The problem is, this invariance "works" for predictive models and technological problems. The usefulness of the logic is then what matters. Also, there are fields I am sure, that take into account the variance you describe, and put back the subjectivity in the equation, such as quantum mechanics and relativity, etc. — schopenhauer1

Notice that when we point to the invariances of a language like Boolean logic, we are directing ourselves to an inscribed symbolism, something 'physically' present on a page or built into a device. But as I said concerning the way that our sense of the meaing of a symbol drifts the moment we encounter it and then try to return to it the next moment, the evidence of this isnt in the symbol itself but in what happens moment to moment between ourselves and the symbols, in the space between. Its kind of a catch 22.If you believe in the notion of invariance, you can just point to your logical symbol as evidence of it, and if you dont believe in invariance you will also point to those symbols for evidence, but with this 'in-between' space in mind.
The point isnt that logical symbolization is wrong or doesnt work, but that it works not because it is the manipulation of relations between invariant abstractions, but becasue it instantiates a narrative thematics with enough inferential consistency to make us believe in the invariance of its joints. But its the implicative consistency that makes it work. It not only doesnt need invariance, but belief in this concept holds back what our technologies can do, becasue they aren't designed to pick up on and take advantage of this natural drift in sense. instilling greater creative innovation in our machines will require that we explicitly tap into what we now only implicitly understand in our technological languages.

Invariance only works as well as its limitations allow it to, just as Cartesian philosophy 'works' only as well as its limitations allow. This is like saying that those who believe that truth is 'objective' can cite how wonderfully a non-relativistic approach to science solves problems. They cite the wonders of the hypo-deductive method and the linear progress of the sciences. But Kuhnian approaches to science(there is no objective truth), which believe that science is not a linear progression, and that scientific ideas change via revolutions rather than accumulation can argue that their way of understanding also 'works', but differently, and in a way that provides more options for creative advance of thought. This is because "truth is not objective" doesnt mean objectivity is false, it means the idea of objectivity is an island floating on a moving sea, but its adherents cant see past the edge of the island and so see only invaniance. Technologies used to build computing machines work wonderfully, but in a limited fashion.. In order to exceed these limits and accomplish what even the simplest one celled organisms are capable of in terms of intelligence , they will have to modify their vocabulary and methods.

Quantum mechanics and relativity dont question the fundamental basis of an objective causal logic, although they play around with applications of it in terms of specific mathematical models

Conway's game of life was small step in the direction i have in mind.

So reason, or logic, is itself irreducible, which means it cannot be existentially explained because all explanations both presuppose and utilize it, as others have noted. I was merely trying to tease out the ways in which reason or logic, and language itself, might be thought to have evolved from our experience of a world of differences and similarities, of change and invariance. Without primordial difference and similarity (identity), change and invariance or regularity or recurrence or whatever term you like, the world could not be the world; there would be no intelligibility to begin with and hence no survival. — Janus

Sounds like the assertion that claiming there is no objective truth is itself making a truth claim.
As I wrote in earlier posts, according to phenomenology since Husserl, you've got it exactly backwards. Existence is irreducible, and logic presupposes it. There are explanations which precede logic, of which logic is just a historical derivative mode , and not a necessary one. Such explanations do not assume the law of non-contradiction. Differences and similarities are not opposites, they are both implied in every meaning. Invariance is not opposed to change, it is the effect of a constructive activity that maintains itself over time as the same differently. In order to be invariant, a meaning has to reflectively turn back on itself so that it can persist as itself. The effect of exposure to context guarantees that this reflexive move exposes any meaning to alteration of sense. Thus invariance is always the invariance of a meaning whose sense begins to drift at the moment of its turn back on itself in reflection. So the illusion is created of pure invariance only because this continual drift of sense of a meaning is subtle enough that most dont notice it. From this inattention to change within identity was born the concept of pure invariance and the law of non-contradiction.

If I have you stare at an object or say a word over and over again , at the end of this exercise you will declare that the object stared at or the word repeated continues to be the same object or the same word throughout the time frame. But what you likely would not have noticed is that the SENSE of the meaning of the object or word wandered very slightly over that period of time. To claim that this is just a subjective effect and can be separate from what we know of real world objects (and ideal conceptual objects) misses the point that our notion of real world objects is derived from subjective experience.
Logic's assumption of invariance and non-contradiction depends on ignoring these facts.
And physics can ignore them not because the aspect of the world it studies functions differently than subjectivity, but for its own convenience and due to its theoretical limitations it uses a vocabulary that masks these facts.

So, what do you think would be the practical difference that a posited future physics working under the paradigm of phenomenology would have form the physics of today? — Janus

Beats the hell out of me. Seriously though, the primordial ground for Husselian phenomenology is time, More specifically time consciousness as the tripartite structure of retention, presencing and protention.

According to at least a few of the more philosophically minded physicists of recent times, Rovelli, Greene, Wheeler and De Witt, for example, time is a kind of illusion. The equations of QM do not incorporate time; the so-called "arrow of time" is irrelevant in that context. According to current Quantum theory time simply cannot be an "organizing principle" for physics. — Janus

It seems to me this view of time is in tune with Kant. Temporality and history only take on a fundamental explanatory role for philosophy with Hegel, Marx and Dilthey, and for science with Darwin.
Can a future physics put the arrow of time at the center of its thinking as Smolen, Prigonige and other envision? i think it will have no choice if it wants to avoid stagnating. This will likely mean that physics will morph into an evolutionary science in accord with the biological and social sciences. Just one persons's opinion.

Can you explain the practical implications of the difference between Heidegger's "mattering" and Levinas' "end in itself"? — schopenhauer1

Levinas says we enjoy (or suffer) things for their own sake, not because they are means to an end.
In this sense, they clearly matter to us. But as ends in themselves, the way they matter is different than it is for Heidegger. How so? For Heidegger, having something matter to me, caring about it, having concern for it, its having significance for and affecting me; these are absolutely primordial for my experience of all aspects of the world as a Dasein. there is nothing I can encounter that does not have significance for me in relation to some ongoing concern. But the way in which I encounter beings, objects , people, is such that they always appear within an implicit nexus, a rich integrated context of a totality of relevance. So I am always immersed in and involved in a particular sort of experiencing in which everything that I am engaged with emerges out of that background totality of relevance. I type these words with a given purpose in mind which is always shift its sense, then I am distracted from my writing by my phone. But even in being distracted, the larger background context of relevance isnt broken. The possibility of my phone ringing was implied by that context.

