There can be no pure duplication or repetition of a past as identical to itself. — Joshs

Sure. But who ever claimed otherwise ?

The space of reasons is fundamentally historical, cumulative, and self-referential.

The far-out version is something like this:

The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate “species,” capable of being revealed by a general notion"; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existence” is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into “truth” or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a “higher” and “higher” truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.

It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. — Kojeve

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm

If we criticize the foundations of our conceptual system, we nevertheless employ this very system to do so.

Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them. Within the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse-to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose
deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed.

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

Is this a Lovecraft story? — Tate

You are chirping and squeaking about chirps and squeaks here. Talk about talk about talk.

Only as weird or unweird as life itself.

I think you have a cartoon of it in mind ? This cartoon is often invoked by mystics or mysterions.

Here's one take on the real thing.

Wilfred Sellars (1912–89), the distinguished philosopher, noted that a person may qualify as a behaviorist, loosely or attitudinally speaking, if they insist on confirming “hypotheses about psychological events in terms of behavioral criteria” (1963, p. 22). A behaviorist, so understood, is someone who demands behavioral evidence for any psychological hypothesis. For such a person, there is no knowable difference between two states of mind (beliefs, desires, etc.) unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behavior associated with each state. Consider the current belief of a person that it is raining. If there is no difference in his or her behavior between believing that it is raining and believing that it is not raining, there is no grounds for attributing the one belief rather than the other. The attribution is empirically empty or unconstrained.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/

Otherwise you just have a person in a vacuum who claims himself a man for no reason at all. — Hanover

I think we can expect edge cases that aren't convincing. So far I've only met trans people who were clearly embracing stereotypical traits of the of their new gender. The trans man was growing facial hair. The trans women, which I saw more often, were wearing dresses and carrying purses.

I have known one biological male who embraced a trans lifestyle (no surgery or hormones, just clothing and manner) only to eventually return a relatively masculine style. This particular person had a history of finding ways to be conspicuous, so even his friends were skeptical if also polite.

Our machines will always be able to approximate what we do , since they are but practical models influenced by our best explanations of how we think. — Joshs

AI has had several heartbreaking winters. The most recent 'thaw' was the success at deep learning at task like translation and image recognition. With mountains of data, fast hardware, and efficient algorithms, very narrow tasks now have famously brittle solutions.

Our self-knowledge seems more 'semantic' or linguistic that algorithmic and mathematical, even if we can of course model ourselves that way too.

If we now believe we are embodied, situated sense-makers, you can be sure we will soon produce machines that echo this. They may be wetware rather than silicon, closer to living things than to inanimate parts. — Joshs

The book I mentioned shows an awareness of the problem, but this does not mean we will soon have the solution. Can we circumvent or simulate millions of years of evolution?

When we say someone is stuck in the past they are not literally frozen in an archive, they are continuing to move forward every moment into fresh experience, but so ploddingly that it appears they are only regurgitating a ‘what was’. — Joshs

:up:

if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

dont mistake changing
headlines for changes

if you want freedom
dont mistake circles
for revolutions

think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why

if you want a revolution
learn to grow in spirals
always being able to return
to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

...


https://allpoetry.com/from-Tombstone-as-a-Lonely-Charm-(Part-3)

Everything one has ever experienced , learned and committed to memory interacts with every other bit of one’s past, and the totality of one’s past is changed in drawing on any aspect of it. — Joshs

:up:

This change is extremely subtle so we ignore it and talk instead about the weight of the past, as if past were a present thing that holds us down. — Joshs

No need, in my view, to read a complaint into what's presented as a neutral fact.

For Heidegger and Derrida , the past can’t hold us down if the past only ever exists as already affected by the present that it crosses with. — Joshs

I don't see why the past wouldn't still be constraining. Indeed, I see both thinkers as acutely aware of such constraints.

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace. We must then situate, as a simple moment of the discourse, the phenomenological reduction and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience. To the extent that the concept of experience in general — and of transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular — remains governed by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the reduction of the trace. The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental phenomenology belongs to metaphysics.
...
On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is difference. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order — a phonic or graphic text for example — or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing — in the colloquial sense — as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived “notation” would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise.
...
Without the difference between the sensory appearing [apparaissant] and its lived appearing [apparaître] (“mental imprint”), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorised us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present. — Derrida

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal. The privilege of the phone does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the "life" of "history" or of "being as self-relationship" ) . The system of "hearing ( understanding ) -oneself-speak" through the phonic substance-which presents itself as the nonexterior,
nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier-has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc.
...
Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them.

