a profound insecurity and self-doubt. Every time he boasts ‘I can’ and I did’ he is countering a mocking voice in his head(his father’s ?) disdainfully intoning ‘you can’t’ and ‘you didn’t’. If what we think of as self-concept isn’t about a solipsistic island of meness but a center of integration of experience of the world , then the fragmented , insecure self that Trump obsesses about is less a walled off preserve than a a process trying desperately to integrate the world coherently in a self-consistent manner. Without this self-consistency , our experience unravels into chaos. Thus , Trump finds himself constantly on the precipice of internal incoherence.

I’ve always thought that the modern psychological diagnostic concept of narcissism was not only unhelpful but dangerous. It belongs to a long line of moralistic personality attributions ( selfish, greedy, lazy, evil) that blames or pathologizes the other for our own failure to see the world from their vantage. To embrace the notion of narcissism is to ignore a host of approaches within psychology and philosophy that show why the separation between self and world that it presupposes is incoherent.

We navigate, interpret, improvise...always against a background of personal and social habit. — Zugzwang

This sounds like Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.

So whose characterisation of Hacker and of the orthodox interpretation should I believe? — Luke

It seems to me the introductory summary from Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela that you cited is in general agreement with Hacker’s approach and that of Oxford types like Strawson and Ryle.

I’ve picked out passages from it that I think would be considered problematic from the later Baker’s perspective, and are problematic for me as well.

“… the book propounds an explicit anti-metaphysical view: philosophy is not taken to consist in the pursuit of the sempiternal and hidden structure of language and the world. Language can still be said to have essential features, but they lie in plain view and need only to be made perspicuous by way of describing the uses of words or by tabulating the rules by which language is governed (see PI § 92).”

“The logical syntax of language does not mirror the hidden structure of the world, but is simply a means of representing the world.”


“...the later Wittgenstein is taken to argue that since language is a rule-governed practice (positive result), the idea of a private language is incoherent (negative result). Reading Wittgenstein as providing an overview of grammatical rules that will dissolve philosophical problems and confusions, …” — Luke

The introduction is rejecting metaphysical realism and substituting in its place an empirical , representational realism , also known as neo-Kantianism. But the later Baker would protest that rules and grammar are not ‘essential features’ in the sense of being linguistic facts or classes of representations. Language is not the interpreting of the world via contextually applied rule-based schemes.

How do you view the clarificatory/therapeutic dispute as being relevant to the current discussion regarding morality, the putative distinction between mathematical and ordinary rules, the exhaustion of justifications in following the rule "in the way I do", and the other matters raised in the OP? Do you find the OP to be consistent with your own reading of the Philosophical Investigations? — Luke

I think that as long as one continues to hold onto the need for a clarifying role for language, one is still caught up in a representationalist thinking, and from such a vantage it may be difficult to see the coherence of Antony’s position on morality and the other issues you mentioned, since the sense of all of these is inextricably linked to the former.

all that's needed is a relatively stable background of conventions. For instance, I trust that you understand well enough what I'm getting at here, thanks to extremely complex conventions in stringing words together that have become almost automatic for both of us. — Zugzwang

Hutchinson’s point is that the background conventions do not do this work of understanding by themselves. They don’t exist independently of person-relative, occasion sensitive use. Understanding happens in the bringing to light new aspects of what is presented.

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language — Joshs

I've just read through half of the first article you quoted, Practising pragmatist-Wittgensteinianism. It is almost completely unrelated to this discussion. What's worse is that the article is not even critical of the so-called "Oxford reading", which it turns out, relates only very narrowly to the reading of PI 43 (the meaning-as-use passage). The "Oxford reading" is coined in the article and is cited only in order to criticise a reading by H.O. Mounce. It is not, as you presented, a criticism of the "Oxford reading" or of Baker and Hacker's reading. So I'm afraid I'll have to take your advice with a handful of salt. — Luke

I admit that one would have to read between the lines to extract a clear critique of Hacker and Baker in that article, so I have a couple of large blocks of salt to add to that grain. As far as the Oxford reading of Wittgenstein is concerned, I am not comfortable claiming that no one associated with that group interprets him in the way that I am attributing to both Antony and Hutchinson. I would rather point to specific readings that Hutichinson finds lacking, such as that of Hacker, Malcolm, Ryle and Strawson.

