you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience. I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I 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, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities (visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources.

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.

You may respond to all this by observing that I’m simply describing how the brain creates a representation of the world. But what I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isn’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third.

But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. Yes, but the question is, how does the actual flow of events constrain the kinds of patterns we can construct to model them? Apparently the actual flow of events can accommodate an indefinite variety of construals. We can look at a landscape and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us. Seeing it as a unity by synthesizing its temporally and spatially spaced out elements into an instantaneous whole in the brain allows us to do things with it like creating maps of it. And there are many other ways of construing the scene that are equally true in the sense that we can test out our knowledge in our actual interactions with it and validate our model.

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former? Let’s say that it is indeed better in that it subsumes the features of the former into a more holistically integrated unity. In other words, we can always perceive a phenomenon in restrictive terms as ‘this and only this’ , or in terms that are permeable to alternative constructions. Is the latter way a more accurate representation of reality? I think it’s better than accurate. The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?

We can model physical phenomena in terms of efficient causality, where the behavior of interacting objects is described on the basis of fixed properties (mass, energy), and then declare that the physical world behaved according to the laws of objective causality before humans arrived on the scene. This approach validates itself perfectly well, but perhaps it can be subsumed as just one aspect within a more permeable model of nature, one that doesn’t invalidate the causal account but reveals it as limited and restrictive, like seeing a coastline as disconnected segments. We can declare that dinosaurs existed before we discover them, and then in 50 years a new biological approach will discard names for living things in favor of a radically holistic ecological approach in which it no longer makes sense to talk about discrete objects moving through space we call animals , but instead a web of reciprocal relations within which we no longer need to tease out categorical entities we call animals. And they could then declare this ecology (but not dinosaurs) something that existed before humans arrived.

We can apply this subsuming account of knowledge to ethics as well. We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.

your claim is that the coastline changes because different people paint or think of it differently, and that it doesn't exist until painted, mapped, etc. Nothing you've said supports this claim; it doesn't follow from the premises. No one disagrees that different people will paint a coastline differently or that coastlines interacted with birds before men. However, most would disagree that the coastline didn't exist until it was painted. Again, you seem to need a premise like: "things are entirely defined by their relations and all relations and properties are essential." But I don't see why anyone would agree to premises like this because it implies things like: "you change when someone lights a picture of you on fire," and "ants didn't exist until people developed an abstraction of 'ant — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted. The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use. Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they don’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts. The development of knowledge of a coastline , or any other aspect of nature , is in the direction of an enrichment of sense. This is what I mean when I say that the meaning of the concept of coastline changes with the development of knowledge. The issue here isn’t whether things exist outside of us, it’s what kinds of constraints their existence produces in relation to their enrichment by the development of knowledge.

Knowledge produces material changes in the world not by nullifying existing things, but by integrating them in more and more complex and useful ways with respect to our practical uses of other things. The fact that a coastline exists in some sense outside of our growing knowledge of it is utterly irrelevant to anything that makes it scientifically important to us and gives us the power to control nature and get along with each other. If you want to assume there is some intrinsic content that defines the existence of natural things independent of our knowledge of them, I can go along with that, but I would argue that such content acts as barely more than a placemark in comparison to the processes of integration and correlation by which we know about them and do useful things with them. I think the independent existence of things is so important to you because you confuse intrinsic content with integrative processes of knowing.

To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it.

…when a concept or model changes, it does not imply that what is known through them changes. This is for the same reason that if I light a photograph of myself on fire I don't suffer burns, or if I unfocus my telescope, the craters in the Moon aren't smoothed away.

“whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interaction”

Yes, a system of interaction where the ocean is not a cliff or a beach. But these interactions don't depend on us knowing about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The word ‘bus’ implies a system of interactions with the object ‘bus’ based on our understanding of what it is and what it does. Someone who doesnt know about automobiles or even carriages would see it as very different kind of object and interact with it in different ways as a result. If you want to see how different people interact differently with the same coastline ask them to sit down and paint a painting of the scene as accurately as possible. There will be similarities among the paintings, but none will look identical. This is not just due to different skill levels but to the fact that each person’s procedure for measuring and depicting it makes use of a slightly different process. Objective space is derivative of our subjective determination of space.

"America did not have a coastline until it was mapped," and "penguins and cockroaches didn't exist until man experienced them," are prima facie implausible claims. Extraordinary claims require solid evidence. Yet as noted above, one can easily accept enactivist premises, reject the "view from nowhere," and recognize the epistemic primacy of interaction without having to suppose any of this. You seem to need additional premises to justify this sort of claim, not merely dismissing other views.