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

What turn out to be prejudices in retrospect, were the very 'mechanisms' that made their transformation into prejudices possible in the first place. We can only judge now by the (unstable) standards we 'are.' We agree, I think, that each such judgment changes who we are.

Is wisdom best though of as the skill of living a good life ? Is it like riding a bike ? You get better by falling off less and less. Maybe you can end up riding hands free.

You mention courage. Maybe knowledge makes us less afraid of death or relative poverty in the first place. Maybe knowledge clarifies what's essential, counsels us to do what we can and forgive and accept what cannot be prevented, even with care and skill.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis

For me, philosophy is a matter of ideas and insights, not warranted or justifiable claims and propositions. — Janus

We've discussed this some already, of course. To me philosophy is not simply constituted by (potentially) justifiable claims. It makes such claims about such claims. It discusses justification in the first place. This is human self-knowledge. We make explicit the nature of our behavior-coordinating 'chirps and squeaks.' This surely involves creativity. Where do shiny new hypotheses come from ? The strong philosopher is like a non-fiction poet, not only seeing human reality in a new way but making a case for this being better than a merely exciting madness and instead a deeper and truer rationality. I agree with you that the point is to put more life in to life, to live more vividly. It's not given that self-knowledge is the best path toward this goal, but I think it's a path.

Folks can babble endlessly about mind and matter and mostly nobody minds, because it doesn't matter. There's very little semantic constraint. — igjugarjuk

Perhaps norms of intelligibility, which can be identified perhaps with semantic constraints, are too readily mistaken to Sunday School platitudes. All that's intended by the phrase are the mostly unwritten rules that we disobey at the risk not only of being misunderstood by others but also of not knowing ourselves what we are talking about in the first place.

One man's fallacy is another man's phallus. — Janus

:up:

What I mean by ‘not even temporarily’ is that only the actual interchange , in that moment, establishes the actual norm as what it is. — Joshs

I agree that something like a finishing touch or final spin is added at each moment, but it strikes me as unrealistic to ignore the weight of the past here. To have skill at speaking even basic English is the work of many days.

But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, — Janus

How are such contexts to be decided if not rationally ? This is as simple as offering reasons for claim that a context is or is not subject to rational norms. Admittedly people sometimes just stop talking and wage war.

I don't think it does. — Michael

:up:

Somehow our heiroglyphs (metaphors) gather a meaning not originally there...a new abstract sense. The original image can fade completely.

'Life' emerges from the PIE root *leip- "to stick, adhere."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=life

Life sticks around, a pattern that endures by self-replication. It's as if life doesn't want to go away.

It is assumed, not without good reason, that computers are all syntax and no semantics and this fact has very disturbing implications - we pride ourselves at being able to do logic & math, these skills we've decided define us, but this is hard to reconcile with the fact that not another life-form but actually inanimate machines can beat as hands down in both math and logic. — Agent Smith

I just read Erik Larson's The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. He makes a strong case that computers are doomed to stupidity, unless a necessarily unpredictable conceptual revolution changes the scene entirely. He unveils what in retrospect looks like an absurdity at the heart of the 'theology' of The Singularity.

Our gift is not crunching through possibilities. Our gift is the initial abductive leap. We are also radically enworldled. It's very hard to give computers the near infinite background knowledge required for disambigulation. For instance, computers have struggled with 'the box is in the pen.' We humans can guess that 'pen' must refer to something one might keep pigs in rather than a writing utensil.

We must be fair though. With the internet and advances in hardware, enough data and compute became available for brute-force-ish statistical methods to succeed to a practical level at simple translation. This is certainly a triumph, but I'm not holding my breath for the HAL-9000's insightful review of A Spirit of Trust.

Semantics is under assault, it's losing the battle - a point in time may come when people will ignore it completely like how computers do today. — Agent Smith

Perhaps the reverse is true. Semantics is central, and computers may only reveal that by contrast.

Behaviorism is just ridiculous, but people adhere to it for various ridiculous reasons, none of which are very interesting. — Tate

You then go on to talk of chirps and screams that mean nothing ?

Behaviorism has its heart in the right place.

A trap in philosophy and is getting so tangled up in theory and language that all we have is an infinite regress of maps referring to other maps, and reality attaining the status of myth and legend. — Yohan

:up:

Good point. Another trap, though, is simply giving up on the labor of clarifying concepts. No one cares if the Target cashier has strong account of truth or justice.