You’ll find an unambiguous critique of Hacker and Baker in another piece by Hutchinson and Read titled ‘Whose Wittgenstein’.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phil-Hutchinson/publication/279027201_Review_article_Whose_Wittgenstein/links/5878db2508ae9a860fe2a58b/Review-article-Whose-Wittgenstein.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=tH6S94ARp2JGAc2uTUTosTyRrEWJ1o93vrRFYsEAiiZcEdEkSt7lJMKbSzKnXCM_uFDPfG5CyLLc-kImJYNtXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_sg%5B1%5D=xUbobHnMyNV6-TK5P0zRpUf5wZKo0Vl3ny9G28AQpeKNNQ0KKhRa1AN4f_m9GmZF5OCmZ9t03V_Kcv_GPUIxZAjNEvumug81yRA4sgbbaUXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_iepl=

Here are some snippets:

“While one may be inclined to lean towards Baker & Hacker (if one must lean, on such matters) regarding Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks when the target of their criticism is Saul Kripke’s exegesis—given that the latter (notoriously) selectively reads Wittgenstein’s remarks in order to generate ‘Wittgenstein-the-rule-following-sceptic’ or ‘Kripkenstein’—this does not blind one to …a recognition that there is in play therein an understanding of Wittgenstein on following a rule which, while avoiding the pit-falls of Kripke’s ‘reading’, saddles Wittgenstein with a substantive philosophy of questionable value.”

“…Hacker’s summatory Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies… tells one in the end rather less about Wittgenstein than about a narrow ‘Oxford philosophy’ which misses the richness and breadth of Wittgenstein’s work and appeal.”

“Gordon Baker, Hacker’s co-author in these papers, had, from 1991 onwards, not only explicitly distanced himself from the Baker & Hacker reading of Philosophical Investigations but also frequently used ‘Baker & Hacker’ readings as a stalking horse for his own new reading…”

it is a clear misreading by Cavell (followed by Antony) to view PI 217 as pointing to an end to rules or an invitation for further justification. (Cavell reads far too much into the word "inclined".) — Luke

“We find it odd that in HWCC—and in fact in the entire large volume of literature published by Hacker on these matters— he has never sought to seriously engage with Baker’s post ’90 ‘apostasy’.Particularly so since Baker explicitly identifies continuities between his own (post Baker & Hacker) reading of PI and the readings advanced by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben. What is significant about Baker’s change of mind is not that he did so: a change of mind does not necessitate progress. What is significant is the extent to which Baker’s later work stands as a powerful critique of the reading propounded by he and Hacker in the 1980s, and by Hacker since.”

“In short, Baker’s post­-1990 ‘position’—expounded throughout BWM—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.”

I don't see evidence yet in your posts that you and Antony are even on the same page. — Luke

Perhaps not. But I suggest we first find out if Antony supports Hutchinson’s ( and Baker’s) assertions about what is lacking in Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.

It is possible that you and Antony have mistaken me for appealing to "grammar-book rules" as per the final paragraph above, but I have been talking about the ""rules" of grammar" as described in the same paragraph. I have referred to this wider sort of grammar - Wittgenstein's concept of grammar - as a corrective to what is indicated by the discussion title: 'Rules' End', and to Antony's explicit statements that some concepts are without rules; the idea that some meaningful language-use is not rule-governed. That's just not the case. — Luke

Regarding your claim that grammar and rules "only function by being changed in actual use", you have given no reason as to why these function only "by being changed", or why they do not function without being changed. — Luke

Maybe you could answer Hutchinson’s
question put to Hacker:

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non­occasion-sensitive) reference points?”

“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-V 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.”

Hutchinson addresses the relation between rule and use in his focus on perspicuous representation.

“A key indication of the difference ( between Hacker and the later Baker) can be gleaned from the understand­ings of the place of ‘perspicuous (re)presentation’, of which Wittgenstein writes in PI §122, that it ‘is of fundamental importance for us’. For Baker ‘perspicuous presentation’ does not denote a class of repre­sentations as it is usually thought to do (in the work of Baker & Hacker for instance, though, to be sure, not only there). It rather denotes what works: what achieves the therapeutic aim. And that this form of representation does so here, now, for this person, etc. does not imply that it will do so again, (or) for someone else. Therapy is achieved by facilitating one’s inter­locutor’s ((or) one’s own) arrival at a position where they might freely acknowledge hitherto unnoticed aspects.

