↪praxis

I thought you might want to show where no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year is proposed. I couldn’t find it.

I guess use your imagination then. How would that tax cut benefit the 1% in your view — NOS4A2

Heres an interesting take on that alleged no taxes for anyone making less than $150,000 a year’, from New Republic’s Timothy Noah:

In a meeting with Republican congressional leaders in June 2024 Trump said he favored an “all tariff policy” that would allow the United States to abandon the income tax. He said it again in October 2024, first to a bunch of guys in a Bronx barbershop (“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s…. [we] had all tariffs. We didn’t have an income tax”), and then to Joe Rogan. (Rogan: “Were you serious about that?” Trump: “Yeah, sure, why not?”) Trump said it yet again in his inauguration speech (“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”). One month later, Trump’s tariff-crazed Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, discussed the idea in some detail:

“His goal is to have external revenue. You know, the way I think about it, we all are so used to paying taxes, we’re so used to it, we have like Stockholm syndrome. You know, “Don’t stop the Internal Revenue Service, God forbid!” … Let [other nations] pay a membership fee. We all understand that model. Let them pay…. I know his goal is: No tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. That’s his goal. That’s what I’m working for.”

This drew a little more attention than Trump’s remarks. Maybe that was because Lutnick’s scheme was one-quarter less insane. In Lutnick’s formulation, the IRS would still tax people whose income exceeded $150,000. Still, exempting everybody else would cut loose at least three-quarters of all current taxpayers, at a cost to the Treasury of about $1 trillion per year. (The under-$150,000 cohort would still have to pay payroll tax, which for most in this group exceeds what they pay in income tax. But I digress.)

A $1 trillion hole in tax receipts is smaller than the nearly $3 trillion hole left by eliminating the income tax entirely. But $1 trillion is still an insane amount to have to raise in tariffs on $3.3 trillion of imports. Lutnick said later that none of this would happen until the budget was balanced, at which time everybody heaved a sigh of relief, because there’s no chance in hell Trump will ever balance the budget. Trump’s immediate reason to hunt tariff revenue is to try to cover the cost of his tax proposals: extend the 2017 tax cut, restore the deduction for state and local taxes, eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, et cetera. The cost of these approaches a whole ‘nuther $1 trillion per year.

Have you noticed that Trump never gets a number right? He will never acknowledge arithmetic. I don’t feel certain Trump’s even signed on to Lutnick’s compromise idea of eliminating the income tax only on incomes below $150,000. But to pursue any version of this scheme, Trump needs to slap tariffs on everything that moves, while leaving his underlings to supply a rationale. Just about any justificaiton will do.

The left died. This is what's taking its place — frank

Not for long.
I completely agree with this assessment for Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait:

Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.
A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

↪Joshs Americans are in for a real ride now. At least for others, it's just the exports to the US going down the drain... for the US consumers, a bit different. — ssu

I’m all in favor of these tariffs. Trump only won the election because his core MAGA supporters were joined by libertarian free-market neo-liberal business types who believed Trump basically shared their economic perspective, and just used tariffs as a bargaining chip. They didn’t realize the Trump who made them money in his first term was a Trump whose real goals were being constrained by those around him. They didn’t think they were electing an imperialist mercantilist. A lot of them don’t even know what that is, it’s been discredited for so long. But they are likely to learn now the hard way, with a deep recession and steep bear market. If that happens, I think they will vet all future candidates for office to make sure that no imperialist-mercantilist platform ever gets voted in again.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he spoke with Prime Minister Mark Carney about that prospect on Wednesday morning ahead of President Donald Trump’s ominous Liberation Day announcement on sweeping new tariffs.

Ford suggested that Carney told him a zero-tariff situation was possible if Trump agreed to drop all tariffs.

Trump doesn’t believe in trade. He has said he thinks trade is ‘bad’, that there is always a winner and a loser. As a mercantilist, the last thing he wants is tariff-free open trade.

Some hinge propositions are of the form "...counts as...", and as such their role is in setting up the language game. "The piece that only moves diagonally counts as a bishop"; "This counts as a hand"; "'P' counts as true if and only if P". — Banno

Is this what’s called anaphoric or prosentential logic? I’m
thinking of Brandom here.