Even the most surprising events emerge out of a larger context of relevance so that I can only be surprised by those things that at some leveI I anticipated. What does this imply about mattering for its own sake via an ongoing nexus of mattering? Heidegger, given his way of seeing contextual significance as an endless flowing continuity, would say that the enjoyment of things in themselves must also imply an anticipating beyond those things also, toward further modifications of enjoyment or suffering. But not as Levinas seems to accuse him of, as making hunger and enjoyment matter only becasue there is some overarching utility in mind. The contextual nexus is not over arching for Heidegger, it is more temporally unfolding. What I am affected by this moment totally engages me, in itself, for what it is in itself, not becasue of some overarching scheme.

Looks like certain forms of logic start to point to a kind of realism, or at least a usefulness that can't be ignored. Then we get the typical debates of realism and social constructivism, yadayada. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, their usefulness cannot be ignored. Even Heidegger has a healthy dose of respect for the power of logic. All he's saying, really, is that he thinks it would be helpful to yet again, but from a bit more radical perspective that is neither subjective nor objective but a peculiar 'not yet' of either, reexamine the way we understand the genesis of logic in our thinking. We can then look back at all these wonderful things that logic allows us to do, and see more penetrating what it is that is really at the heart of its so-called precision. One day, maybe a century from now, all those devices which depend such languages as boolean logic, will be producible via a completely different operating language, that may appear at first blush to be devoid of the requirements of logic(non-contradiction, etc). In other words, I envision a kind of technological langauge that is not itself 'logical' , but that nevertheless underlies all logics.It will allow us to continue to produce logical machines if we wish, as well as machines which do much more useful and interesting things via this new language, including the kinds of things that we now lump into the amorphous category of subjectvism, irrationality and affect-feeling-emotion..

Most vague, I know.

Yes yes everyone's read M&V. But it doesn't take the sting out of the tail of Levinas' critique. — StreetlightX

It depends on how you read M&V. You could interpret it as saying that Heidegger is not a utilitarian means-ends kind of guy, but Levinas is forced to construe him that way because of his own inclination to absolutize difference., So its not that Dasein is never hungry, but that enjoyment and suffering, and all other being-affected-by-the-world, matters to me becasue mattering belongs to a continuity of mattering, not as a means to an end(or as an end in itself) but as a means to a means to a means ad infinitum.

These are approaoches to philosophy I can think of off the top of my head that have freed themselves from enslavement to logic:hermeneutics, phenomenology, social constructionism, post structuralism, deconstruction. Literature, science philosophy. None has precedence or priority over the other. They are more closely related than most think , and that is why they evolve in parallel within cultural eras, and it is possible to talk about classical or enlightenment or modernist philosophy, science and literature. Each is a different style of presenting a worldlview, a variation on a larger thematics within each epoche that unites all these modes of ideation

Its interesting that so far in this discussion of the relative worth of philosophers no complaint has been made of a similar difficulty in deciding the value of scientific theories.Why is that? Because it goes without saying that a validated empirical result is self-evidently true? Kuhn would argue that determining philosophic worth should be no more or less difficult than determining the 'truth' of sicnetifc approaches. In both cases, we adopt a theoretical description because it is pragmatically useful in interacting with our world. Rorty, in likening philosophy to literature, failed to point out how our understanding of literature has also succumbed to a deconstructive turn, Its not a question of choosing one over the other, science over philosophy or literature over philosophy, but to see how each is embedded in the other.

I don't know who you think has such a "colloquial" (nice bit of condescension there, btw :up: ) understanding, but as far as I know Husserl's "epoché" or suspension of judgement concerning the question of the existence of an objective or external world is certainly no secret and could even be said to be notorious. — Janus

You overestimate the extent to which Husserl has been effectively understood . Zahavi, one of the foremost Husserl scholars, has found the 'colloquial' misreading of Husserlian phenomenology to be widespread.

Science does not need to assume that "reality is out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated". — Janus

Science needs to assume the conditions of possibility that make the notion of objective causality, and therefore calculability, intelligible. This doesnt mean that the quantum physicist mediates on these conditions of possibility, these notions that were established and elaborated over centuries by philosophers and scientists-philosophers like Galileo and Newton. It means that physicists implicitly assume such conditions of possibility. Put differently, a scientist works within a worldview that makes the questions that they ask, the puzzles that they see, the discoveries that they make, coherent to them. And when they innovate within that worldview, their discovery elaborates and subtly transforms that worldview, even if their contribution doesnt explicitly make this apparent . Physicists today don't need to know phenomenology at an explicit or an implicit level, because their worldview hasn't evolved in that direction yet.
But they do need to know the general ideas that Aristotle Descartes, and I would argue, Kant, contributed to the establishment of the modern concept of empirical objectivity, at an implicit level , whether they have actually read the work of these figures or not.
Just as this is the case, eventually physics will move on from its Cartesian framework . My belief is that they will make their way into the worldview that phenomenology has constructed. They will not, of course, find it necessary, or even be able to articulate explicitly,this new worldview, except for a few philosopher -physicists. But they will indeed depend on the new worldview in order to make their 'natural' subject matter intelligible to them implicitly , just as they now depend on a Cartesian-Kantian worldview. This was Thompson's point about the need for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way. It's not that scientists will have to sit down ans talk about how to change their orientation from physicalist to post-physicalist, They will simply continue to devise experiments and create new theoretical models as they have done for centuries, and at some point it will become apparent that they have made the move out of the older worldview into a new one. A few of them, like Lee Smolen, will take it upon themselves to wax explicitly philosophical, as he has done concerning the need to incorporate temporality into physics. His argument is that the current generation of physicists is anparticularly non-philosophical generation unlike that of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg, and physics has suffered as a result. Their leaving time out of physics as as a central organizing principle has held back their ability to tie together a number of loose ends in cosmological understanding.

what you say only demonstrates further that mathematics is more strictly rule or procedure-based in precisely dealing with determinate abstract objects, than is any 'living' inquiry such as phenomenology or the even the natural or social sciences. As far as I can see what you say there only goes to further support that contention. — Janus

My point was that mathematics gets its precision from its grounding in supposedly determinate self-identical abstract objects . But Husserl, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty , Heidegger, Derrida and others, believe the notion of a determinate self-identical abstract object to be an illusion, a fiction, the imperfect product of intentional activity. It s not simply that they are subjective constructions, but that even understood as mental objects they do not have determinant self-identicality in the way that Enlightenment thought presumed. This is one of the central insights of that 'llving' inquiry called phenomenology.