Acknowledging new aspects helps free one from the grip of a philosophical picture that initially led to the seeming intractability of the philosophical problem. Any presentation which serves this purpose can therefore be said to have been perspicuous— for that person, at that time, thereabouts. Perspicuity, on this understand­ing, does not denote a property of a class of representations but is rather an achievement term: perspicuity is accorded to the presentation that achieves the bringing to light of new aspects which are freely accepted by one’s philosophical interlocutor.
One consequence of the later Baker’s rendition of ‘perspicuous presen­tation’ is that it allows one to reinterpret what ‘our grammar’ might be when we consider ourselves to be perspicuously presenting it . For (later) Baker ‘grammar’ is best read as ‘“our” grammar’; while for Hacker, ‘grammar’ is to be read as ‘the grammar’.”

“… the word ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein, far from meaning what Hacker (and the early D. Z. Phillips, and possibly, at moments, Dilman) takes it to mean, is intended as our grammar, as indexed to the person or persons employing it, in such a way that an appeal to ‘“the” grammar’ cannot be used to settle philosophical disputes, but only as a way of facilitating a person’s knowing how they are actually using a term and how that relates (or does not) to how they want to use it.”

The actual use can "co-invent the sense of the rule, grammar", but - if I understand you correctly - that is a change in the rules, not an end to the rules. — Luke

If actual contextual use offers a fresh sense of a rule, and we only know rules in actual use , where is an ‘unchanged’ rule stored? Is there some internal or social non-contextual realm where they are kept protected from alteration?

I’ll give Hutchinson the last word:


“We focus here on the claim that there are two complementary strands, clarificatory and therapeutic, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We can find no evidence for these being discrete though complementary strands. Yet Hacker repeatedly asserts them to be so . However,
leaving the question of textual evidence aside, asserting them to be so certainly has unfortunate implications for Hacker’s ‘Wittgenstein’. The unfortunate implications are: if elucidation and therapy (connective analysis, perspicuous presentation) are distinct endeavours,
though both undertaken in PI, then what motivates the elucidations? It is difficult, without relating, i.e. subsuming, the practice of elucidating to the therapeutic thrust of PI, to understand why Wittgenstein would want to engage in such ‘clarifications of our language’. For if the clarification of our grammar is not occasion-sensitive—not carried out on a case-by-case basis with a particular interlocutor—then Wittgenstein, it seems, is embroiled in something of a performative contradiction.

For if clarification per se is a goal then it presupposes a particular view of how language must be (contra, that is, PI §132). In clarifying language in this way Wittgenstein is taken to dissolve philosophical problems by showing us (clarifying, perspicuously representing) the rules of our grammar (linguistic facts). Again this raises the prospect of Wittgenstein, at a really quite basic level, contradicting his own metaphilosophical remarks in the very text in which he makes those remarks; a text, we should recall, that he laboured over for sixteen years.
Indeed, it turns Wittgenstein into a closet metaphysician. This “problem of motivation” then presents further problems for Hacker; if he insists upon ‘connective analysis’ as separate and distinct from therapy, then this must (at the least) imply that Wittgenstein does have a picture (or a theory) of ‘language’; such that it enables us, as it were, to take up a stance external to that ‘language’ and survey it; and that these elucidations serve some non­person-relative and non-occasion-sensitive elucidatory purpose.

This is important because holding on to the idea that there is more than therapy hereabouts leads Hacker to saddle Wittgenstein with a form of conventionalism. Hacker seems not to realize why others find his form of‘Wittgensteinianism’ easy to dismiss.”

I see free will as a necessary precondition for any human understanding consistent with a Kantian pure intuition — Hanover

I’m not sure than Kantianism avoids its own sort of determinism (fixed categories , ethical universality and an empirically rational universe).

Let's call it the grammar of our ethical situations.
— Antony Nickles

Let's not. Grammar is of our language. — Luke

I have a suggestion to make which may or may not clarify this debate. Rather than giving the impression that what you are attempting to do is locate THE correct reading of Wittgenstein, maybe you could instead accept that there may be more than one ‘correct’ Wittgenstein, and proceed to learn about the alternatives to your own. You will still end up preferring one version over another, but at least you’ll have opened yourself up to other possibilities.


it may be helpful to recognize use that, like with all great philosophers, interpretations of Wittgenstein fall into distinct camps. As I mentioned in an earlier post , I see this debate as pitting a certain Oxford reading ( Hacker and Baker) against what I would call a phenomenological-enactivist reading.