, I often "take it as true" that my colour judgements are synonymous with the optical colours, due to learning the colors by ostensive definition; in spite of the fact that the definition of the optical colours makes no mention of my color judgements. — sime

Doesn’t this kind of truth depend on a comparison or correspondence, even if only ‘taken as’ correct, between color judgement and optical colors?

What are the philosophical / epistemological / logical grounds for hinge propositions being exempt from doubt?
— Corvus

I guess you could doubt them, you just exit the language game when you do — frank

In order to doubt anything, one must rely on that which is beyond doubt. In other words, one cannot exit all language games and still be capable of doubting.

For example:
i) That Paris is in France cannot be doubted means that we started with a doubt and then concluded that our doubt was baseless.
ii) That Paris is in France is exempt from doubt means that we are not even allowed to doubt at — RussellA

One way of understanding ‘exempt from doubt’ is the way I suggested here:

In the second way of thinking, only the epistemological ‘I know’ represents my conviction (justifiable or not) that what I believe to be the case corresponds to what is actually the case. The hinge ‘ I know’ is not a conviction that what I believe corresponds with the way things actually are. It functions prior to correspondence, and the split between hypothesis and experience. Both what makes hypothesis and any possible experience that could validate or falsify it intelligible are already framed by the hinge conviction. — Joshs

The two language games I'm referring to are seen in one use of 'I know.." as an epistemological use, the other use as an expression of a conviction. Something I believe to be an indubitable truth, which doesn't have a justification like normal propositions. There is no justification; it's a lived conviction shown in our actions — Sam26

Let me offer two ways of thinking about this distinction between ‘I know’ as epistemological and ‘I know’ as hinge conviction, and you tell me which one you prefer. According to the first way, in both the epistemological and the hinge ‘I know’, truth is a correspondence between what I believe to be the case and what is actually the case. But the hinge ‘I know’ doesn’t have a justification or proof for its conviction that the way things really are corresponds to the way I believe them to be.

In the second way of thinking, only the epistemological ‘I know’ represents my conviction (justifiable or not) that what I believe to be the case corresponds to what is actually the case. The hinge ‘ I know’ is not a conviction that what I believe corresponds with the way things actually are. It functions prior to correspondence, and the split between hypothesis and experience. Both what makes hypothesis and any possible experience that could
validate or falsify it intelligible are already framed by the hinge conviction.

I don't understand what "the superordiante concept" might be. This in relation to the yin-yang. Here addressed as though it in fact occurs. — javra

For instance , one could take as the ground of one’s superordinate concept of the masculine-feminine binary a biologically determined , universal set of behavioral traits. One always knows what masculine or feminine mean, because their biological origin makes them
impervious to cultural influences. One could, on the other hand, view the superordinate concept as socially produced. In this care we only know what the words masculine and feminine mean via our participation in specific cultural contexts and historical eras. These are just two of many possible ways of understanding the superordinate concept.

A thing will have masculine and feminine aspects. Take one of the masculine aspects. Does that masculine aspect have feminine meta-aspects? This is a way of saying, that while an object level phenomenon has masculine and feminine aspects, the aspects themselves are dichotomously masculine or feminine. — fdrake

And what can we say about the superordinate concept imparting to ‘masculine’ and feminine’ their intelligibility? How is it grounded, and what is its genesis?

This is clearly part of Trump's Project 2025 program. Did Musk set you up to this? — T Clark

I believe Project 2025 states that all facts must be derived exclusively from social media sources.

You are conflating two different types of propositions within the language game. There is the hinge proposition and there is the ordinary proposition.

You are right that the ordinary proposition is the product of practical discursive engagement with others, but the hinge proposition is a different thing altogether.

This is why Wittgenstein critiques Moore's "here is one hand". The whole point of Wittgenstein's hinge proposition is that is not the product of practical discursive engagement with others — RussellA

Where do hinge propositions come from, and where do empirical propositions come from? If only empirical propositions are the product of discursive engagement with others, then how do we learn hinge propositions? From within the solitary imagination of the individual mind? Are we not brought up to see the world a certain way? And can we not be brought to look at the world in a different way?