What was the “Oh dear!” Comment about? — I like sushi

You were trying to get TheGreatArcanum to elaborate on his angels and devils theme. My fear was that might lead in certain, shall we say, psychopathologic directions.

Some things to note about this everyman; it's bodiless, it doesn't have contextual constraints like 'a person reflecting' or 'a person with chronic pain', it's sexless, genderless, mentally typical... — fdrake

These are good observations. One could add that in the mode of average everydayness of 'Das Man' (which is what I assume you're talking about), social experience is treated as generic, unreflective, consensus, conventional. "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar".

Interestingly, average everydayness is not a present to hand mode but related to the ready to hand.
And it should be mentioned that it is not that the experience of Das Man is genuinely generic, conventional and public. It is that one believes it to be so, and doesnt notice the way that one's encounters with others is contextually particularized. We believe we are talking about the same things, understanding our shared words in exactly the same way, even though that is never the case. In the mode of average everydayness we understand this implictly but not explicitly. And because it is not explict, we are not able to make use of what particularizes our experiences and therefore tend toward following the herd.
The way I see it, when Heidegger wrote Being and Time, his culture, his small town community, did believe such things about the veridical nature of the shared meanings of social life. If he were writing today, I wonder if he would find the concept of Das Man useful in a culture where more of us have become accustomed to interpreting each others words and actions in contextual terms,and where convention and conformity are disdained.

BTW, I'd like to hear more about what you mean by ontic feedback loops.

Levinas: "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry". That's about as brutal a critique of Heidegger that I know. — StreetlightX

Here's a more straighttforward critique of Levinas's reading of Heidegger from your favorite writer:

According to Levinas. "the thought of the Being of the existent would have the propositional logic of the truism, placing ethics under the heel of ontology. Being as ontological difference is the concept of an abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of existents in its extreme universality." Levinas interprets "the thought of Being as a concept of Being", but Being is not a concept or theory or existent.
"Heidegger is emphatic on this point: the Being which is in question is not the concept to which
the existent (for example, someone) is to be submitted (subsumed). Being is not the concept of a
rather indeterminate and abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of existents in its
extreme universality because it is not a predicate, and authorizes all predication.

"By making the origin of language, meaning, and difference the relation to the infinitely other,
Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse. But the true
name of this inclination of thought to the Other, of this resigned acceptance of incoherent
incoherence inspired by a truth more profound than the "logic" of philosophical discourse,
transcendental horizons of language, is empiricism. The profundity of the empiricist intention
must be recognized beneath the naivete of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of
a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism
is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretention or modesty.(Derrida, VM189)"

I no longer think we need to reconcile or unite the two, rather, those who propagate metaphysics need to adhere to logic instead of fuelling fancies and gross mysticism. Subjects like mind and consciousness can be investigated logically and, to some degree, practically without abandoning the field of metaphysics or natural philosophy. — BrianW

What about schools of philosophy that no longer consider themselves metaphysical in the sense of going beyond the natural?

From the article " One attempted solution was Continental philosophy, conducted mainly in Europe: it could ignore science, ignore reason, and plunge into a celebration of bombast and incoherence." Or perhaps the author doesnt have a clue how to understand contemporary continental philosophy and so derives his views of philosophy from Descartes and Locke. Let's see if we can help him out.

(shameless self-plagiarism inserted below):

"it sounds like you're saying there is a real realm of physical nature and a real realm of human subjective experience, or what we colloquially call 'phenomenological', and that the two are different in their contents and methods of study but equally primordial. We can study the nature of human experience naturalistically, using objective empirical methods of the social sciences, or phenomenologically, via non-empirical philosophical modes of inquiry.

The meaning of Husserl's phenomenology, which served as the jumping off point for Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, among others, is quite different from this colloquial understanding of phenomenological. As Dan Zahavi puts it " Husserl is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. The attempt to do the latter assumes that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism. Frequently, the assumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real.
The positive sciences are so absorbed in their investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that they do not pause to reflect upon their own presuppositions and conditions of possibility. For Husserl, natural science is (philosophically) naive. Its subject matter, nature, is simply taken for granted. Reality is assumed to be out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated. And the aim of natural science is to acquire a strict and objectively valid knowledge about this given realm. But this attitude must be contrasted with the properly philosophical attitude, which critically questions the very foundation of experience and scientific thought."

As Evan Thompson concurs "I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential. We can see historically how
the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same
time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be
post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as
not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually
involving the mental)."

So I would correct the idea that science is concerned with studying the natural world. Scientific approaches which are ensconced within a naive realist worldview believe that what they do is study the natural world. Empirical perspectives, such as 4ea(enactive, embodied, embedded extended affective), which have absorbed Husserl's lessons, do not make such claims for studying something called nature that can be thought independently of how the world appears for a subject. They don't study a natural world but an intersubjectively enacted world. And this isn't just psychologists I'm talking about but also biologists and physicists."

But first science (not all science, just those practitioners who make claims for the emancipation of science from philosophy) would need to know that it never left the fold, it just thinks it did because it takes a naive attitude toward the world.What science did do was emancipate itself from a certain are of philosophical thinking.