As it stands, this looks akin to saying "three and three doesn't make five, thus it must make seven." Well, the first premise is right. The conclusion is extremely counterintuitive though and it's unclear how it is supposed to follow. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I should note that cartography is as much an art as a science. Is an authography projection more accurate than a mercator projection? Things exist in relation to what they interact with, and their properties are a function of that interaction. If a coastline existed prior to the arrival of humans, we have to ask who or what it existed for and in relation to. For instance, we could show what existed in terms of the ways of dealing with it of other animals . Birds have excellent vision and can scan a large area. They ‘see’ something like a coastline much better than we can with the naked eye, but what that coastline means for them is a function of what they do with it, how it matters to their activities and purposes. Just as the person who has no familiarity with vehicles ‘sees’ a bus differently from someone who knows what they are for, a bird sees a coastline differently from the way we do. If we remove all the animals, the coastline still exists , but now it has to be understood from the ‘point of view’ of the inorganic structures that interact with it. In each case, whether it is involved with humans, animals or non-living things, the coastline exists as ‘something’, but what this something is must be determined by what it does, and what it does is a function of its relations with the structures it interacts with. Nothing about a ‘coastline’ or any other thing pre-exists its interactions with other things. Things are nothing outside of their interactions. This is what it means to exist.

Having said this, you might be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan of truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. Furthermore, I associate truth with achieving a knowledge characterized by stability, inferential compatibility, prediction and control, harmoniousness and intimacy. It might seem as though what I have said points to a relativism that eliminates the possibility of achieving these goals of truth, but I believe the universe is highly ordered. Its order is in the nature of an intricate process of self-development rather than in static properties and laws. We become privy to this intricate order by participating in its development through our sciences, technologies and other domains of creativity.

Also, is it supposed to be a vice to "assert with bold certainty" that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It depends on the system of convictions that underlie your beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad for a baby, just as what constitutes genital mutilation depends on such guiding assumptions. Archeologists found tiny tools and weapons dating back 1700 years.

"They were just not made for adult-sized hands," Losey says. Instead, they appeared to be scaled-down versions for children. Perhaps, the researchers speculate, adults fashioned the tiny tools so that youngsters could begin to hone the hunting skills they would later need, the researchers report this month in Antiquity

Losey and Hull's speculation lines up with what researchers observe in many societies today, says David Lancy, an anthropologist emeritus at Utah State University in Logan. From an early age, children are allowed to interact with the tools adults use to work, forage, and hunt, often with no parental supervision. Babies suck on sharp knives; toddlers play with machetes.

I mention in my other post that I believe in truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. This goes for ethical truth as well. But I dont see this progress as conformity to pre-determined moral truths , any more than I see scientific progress as conformity to ‘the way things are’, except by understanding the ‘way things are’ in terms of an intricately intercorrelated order of development that transcends all fixed properties and laws. This means ethical progress is not a matter of finding fault on the basis of a pre-given knowledge, but of enriching understanding by presenting new dimensions of appraisal and construing.

A better question would be, why do you think only good things are meaningful? Meaning, and of course, this is not the dictionary sense of meaning, but the affective sense, referring to the pathos of one's regard for something, is about something affectively impactful, and this includes have an interest, being concerned, loving, hating and the entire range of value possibilities. A fatal birth defect is meaningful to the extent it occurs in the context of such engagements.
— Astrophel
to the straightforward question:
Explain in what way (e.g.) a fatal birth defect is "meaningful".
— 180 Proof
In fact, he has done good deal of appealing to authority, but no actual relevant discourse. — Vera Mont

He’s summarizing Henry here, who’s a tough nut to crack. What he’s getting at is the association between objectively causal , representational models of nature and the accidental or arbitrary. The two would seem to go together due to the assumed affect and value-neutrality of objective causes. Forces of nature are not presumed to harbor any affective value in themselves. Henry argues that this externalistic way of thinking is a derivative distortion of the primary relation between subject and world.

Sure, the concepts/notions might change (or we might say our intentions towards them). That seems fine. What seems implausible is that all the interactions mass should have changed because our scientific theories did, or that North America had no coastline, no place where the land met the sea, until someone measured it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our scientific theories are not immaterial idealizations, they are intrinsic components of our material interactions with the world that we are trying to understand. When our theories change, a crucial aspect of those material interactions are transformed.
To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it. It is fine to use the word ‘coastline’ and imagine it has an independent reality, but whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interactions. We want to insist on the independence of ‘coastline’ at the same time that it is OUR word and OUR way of understanding how it is independent, which is a kind of dependent independence.
Measurement is built into the word coastline, even when we imagine a coastline prior to any human measuring of it.

Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constants which do not act
as efficient causes.

How so? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

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

Anyhow, the fact that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby, that one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe, or that one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird does not seem the sort of things that should require recourse to cognitive science to explain — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nor should the meanings of these examples be reified as epistemological truths, as G.E. Moore tried to do when he attempted to demonstrate an epistemological certainty by raising his hand and declaring ‘I know that here is a hand’.
You’re doing the same thing by asserting with bold certainty ‘ a knife is a bad toy to give a baby!’ , ‘one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe!’ and ‘ one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird’! Are these certainties that need to be justified, and if so, is there an end to justification, a bedrock of belief underlying their sense and intelligibility? And what kind of certainty is this bedrock?