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.

If empirical propositions are formed through contact with the world and with others, what does it say about this world we are in contact with that it appears to us already interpreted through our hinge propositions? And what does it say about hinge propositions that we are brought up with them through cultural discursive transmission, and that they can be altered through practical discursive persuasion? Perhaps hinge and ordinary propositions are not two sharply distinguishable entities , but more or less fluid, more or less hardened aspects of the same practical discursive processes. Cannot hinge propositions be likened to Kuhnian scientific paradigms? How do we arrive at a new paradigm if not via contact with the world?

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.
96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became
fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.
98. But if someone were to say "So logic too is an empirical science" he would be wrong. Yet this is right: the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.

:up:

What do you see as the ‘rules’ of ‘I have hands’ such that they hold across language games? Would Wittgenstein accept that there is any sort of understanding that holds ACROSS language games?
— Joshs

The first rule might be assumed embodiment, i.e., I act as if I have hands by grabbing and pointing for e.g..

The second rule might be realizing there is a linguistic baseline. It’s a shared certainty that’s voiced. Pass the potatoes assumes hands, doubt this foundation and things stall.

The third rule is immunity to doubt. Doubting here would break the frame or foundation, not allowing further linguistic action. — Sam26

Wittgenstein argued that the general is never to be understood as including within it the particular, that there is no one thing that members of a category have in common. Thus there can be no general language game including within it particular language games. There are only family resemblances among language games, and this family is not itself a game.

65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.—For someone might object against me:
"You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language­ games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,— but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". (P.I.)

For Wittgenstein, the hinge proposition "here is one hand" is independent of any world. As a hinge proposition, it is the foundation of the language within which it is a part, regardless of its truth, where truth is a correspondence between language and the world — RussellA

It isn’t independent of any world. On the contrary, it is the product of practical discursive engagement with others and with material circumstances in the actual world in which we live. That is why it is a form of life rather than a transcendental ideality. For Wittgenstein truth would be a correspondence between a hypothesis and an empirical event of the world , in which both hypothesis and world show themselves as already organized intelligibly on the basis of the same language game.
Merleau-Ponty put it this way:

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

On the other side of the argument, “I have hands holds across contexts and language games. Atheists function without belief in God, but how would they function without the belief we have hands? Moreover, belief in God is doubted by many, and it’s debated in theology and philosophy. Wittgensteinian hinges resist doubt (OC 19 “incapable of doubting”). The belief that God exists invites doubt, even among those who believe. — Sam26

What do you see as the ‘rules’ of ‘I have hands’ such that they hold across language games? Would Wittgenstein accept that there is any sort of understanding that holds ACROSS language games? Wittgenstein would not have used ‘I have hands’ as an example of a hinge proposition if it were not possible to conceive of a language game in which such a phrase were not intelligible, or intelligible in a way that was incommensurable with Moore’s intent. Non-neurotypicals would be just one example of a population in which ‘I have hands’ might not be intelligible in Moore’s sense.

As far as belief in God, there are many kinds of faith in God, many kinds of conceptions of who or what God is, or where he/she/it is , or how they are. What you’re looking for as a hinge is the underlying metaphysics making intelligible both the kind of faith and the kinds of doubt that accompany it, rather than the proposition ‘God exists’.

↪Joshs Moore's papers indicate the opposite. — Sam26

Could you supply some quotes in support of your argument? I just read Moore’s ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ and section 4, where he brings up the example of ‘my hand’, seems to depict it as an empirical truth without need of proof.

hinges are not true or false in the propositional sense but are accepted as true or false as a matter of conviction or for purposes of utility — Sam26

I would say that true or false pertains to whether something is or is not the case, an issue of adequation between the representing and the represented. The kind of certainty pertaining to hinge propositions is not that of adequation , of whether something is the case, but of how something is the case.