“The Oxford movement that wanted to follow Wittgenstein actually fell back somewhat. It rightly emphasized that a word means its use in situations — the word marks or changes something in the situation in which it can be said. A word's use-contexts have no single picture or pattern in common. As Wittgenstein said, a word's situations are a "family," not a common pattern. But then the Oxford Analysts tried, after all, to define the use of a word, if not by a concept then at least by a rule, to capture what a word marks or does. That effort failed; rules don't limit what a word can mean, either.”( Eugene Gendlin)


I don’t see evidence yet in your posts that you recognize there is such a camp that backs up Antony’s perspective on Witt. Or it may be that you are struggling to understand the coherence of such an account.

Let’s see if it might help to widen the scope of this discussion a bit. The two camps I mention differ not just in their understanding of Wittgenstein, but in the broader psychological articulation of the relation between perception , cognition and language.

Phenomenologically influenced models of cognition and language break away from older theories by abandoning f the notion of internal representations. In you discussion you have focused on such things as concepts, rules, criteria and the influence of social normativity.

These are all factors which shape how we understand and use words, but the question for the enactivist Wittgensteinian camp is what exactly is the functional relationship between these influences and the actual senses of words that arise in contextual situations. Their argument is that none of these shaping factors can be seen as stored internal representations or as having some other sort of temporary identity to them, such that when we understand a word we are consulting some pre-existing scheme(rule. social norm, concept, etc). It is not that these don’t come into play. It is that when they do come into play it is not a matter of simply piecing together or cobbling a pre-existing structure with a new situation.
Such background internal and culture constraints (grammar , rules) only function by being changed in actual use. The actual use co-invents the sense of the rule, grammar, concept that ‘was’ implicated.

“All structures, concepts, representations, schemes and laws are to be viewed as already involving a concretely ongoing activity, and thus they can never explain or picture it.” (Gendlin)

I know much more explanation needs to be given here , but it might help if you familiarized yourself with the enactivist critique of representationalist models.

Any examples of Greeks using 'meta' that way? I keep hearing that for a long time it only connected to 'physical' with reference to cataloguing of Aristotle's books? — bongo fury

“The term was invented by the 1st-century BCE head of Aristotle‘s Peripatetic school, Andronicus of Rhodes. Andronicus edited and arranged Aristotle’s works, giving the name Metaphysics (τα μετα τα φυσικα βιβλια), literally “the books beyond the physics,” perhaps the books to be read after reading Aristotle’s books on nature, which he called the Physics. The Greek for nature is physis, so metaphysical is also “beyond the natural.”

Aristotle never used the term metaphysics. For Plato, Aristotle’s master, the realm of abstract ideas was more “real” than that of physical. i.e., material or concrete, objects, because ideas can be more permanent (the Being of Parmenides), whereas material objects are constantly changing (the Becoming of Heraclitus).“

The question was how, why or when did 'speculative' enter the lexicon. Interesting though to see it joined to 'dialectics'. Is/was that common? Examples please. If so then perhaps your theory, that 'speculative' meant 'fanciful' in relation to Hegel's historicising, gets some traction. — bongo fury

Hegel regarded his dialectical method or “speculative mode of cognition” (PR §10) as the hallmark of his philosophy.

From Brittanica:

The Hegelian system, in which German idealism reached its fulfillment, claimed to provide a unitary solution to all of the problems of philosophy. It held that the speculative point of view, which transcends all particular and separate perspectives, must grasp the one truth, bringing back to its proper centre all of the problems of logic, of metaphysics (or the nature of Being), and of the philosophies of nature, law, history, and culture (artistic, religious, and philosophical). According to Hegel, this attitude is more than a formal method that remains extraneous to its own content; rather, it represents the actual development of the Absolute—of the all-embracing totality of reality—considered “as Subject and not merely as Substance” (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this positing—expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the factual elements of life and culture—and finally regains itself, through the negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.