The categories, according to IETP, were adapted pretty well wholesale from Aristotle. I am interested in your comment that they can be equated with the forms. — Wayfarer

I just meant that Kant's transcendental categories of perception and understanding (space and time,quantity, quality, relation, and modality) are apriori formal organizing principles. They are , of course, contents also, but contents which cannot be modelled mathematically(mathematics does't describe them because it presupposes these categories. They are the formal conditions of possibility of doing math and logic. One could say Kant is the first modern deconstructer of mathematics and logic

BTW, I am grappling with how to treat Thompson's(and Varela's) attempt at integrating Buddhist-inspired contemplative practices with phenomenology(and cognitive neuroscience). In partrticular , their articulation of the not-present-to-itself ego in terms of bliss, compassion, generosity, etc. How can they justify such positive affective characterizations of primoridal being-with? Notice that Heidegger thinks Dasein via ambiguous and equivocal affectivities like primordial guilt, angst and uncanniness,

What is the true experience or description of something? — waarala

Heidegger defines truth as simply the unconcealing of beings (letting beings be), not whether that unconcealing is accurate with respect to some standard of comparison.

After all, Dasein/existence has a physiological body which is often a technical object — waarala

Heidegger would say that Dasein does not 'have' a body in the sense of possessing an object, Dasein 'bodies forth'.
"There is actually no phenomenology of the body because the body is not a corporeal thing . With such a thematic approach, one has already missed the point of the matter. I myself am the relationship to something or to someone with whom I am involved in each case. However, "relationship" is not to be understood here in the modern logical-mathematical sense of relation as a relationship between objects. The existential relationship cannot be objectified. " Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars

Abstraction/generalization broadens (or eventually destroys) the context so that the "fulfillment of the sense" (phenomenological concept) is experienced only with regard to some general properties. — waarala

But can generalization ever really destroy context?(I think of Derrida's famous adage 'there is nothing outside context'). Even if a concept is experienced only with regard to some general properties,
aren't these so-called general properties made relevant for an individual in relation to their particular contextual situation, without their being explicitly aware of this? In other words, is there any way to ever escape the particularizing effect of context, even when we lose sight of this?

The phenomenological approach is the only instance where the so called ‘real’ doesn’t matter. It is essentially a science of subjectivity and so cannot then be extended as an existent absolute. — I like sushi

Indeed, but according to Husserl , it does give us apodictic certainty and an absolute grounding.

. It sounds like you want a co-creator of the philosophy. Even if people were willing to do it, they'd be afraid that they wouldn't know how. — ghost

To bad Guattari isn't around. I think he'd get off on the gig.

That was hilarious

oh dear

Since Galileo, the presumption of philosophy has shifted precisely to a 'detached understanding' in the sense of 'objectively absolute' - or as near to it as possible - and the 'reign of quantity'. But what has entirely gone, is the sense of there being a vertical dimension, some axis along which the judgement of what is 'higher', in a qualitative sense, is intelligible. — Wayfarer

Wouldn't that higher dimension still be operative for a Kantian and neo-Kantian empiricism? The 'reign of quantity' needs its proper form to organize it, otherwise it becomes blind. We laugh at the idea that the secret to the universe is the number 44, because it points to no organization, no gestalt to animate it meaningfully. Unlike classical and scholastic Platonism, Kantianism doesnt believe in an eternal content that mathematics can reveal to us, but it does believe in eternal form. In a way this leaves mathematics in a more subservient role than it played in earlier philosophical eras. For the eternal form that represents the Kantian ideal, and is manifested in the transcendental categories, is not something that any given mathematical structure can approximate. It is simply the formal idea of mathematical objectivity itself.

Science, in its various guises, is concerned with understanding the cosmos, the natural world. Phenomenology is concerned with understanding the nature of human experience as such, with life as it is lived, specifically. — Janus

it sounds like you're saying there is a real realm of physical nature and a real realm of human subjective experience, or what we colloquially call 'phenomenological', and that the two are different in their contents and methods of study but equally primordial. We can study the nature of human experience naturalistically, using objective empirical methods of the social sciences, or phenomenologically, via non-empirical philosophical modes of inquiry.

The meaning of Husserl's phenomenology, which served as the jumping off point for Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, among others, is quite different from this colloquial understanding of phenomenological. As Dan Zahavi puts it " Husserl is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. The attempt to do the latter assumes that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism. Frequently, the assumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real.
The positive sciences are so absorbed in their investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that they do not pause to reflect upon their own presuppositions and conditions of possibility. For Husserl, natural science is (philosophically) naive. Its subject matter, nature, is simply taken for granted. Reality is assumed to be out there, waiting to be discovered and investigated. And the aim of natural science is to acquire a strict and objectively valid knowledge about this given realm. But this attitude must be contrasted with the properly philosophical attitude, which critically questions the very foundation of experience and scientific thought."

As Evan Thompson concurs "I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential. We can see historically how
the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same
time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be
post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as
not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually
involving the mental)."

So I would correct your claim that science is concerned with studying the natural world and phenomenology with the inner world of experience. Scientific approaches which are ensconced within a naive realist worldview believe that what they do is study the natural world. Empirical perspectives, such as 4ea(enactive, embodied, embedded extended affective), which have absorbed Husserl's lessons, do not make such claims for studying something called nature that can be thought independently of how the world appears for a subject. They don't study a natural world but an intersubjectively enacted world. And this isn't just psychologists I'm talking about but also biologists and physicists.

The practice of mathematics is rule-based; it is the rule-based discipline par excellence. You can't dispense with the rules and still claim to be doing mathematics. — Janus

How is mathematics rule-based? A mathematical operation assigns a procedure.These procedures organize actions in a particular way. That is how they act as rules. But constructivist mathematicians know that we cannot logically derive one procedure from another in terms of formal proof. Addition, multiplication and more sophisticated procedures ,therefore, act as all other linguistic concepts. They are formal abstractions. Their precision and power resides not in their being rules, because a rule in its essence is simply a way of proceeding. What give them their usefulness is the fact that they are supposedly unambiguously understood. The command 'move to your left' is a rule, but it is imprecise, subject to interpretation. What gives the meaning of a mathematical rule its suppose freedom from ambiguity? Mathematics, resting on logic, begins from the thought of a pure, ideal object , devoid of all content but that it exists in itself as object. This would seem to be obvious but the idea of pure object had to be formulated as such by the Greeks. Once the idea of ideal object was established , the possibility of calculation became possible. Calculation makes no sense without objectivity. Mathematical rules are operations on ideal objects. One counts two or three or four of 'this' . IF there is no self-identical 'this' to remain itself , then there is no basis for calculation. Even if one counts different things, one is abstracting a common property to be counted..