Another guy named G.E. Moore tried to say, “I know I have hands,” as if it was a matter to be justified or a matter of proof. Wittgenstein disagreed, saying that it wasn’t a matter of proof. He said that these beliefs were so basic that a proof wouldn’t make sense — Sam26

Seems to me the latter is what Moore was arguing. He believed ‘I know I have hands’ to be certainly true, but not subject to justification or proof. Wittgenstein argued that the proposition ‘I know I have hands’ is not subject to doubt. It is neither a true nor false belief.

Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether ‘logic is objective or not’, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove ‘you can only use logic to prove’ as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth. — Fire Ologist

Logic is objective because logic depends on an already constituted set of assumptions concerning what an object is. Therefore, logic can’t be used as a means to reveal the psychological genesis of those assumptions, as writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger argued. Derrida summarizes Husserl’s opposition to Frege on this point:

“… only "composed" logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like "quality," "intensity," "place," “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl's eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic. If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination.

This determination cannot be provided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations. Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this definition and its possibility would be inexplicable. (The Problem of Genesis)

I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism
— Joshs

I'm dying to know what your software misunderstood here — J

Supposed to be ‘I am drawn to the critique of both realism and anti-realism’.

That’s what I get for doing all of my composing on an iphone while hiking.

Reading the debate between Chakravarrty and Poncock on epistemic stances and rationality, I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism offered by figures such as Fine, Davidson, Brandom and McDowell. Joseph Rouse explains:

​Arthur Fine has prominently advanced a first challenge to all sides of the realist debates in a series of papers advocating the “Natural Ontological Attitude”, by asking what these debates are about. For example, they might be understood as advocating alternative goals for scientific inquiry (truth, empirical adequacy, instrumental reliability, advancing social interests, and the like). Realists and anti-realists attribute such goals to the sciences as an interpretation that “makes better sense” of scientific practices and achievements. Fine offers a trenchant reply:
Science is not needy [for interpretation] in this way. Its history and current practice constitute a rich and meaningful setting. In that setting, questions of goals or aims or purposes occur spontaneously and locally.
Michael Williams makes a similar argument in epistemology more generally, challenging the belief that “there is a general way of bringing together the genuine cases [of knowledge] into a coherent theoretical kind”, such that one can make a general case for realist or anti-realist interpretations of knowledge claims.

Another way to dissolve the realism question highlights a problematic commitment to the independence of meaning and truth. Anti-realists are evidently committed to such independence, because they endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is “really” like needed to determine whether those claims are “literally” true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like. Realists nevertheless agree that understanding theoretical claims and determining whether they are correct are distinct and independent achievements.

For realists, it is a significant achievement to determine, for some scientific theory or hypothesis, that this claim, with its semantic content independently fixed, is true. If the determination of the truth or falsity of a claim were entangled with the interpretation of its content, however, such that what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth, then realists would be unable to specify the claims (i.e., the contents of those claims) about which they want to be realists. Anti-realists in turn could not pick out their preferred proximate intermediary (perceptual appearances, instrumental reliability, social practices or norms) without invoking the worldly access they deny.

​Donald Davidson (1984) developed a classic criticism of this assumption and the realist and anti-realist positions that presuppose it. Davidson argued that the only way to justify an interpretation of what a claim says is to show that this interpretation maximizes the truthfulness and rationality of the entire set of beliefs and desires attributed to a speaker in conjunction with that interpretation. Otherwise, any attribution of false beliefs to the speaker would be justifiably open to a response that attributes the error to the interpretation rather than to the claims interpreted. Only against the background of extensive understanding of what is true can we also understand the objective purport and content of beliefs and utterances. Davidson rightly concluded that “Nothing, no thing, makes our sentences or theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world...”

Its from ‘The Will to Know’

Nietzsche utilizes the awkwardness of the summation of these ideas in the saying "There are not facts." But fact is, Nietzsche details facts about many things, and utilizes the term fact to point out truths across different eras of time. Nietzsche was a philologists, first and foremost, who studied the evolution of ideas throughout time by examing our language. — DifferentiatingEgg

According to Foucault, Nietzsche details two kinds of truth, connaissance and savoir.