You can look at people as if they're monkeys who communicate through chirps and screams. None of it really means anything. It's just sounds that are made according to a protocol. — Tate

I also like to zoom out and think in terms of chirps and screams. Perhaps the protocol is the meaning. This protocol swells and becomes self-referential, until it can talk about itself as chirps and screams governed by evolving norms (a protocol).

What is the territory? What exists beyond our maps? — Yohan

The territory might just be that our maps aren't ever exhaustive or entirely trustworthy. Let's say that the territory is all true statements. Let's say our maps are our beliefs. Unlike the analogy might suggest, the territory and map are both made of assertions. Our maps are our best guesses about the territory, beliefs we have reason to hope are true. This approach does conform to the analogy when we reflect that we never bother to create enough beliefs to match the presumably infinite size of the territory. There are many truths we'll never care about, like the number of electrons in a particular transistor at a particular instant.

What gives mental phenomena a special ability to exist without an object, but not physical phenomenon? — Yohan

The point, as I see it, is that Descartes is supposed to start with nothing. He takes some concept of the self for granted, missing or choosing to ignore how problematic that is. He also takes language for granted. Somehow this reasoning voice whose body may be a dream can safely be taken for granted. It sounds more like a Beckett play than a metaphysical foundation. The way to fix this, saving what it gets right about that voice, is to scrap the absurd solitude (because the self makes no sense without a non-self) and discuss our communal commitment to rationality above all things. Descartes set a weird but still legible example of striving toward presuppositionlessness, which is a flavor of autonomy.

it is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. (5:21)

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)


To think for oneself Kant describes as the maxim of unprejudiced thought; its opposite is passivity or heteronomy in thought, leading to prejudice and superstition.[25] To think in the place of everyone else is the maxim of enlarged or broad-minded thought. And always to think in accord with oneself is the maxim of consistent thought (5:294). Although the last maxim sounds more straightforward, Kant is careful to emphasize its difficulty: it “can only be achieved through the combination of the first two and after frequent observance of them has made them automatic” (5:295). Consistency does not just involve getting rid of obvious contradictions in our explicit beliefs. It also requires consistency with regard to all the implications of our beliefs—and these are often not apparent to us. To achieve this sort of law-likeness in thought depends both on the genuine attempt to judge for oneself and the determination to expose one’s judgments to the scrutiny of others. In other words, it involves regarding oneself, first, as the genuine author of one’s judgments, and second, as accountable to others. As we might also say, it represents a determination to take responsibility for one’s judgments.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/

We talk earlier in the thread about truth and time and then off and on about meaning as use. I found these passages illuminating. I'd link it if I had an electronic source. Instead I typed this up myself.

From Brandom's A Spirit of Trust, from pages 448 and 449
///////////////////////
Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.

...
The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of the same coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other.
/////////////////////

Brandom invokes T. S. Eliot in the same pages. Sounds like Heidegger...who sounds like Hegel ?

////////////////////////
...if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
...
...the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
...
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
...
...what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
...
In a peculiar sense he [the new poet] will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.
...
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
...
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.
...
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

Then it’s not about our use of the word “true”? — Luke

'True' has a use like the twelve on a traditional clockface or North on a compass. Or like the knight on a chessboard. A justified belief may be false. An unjustified belief may be true. We could, no matter how careful and clever, still be wrong.

What is the grammar of being right or wrong ? True or false ? To me it seems absolute. It is not reducible or exchangeable for warrant.

We can always be wrong about the world, because it doesn't make sense to say we could be wrong about being able to be wrong about it. The minimal specification of the world seems to be as that which we can be wrong about. The negation is incoherent. "It is wrong to claim we can we be wrong."

Critics get that impression based on quotes like these in which Heidegger denigrates the ‘one’ for being an ungenuine, obscuring, closed off mode of discourse. — Joshs

I guess I side with Dreyfus in thinking Heidegger is being self-righteously pejorative, as if he can't help himself, despite in other places insisting on a more 'amoral' perspective.

Of course we pretty much start as one, knowing only what everyone knows. We are waist-deep in the superstitions of our time, the prejudices that Gadamer discusses. Hermeneutics. Endless interpretation.