Such a dialectical scheme (immediateness–alienation–negation of the negation) accomplished the self-resolution of the aforementioned problem areas—of logic, of metaphysics, and so on. This panoramic system thus had the merit of engaging philosophy in the consideration of all of the problems of history and culture, none of which could any longer be deemed foreign to its competence. At the same time, however, the system deprived all of the implicated elements and problems of their autonomy and particular authenticity, reducing them to symbolic manifestations of the one process, that of the Absolute Spirit’s quest for and conquest of its own self. Moreover, such a speculative mediation between opposites, when directed to the more impending problems of the time, such as those of religion and politics, led ultimately to the evasion of the most urgent and imperious ideological demands and was hardly able to escape the charge of ambiguity and opportunism.”

For your argument to work, God's omniscience must go out the window but if that, you would be arguing against not God but something else entirely, an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, non-omniscient being - that's not God. — TheMadFool

Liberal theology has come along way since the formulation of God as omniscient( see process theology, open theism).

the point was that a certain type of metaphysics underwrite science, which you seem to agree with. — Olivier5

Galilean and Newtonian physics can be argued to be consistent with the rationalist metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza. The hypothetico-deductive method proposed by Bacon in this period was a philosophy a scientific method that arose out of rationalism.
The idealistic metaphysics ushered in by Kant and Hegel
has been suggested as a grounding for Relativity and quantum physics. The philosophy of science that is embraced by modern physics is typically that of Popper, who was an adherent of Kantian idealism. Postmodern metaphysics ( or anti-metaphysics) has its parallel in the philosophy of science of Kuhn and Feyerabend, which critiques the Kantian and Popperian model.
So you see we have at least three distinct metaphysical eras ( and we could divide them up into many more) that accompanies the history of science from the 1600’s to today.

The ‘meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’ (nature).
— Joshs

If that's an is, and not an ought to be, then... is, since when? — bongo fury

Since the Greeks?

His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence.
— Joshs

Don't understand. — bongo fury

Speculative dialectics deservedly got a bad rep when philosophers decided they no longer needed to bother studying actual contingent circumstances of human life in its sociological, political and anthropological aspects. Instead, they could apply a one- size -fits -all Hegelian scheme of dialectical stages onto whatever aspect of human history they wanted to focus on, revealing its supposed necessity and inevitability. This is why it was important for Marx to ground the dialectic in material circumstances.

That all sounds very liberal and pleasant, but what process goes into "establishing agreement not only about basic definitions... but also about basic beliefs"? And what if such agreement cannot be found? What if the other person's position remains obscure? What if the difference of commonality is exactly what is significant?

Sometimes folk are what we in the trade call wrong — Banno

Lyotard’s distinction between a litigation and a differend. may be relevant here:

“ A differend is a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement. Lyotard distinguishes the victim from the plaintiff. The later is the wronged party in a litigation; the former, the wronged party in a differend. In a litigation, the plaintiff’s wrong can be presented. In a differend, the victim’s wrong cannot be presented. A victim, for Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong.

This disempowerment can occur in several ways: it may quite literally be a silencing; the victim may be threatened into silence or in some other way disallowed to speak. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the discourse of the rule of judgement. The victim may not be believed, may be thought to be mad, or not be understood. The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim’s wrong cannot be translated into its terms; the wrong may not be presentable as a wrong.”

Science, as posted by 180 Proof, is metaphysics that works (generally). I agree with that, while of course others may disagree. — Olivier5

Except that science doesn’t have a single definition , it is a historical development with a changing understanding of itself, undergirded by a changing metaphysical outlook.
So the question isn’t whether science works , but how the way it purportedly works changes along with changing metaphysical frameworks. The notion that science simply ‘works’ itself presupposes a particular metaphysics of science, one that is now undergoing transformation.

I'd have thought that metaphysics starts from the assumption that all the physics is settled, so there are no speculations to deal with. — bongo fury

The ‘ meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’( nature ).
It need make no claims for a particular content of science being settled or unsettled.
As far as it’s speculative role, this term began fashionable after Hegel. His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural
and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence. Thus it was speculative rather than empirical.