“…the Aristotelian model appeared to characterize classical philosophy. This model entails that the Will to know ( savoir ) is nothing other than curiosity, that knowledge (connaissance ) is always already marked in the form of sensation, and finally that there was an inherent relation between knowledge and life. The Nietzschean model, on the other hand, claims that the Will to know ( savoir ) refers not to knowledge ( connaissance ) but to something altogether different, that behind the Will to know there is not a sort of preexisting knowledge that is something like sensation, but instinct, struggle, the Will to power. The Nietzschean model, moreover, claims that the Will to know is not originally linked to the Truth: it claims that the Will to know composes illusions, fabricates lies, accumulates errors, and is deployed in a space of fiction where the truth itself is only an effect. It claims, furthermore, that the Will to know is not given in the form of subjectivity and that the subject is only a kind of product of the Will to know, in the double game of the Will to power and to truth. Finally, for Nietzsche, the Will to know does not assume the preexistence of a knowledge already there; truth is not given in advance; it is produced as an event.

This model of a fundamentally interested knowledge, produced as an event of the will and determining the effect of truth through falsification, is undoubtedly at the furthest remove from the postulates of classical metaphysics.

Goodness, as I understand it, certainly does not mean humankindness and responsible conduct! It is just fully allowing the uncontrived condition of the inborn nature and allotment of life to play itself out — Chuang Tzu

What do you suppose ‘uncontrived condition of the inborn human nature’ means? Do we have an inborn nature? Or do we contrive our nature through our interactions with others? If the latter, then perhaps goodness is to be made as much as found?

A critique of Frege's theory of sense and reference by Wittgenstein isn't possible, because Frege never provided an explicit theory or definition of sense. Frege only demonstrated his semantic category of sense (i.e. modes of presentation) through examples. And he was at pains to point out that sense referred to communicable information that leads from proposition to referent - information that is therefore neither subjective nor psychological — sime

If not subjective nor psychological, then what? Grounded in empirical objectivity? You think Wittgenstein understands sense to be grounded by reference to facts that transcend the normativity of language-games?

The important point is that when we develop/invent rules and make decisions about how to apply them, we are not totally "in charge". Put it this way - our agreements can lead to undesired consequjences and disagreements, which need to be resolved. We don't invent those - we would much rather they didn't happen, so we don't invent them. We do resolve them. That's not a problem, in itself; it's just part of our practice. — Ludwig V

In what way is the invention of a mathematical rule different from the creation of a language game/form of life? When Moore says ‘this is my hand’, Wittgenstein argues that he confuses an empirical assertion with a grammatical proposition. Moore’s gesture is pointing to the grammar , the rules, of a language game that Moore ‘inherited’ from his entanglement with his culture, but which rules are invisible to him. Moore ‘discovers’ that this is his hand, but doesn’t realize that his discovery only makes sense within the language game. Isnt this form of life an invention, but one that Moore was not ‘in charge of’? Couldn’t we say that scientific paradigms are invented , and the facts that show up within them are discovered?

Many of Wittgenstein's contemporaries said it better than Wittgenstein by formally distinguishing assertions from propositions. In particular, Frege introduced turnstile notation to make the distinction between propositions on the one hand, and assertions about propositions that he called judgements on the other. — sime

I consider the most important and radical implication of Wittgenstein’s later work to be his critique of Frege’s theory of sense as reference. Frege remained mired in a formalistic metaphysics centered on logic, without ever grasping f Wittgenstein’s distinction between the epistemic and the grammatical.

↪Joshs Seems we pretty much agree, except that I don't think calling this an "intuition" is at all helpful, since it hints at private mental phenomena. It's not about intuition, it's about action - following a rule is something we do, not a "special sense — Banno

I agree. Intuition isn’t really what I was after. Wittgenstein said it better.

213. "But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation."—Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. (There is something to be said, which is connected with this, about the psychological 'atmosphere' of a process.) So it must have been intuition that removed this doubt?—If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong. ((Intuition an unnecessary shuffle.))

… It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.