Prima facie, does it make sense that scientific advances in understanding gravity change what gravity is and how it works? Did the coastline of North America change when men began to map it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Scientific advances in understanding gravity, mass and energy from Newton to Einstein changed the meaning of these concepts in subtle ways. The notion of coastline doesnt exist independently of the actual processes of measuring it, and these processes conform to changeable conventions of measurement.

You mention constraints. The next question is, "from whence these constraints?" Well, one view that might recommend itself is that "things do what they do because of what they are," i .e., natures that explain why things interact as they do, and we might think the case for natures is particularly strong for those substances that are (relatively) self-determining, self-governing, self-organizing wholes (principle, organisms, although other dissipative systems might be lower down the scale here). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constraints which do not act as efficient causes.

This is absent from the discussion,
— Astrophel
What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here — Vera Mont

Let me give it a try. Astrophel is basing his view of relations between subject and world in part on phenomenologist Michel Henry. Given the respect for Henry’s work on the part of enactivist cognitive theorists, I think there are substantial compatibilities between Henry and these approaches in psychology of perception and related philosophy of science.

So let’s take your comments about scientific observation and rethink them from an enactivist perspective:

Much can be said about the process of observation, taking measurements, hypothesizing, experimentation and testing. The 'basic data' is already there, in the physical world, to be noticed, recorded, studied and understood. There is no single 'perceptual event'. Conscious beings notice their environment and make sense of it to the best of their ability. — Vera Mont

What is the relation between observation and knowledge?
You mentioned that we have to ‘make sense of’ what we observe. Let’s talk about what this ‘making sense of’ consists of. Notice that the development of human knowledge is not simply an internalizing of external facts. ‘There’s a leaf out there and here inside my brain is a representation of that leaf.’ We can instead track the development of knowledge in terms of a remarkable increase of complexity of organization in human brains, human social organization and our built technological environment. Every leap in knowledge is manifested by the construction of new devices, new apparatuses of observation and measurement. Put differently, knowledge evolution involves the construction of a biological niche that we inhabit , interact with and are changed by.

When we build such things as apparatuses of measurement , we don’t use them simply to passively observe an aspect of the external world, we bring together different parts of the world together with our devices and our devices together with our activities. Knowing what a leaf is ‘in itself’ is useless to us. What we want to know is how the leaf interacts with us and other other aspects of the world that we are actively involved with. This is not a passive observational mirroring or representing. , it’s a synthesizing. In coming to know the world we are building new webs of interconnections where there were none before. Saying that knowledge represents the world makes no more sense than saying that the evolution of more and more complex forms of life is a representing of the world. Human knowledge as biological niche construction allows us to actively manipulate our world in more and more complex and controllable ways. But doesn’t scientific knowledge depend on the fact that there are laws and properties intrinsic to the things of the world?

These laws and properties are what show up for us in the ways we interact with our world through our built
niche. The reality of the world shows up for us in terms of constraints on what works and what doesn’t. We can’t build that niche any way we want to, just as there are constraints on what will allow organisms to survive. But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge
develops. The properties we observe are not properties of the things in themselves but properties of our arrangements of interaction with them, and as these arrangements of knowledge evolve, the properties change. Not any old way, but not also not as fixed external ‘laws’.

While it's true that many of our convictions are hinges (basic beliefs), I wouldn't use "system of convictions," and Witt never used this wording — Sam26

How exact do you need the wording to be? He said my convictions form a system.

102. Might I not believe that once, without knowing it, perhaps is a state of unconsciousness, I was taken far away from the earth - that other people even know this, but do not mention it to me? But this would not fit into the rest of my convictions at all. Not that I could describe the system of these convictions. Yet my convictions do form a system, a structure.

My take on that is that chess is a game (or perhaps even a sport, though I personally don't think so) while math is not a game. — Arcane Sandwich

By ‘game’, Wittgenstein meant a discursively produced and reproduced system ( convention) of intelligibility. I consider math to be a discursive convention as well.

Sorry Josh, but I never said anything about a "system of convictions." You're confusing what I said about Moore's use of "I know..." (which is more like an expression of conviction as opposed to knowledge) with the framework of reality, made up of basic beliefs or certainties. — Sam26

I was equating “system of convictions” with the expression you did use: “truths that are part of our background certainty.”
Do you distinguish between what you call the “framework of reality” and what Wittgenstein calls a system of convictions, which I see as equivalent to language games, hinge propositions and forms of life?

The statement, "I believe this is a hand," can be said (I don't like the term 'truth value') to be true in some language games. It's comparable to saying "It's true that bishops move diagonally." — Sam26

Someone is trying to learn the rules of chess. They are afraid they are getting it wrong, so they ask if it is true that bishops move two squares up and one step over. Even as they ask this, they doubt that they have it right. Notice how in this example, it makes sense to talk about true vs false and doubt. But what is one doubting, what is one getting wrong, the language game of chess? But that can’t be, because it doesn’t make sense to doubt a language game. So what is true or false, or to be doubted, about the statement ‘bishops move diagonally’ if not the rules of chess?