Husserl argues that what we actually experience are continuous flowing adumbartions of perceptual modifications, aspects, variations, not objects in themselves. We synthesize the idea of an object out of this constantly changing flow of experience, but we never end up with a simple conceptual form, because it is in the nature of experiencing to continually modify itself. Our objects are relative , always incomplete , ongoing syntheses, They are ongoing activities of consciousness.
The supposed pure self-identicality of objects, the basis of the power and precision of math, is in fact a self-changing process instead of a solid fact.. Thus means that the rule-bound nature of math amounts to the assignment of a procedure of action whose dependability is no more assured than the stability of meaning of the objects it seeks to organize via its rule. so the most fundamental precision grounding phenomena of experience(including 'nature') inheres in a discourse that is indeed rule-bound(in that it prescribes a procedure of thought) but a rule that takes into account self-reflexively the self-transfomational nature of nature. That is to say, such a rule takes into acdcount that the irreducible basis of the world is not objects in themselves, but intentional activities of subject-object correlation. So we can see why recent philosophers are no longer interested in grounding or buttessing their theories in formal logic/mathematics.
They have found more clarifying discursive rules.

there are elements of science in phenomenology, but it is ultimately an art. — Janus

So what is your definition of science that differentiates it from phenomenology? Here's my definition. Science is a name with changing meanings over time. It can be traced genealogically through cultural history in terms of these changing self-understandings which transform themselves in parallel with changes in philosophical worldviews over the past centuries . There is Greek science and philosophy, Scholastic science and philosophy, Enlightenment science and philosophy, Modernist science and philosophy, and post-modern science and philosophy. The difference within any era between the two is nothing that exists outside of that era, not science's understanding of its method, goals, tools, language. All of these are contingent. All that differentiates it from philosophy in any trans-historical sense is that it is more 'pragmatic'. And what does that mean? It uses a vocabulary that is less comprehensively self-examining. In one era that means it has privileged access to 'truth', in another that means it is a social construction which is as much art and politics as it is fact.

mathematics is strictly rule-based and phenomenological inquiry is not. — Janus

Yes, but the reason that the rule-based nature of mathematics was so central to the philosophical projects of Aristotle, Descartes and Leibnitz was becasue the metaphysical grounding of logic and math was considered by them to also be 'rule-based'. They believed in a world that was grounded in such a way that it could be described as consisting of precisely defined rules of relationship.
Most philosophers no longer believe that the rules of relationship that ground ontology have fixed content. So the role that mathematics once served to model the metaphysical grounding of philosophy has been taken over by verbal description. Even when mathematical description is used, it is recognized as just being a species of language( all language implies a rule-based function) rather than a platonic essence. There is no longer agreement on the role of proof.
Husserlian phenomenology is very much rule -based, in that it consists of apodictic certainties. But these are no longer certainties of specific content, but certainties of the structural nature of temporal change. Husserl had no need to make use of mathematical description to model his grounding of phenomenology, since for him the mathematical, as a product of logic, is secondary to what grounds meaning.So my point is that the role that mathematics used to play in philosophy has been taken over
by a form of description that reflects the new way that ultimate precision is now understood. In that sense phenomenology, Nietzschean polemics, post structuralism , hermeneutics and pragmatism carry forward the tradition of mathemtics as the language of ultimate precision, but via a new type of discourse.

i

When will we know that we have fully understood such a glorious thing as 'the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience.' Why would we need to know? — ghost

I apologize for being lazy, but I've linked to an article I wrote in which I explain why I care about all this arcane stuff, and what relevance I think it has to the understanding of psychological phenomena such as affectivty , empathy, metaphor and social conditioning. https://www.academia.edu/38392024/Heidegger_Against_Embodied_Cognition

This ignores why we evolved to do such a thing in the first place. — ghost

What do practical engagement . usefulness and achievement require? It used to be believed by most philosophers and scientists that the universe was a puzzle with fixed rules to be solved. More recently, we came to believe that knowledge of the world was not a matching of inner theory with outer independent reality, but a co-construction of a self-transforming universe. To discover the rules of the world was to invent a means of interacting with the world in adaptive ways. In this view, objects are contingent and temporary products of subject-object interaction.Heidegger is not far from this view. He just wants to clarify that they are even more temporary than we think. His approach doesn't abandon us to chaos. On the contrary, it show the arbitrariness in fixing objects as self-identities with attributes and properties, and offers a less arbitrary alternative thinking .
.

What is an example of this "not as good" way of thinking he labels "present-at-hand"? Is it literally just Descartes sitting in his room, ruminating about metaphysical matters a priori? Does it have to touch a "real world application" for it to be considered the "good" ready-at-hand? — schopenhauer1

In my view, there are lots of things Heidegger didn't make clear about the limits of science with regard to his notion of the present to hand. For one thing, his critique of science should really have clarified itself as a critique of a certain era of scientific thinking that most scientists, especially those in the hard sciences, remain within. But science's understanding of itself changes over the centuries.
This brings up a number of questions. In what ways does one's philosophical understanding of the nature and genesis of mathematics and logic affect how one uses such tools?There are mathematical platonists(Roger Penrose) and social constructionists(Arthur Fine) within the scientific community these days, yet both groups continue to rely on logic and mathematics. I think the difference between these groups is in how they interpret the meaning of their empirical results, as well as how s scientific method operates.The social constructionist will argue that mathematics doesnt give us a mirror of nature, and that it wasn't divinely ordained to fit the world. It is, instead, just a useful tool of language. Heidegger would mostly agree with the social constructionist.

As a semi-Heideggerian myself, the way I see present to hand theoretical concepts and mathematical schemes is that they are abstract devices whcih are designed to be general enough in their meaning as to mask the differences from person to person, and from moment to moment, in the meaningful sense that we get from them. Planes stay up in the air despite the fact that there is a certain play in the engineering language we rely on to build them.