It strikes me that metaphysics, though it may purport to explain (or question) why science or other things "work", doesn't "work" itself. Merely to claim that other things like science or religion "work" provides no support for metaphysics, though. — Ciceronianus

Metaphysics is really no more than one pole of an abstract-concrete continuum that runs through all modes of thought and culture. Within science intself there is more and less applied thinking , more and less
theoretical and meta-theoretical. Metaphysics as it is practiced in particular by continental philosophers is just their attempt to achieve an ‘ultra-meta’ perspective. If you think getting too theoretical muddies the waters you can always climb down from the perch and immerse yourself in the details.

Understanding the person you are trying to get to do what you want doesn't dissolve the conflict or lead to immediate cooperation, but it may prove a useful tool in getting them to do what you want. — Ennui Elucidator

How many of the interpersonal conflicts, large and small, that we all experience on an almost daily basis, have to do with not being able to get others to do what we want , and how many of them have to do with our not being able to fathom why the other person will not do what we want? Put differently , I am suggesting that the depth of our anger, disappointment , anxiety , guilt and other negative affective responses to the behavior of others we are dealing with, is in direct proportion to the breakdown in trust and mutual understanding we perceive with them. A ‘conflict’ with someone who thwarts our preference due to reasons we fully understand and can empathize with is not really a conflict at all. It’s more of a minor strategic challenge: how do we incentivize their actions or negotiate a compromise suitable to us both?

But this sort of situation plays only the most minor role in the daily drama of living. What keeps us awake at night is the loved one, friend or acquaintance who inexplicably disappointed us , angered us , rejected us , severed our bond of trust with them , caused us to doubt our own worth.

These are the conflicts caused by a breakdown in understanding. And these are what account for the kinds of conflicts that take place among larger social
groups, and that lead to wars and persecutions. The problem with axioms of discourse is that they have already been implicitly violated by the time the conflict is perceived. Ethically meaningful interpersonal conflicts are only possible in the first place as the breakdown of tacit pre-existing axioms of shared understandings.

if poetry contains an authentic metaphysics, how can it be evidenced?" — Gus Lamarch

If poetry contains a metaphysics , then do prose literature, visual art, music ,scientific and political
discourse also contain their own authentic metaphysics? If not, then what is it about poetry that distinguishes it from all other modes of creative expression?

Isnt it the case that it is the particular CONTENT conveyed by any of the innumerable modes of cultural expression within an era ( including poetry) that manifests a mataphysics? For instance , if one were to delimit a cultural history of poetry in the West, would one not be able to correlate the changes in the way poets considered their craft over the centuries with changes in metaphysical outlook? Doesn’t classical Greek poetry reflect a different metaphysical thinking than the poetry of the Renaissance or the Modern or postmodern eras?

I think the the tools you describe are useful and can work if people come together in good faith. — Tom Storm

Hermeneuticists like John Caputo and Richard Rorty call this working together in good faith toward a fusion of horizons of understanding the ‘conversation of mankind’. It has been critiqued by postmodernists like Derrida and Lyotard , who point out that in many cases the two parties are not operating with the same senses of meaning , and there is no meta-understanding that can arrived at, no perfect agreement, through an effort of ‘good faith’ What is needed in these cases is respect for the disagreement rather than pursuit of fusion.

Often in a negotiation (shuttle diplomacy style), you can get two parties to agree on what to do for profoundly different reasons. — Ennui Elucidator

It sounds like perhaps you have a background in the law.
If money is at the center of a dispute, or things money can buy, then this kind of negotiation can work. But in most emotionally fraught conflicts, it is contrasting worldviews that are at the center, in which case separation-violence and insight constitute the opposing poles of action.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.
— Joshs
How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory. — Michael Zwingli

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712318772778

What I have in mind is the truly hard question of philosophy, which is not consciousness (though indirectly, one can claim this) but presence. — Constance

One might call this the ‘metaphysics of presence’, after Heidegger and Derrida. Indeed, if one begins with presence , then one finds oneself ‘before’ language , becuase presence, as self-presence, auto-affection, self-identity, must be before language since it precedes relation. The trick is to think before presence Then language reappears , not as that which takes place between presences , but as prior to presence.

The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism. — Michael Zwingli

Your references are a bit out of date. The most sophisticated current models of memory dont make use of a computer storage metaphor anymore. Those were all the rage 40 years ago. Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.

But the world is brimful with relations that don't require us to be noticing them, or even involve us at all, in order to exist.