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.
...
nasmuch as understanding always occurs against the background of our prior involvement, so it always occurs on the basis of our history. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus always an ‘effect’ of history, while hermeneutical ‘consciousness’ is itself that mode of being that is conscious of its own historical ‘being effected’—it is ‘historically-effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Awareness of the historically effected character of understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’ (Horizont)—understanding and interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation—indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre

In case it's unclear, I stress the primacy of the social as a neutral fact...as a discovery that various thinkers have made which is contrary to a certain encrusted interpretedness that takes the isolated self and its peep show as that which is truly given.

I could and sometimes do stress the anxiety of influence, our horror of being just a copy, a just a second-rate someone else. Creative types experience this the most. I think plenty of less creative types are satisfied being a good electrician, a good dad, a good progressive, a good conservative, a good Baptist, etc. The self-creating artist needs to be a new category altogether. The strong poet or strong philosopher needs to weave himself or herself into the conversation so people can't afford not to talk about them, thereby winning a false immortality.

Accepting the fact that one can never entirely reflect oneself out of tradition does not mean that one cannot change and question one’s tradition. His point is that in as much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with. Second, all successful efforts to enliven a tradition require changing it so as to make it relevant for the current context. To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own. In other words, the importance of the terms, “prejudice” and “tradition,” for Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in the way they indicate the active nature of understanding that produces something new. Tradition hands down certain interests, prejudices, questions, and problems, that incite knowledge. Tradition is less a conserving force than a provocative one. Even a revolution, Gadamer notes, is a response to the tradition that nonetheless makes use of that very same tradition. Here we can also perceive the Hegelian influences on Gadamer to the extent that even a rejection of some elements of the tradition relies on the preservation of other elements, which are then understood (that is, taken up) in new ways. Gadamer desires not to affirm a blind and passive imitation of tradition, but to show how making tradition our own means a critical and creative application of it.

Similarly, true authority always requires an active acknowledgment by others. Without such an acknowledgment, one finds not true authority but passive submission resulting in tyranny. For, acknowledgment requires an active implementation of and reflection on the meaning of that authority for oneself—one based in knowledge not ignorance. Hence, understanding always has a built-in possibility for critique as we strive to make something our own and do not simply passively mimic it. Memorizing a text, for example, is no indication that one understands it; one has understood only when one can put the text into one’s own words, enlivening the text and allowing it to speak in new ways.

https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH3b

They could all be wrong, or metaphysical perspectives in general may be "not even wrong" in that they are inadequate to life itself. — Janus

:up:

To me this is why truth is absolute. Warranted or justified beliefs can be false. Unwarranted or unjustified beliefs can be true. Justification is normative, cultural. We can be rational and scientific and still get it wrong. Of course we think that being rational and scientific will increase our chances of getting it right.

he Peircean idea that the metaphysics arrived at by the "community of enquirers" at the end of enquiry would be the truth is absurd in my view. This seems to be a kind of scientistic hubris to me. — Janus

It's got that old-fashioned Hegelian optimism that's hard to embrace these days. What I like about it is that it recognizes that reality is intelligible or linguistic. Reality is the meaning of true statements. It's not some raw ineffable hidden stuff. This is like a oversimplified version of Hegel versus Kant. Are we in direct contact with reality or not ? I say yes, though the issue is largely aesthetic rather than practical.

I can hardly doubt there are plums in the fridge if I'm looking at them. — Janus

Sure, but this is a comment about belief. It's psychology, not grammar.

But what does it mean to find that it is true? — Luke

We never find that it is true, in my view. A conjecture becomes a belief.

In my view, truth is absolute.

It is only if the statement is used as an assertion that "p" and "p is true" have the same meaning. — Luke

Well, yes, of course.

However, if it is used as a conjecture instead, then it could be either true or false and we would need to investigate whether the truth conditions for "there are plums in the icebox" are met or not. — Luke

I agree. I've actually mentioned this use several times so far though.

I read the word 'not' into the above.

To assume P is to no longer be wary of using it as a premise.

If you are trusting the word of another then I would say you believe there are plums in the icebox, not that you know it. — Janus

I suggest that knowledge is not about certainty but rather about protocols. Do I know that $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational ? Yes. But I can't gaze on it. I just know how to justify that claim.

But let's say that I think I saw them with my own eyes. Perhaps my memory is incorrect. Perhaps I hallucinated. Metaphysical certainty is a dead end. In fact, it only makes sense with the help of an absolute concept of truth. Assume P.

If you trust another you trust both their word and their memory. — Janus

:up:
And their skill with English.

But 'know' is or is better conceived to be about license, I claim, which is typically (only) correlated with likelihood.