Isnt my telling someone their belief that ‘bishops move two squares up and one step over’ is false akin to the adherent of an heliocentric account telling the adherent of a geocentric account that their belief is false? In both examples, aren’t the concepts of falsity and doubt misplaced? We act as though believing a bishop moves two squares up and one square over is incorrect in the same way as miscalculating the product of 25 x 347, when in fact it is an example of producing rules of a different language game than that of chess.

My approach to truth is that it's more about their role in different language games. So, one role is that statements can be true as part of a framework, like the role of hinges or the role that rules play in a game. These are not truths that are justified, but truths that are part of our background certainty (and they can be used as propositions in an argument). — Sam26

You say that the system of convictions that form the background certainty of a language game can be used as propositions in an argument . Banno says the kind of propositions that the ‘truths’ of a background system of convictions can be used as are those which assign a truth value. Do you agree with him? If not , what kind of propositional argument can these truths be used as? Can you give an example? I have problems with calling a language game an ‘argument’. What kind of argument is a form of life? If we try to persuade someone to adopt our way of seeing, are we presenting an argument or is our way of seeing the condition of possibility for arguments? Isnt the language game the bedrock, the groundless ground for arguments and the point where arguments end?

105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

By this, Wittgenstein doesn’t mean that the elements of the background system form a meta-argument, but that they are not of the order of an argument at all.

I think there is a need here to distinguish between essential and accidental properties, as a way toward understanding this question. If we say that every single rule is essential to the game known as "chess", then changing any one of them would render the new game as no longer "chess". We'd then say that any such change affects the foundation. But if, for example, we designate only the position of "check" as essential to the game, then we are free to make all sort of rule changes, still call the new game "chess", and say that we have not doubted "the foundation".

So it all depends on what is determined as "the foundation". I believe that in many conceptions, there is no such thing as "the foundation", because numerous essential aspects are brought together, therefore numerous foundational aspects — Metaphysician Undercover

A language game like chess has built into its assumptions the looseness of the relations among its rules. This looseness is what makes it permissible to tinker with individual rules without making the game unrecognizable or incoherent. What is considered accidental and what is essential is itself specified by the structure of the language game of chess. By contrast , the language game underlying the statement ‘water boils at 100 degrees’ cannot remain intact if this fact is questioned.

However, I believe that we do have to acknowledge the reality of foundational aspects, such as when we turn things right around, like the change from the geocentric to the heliocentric model. Clearly the foundational belief was doubted.
Imagine if we turned the game of chess right around, so that each player started in an equal position of checkmate, with some pieces already taken off the board, and the players were allowed to move other pieces while the king was checked, and the goal was to get all the pieces back to what is now the starting place. This would render the check position irrelevant, and that change would clearly be the result of doubting the foundation, because "the object" of the game would be completely changed. In this case we can say that when the conception of "the object" is doubted, the foundation is doubted — Metaphysician Undercover

Wiitgenstein uses the word ‘doubt’ to indicate a situation where some particular feature within a language game is put into question, while leaving the game intact. This is why he says that some beliefs must be left certain in order to doubt anything. We can’t doubt the geocentric model by switching to a heliocentric model unless the two models have features that can be incorporated under the same language game.

"To state that a truth value is a property of propositions that function as assumptions in an argument is to lay out the terms of a language game.

But"
...such assumptions are not themselves amenable to ascertainment of truth value.
— Joshs
Well, no. We do assign truth value to some propositions, but we also work out the truth value of other propositions. Not all assumptions must be hinges. — Banno

To be clear, when I equated ‘stating a truth value as a property of propositions that function as assumptions in an argument’ with ‘laying out the terms of a language game’,I didnt mean that all language games are expressible in terms of presenting a truth-apt argument. That is, I dont believe that ‘language game’ is just another word for a ‘proposition with truth values’. They are not the same thing. The latter is subordinate to the former, in the same way that moves in a chess game are subordinate to the rules of chess, and the rules of chess is just one among many possible language games. I’m equating a truth-apt propositional argument with the moves of chess, not with its underlying rules , and certainly not with the nature of language games in general. The underlying rules of a truth-apt argument are not reducible to formal logical notation such as ‘Here is a hand. Therefore there are hands. f(a)⊢∃(x)(fx).’ The bedrock of underlying assumptions making truth apt arguments intelligible don’t , and can’t, look like any statement in formal logic. A system of bedrock convictions is a gestalt structure of interdependent meanings.

141. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)
142. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.
410. Our knowledge forms an enormous system. And only within this system has a particular bit the value we give it

Furthermore, because the system of convictions underlying the intelligibility of truth apt statements is only one particular language games among many possible games, one can no more use truth apt arguments to express language games in general than one can use the rules of chess to express any and all languages games.

Sounds about right to me.