The codes and patterns that are intrinsic to nature that you assert in the second passage quoted above are the intrinsic relational properties of the world, which nonetheless do not need us to create, or even mediate, their existence it would seem. — Joshs

Yea, this is the realist conclusion of semiologists. And their patron saint, Charles Peirce, found it necessary to ground all this subject-independence in a Divine origin.

At any rate, realist semiology asks why it should be necessary to attach all phenomena to the subject in order to arrive at a perfectly satisfactory account of the way things are. Postmodern philosophers respond that if we examine closely what it is we are doing when we posit a world independent of us , and a history that can be extracted independently of our present , we will find that the idea of subject-independent phenomena is no longer useful, interesting or even coherent.

Specifically , they claim that when we imagine or theorize about the oldest and simplest forms of existence , those most distant in time from the appearance of human beings, we are not only making use of the latest cultural
understanding to model this subject-independence, but there isn’t a single aspect of our natural history model that isn’t completely beholden to the current framework that defines its terms. The reason for this is that the basis of any inquiry into what ‘is’ or what ‘was’ is a pragmatic affair. What ‘is’ only has sense for us in relation to our aims, goals and purposes. When we ask what exists we are always asking what we can do with a thing. Being and use are not separate issues, they are the same issue.

Now, what if one acknowledges this and still wants to maintain that there is and was a subject independent world? It becomes a powerless notion, because unlike the Kantian thing in itself , the postmodernist ‘outside world’ doesn’t unidirectionally shape our representations of it. They argue that history must be distinguished from historicism. Historicism assumes we can retrieve intact previous eras of human or natural history in order to study them. But the actual historical nature of our experiencing of the world precludes such a duplication of what was. Instead , historical study is always revision and reinterpretation. To return to the most archaic past is always to move into a new future.

Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You? — Banno

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. But how the world does this is dependent on what I project forward. The world responses precisely, but in different ways, to different formulations.


Reciprocal dependence between self as world is not the same thing as a noumenal reality. The latter seems to imply a relation of one-way correspondence between representing subject and subject-independent world.

if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument. — Banno

I prefer to word it this way: reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world.

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena). — Amalac

Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by positing a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism.

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions. — Banno

I dont know if this will help. It lays out the anti-noumenal phenomenological argument, claiming that it gives us a more robust realism than the Kantian or neo-Kantian alternatives.


‘As Husserl points out in the lecture course Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme from 1915, nothing might seem more natural than to say that the objects I am aware of are outside my consciousness. When my experiences – be they perceptions or other kinds of intentional acts – present me with objects, one must ask how this could happen, and the answer seems straightforward: By means of some representational mediation. The objects of which I am conscious are outside my consciousness, but inside my consciousness, I find representations (pictures and signs) of these objects, and it is these internal objects that enable me to be conscious of the external ones. However, as Husserl then continues, such a theory is completely nonsensical. It conceives of consciousness as a box containing representations that resemble external objects, but it forgets to ask how we are supposed to know that the (mis)representations are in fact (mis)representations of external objects:

The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones etc. For such a picture observing ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal picture, and so on ad infinitum (Husserl 2003: 106

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl’s anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn’t merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (Husserl 1982: 111).

This claim is one that resounds throughout Husserl’s oeuvre. As he, years later, would write in Cartesianische Meditationen, it is absurd to conceive of consciousness
and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially
interdependent and united (Husserl 1960: 84). Husserl’s idealism is not a reductive idealism. Husserl is not a phenomenalist that seeks to reduce the world to a complex of sensations. His opponent is not the dualist, but the objectivist, who claims that reality is absolute in the sense of being radically mind­independent. To deny the latter, to deny that the “universe of true being” lies “outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence” (Husserl 1960: 84), is not to say that reality literally exists in the mind, or that it is an intramental construction, but that reality is essentially manifestable, and therefore in principle available and accessible to consciousness.”

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

And that something else is given by the subject, who, immersed in space and time, apprehends the phenomena, but never the things in themselves (the so-called "noumena").

From this perspective, the so-called "problem of knowledge", which has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years, disappears in one fell swoop. And not only does it disappear, it is revealed as nonsense.

Indeed, it is impossible for a human being to think in non-human terms, from a pre- or super-human perspective, thus valuing the “primal objectivity” of a world: value-neutral, ahistorical, timeless, and also, making a judgment on how that ontological condition prior to one's own existence is.

