Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute released a new report on so-called “assassination culture” online, with Anti-Trumpism figuring prominently.

I’ll posted a brief quote below to give a sense of the undercurrent of political violence we’re dealing with — NOS4A2

When I read this post, my first thought was not, ‘Gee, what kind of violently disturbed person would seriously consider assassinating a political leader?’ It was ‘ What context of background assumptions would motivate someone to write this post?’ Let me explain. Let’s say you were living in England in 1943 and a Cambridge University research institute released a report on assassination culture, with anti-Nazism figuring prominently. Would you be disturbed enough about such behavior to write a post (we’ll pretend the internet existed then) about it, or would you empathize with such sentiment even if you were personally opposed to murder in general?

My question to you, then, is what kind of assessment would you have to make of a particular political leader in order to justify your empathetic response to the desire of others to assassinate them?

I’ll make this more direct. I was born and raised in the U.S., and if you live in my country, I want to you to justify your motivation to me. I’ll share mine first. I don’t condone killing anybody, but here is my justification for being sympathetic to those who harbor the desire to see Trump wiped out.

In my lifetime, Ive seen presidents make decisions that many consider unconstitutional, or act in ways that constituted executive overrreach. I’ve seen presidents claim to represent the country as a whole, but pursue sharply partisan goals that alienated half the population. I’m a liberal democrat, but I never doubted that Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and even Nixon, wielded their power not only for the sake of goals that went well beyond their own narrow self interest, but in principle were against the idea that having power meant eliminating all opposition to their will.

I have come to the realization that Donald Trump has a fundamentally different view of power than these presidents, and all previous presidents with the possible exception of Andrew Johnson. Trump’s view of power is that only one man, himself, can be allowed to control the country. All sources of potentially dissenting opinion are to be viewed as disloyalty and must be squelched. This includes all independent institutions, such as the press, academia, government agencies, law firms and judges, and corporate ceo’s. He will initially be viewed by his base of supporters as acting on their behalf and under their control, but eventually their voices will be squelched as well.

The fact that this is his view of power doesnt mean that he can succeed in decimating the checks and balances of democracy. He needs the help and acquiescence of many others to accomplish this. But in order to make sure this does not happen, others must realize that Trump, if not challenged, will act to remake America in the direction of Netanyahu’s Israel, Orban’s Hungary, and Putin’s Russia.

Having that realization doesnt mean encouraging ‘assassination culture’, but it requires taking seriously the unprecedented danger to American democracy that Trump represents. My impression is that your unsympathetic post about assassination culture reflects the fact that you are not convinced that Trump is an authoritarian personality.

Beyond that, the problem is party loyalty. Only a handful of Republicans could bring themselves to vote against their party's candidate: a morally bankrupt criminal Republican is more acceptable than any Democrat — Relativist

That’s not party loyalty. The Republican party which existed for decades was destroyed by the MAGA populist movement, and many of its brightest lights either fled to the Democratic party or became independents. It is precisely because loyalty to the old Rebublican party dissolved that a former Democrat like Trump could become the new embodiment of the party. To the extent that a percentage of his voters were not MAGA populists, this was because they thought that when it came to running the economy he would govern like a free market, small government pro-business Republican, which is precisely what he did in his first term.

As Paul Krugman writes:

Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.

And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.

They're not paying the tariffs, so is he just fucking stupid in all this believing the money will flow into the nation and not just out of the pockets of its businesses and citizens? — Christoffer

Big time stupid ( or as Paul Krugman calls him, ‘a feces-flinging chaos monkey’). And big-time dangerous. How did it come to this? Lots of people left behind by cultural and economic changes wanting to believe in a fantasy of a return to the days of abundant high-paying low skill industrial jobs. And a slimy used-car salesman who believes in that same fantasy uses his best skill, selling snake oil, to become the prophet of the deluded. But his own delusions of grandeur and need for absolute power will ultimately betray his own followers (and the billionaire ‘tech-bro’ supplicants who hoped to get even richer by ass-kissing the King, but are now seeing substantial chunks of their fortunes wiped away in the carnage he is unleashing).

If so, then why don't people do anything about it?
— Christoffer

How, though? He’s been empowered by the popular vote to do what he’s doing. — Wayfarer

This is how:

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/15-ways-you-can-fight-for-democracy

↪Punshhh ↪Joshs

The tariffs and the return of "industrial policy" that differed radically from the neo-liberal orthodoxy that had dominated the GOP for decades were discussed throughout the campaign. You can find all sorts of articles on this from before Trump was elected, and he had rhetoric focused on the trade deficit in his speeches on a regular basis.