. If a proposition is to function as an assumption in an argument it must have a truth value. So if hinge propositions are to "ground" our deductions, they must have a truth value — Banno

It seems that you and I read Witt in alignment with different communities of interpretation. The group I identify with believes that all uses of conceptual meaning produce senses of meaning. No word concept can have only one sense of meaning associated with it. If I say that something is true, it always must be asked in what sense , what context of use, within what language game I mean to use this word. This goes for the concept of ‘truth value’. To state that a truth value is a property of propositions that function as assumptions in an argument is to lay out the terms of a language games. Certain bedrock assumptions
must be in place in order for this game of true-false to be intelligible, and such assumptions are not themselves amenable to ascertainment of truth value.

if Wittgenstein is right then we cannot properly be said to know hinge propositions, since they cannot be doubted; and if that is so, then what is one to make of saying we know hinge propositions in a way that is different to other propositions? — Banno

We can be said to know a hinge proposition as being intelligible to us, as opposed to knowing something as in being able to prove it through some empirical or logical procedure. I ‘know’ this is my hand says that the proposition ‘this is my hand ‘ makes sense to me in a particular way, within a particular language game. I have learned how to see that world a certain way. That way can’t be ‘false or true’ since it is simply how things appear to me, how a convention was handed down to me.

What's an example of an organism choosing its motives, goals, or purposes? Aren't those things we discover rather than determine? — frank

We discover , and alter, our purposes in the responses of the world to our perspectivally-based interactions with it.

Turning the foundation on its head requires doubting it. Only by doubting it, will we seek a better way. We will never "change our whole way of looking at things", unless we first doubt our current way of looking at things — Metaphysician Undercover

Would you say that deciding to change the rules of chess in order to make a more interesting game is an example of ‘doubting’ the current foundation of chess?

if we deny to AI conversational assistants the ascription of genuine emotions or autonomous drives, that must be, it seems to me, mainly on account of their lack of embodiment (and social embedding as persons in a community) rather than some missing (literally or metaphorically) "inner" ingredient.
— Pierre-Normand

Being is not an ingredient. — Wayfarer

You wrote that humans are reflexively aware of themselves. This aligns with the notion of subjectivity as consciousness, and consciousness as self-consciousness ( S=S). When God was believed to be the origin of all things, he-she was deemed as the true being, the basis on which to understand all other beings. When man eclipsed god, subjectivity and consciousness took on this role of true Being. An object is that that which appears before a positing self-affecting subject.

A different way to think about being is articulated by people like Heidegger. When he says that Dasein is the being who cares about his own existence, he is rejecting the notions of
subjectively as identity, as self-reflective awareness (S=S), in favor of the notion of being as becoming , as practical action. Being as thrownness into a world. This is consistent with Pierre-Normand‘s suggestion that the appearance of subjectivty ‘emerges from the co-constitution of the animal/person with its natural and social environment, or habitat and community.’

This leads to ’s question:

Can the human mind exceed the limitations of its architecture? — SophistiCat

If it cannot, then my argument that only humans and other living organisms can change their normative motives, goals and purposes would seem to fail. But I would argue that this way of thinking assumes a split between psycho-social and biological processes, ontogeny and phylogeny, nature and culture. It is now understood that behavior feeds back to and shapes the direction of evolutionary processes directly through its effect of genetic structures. This means that the biological brain-body architecture organizing human motives, norms and purposes exists in a mutual feedback loop with cultural behavioral processes. Each affects and changes the other over time. The same is true of the machines we invent, but in a different way. We produce a particular A.I. architecture, and the spread of its use throughout culture changes the nature of society, and sparks ideas for innovations in A.I. systems.

But notice that human intelligence functions as interactive coping in contextually specific circumstances as an intrinsic part of a wider feedforward-feedback ecology that brings into play not only our reciprocal exchanges with other humans but also other animals and material circumstances. Machine ‘intelligence’, by contrast, does not participate directly in this ecological becoming. There is no true mutual affecting taking place when we communicate with ChatGPT. It is a kind of recorded intelligence, a dynamic text that we interpret, but like all texts , it is not rewriting itself even when it seems to respond so creatively to our queries.

And again, it is a mistake to think that these propositions are not true. If they were not true, we could not use them to make observations or deductions. — Banno

I like the rest of what you said, but could you clarify the above? Sam26 pointed out in an earlier post that the sense of ‘ know’ and ‘true’ are not the same for hinge propositions as for particular facts within the games that they set up. Do you agree with this, and if so, how would you characterize the distinction between the sense of ‘true’ with regard to a way of setting up a language game and an observation within that language game? For instance, I would argue that observations are true or false, but language games are true or unintelligible. Unlike an observation within a language game, the language game itself cannot be true as opposed to false. It makes no sense to declare a language game false, only unintelligible.