You state the problem nicely, but don't mention Wittgenstein's solution.
The Private Language argument indicates that there's no way for you to know what rules you've been following up till now. Check out Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language by Saul Kripke.
— frank
The PLA (insofar as it is an argument) establishes, IMO, that there is no way for you to know what rules you have been following up to now, if they are private rules. "Private" means that your say-so determines what is correct and what is not. So "correct" and "incorrect" have no application - no meaning. — Ludwig V

What gives meaning to rules is human agreement in the context of human life. Think of how the fact that we agree on how to use words is enough to make them words. (This fact is, perhaps, not a fact of the matter, but it is a fact nonetheless.) What often gets left out of this is that we sometimes find that we don't agree on how to apply our rules; so we have to make a decision about how to go on. — Ludwig V

It’s not human agreement , as though each individual voices their opinion and then the group arrives at a consensus. Socially normative meanings function prior to and already within individual experiences of rules and criteria of action. At the same time that such social norms allow us to make sense of our own perspective within them, we can differ among one another within shared language games as to how to proceed. And whether or not we agree on how to apply our rules, those rules never are enough to tell us how to go on. It is only within the actual context of the situation that we ‘intuit’ the specific sense and use of a rule. This intuitive knowing is the solution, not waiting for a consensus from a group.

If the rules of a language game make rational numbers intelligible, then isnt it a new set of rules that make irrationals intelligible?
— Joshs

It's a fiction that meaning arises from rule-following. There's no fact of the matter regarding what rules you've followed up til now. — frank

If we’re talking about Wittgenstein on rule-following here, then there is no intelligible meaning without rules, criteria, forms of life. But at the same time, in applying those concepts, criteria and rules, we don’t simply refer to them as a picture determining in advance how to go on. The rules underdetermine what to do in each new situation. There is an element of invention in following rules.

But I don't think that "invent" is the appropriate description. The story of the irrationals shows that when we set up the rules of a language-game (and that description of numbers is also an idealization), we may find that there are situations (applications of the rules) that surprise us. Hence it is more appropriate to say that we discover these — Ludwig V

If the rules of a language game make rational numbers intelligible, then isnt it a new set of rules that make irrationals intelligible? In other words, don’t we have to invent irrationals as well as rationals?

What I found interesting in that article is not so much the evolutionary psychology behind it, (but in this case it is nice it supports the point as many in this forum do seem to embrace it) what I found interesting is the correlation between perceived attractiveness as a dating partner and delinquency. I think the answer for it lies more in the concept I explained as 'subterranean values', social values that are presented but seldom 'officially' articulated, then in some evolutionary psychology — Tobias

I would like to hear more about how you understand the relation between the social construct of masculinity you are associating with the right, and conservative populist thinking in its wider scope. Do you think the former explains the latter, the reverse, or is there some more complex relation between the two? And if you agree that ‘masculinity’ is an outdated social construct that is lingering among men, why are you labeling the construction that’s taking its place as ‘feminine’? Don’t masculine and feminine go together as the two poles of an outdated binary social conception? Aren’t they in the process of being replaced by a new binary, in which both what had been understood as masculine and what was seen as feminine are redefined? Or perhaps the binary itself is on the way to being replaced by a spectrum or non-linear plurality or fluidity?

, I hold a social constructivist view myself. — Tobias

Then why did you write this?

delinquency does not appear to increase dating by increasing the delinquent's desire for dates. Instead, they suggest that delinquency increases dating outcomes by making the delinquent more attractive to prospective mates. This finding supports evolutionary psychology's implicit prediction that adolescents may, knowingly or unknowingly (see Berry & Broadbent, 1984; Claxton, 1999; Lewicki et al., 1992; Massey, 2002), perceive delinquency as one type of risk-taking behavior that reflects such qualities as nerve, daring, and bravado. 5 From an evolutionary perspective, such qualities may be highly beneficial to a prospective mate's social status, physical well-being, and/or genetic lineage" — Tobias