It's certainly true that when voters pick a candidate they are rarely selecting on a single issue, but it's hardly a move that has come out of left field. Both polling and my person experience living in an area that went hard for Trump suggest that the most common attitude for supporters is that they are willing to "try it out" and suffer some "short term pain for long term gain." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Based on his first term , voters learned to take what Trump said ‘seriously but not literally’. Whatever he had been babbling about for 40 years concerning tariffs and reproducing 1950’s industrial America, what he actually did in term 1 was to slap mild tariffs on China, and renegotiate Nafta by changing a few apostrophes and commas here and there. More importantly, he lowered taxes for wealthy corporations, tried to get rid of Obamacare and made other efforts to please the pro-business small government libertarians. These corporate types, who could care less about making things in America again and just wanted to free themselves from high taxes and Biden’s regulatory crusade (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc) had every reason to believe Trump’s second term would be a repeat of the first. I certainly thought it would be, and like many was stunned to find out that he actually took his half-assed 19th century mercantilism seriously and was willing got to go the distance with it (at least so far). His current all-out tariff war may not have been a surprise to North Carolina MAGA supporters, but it sure as hell was to many wealthy businesspeople who voted for him, and are now regretting it mightily.

Second, it's perhaps dysfunctional that major policy choices are made wholly by presidents in this way. That's an outgrowth of decades of dysfunction in Congress, which can no longer govern — Count Timothy von Icarus

The reason he is getting no opposition from Congress is because they are terrified that if they do oppose him Trump will direct the wrath of his MAGA army on them. Unlike the first time around, MAGA and Trump together have made sure that Trump is surrounded by only yes-sayers in his second administration and in Congress. There is no one left to act as a check on his power, or to question his decisions.

This leads to a profoundly important issue concerning you, me and everyone else who cares about the future of this country as a democracy. You’re trying to make an equivalence between Trump’s actions and the seemingly dictatorial overreach of Democratic leaders like Binden. If this were a ‘normal’ president, I would agree with you. Such overreach can be found throughout the history of American government. One of the most egregious examples of this was the period surrounding World War I, where under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson severe restrictions of free speech were allowed to occur, with long imprisonment for those, such as Eugene Debbs and Emmas Goldman, who opposed the war. Even the Supreme Court sanctioned such restrictions.

But Timothy, it is absolutely vital to make a distinction between zealous executive overreach in the name of policies and principles that have wide popular support (even if that support is purely partisan) , and something quite different. In the first case, the overreach is motivated by, and continues to feed itself, through the aims of a community consensus. It is not just that the decision-making leader sees themselves as speaking on behalf of a ‘we’, they have no interest in usurping the authority of this ‘we’ so as to concentrate itself in an ‘I’ that tolerates no challenges to its sovereignty. Such a notion would be repugnant to most U.S. presidents, with the exception of Andrew Johnson , and I believe , Trump. Unlike some, I am not saying that Trump’s desire for supreme power is motivated by purely selfish interests, such as greed or self-aggrandizement.

I think he truly believes he has a way to ‘make America great again’. But I think this is also the case with Victor Orban, Erdoğan, Putin and Maduro. What distinguishes the authoritarian from the kind of executive overreach you cite is a personality that needs to be the sole decision maker, and considers all dissent as disloyalty. They strive to replace a law-based system of government with that of edicts from one man at the top. If Trump were to be given absolutely free reign, he would use intimation and threats to weaken and then destroy the ability of law firms and judges to move against him, would cement a grip on academic institutions, media and other organizations which attempt to maintain independence from his control. To be successful at such attempts he cannot do all this by himself. He need the acquiescence of these institutions, their willingness to preemptively give up their independence to avoid his punishments. And it is not as though he is alone in his preference for despotism. An admiration for figures like Orban and an outright rejection of Enlightenment values runs through MAGA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/enlightenment-trump-far-right-europe/682086/

Could I be wrong about Trump? Sure. In fact I was reluctant to ascribe these extreme dispositions to him for a long time, perhaps partly out of denial. I just couldn’t allow myself to imagine that a majority of Americans would elect as president someone who sees power as absolute one-man rule. But the last three months have convinced me. I suspect that you may never be convinced. I would like to say that it is enough for me that people like you oppose him for whatever reasons you come up with.
But if I am right about Trump, simply passively sitting back and waiting till the next election may not protect our democracy. I have no doubt now that, left to his own devices , this country would end up looking as repressive as Hungary. But this country has a more robust civic culture than Hungary, and as long as we all act to resist his attempts at intimidation and support independent institutions, we can avoid that fate.

Seems like you wouldn’t make these cuts if you were interested in revitalizing American industries. — praxis

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao banished intellectuals to the countryside and decimated academic institutions, so that there would be no smart people around to challenge his power. Parallels here?

"Hey tariffs will make things cost more but at least there's less government spending on social security" isn't the win you think it is — Mr Bee

Neither are cuts spending on research and innovation in medicine, AI, energy and all the other things that China is pulling farther and farther ahead of us on.

Corporations will go wherever they can get short-term profits, which is why they will also flock back to Russia without state intervention to stop them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My point is that if I own a corporation in the U.S. and I am interested in expanding, I would consider my best strategy to be to sit on my hands and wait this thing out rather commit my company to a move with the assumption that I can plan on the basis of whatever Trump declares to be the tariff situation this month, this week or this afternoon.