↪JoshsOC 291 is just Witt reiterating that some truths about the world are just part of the framework or foundation of understanding. They're not questioned or doubted. I just believe it, i.e., I believe it's true without justification. — Sam26

But they not just undoubted foundations. They are systems of significations which act to qualitatively organize facts in a certain way, with a certain sense. These foundations can be turned on their head, and then the facts become organized in a completely differently way, revealing a completely different sense of meaning, as when paradigms shift. Turning the foundation on its head isn’t doubting that foundation or making it false. It’s changing the rules of intelligibility. It’s not just that I beleive it’s true. I believe what is true according to a certain arrangement. I doubt particulars organized within a system of sense. The system of sense does not itself change by being doubted, but by ‘changing the subject’. Similarly, with the duck-rabbit drawing, I can’t doubt whether what I am seeing is a duck rather than a rabbit. When what I see appears for me as duck I am simply certain of it. I don’t switch from seeing the duck to seeing the rabbit by doubting the duck. I do so by seeing under a different aspect.

I believe water boils at 100’degrees the way I believe what I am seeing appears to me as a duck. For the drawing to no longer appear to me as a duck, the whole system of component parts will have to undergo a re-organization. For water no longer boiling at 100 degrees to make sense will imply a total re-organization of the underlying paradigm.

↪Joshs
The nature of living systems is to change themselves in ways that retain a normative continuity in the face of changing circumstances
— Joshs

That's handled by your neuroendocrine system in a way that has no more consciousness than an AI's input. If you actually had to consciously generate homeostasis, you'd die in about 5 minutes. — frank

Consciousness is not some special place walled off from
the rest of the functional activity of an organism. It’s merely a higher level of integration. The point is that the basis of the synthetic, unifying activity of what we call consciousness is already present in the simplest unicellular organisms in the functionally unified way in which they behave towards their environment on the basis of normative goal-directness. What A.I. lacks is the ability to set its own norms. An A.I. engineer creates a clever A.I. system that causes people to talk excitedly about it ‘thinking’ like we do. But the product the engineer releases to the public, no matter how dynamic, flexible and self-transformative it appears to be, will never actually do anything outside of the limits of the conceptual structures that formed the basis of its design.

Now let’s say that a year later engineers produce a new A.I. system based on a new and improved architecture. The same will be true of this new system as the old. It will never be or do anything that exceeds the conceptual limitations of its design. It is no more ‘sentient’ or ‘thinking’ than a piece of artwork. Both the art artwork and the A.I. are expressions of the state of the art of creative thought of its human creator at a given point in time. A.I. is just a painting with lots of statistically calculated moving parts. That’s not what thinking is or does in a living system. A machine cannot reinvent itself as new and improved without resort to a human engineer.

Hinton's argument is basically that AI is sentient because they think like we do. People may object to this by saying animals have subjective experience and AI's don't, but this is wrong. People don't have subjective experiences. — frank

The nature of living systems is to change themselves in ways that retain a normative continuity in the face of changing circumstances. Cognition is an elaboration of such organismic dynamics. A.I. changes itself according to principles that we program into it, in relation to norms that belong to us. Thus, A.I. is an appendage of our own self-organizing ecology. It will only think when it becomes a self-organizing system which can produce and change its own norms. No machine can do that, since the very nature of being a machine is to have its norms constructed by a human.

↪Joshs This should probably be in my thread on OC. — Sam26

Done.

This is slightly different but related. The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed — Sam26

Wittgenstein seems to suggest that the intelligibility of ‘water boils at 100 C.’ depends on such a bedrock of hinge propositions ( a ‘whole way of seeing nature’).

291. We know that the earth is round. We have definitively ascertained that it is round. We shall stick to this opinion, unless our whole way of seeing nature changes. "How do you know that?" - I believe it.
292. Further experiments cannot give the lie to our earlier ones, at most they may change our whole way of looking at things.
293. Similarly with the sentence "water boils at 100 C. (On Certainty).

I edited this in later, so you may not have seen it.

This is slightly different but related. The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed — Sam26

Wittgenstein seems to suggest that the intelligibility of ‘water boils at 100 C.’ depends on such a bedrock of hinge propositions ( a ‘whole way of seeing nature’).

291. We know that the earth is round. We have definitively ascertained that it is round. We shall stick to this opinion, unless our whole way of seeing nature changes. "How do you know that?" - I believe it.
292. Further experiments cannot give the lie to our earlier ones, at most they may change our whole way of looking at things.
293. Similarly with the sentence "water boils at 100 C. (On Certainty).

Hinges aren't true in the epistemological sense, i.e., justified and true. However, one can use the concept of true in other ways, just as the concept know can be used in other ways. For example, someone might ask when learning the game of chess, "Is it true that bishops move diagonally?" You reply "Yes." This isn't an epistemological use of the concept — Sam26

So for example, when Moore raises his hand and says ‘I know this is a hand, and therefore it is true that it is a hand’, he is confusing an epistemological with a grammatical use of the concepts of know and true, because he considers his demonstration as a form of proof. Would you agree? But then what would be an example of a grammatical use of the word true in Moore’s case? Something like: ‘it is true that Moore is invoking a particular language game by raising his hand and saying he knows it is a hand?

This is slightly different but related. The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed — Sam26

Wittgenstein seems to suggest that the intelligibility of ‘water boils at 100 C.’ depends on such a bedrock of hinge propositions ( a ‘whole way of seeing nature’).