As I write these lines on this page right now I could treat the letters and words in a present to hand way by believing that I perceive the meaning of each of them as bits of self-contained data, If I'm a Kantian I will believe that the data in and of itself doesnt form conceptual meaning until I as subject construct such meaning out of the data, but this would remain present to hand for Heidegger. Understanding the text in a ready to hand way, I perceive each letter and word as framed by and emerging out of the context of the ongoing meaningful thematical background, in Wittgensteinian fashion to some extent. So I don't first register the words in terms of some general dictionary definition and then connect them to the current narrative, Accessing some generic present to hand definition of the words would be a secondary, derived act. And in reading the same word over and over again, it is not the identical meaning that comes back to me but a meaning that is very subtly changing its sense in accordance with the subtle changes in the context of my activity of thought.( the major challenge here is to understand how something we perceive or think can appear to remain identical to itself over time not just in spite of, but because of its moment to moment changes in meaningful sense)

Basically, converting the present to hand back to the ready to hand doesn't require that we abandon logic, math and theory. It is a matter of enriching our thinking in the following way.
Whenever we are tempted to perceive a meaning as a 'thing-object' , a persisting self-identity,
we can make note to ourselves that what we are really encountering when we take something 'as' something-in-itself is a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to continue to 'BE' itself from one moment to the next.
In a way, this is a subtle modification of the usual way of treating objects. For everyday purposes it wont alter our comportment toward the world very much. Realizing that the allegedly persistng self-identicality of a thing only remains the 'same' by very slightly changing its sense in alignment with our unfoldling context of activity and purposes wont make the apparent moment to moment intelligible stability of our world collapse into chaos. But it may make the world appear a bit less arbitrary than it otherwise would. It reminds us that what we really want when we reflect creatively is not to nail down a self-identical content, but to find in the ongoing and unceasing flow of experiential change thematic unities and regularities

Well of course the objects in themselves are there. — fdrake

Let me flesh out what I mean by 'object in itself'. Forgive for quoting myself from an earlier comment on this thread.

I wrote " I read Heidegger as saying that that the idea of the present to hand object is a contrivance. In 'What is a thing' he talks about how it has become ingrained among people in the modern era to assume that self-identical persisting objects with attributes and properties exist , independent of the activities, thinking and purposes of individuals who encounter them. He calls this the "natural conception of the world". He goes on to say that what people today assume as natural and universal was in fact an invention of the West , beginning with the Greeks, and would have been considered an alien notion to many cultures. Heideger argues that RAH (ready at hand) underlies the PAH(present at hand) conceptualization, as well as all other possible variations of it. Why can there not be an 'object in itself? Because the notion of 'in itself' for Heidegger already implies a self-transcendence. His whole project begins from rethinking the 'is', attempting to show us that the simple copula is not just an inert glue between subjects and objects, but transforms what it articulates. This is a strange notion, but the upshot is that to experience is to alter. The meaning of anything is in the way in which it is an alteration with respect to our current situation. To point to a moment of experience and say 'object' is to do violence to this dynamism at the heart of meaning by attempting to freeze what was mobile, and thus actively significant and relevant, and make it inert , dead, meaningless. This PAH thinking which underlies our logic and empirical science allows us to do many things, but runs the risk of making us forget its basis in pragmatic involvement with the world."

The transcendental priority of the ready to hand is legitimised through an appeal to everyday Dasein, not to specific modes of comportment. — fdrake

But all inauthentic modes of comportment for Heidegger belong to average everydayness, and there is no room for the present to hand in authentic Dasein.

Dasein is a poor description of someone staring at a screen, someone feeling lactic acid in their muscles, someone contemplating the mysteries of life. — fdrake

Why would contemplation, reflection, feeling be modes that require the notion of self-identical object-things for their unfolding? I should add that for Heidegger, in doing something like performing a formal logical proof it isnt even a question of abandoning heedfully concernful relevant comportment. There simply is no activity that doesnt presuppose such relevant relating to beings.

Heidegger talks about what it means to see something 'as' something: "In the first and authentic instance, this “as” is not the “as” of predication qua predication but is prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be
found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood.

I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so
original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it’s possible at
all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a
pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an
as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as
an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the
privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by
prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is
primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)

And as Derrida showed better than Heidegger did, in the midst of our pointing at, labeling, formalizing the world into thingly objects(res extensia) that we say are 'simply there', we are unknowingly remaining within radically contextual relating. This doesnt make the concept of an object 'false', it makes it a notion that doesn't fully understand the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience.

IS there such a thing as a hammer? Yes, but not as a meaning that adheres in itself independent of what we are doing with it, why we are accessing it. And furthermore, just staring at it amounts to staring at something that only remains the same by transforming its specific sense for us in subtle ways every moment of our apprehension of it. To be an 'it' of any kind is always to be a certain kind of change. To continue to be that 'it is to continue to change in a certain subtle kind of way that we naively call 'self-identical persisting'.

Yes, like troubleshooting a technical problem. You may know some of what to do, but it's not a flow state by any means, but grueling attempts to match known heuristics with the new problem or find a possible other cause and solution. — schopenhauer1

Gruelling and non-flowing, yes. But this paragraph is also an excellent example of contextually relevant ready-to-hand thinking. The ready to hand is not a proxy for 'flow' or 'at ease' situations.It applies equally to the oppsite situation of interruption, crisis, puzzlement. Being stuck or interrupted doesnt mean that the larger context of significance suddenly vanishes for us. Even the flailing about for new solutions is informed by ,and takes its sense and significance from, that context. Its not present to hand objects that we have the need for in this circumstance.. We don't need to call out to ourselves or others the names of tools at this point unless we are asking for something for a particular purpose it may serve. Even if we are making use of mathematical or logical language, the way we are able to benefit from it is seeing the relevance in it for our immediate purposes.

if present-at-hand is equated with reflective capabilities, it is indeed the primary way we humans engage and survive in the world (contra Heidegger). — schopenhauer1

The present to hand is not equated with reflection by Heidegger, it is equated with subject-object predicative statements(the basis of formal concepts as well as objective determinations of physical things). There is nothing particularly problematic for Heidegger about reflective thinking unless it cuts itself off from relevant contexts of involvement by narrowing itself down to theoretical or logical analysis. He would not want us to simply reject such forms of discourse, but to understand its derivation. so that we can use such forms in a more knowing and ethically effective manner.