From Thomas Sowell:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things. And if they don’t work, then you admit it, you abandon that, you go on to something else and you try that until you come across something that does work.
That’s not a bad approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who’s making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you’re going to do next. And that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do.
And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So if this is just a set of short-run ploys for various objectives limited in time, fine, maybe.
But if this is going to be the policy for four long years, that you’re going to try this, you’re going to try that, you’re going to try something else, a lot of people are going to wait.

Meanwhile, Trump won the most votes in a free and fair election, and his party won both chambers of Congress. People are getting what they voted for. It's not a failure of "too little democracy" (i.e. "too much authority") when a proven incompetent populist demagogue wins power, quite the opposite — Count Timothy von Icarus

I never claimed that he didn’t win fair and square. Hitler won in a fair and free election, too. That doesn’t mean he didn’t govern by edict rather than rule of law. As to people getting what they voted for, a sizable chunk of those who voted for Trump thought they were getting someone quite different than what he has turned out to be. The ones who put him over the top did not vote for 19th century mercantilist protectionism.

There may be a temporary increase in demand, but in the longer term American companies will not be able to compete with foreign companies who re-assemble cheaper supply chains excluding the U.S.

It's probably more likely to be the opposite, provided the tarrifs remain in place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Explain to me how we build cheaper cars when we have to make all the components here, while other countries will forge their own trade deals to integrate production among multiple countries for the lowest prices. Of course the heartland would be better off if it werent for offshoring and automation. There would still be millions of workers in assembly lines with high wages under labor protections. But even if all the companies that left came back, they would offer many fewer jobs than decades ago.

I'm not predicting rosy days, I'm just saying an emotionally neutral viewpoint is not predicting disaster. Maybe a recession. — frank

Voters need to feel like it’s a disaster for their quality of life. That’s the only way to be rid of Trump.

Black swan events happen often enough that every company takes risks to expand. But if anything, a lot of American companies should look for an increase in demand resulting from the tariffs. — frank

Natural disasters and cyclical recessions are one thing, but businesses don’t expect Black Swan events to be caused by the policy whims of a dictator, which is why there is little urge to invest in authoritarian regimes where policy changes on a dime.
There may be a temporary increase in demand, but in the longer term American companies will not be able to compete with foreign companies who re-assemble cheaper supply chains excluding the U.S.

That said, one expert opinion is that recession probably wouldn't be caused directly by the tariffs, but rather by the fear inspired by them — frank

It’s not just fear. It’s impossible for a company to invest in expansion if there isn’t predictability over a 5 year horizon, which is how long it takes to build new plants, etc. Trump continually changes his mind about tariffs, wanting to subject every country to the prospect of renegotiation based on his whim. As a result, businesses are suffering from paralysis right now, which leads to a freeze on hiring and other effects which can lead to recession.

Some believe the U.S. is strategically positioned to leverage tariff-induced chaos in order to push for a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" that could simultaneously weaken the dollar and preserve its status as the world's reserve currency, ultimately leading to re-industrialization — praxis

The article you linked to is called ‘sane-washing’, trying to to turn an utterly incoherent attempt to rationalize Trump’s
logic-free actions into a coherent plan.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-tariffs-threats-incentive-for-canada-mexico-and-everyone-else-to-break-free-by-j-bradford-delong-2025-03

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/25/trump-trade-wars-mar-a-lago-accord/

↪Joshs
Have you spoken with an expert in economics or geopolitics about these predictions? There are a number of educated opinions on Reddit, although the moderator on AskEconomics just locked the thread because it was getting too rambunctious. — frank

I have been obsessively reading everything I can get my hands on by economists, both liberal and conservative. None of them are foolish enough to ‘declare’ a recession before it begins, but there is a consensus that what is happening now is a profound shock to the global economy the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 95 years.

Yesterday was the beginning of the end for Trump. His displaying of that ridiculous chatgpt-generated chart in the Rose Garden was the moment he jumped the shark. This what’s going to happen next:

The U.S. will fall into a deep and prolonged recession which will put many out of work, and a steep bear market will wipe out retirement portfolios. Heightened inflation will add insult to injury. Those Trump voters who thought they were getting a free-market champion will be out for blood. Congressional Republicans will remove their heads from Trump’s butt as they realize they have more to fear from their constituents than from displeasing Great Leader. By the time we get to the mid-terms, the country will look like something from a Cormac McCarthy dystopian wasteland, which will return some power to the Democrats. In 4 years, the MAGA brand will a toxic , shrunken vestige of what it once was.

If so, then why don't people do anything about it? Why is everyone just accepting that all of this is going on — Christoffer

If you live in the U.S. , why don’t you do something? You can start by joining the nationwide protests planned for tomorrow.
https://handsoff2025.com/

↪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?