291. We know that the earth is round. We have definitively ascertained that it is round. We shall stick to this opinion, unless our whole way of seeing nature changes. "How do you know that?" - I believe it.
292. Further experiments cannot give the lie to our earlier ones, at most they may change our whole way of looking at things.
293. Similarly with the sentence "water boils at 100 C. (On Certainty).

So? What's bad about it? I don't get your point — Arcane Sandwich

15 minutes of my life I will never get back…

Define "positive statement". What do you mean by that? — Arcane Sandwich

I mean the opposite is of negative statements. Every reference to correlationism in After Finitude pits it in a negative light. For instance:’

contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers:

we cannot get out of our own skins

every variety of correlationism is exposed as an extreme
idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that what science tells us about these occurrences of matter independent of humanity effectively occurred as described by science.

Why would I need one? — Arcane Sandwich

Have you actually read After Finitude? I don’t find a single
positive statement about correlationism in it. Do you?

Correlationism is a live option in today's Continental debates. It is also a live option in the Analytic tradition. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. There is nothing bad about it… Perhaps some aspects of it have to be reformulated, perhaps others discarded, perhaps others reinforced. — Arcane Sandwich

Could you give a quote from Meillassoux supporting this assertion? All I find are claims that correlationism has been a disaster.

But that's my point, Josh. Language can't be a sort of free-for-all game. It needs rules. And I think that those rules are something akin to what lawyers call "Letter of the Law", as something different than the "Spirit of the Law". Interpretations (Spirit of the Law) are all fine and dandy, but sometimes we just have to go back to the Letter of the Law.

Do you disagree? — Arcane Sandwich

Could you just tell me what words you would replace “is a bad thing” with? I’m dying to know.

Where does it say that Harman and Meillassoux say "correlationism is a bad thing"? — Arcane Sandwich

Ya got me there.

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux.
— Joshs

Except for the fact that they don't say that. And even if they did, shouldn't you include Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier in that group? They are, at the end of the day, "the Founding Fathers of Speculative Realism", if you will. — Arcane Sandwich

They don’t?

The loosely demarcated movement known as Speculative Realism (SR) got its title from a conference named Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop, held at Goldsmiths University in April 2007. [1] The speakers – and original members – were, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, even if the influence of SR has since spread well beyond the work of these respective philosophers. It would however be important to note from the outset that there are important and fundamental differences between the positions of the various thinkers that are often grouped under this umbrella term…

What is often said to almost exclusively unite all the original and current proponents of SR is their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’..both terms are to an extent similar in terms of what they critique, namely (what proponents of SR see as) the prevalent tendency within Kantian and post-Kantian thought to treat the relation between thought and world as the primary subject matter of philosophy. In making such a claim, they argue that philosophy since Kant lamentably negates the possibility of thinking or knowing what the world could be like ‘in itself’, that is, independently of our all-too-human relation to it. (On Correlationism and the Philosophy of (Human) Access: Meillassoux and Harman.
Niki Young)

I like to think that I have about the normal number of friends and acquaintances. There’s about 30 people I’m in regular contact with, and almost all are people like me, directly connected to the arts in some way. Teachers, composers, poets, painters, writers and such. Yet not one of these people, or any of my relatives ever talks about, or ever mentions or reads anything about philosophy or philosophers. — Rob J Kennedy

You may not talk explicitly about philosophy or philosophers, but that doesn't mean that you dont ever think philosophically. Every time you take a step back from your art and think about how you are approaching it , and question how you might gain a different perspective on it, you are thinking philosophically. Artistic movements are comprised of innovators who asked themselves how they could express themselves through their art in a way that departed from the accepted approaches surrounding them. Only a minority of these artists ( William Blake, Terrance Malick, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Shelley, DuChamp, Wagner, Sartre, etc) will feel comfortable, however, in articulating their philosophical insights as full realized, concrete verbal concepts. It is this latter skill you appear to have in mind as what you call philosophy. Is there some specific personality type we could link to this? I doubt it. I certainty wouldn’t say that philosophers are inherently more introverted or isolated than painters, poets or novelists. Any form of creativity that is non-collaborative will require long periods of solitude.

I would turn the OP’s question on its head. What does it say about someone who calls themself an artist and yet who has no interest in philosophy? My suspicion is that if none of your artistically-inclined acquaintances have any interest in philosophy, then they are also less likely to be interested in modes of creativity outside of their narrow domain, or be interested in significantly innovating within their domain. Great art movements have always been filled with eclectic, curious souls whose art borrows widely from poetry , philosophy, politics, science, literature and spirituality, and everything in between. Perhaps what appears to you as a peculiarity of philosophy is more a symptom of a lack of innovative spirit among your social circle.