That is one of the problems I have with knowledge as JTB; how do we know when our beliefs are justified? What are the criteria that must be satisfied for a belief to be counted as justified? It cannot be a precise science, and it would seem there must be degrees. Why do we need to speak in terms of "knowing" at all rather than in terms of more or less certainty or doubt? — Janus

In my view, this is because our expertise varies and our role in a society matters. A scorekeeping vision of rationality features us all as tracking one another individually for reliability and coherence. Some people are so confused and unreliable that their certainty is no comfort to us. 'The worst are full of passionate intensity.' A psychiatric diagnosis, if legal, creates the truth. A justified belief is the best we can get, so our strongest word 'know' seems appropriate. Why waste it ?

As far as I can tell, there's nothing more primary or given...for us at least...than asking for reasons. Do you want me to believe or do something willingly ? Then you need to give me reasons, make a case. If you have doubts about logic, it's presumably because you have seen a (logical) case against its authority...but there's something fishy in this, no ?

I keep quoting this because it seems close to our essence as post-Enlightenment humans.

It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
...
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified) — Kant

Pretty nice lecture about the 'pomo' challenge to Enlightenment reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiM7IwZWW5g

This might also be relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychologism/

Yes, I would lie to protect the innocent. Deception is part of war, and I would not feel bad at all about waging war on the Gestapo. I don't resent pacifists, but I can't join them either.

Belief is one thing, actuality another; which means our beliefs can be wrong. — Janus

:up:

I think the minimal concept of truth is involved in tracking that possibility of error.

My point is only that our being wrong is irrelevant if there is no possibility of seeing that we were wrong. — Janus

:up:

I agree. But I don't think certain pragmatist versions of truth were successful. Warranted does not equal true. What's-most-practical does not equal true. To me this is not so much a metaphysical fact as a fact about grammar. I think we use 'true' in an 'absolute' fashion.

To take P as true is to reason from P as a premise with complete confidence. To take P as true is to forget or rather ignore all doubts about P and explore a possible world. This is one use of 'true' that occurs to me. It could be simplified, as a mathematician might do it, as Assume P.

If you know there are plums in the icebox then you've seen them, and in telling me about them when the icebox is closed, you are remembering them being there, which amounts to imagining them. — Janus

I could be trusting the word of another. Knowledge is about warranted assertion. If I turn out to be wrong, I can make a case for my right to have made the incorrect claim. For instance, I trusted a trustworthy person.

The path you seem to be going down is too subjective in my view. You are going 'first-person' and invoking uncheckable private experience. I do think it's reasonable to talk about the creation of beliefs in terms of sense-organs and objects that affect them. But that's third-person.

Are we just not understanding one another ? I admit that I can't grasp what you are saying. I'm trying to experiment with wording to achieve consensus.

'It is true that plums are in the ice box' does basically what 'there are plums in the icebox' does. To call something true is roughly just to endorse it (as if repeating it.) The sting of word 'there are plums in the icebox' means something about the world, something about what's in an icebox. The world just is such truths, already 'mediated' or 'linguistic.' This approach rejects some vague theory of a 'naked' or 'raw' world (things in themselves) as basically empty and useless.

If one assumes P is true, one licenses the inclusion of P as a premise in any inference. This is where 'true' has a useful expressive role that helps us reason about reasoning. I think my position is prosentential.

According to the prosentential theory of truth, whenever a referring expression (for example, a definite description or a quote-name) is joined to the truth predicate, the resulting statement contains no more content than the sentence(s) picked out by the referring expression. To assert that a sentence is true is simply to assert or reassert that sentence; it is not to ascribe the property of truth to that sentence. The prosentential theory is one kind of deflationary theory of truth.

We care about beliefs because they are the things we take to be true. — Banno

:up:

This ‘world for us', from one to the other to the other, is constituted within MY(the primal me) subjective process as MY privileged apperception of ‘from one to the other to the other'. — Joshs

Right. But I find this approach to Cartesian. Although we have our own sense organs and nervous systems (which makes this view tempting), I think the 'I' is linguistic and normative and therefore part of the shared tribal software. I guess I side with Heidegger against Husserl here. The 'one' has priority. We are being-in-the-world, being-in-language, being-with-others. We are not I-things that only contingently have a world or a language. I speculate that the 'hard problem' is inspired by wondering at a tautology. It is raining or it is not raining. It's not how the world is but that it is.