What do we mean by masculinity and femininity? I think in the previous thread it was left implicit. Here I take a broad and theoretical view of masculinity and femininity, derived from the sociologist Hofstede. He ranked societies as feminine and masculine based on a number of characteristics. O — Tobias

I consider masculinity, femininity, homosexuality and all other gendered concepts to be social constructs which interpret biological features in ways that vary from era to era and culture to culture. What you seem to be doing is turning one such era-specific construct , the masculine-feminine binary, into a biologically essentialized universal and then using it to explain traditionalist thinking on the political right in the West today. I argue instead that what you understand as masculinity and femininity are not only culturally relative constructs, but do not explain right wing populism. Rather, they are themselves subordinate elements of a larger traditionalist worldview which is about much more than gendered behavior. Do MAGA supporters embrace guns, authoritarianism, oppose abortion, immigrants, climate science, Transgender rights and feminism because of masculine thinking, or are the very concepts of masculinity and femininity they espouse reflections of a traditionalist worldview?

although I wouldn't use "predetermined"
— wonderer1

I mean, maybe you should.. — DifferentiatingEgg

I read Nietzsche as critiquing both freedom of the will
and the determinism of cause and effect.

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity's excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen's, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect.

We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.” We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically. The “un-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinker when he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, unfreedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity”. (Beyond Good and Evil)

I follow Deleuze’s reading of the Eternal Return as non-deterministic and unconditioned.

…the eternal return and the Overman are at the crossing of two genealogies, of two unequal genetic lines. On the one hand they relate to Zarathustra as to the conditioning
principle which "posits" them in merely hypothetical manner. On the other hand, they relate to Dionysus as the unconditioned principle which is the basis of their apodictic and absolute character. Thus in Zarathustra's exposition it is always the entanglement of causes or the connection of moments, the synthetic relation of moments to each other, which determines the hypothesis of the return of the same moment. But, from Dionysus' perspective by contrast, it is the synthetic relation of the moment to itself, as past, present and to come, which absolutely determines its relations with all other moments. The return is not the passion of one moment pushed by others, but the activity of the moment which determined the others in being itself determined through what it affirms. Zarathustra's constellation is the constellation of the lion, but that of Dionysus is the constellation of being: the yes of the child-player is more profound than the holy no of the lion. The whole of Zarathustra is affirmative: even when he who knows how to say no, says no. But Zarathustra is not the whole of affirmation, nor what is most profound in it.

ll affirmation finds its condition in Zarathustra but its unconditioned principle in Dionysus. Zarathustra determines the eternal return, moreover he determines it to produce its effect, the Overman. But this determination is the same as the series of conditions which finds its final term in the lion, in the man who wants to be overcome, in the destroyer of all known values. Dionysus' determination is of another kind, identical to the absolute principle without which the conditions would themselves remain powerless. And this is Dionysus' supreme disguise — to subject his products to conditions which are themselves subject to him, condi-tions that these products themselves surpass. The lion becomes a child, the destruction of known values makes possible a creation of new values. But the creation of values, the yes of the child-player, would not be formed under these conditions if they were not, at the same time, subject to a deeper genealogy.

Do we in fact know that the dream precedes, or grounds, the kicking? Might it not be the case that my legs kick for some independent, strictly neurological reason, which then causes me to dream about kicking, in the same way that a full bladder causes me to dream about urination? — J

My guess is if one kicks without volition while asleep, one’s dream will not likely incorporate the kicking into a narrative where one has chosen to kick. Instead, the dream might consist of one’s legs being manipulated by someone or some thing. This argument assumes the dream state knows the difference between passive sensory impingement and sensory feedback from intentional acts.

I don't understand how you can construe the post-phenomenological heritage a minor paradigm when it's quite hegemonic. It isn't hegemonic everywhere it touches, but it's a pernicious orthodoxy in social studies.

It's also a heritage that lets people do discourse analysis with no fieldwork while still getting papers published. People write 30 page papers whose principal argument is based on homophones {both meanings of site, cite...} and it gets through peer review because it apparently cleverly references the differential nature of the signifying chain.