Heidegger: "For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances.But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning
and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being.
Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive."

From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. — fdrake

When something is missing or malfunctions and it disrupts our seamless ready-to-hand involvement with tools , we don't revert to a present to hand mode of understanding unless we explicitly thematize what was missing , which means to point to it and define it as an object , in isolation from what we need it for. Normally, when our seamless involvement is interrupted by a missing tool, the way in which what was missing played a role in terms of the totality of relevance of the context of our involvement is what becomes explicit, not as a thematized 'object'. It's a matter of whether we are understanding a thing in terms of its relevance to our purposes and activities or simply as a defined entity with properties and attributes, independent of the way it matters for us in a particular context.

"When something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references discovered in our circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for and at hand with. Again, the surrounding world makes itself known. What appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection." Being and Time

For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other. — fdrake

Calling the ready to hand 'autopilot' or flow implies suggests, even if you dont mean it that way, that objects 'in themselves' are there and we are simply not paying attention to them when we are focusing on a task. But this isn't how Heidegger understands the distinction between ready to hand and present to hand. The present to hand does not stand on equal ontological footing with the ready to hand. It's a derivative and impoverished mode of the ready to hand for Heidegger. . It s not that in pointing out an object we are attending to something extra, something we ignored during our labors. The opposite is the case. In moving from the ready to hand to the present to hand mode, we are ossifying, freezing , flattening and distorting the beings we are involved with.

Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself. — fdrake

These all seem to me good examples of continuing within the ready to hand mode without having to make recourse to objectification. Indicative sounds, using a voltmeter as a tool, thinking how to use language in ways that matter to the situation, are all relevant articulations that move a stuck situation forward by involvement with contextually meaningful tools rather than thinking of them explicitly as objects. If one were to stop ones activities and merely say or think 'this is a voltmeter, this is a sound, etc. that would be an example of reverting to the present to hand mode.

construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! — fdrake

Heidegger isn't just faulting those Cartesian types who believe that empirical or conceptual objects are essences. He is deconstructing the concept of a formal indicator by showing how it is derived from the ready to hand , that is, how the concept of a material or theoretical object as a self-identical predication emerges as an impoverished mode of understanding our relevant involvement in the world, Heidegger doesn't want to do away with logic or empiricism . He recognizes their value. But he also recognizes the danger inherent in not recognizing how the present hand is generated from the ready to hand.

scientific researchers are indisputably successful overall at testing and applying what they discover and building on the discoveries of previous generations of scientists. — Izat So

Scientists don't build on previous discoveries so much as upend previous accounts and the definitions that go with them. Empiricism is not a mirror of nature, it is a maker of worlds that allow us to do useful things.

All your argument has accomplished is to replace the mythology of the metaphysical primacy of God with the mythology of the metaphysical primacy of science. I don't know if youre aware of how outdated your philosophy of scientific method sounds to a growing community of philosophers as well as scientists. Check out French physicist Bernard d'Espagnat and American physicist and philosopher Arthur Fine , for starters.

However, when I try to fit this image, the world as still imperfect and requiring improvement, onto a community, any community, it doesn't work. People are happy and content. They aren't bothered by philosophical issues such as the meaning of life and neither are they overly concerned about the goings-on in the world outside their communities. — TheMadFool

I think this is the crux of the matter. If people believe everything is fine within their local community, they are less likely to want to change the world, on the following condition: that they don't perceive the events taking place in the world outside their own happy community as posing an imminent threat to their happiness, or they don't identify and empathize closely with that outer world

I'm rather disconnected from the world — TheMadFool

You can only afford to be disconnected from it if it allows you to be. So far it has apparently left you alone. But you might want to make sure there aren't creeping threats from that seemingly irrelevant outside sphere that you havent noticed in your complacency.

The hippies in the 1960's had their community of other hippies. Within this microworld, many could consider themselves to be content, ensconced within a caring place of shared values. But whenever they traveled outside of their own circles, life was not so happy. So they had a choice, to either try and make the larger world a place that was more accepting of their values, or to isolate themselves away from that larger intolerant world and set an example that maybe the rest of the world would eventually follow.

The desire to change the world is directly related to one's sense of belonging to and identification with suffering people in it. I want to change the world to the extent that it defines me. IFf the world I empathize with is unhappy, then I am unhappy.

I'm wondering if you would apply your explanation of monotheism as an arbitrarily conditioned beilef system to the history of scientific theories, too. Foucault, for instance, presents a genealogical account of cultural history that ties the evolution of religious faith and the movement of science to the same underlying processes .

I haven't read Rovelli, although I enjoyed Lee Smolen's book 'Time Reborn'.
I find particularly satisfying Heidegger's account of temporality, his modification of Husserl's concept of time consciousness.

Piaget differed from Kuhn in one respect. In his little book 'Structuralism' he contrasted his philosophy of science with Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn. The impetus for Piaget's project was to reconcile the teleological dreams of religion with the real. He thought he found a way to do so by demonstrating that the movement of genetic epistemology was not just an arbitrary becoming(as it is for Nietzsche and the poststructuralists) , but a move from a weaker to a stronger structure, as a spiral-shaped progressive re-equllibration which preserves in re-organized form much of what it transcends.

Kierkegaard might have been pleased.

I do have one question. If pragmatism is about what works, that implies a normative fitting process between pre-existing framework of understanding and what is encountered in the world. But if we look at the work of enactive cognitive theorists, we see that the world we attempt to adapt our constructions to is altered by those very constructions, given that cognition is an embodied self-organizing circuit of interaction with its environment. Thus, from this vantage, what works is at the same time a fitting of organism to world and a creative transformation of world by organism. I think Dewey and James understood this. What do you think?