It is impossible to situate Deleuze within the "correlationist" stereotype — Number2018

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist. — fdrake

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux. You may be aware that Meillassoux has been accused of positing an ontological dualism between matter and thought, and Harman has been called a rational subjectivist. In arguing against what they perceive as the subjective idealism of ‘correlationism’ they succumb to their own strains of dualistic idealism, and this prevents them from understanding that there are other ways of thinking a correlation among elements of the world besides one which assumes a transcendent subjectivity. Let’s look at Meillassoux’s definition of correlationism:

Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object 'in itself', in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object.

if we substitute for ‘subject and object’ ‘inside vs outside’, We arrive at Deleuze’s assemblages. He gives us a correlationism (connections, conjunctions, resonances, series, consistencies, diagrams, surveys) produced by non-oppositional, non-hierarchical, pre-subjective differences-in-themselves. This is not to say that Deleuzian assemblages don’t represent a kind of idealism (the virtual is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’), but it is of a quite different sort than that which reifies subjectivity.

He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components.
“The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or a-grammaticalities which supersede the signifier” (Deleuze, 2006, p. — Number2018

Yes, but wouldn’t these components lose their characteristics as stratified forms as they are plugged into planes of consistency, and wouldn’t this plane of consistency integrate this outside into its own pre-personal diagrammatic order?

But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization?...Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of "plan(n)ing," of
diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.”
(ATP)

But one might get the impression that the molar level lacks autonomy and primarily reflects the derivative effects generated by the molecular level. Differently, molar formations do possess their own regime, and they react back upon the molecular forces from which they emerge. They attempt to organize and suppress what exists on the molecular level. As a result, the non-representative desiring machines begin to form reactive structures. Yet, without some kind of causal relation between the two levels, all of this may remain at an exclusively descriptive level. — Number2018

Yes, the actual and the virtual communicate and affect each other as heterogeneities. And yet notice how Deleuze characterizes the molar as ‘false’, as a distorted surface effect , an external envelope, as hiding that which gives rise to it, which is its principle. So yes the molar has its autonomy, but it’s the autonomy of an illusion.

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition. As for these latter instances, since they cease to be conditions, they become no more than effects of the primary difference and its differenciation, overall or surface effects which characterise the distorted world of representation, and express the manner in which the in-itself of difference hides itself by giving rise to that which covers it.

The two repetitions are not independent. One is the singular subject, the interiority and the heart of the other, the depths of the other. The other is only the external envelope, the abstract effect. The repetition of dissymmetry is hidden within symmetrical ensembles or effects; a repetition of distinctive points underneath that of ordinary points; and everywhere the Other in the repetition of the Same. This is the secret, the most ... profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts.” “ The material sense results from this other, as if secreted by it like a shell.”

“What it comes down to is that we cannot content our­selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute
deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin­offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri­mary and always immanent.”

Are those authors arguing that Object Oriented Philosophy is materialist? That would be a convoluted thing to argue, I suppose. Harman is explicit about his immaterialism. — Arcane Sandwich

I think what is important to the authors is that Harman, like the others they discuss in the paper, break away from a subject and language-centered ontology in favor of one that does not slight the agential power of non-human objects.

Graham Harman is not a materialist, Joshs, nor is Object Oriented Ontology a kind of materialism. Harman is against materialism. He has an article (which is a really good read, BTW, even if I don't agree with it) called I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed. He has been an immaterialist ever since his first book, Tool-Being. — Arcane Sandwich

I was drawing from the paper ‘ WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’ by Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail

The second strand of negative new materialism is “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) – a term Graham Harman coined that defines a theoretical commitment to thinking the real beyond the human experience of matter. “What is real in the cosmos,” he asserts, “are forms wrapped inside forms, not durable specks of material that reduce everything else to derivative status. If this is ‘materialism,' then it is the first materialism in history to deny the existence of matter.” For Harman, the essence of beings is to withdraw from all the objects that compose it and think it. As such, being is never something anthropocentric, experienced, or relational but is something absolutely and non-relationally “withdrawn” from everything else, as though it were comple-tely “vacuum sealed.” As it happens, this essen-tialist view of identity as something radically self-contained is in fact perfectly captured by the three discrete, individually circumscribed circles, zeros, or “O's” that have become the theory's standard iconic shorthand. This view also leads Harman to affirm what he calls “a new sort of ‘formalism.'

Timothy Morton similarly argues against “some kind of substrate, or some kind of unformed matter”78 in favor of essential forms that infinitely exceed the human domain of meaning-making. For example, Morton describes “hyperobjects” such as global warming as “real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans.” For him, as for Harman and Tristan Garcia, “objects” ultimately refer to an infinitely hidden essence that never even partially reveals itself in any relation.“

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. I see that as a loss of flexibility in the theory due to its usual emphasis.

Edit: "New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation. — fdrake

It depends on which brand of New Materialism you prefer.
For ‘negative’ new materialists like Graham Harman (Object Oriented Ontology) and Quentin Meillassoux (Speculative Realism) nature can be thought independently of the sociois, since matter is independent of or withdrawn from thought. By contrast, in the performative new materialism of Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, nature and the social, ontology and epistemology are inherently co-implicated and mutually constituting. This is consistent with Deleuze’s account, which does not split nature off from the psychic or the social.(“… the plane of consistency knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.”)

“Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.” (ATP)