There is still a problem for the Kantian view. And that’s the gulf between the roel of the subject and the thing in itself. How can we be in the world if there is an uncrossable chasm between our representations of the world ( the phenomena ) and the noumenal aspect of reality?
Phenomenological philosophy proposed to solve this dualist problem by arguing that there is no noumenal reality. The world as it appears to a subject is all there is, there is nothing hidden behind phenomena. Because it is no longer necessary to assume internal representations or models of a separate outside , it is also not necessary to assume a formal logic as our primary means of access to a world. This removes the issue of whether human ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic to us and not shared by other animals. All living, self-organizing systems function according to the same general normatively oriented principles.

If I grab one of those ducks that are in a row and squeeze, I shall likely discover that ducks aren't always gentle and cute. It will bite and kick and quack up a storm. On the other hand, if I try to grab the row that they're putatively in, well, do you see a problem there? — tim wood

I think we have a problem with more than ‘rowness’ if we’re trying to determine the contribution of the subject to the experience of what we want to call the object. For instance, you said we discover features of the duck by bodily interacting with it. We reach out and squeeze. We then receive all kinds of feedback from the duck, such as tactile( we feel it bite and kick) , kinesthetic( we feel it’s resistance against our grasp), auditory ( we hear it quack), and we see all these behaviors. Perceptual psychologists will tell you that the data we actually receive from the world is very minimal. We fill in the rest based on expectations gained from prior experiences. In fact, our expectations and the data from the outside are so inextricably intertwined that it becomes impossible to separate out what is the subjective contribution and what is the objective contribution to our experience of the duck.

Once we remove from from the picture all of the background knowledge we bring to our experience of the ‘duck’ , all that is left is a constantly changing flow
of meaningless data. If I draw a Chinese linguistic form , someone who reads Chinese will
recognize it as a particular word concept. I would see it as an abstract series of shapes. A snake might see it as separated lines and curves. Which is the ‘real’ object? It depends on who is interacting with it. When we expereince a thing , whether it’s a neutrino or a duck, we are interacting with it in complex ways.

But what if we try and imagine the object independently of our interaction with it? Can’t we just disassemble the patterned complexity that we see ( construct) as the object into its components? But if the object for us , as a result of our constructive activity imposed on it , is nothing but this complex of relations, do the components exist in themselves pure and unrelaronal? Physics seems to be coming to the realization that there are no intrinsic and non-relational properties in the world. To be an entity is to be changing in some way i. relation to something else. This would seem to place the basis of pattern , in the form of irreducible relationality and transformation, at the heart of the so-called outside world. It may turn out to be the case that relational pattern , rather than intrinsic content , IS the basis of objective reality.

When you compare the hardware and the software of a computer, I’m sure you note
that the hardware is the ‘physical’ basis of it and the software is the ‘patterned’ implementation of the hardware. Would you want to argue that the software is somehow less real or secondary with respect to the hardware? But you wouldnt deny that the software allows us to make real changes in our brains and in the world. Furthermore , there is no way to reduce
e software language to a hardware language of physical causality without losing what is essential to the software description. But if software language is only secondary and derivative , there should be a way to convey all of the meaning of the software language via a hardware description.

This has led semiologists to conclude that codes and patterns are intrinsic to nature ( genetic code) , not just to minds.

the idea is projected onto and then supposed to originate in the thing or things. — tim wood

Define ‘thing’ without using a notion of pattern or relation.

You have been working on a thoroughgoing and comprehensive philosophy, with your concept of information as its centerpiece. The most important and relevant implications of a metaphilosophy have to do with the most complex phenomena in the world. And those most complex phenomena are none other than human interactions , our passions, drives and intellectual processes and goals, how the individual contributes to their culture and how that culture
shapes the individual politically , morally , creatively, and how language is to be understood. Of course, you want to locate the irreducible basis for your model in order to give it precision and clarity. You’ve attempted to accomplish this by embracing a kind of quasi-physics vocabulary. The problem with this is that it may run the risk of being dismissed by physicists who don’t see it as either empirically valid or philosophically coherent.
They may be wrong , but I think what you’re aiming for will be much between comprehended by others of you put more emphasis on the human behavioral implications of your theory ( emotion, intersubjective relations , cognition and perception , psychopathology, language , ethics).