For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. — pomophobe

Indeed, Kant showed us the dependence of science on formal conditions of possibility for such grounding concepts as logic, causality and objectivity. But Kant believed in a static universe, a single integrated gestalt that it was our challenge as puzzle solvers to penetrate and represent through incremental trial and error. His frames were set in stone as a priori categories. Hegel asked why we shouldn't think of these frames as themselves contingent and changeable. This led eventually to the idea that science at its most relevant and creative doesn't just rearrange the pieces on a chessboard, but upends the rules of the game. Newtonian physics already 'worked', but modern physics worked in a different way, by turning the Newtonian world on its head. You could say that the quantum explanation works better than the classical account, but its important to note that it works better by reinventing the game, redefining the terms. The same can be said of Darwinian biology with respect to the model it upended. Evolutionary theory didnt solve a puzzle within the bounds of the old framework. In fact, it can be argued that there was no puzzle at all to solve within the terms of the old model. Only within the bounds of the new framework offered by Darwinism did it make sense to talk about a problem of origin of species.

Steve Jobs said :“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

I think problem solving doesn't capture the genius of science. Rather , science first creates a new space of possibilities, upending the old framework and all its rules and definitions . Only when this is done can what didn't appear before as a problem emerge as an issue.
As Heidegger said "The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts."
The historical movement of science is one of revolutions in ways of knowing how.

know-how is prior to knowing-that — pomophobe

Yes, and this perceptual and cognitive know-how, being perceiver-dependent , consists in our assimilating the world into our already-structured processes of understanding. But at the same time, we must accommodate our patterns of organization to the novelties of our environment. This assures that any frame of understanding we use to interpret the empirical world is always in the process of transforming itself subtly. We normally dont notice this. Thus , you can claim that :

The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards. — pomophobe

Just because you don't notice substantial ambiguity concerning the goal or standards doesnt mean that you are not performing an interpretive function every time you sit down to work on a narrowly defined empirical puzzle safely within the bounds of a conventional framework. And the fact that interpretation is necessary in the act of engaging your know-how means that in subtle fashion you are re-envisioning the bounds of that framework in even the most conventional project,and with it your criteria of valuation , purpose and standards.

Recent work on enactivist cognitive science shows that we engage the world in a unified manner. Know-how is holistic. We don't consult an interior script or theory, we engage directly, bring our embodied understanding as a whole to bear on tasks. As we experience the world moment to moment, our frames of understanding shift as a whole, very subtly.

go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of. — pomophobe

Mundane life is non theoretical if theory is understood as a canned abstract database we consult. but It is theoretical in the sense of an embodied holistic pattern of meaningful engagement. Such patterns, as ways of sense making, manifest themselves on a cultural level as the evolving worldviews that define our potentialities and limits as ethical,political and scientifically inforrmed people. Affectivrty is a sensitive barometer of the extent to which our system of know-how is confronted with an event it cannot effectively assimilate. Observe your affective response next time you engage in a project, or even as you read my comment . To the extent that your ongoing sense making capabilities
are not being challenged inordinately, your emotive register will hover somewhere between boredom and mild interest. If , however, something in what I say appears incoherent or challenging in a way that you are not prepared to process adequately , irritation, anger, frustration or anxiety will alert you to a potential reorganization of your system of understanding. In such a situation, could we say that your philosophical scheme of understanding underwent a minor crisis of validation? Not if philosophy is understood as an inert and formal construction. But if we acknowledge that know-how implies that all of us walk around with a stable ongoing interpretive sense-making potentiality, and that this functions in a holistic way in our engagements with our world, then it seems to me that all of us function as naive philosophers(and scientists), regardless of what our skill set consists of.

non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is. — pomophobe

Yes, and that 'stuff' they can't ignore is deeply embedded within and dependent on the very framework of thought that it impinges on. There is always an alternative to solving a problem, and that is transcending the very terms of its formulation. Within certain fields of endeavor the conceptual terms are so broadly drawn as to make it appear that there really is such a thing as 'indifferent-to-us nature'.
To a growing number of philosophers, and empirically minded types as well, this is an incoherent notion.

The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. — pomophobe

Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? Put differently, isnt it possible to to talk philosophically about the way that our moment to moment relation to the world and to our self transforms the nature of both the subjective and objective side of experience, without having to be accused of falling back into the same trap one is trying to critique? On this forum, such accusations take the form of 'Isn't pomo relativism asserting a truth in claiming that objective truth is impossible?' A post-realist argument isn't meant as a replacement theory but as a move toward practice itself. Its way of thinking sees itself as no longer theory at all in the old sensed but as activity and interaction. Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. That's why temporality is so essential to Heidegger(and Husserl).

Philsophers used to be in the forefront of introducing new mathematical concepts(Aristotle, Leibinitz, Descartes). Then they stopped, or at least the continental thinkers did, other than a few odd attempts like that of Badiou. Given that I view mathetical concepts as arising out of the cultural contingency of language generally, I see the the articulations of thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger as the direct continuation of the tradition of mathematical thought. Their formulations ARE a form of mathematics in the most sweeping sense. They are what mathematics had to become.

In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. — pomophobe

A thoroughgoing pragmatism applies not just to means but also to ends..
If our tools don't really make sense to us, then what it means for them to work for us also wont make much sense. That is to say, the way in which we will understand what it means for something to be useful will be contingent and arbitrary, intelligible in relation to local norms, which is in fact how Deleuze and other pomos already tend to understand our relation to the immanent world. The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned.

This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) .

I came across the work of Joseph Rouse recently, who writes in a field called 'science studies', which I find fascinating. It places empirical endeavors smack dab in the middle of a complex milieu of political and socio-cultural practices. It has connections to social constructionism but doesnt restrict itself to a focus on language. It give a window into what scientists are doing as they make their way around black boxes.

I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. — pomophobe

Bennington is one of the best interpreters of Derrida and is able to correct many of the grossest misreadings(like the common misinterpretation of 'nothing outside the text' as nothing outside the bounds of formal language). But Bennington never puts away the Derrida impersonation in any of his writing, right down to the idiosyncratic French inflections(Bennington is a Scot, for God's sake!).
This is not the mark of a writer confident in his originality.Not that I'm saying he has to be original. I imagine Bennington is reconciled to his role as Derrida's bulldog.

There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world. — pomophobe

Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? In terms of topics of active debate in cognitive science these authors represent clear divisions within the field concerning understanding of the capacity of empathy, theories of affect, representationalism vs post-nonrepresentationalism, accounts of autism, the nature of consciousness, etc., and these differences parallel larger philosophical rifts. The journal phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences gives us a point of entry for I=integrating Heidegger with empirical work in affect and consciousness.