You are incredibly well read, surely you've seen even worse excesses. — fdrake

I’m disconnected from these institutional structures. What you say may be true; I have no way of knowing. I have found that there tends to be a substantial distance between the work of the ‘oracles’ of post-phenomenological thought and the interpretation and application of it by legions lesser lights, to the point where it is often almost unrecognizable. You may wonder if I apply my own thinking to real world situations. The answer is yes , every day, as both an ethical and psychological guide. It maintains its validity for me through its effectiveness at making of sense of my world.

↪sime I would regard the presumption that other beings are like myself as apodictic. I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to believe otherwise. And real life is not a hypothetical exercise. — Wayfarer

For Husserl such recognition requires a constituting synthesis , an analogizing transfer of sense from what has already been constituted as my immediate sphere of own-ness ( my self-reflecting ego, and my sensing and sensing body) to that of another subject.

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection.

7k
Not all of this vitriol is aimed at you Joshs, I've just been reading this for over a decade and I'm sick of having it explained to me like I've never read post-phenomenological — fdrake

Sokal read post-phenomenological work, as did Jordan Peterson. Reading and understanding are not the same thing. Understanding a philosophical approach means being capable of summarizing its fundamental concepts in a way that is recognizable to those who support it. If you were to ask me to sum up the positions of your favorite philosophers, I am confident that I would be able to do it to your satisfaction. Before you can adequately critique a set of ideas, you have to accomplish that first step. You have mentioned Deleuze seemingly approvingly in other posts. Do you think he would consider my depiction of postmodern thinking ‘utterly stultifying and totalizing’? How would you summarize the key aspects of his work?

It's utterly stultifying. The particularising nature of the methodology, in practice, just reminds you to do mediation analysis, then tells you you can't isolate causal variables in the wild. Everyone knows this — fdrake

Does everyone know that there are alternative ways of thinking about motivation than what is implied in concepts like ‘causal variables’? Can you list any of these alternatives and the nature of their critique of causation as it is utilized by your favorite philosophies?

The proof is in the pudding, the stranglehold these soft realisms {really, discursive irrealisms} have on academic perspectives in social sciences makes it prohibitively difficult to do research requiring methodological innovation. It ends up totally isolating the disciplines that use this methodology and creating fiefdoms. People default back to broadly structuralist flavoured constructivism when they actually need to get shit done policy wise, because you can actually interpret operational variables and talk about causes {yes, unqualified causes, not mediated causes} with caveats in that framework. — fdrake

It seems to me that you’re advocating for conventional standards for ‘getting shit done’. Methodological innovation in applied fields will mean something different than in purely speculative philosophy and psychology. What areas do you work in such that ‘policy’ that ‘everyone can understand’ and ‘getting shit done’ are key goals for you, and do you think it is reasonable to expect cutting edge thinking in philosophy to be instantly translatable into practical ‘policy’ without an intermediate period of innovators who bridge the divide between the purely theoretical and the applied, and a wider culture which has had time to catch up with the new thinking?

Isnt it this gap between the widely accepted and the bleeding edge that causes the isolated fiefdoms in the social sciences? Wasn’t cognitive science an isolated fiefdom in the early 1960’s when behaviorism still had an ironclad grip on academic research in psychology? Is 4EA enactivism now beginning to transition from isolated fiefdom to a more widely shared method of ‘getting shit done’, a method which seems to be starting to absorb its largest rival, active inference) into its framework? And who is working at the leading edge of enactivism? Have you followed the work of Evan Thompson and Hanne De Jaegher? Stick around for another 20 years and you may be surprised to find that what appears to you as isolated , stultifying and no -operationalizable is developed into the new standard methodology for getting things done policy -wise.

But frankly I think your expressed desire for widely shared standards is a red herring. Your main gripe isn't about application but theory. If you were enthusiastic about the fundamental concepts of what you call discursive irrealisms and their ethical implications you would be among those calling for patience in operationalizing those approaches. Years after cognitive science developed firmly established research methods , B.F. Skinner continued to accuse the program of resting on illegitimate methods. It wasn't its applicability that prevented him from embracing cognitive psychology, it was his inability to grasp its concepts.