• Is indirect realism self undermining?


    Math is a type of brain activity. Brain activity is real. Therefore, math is real.
    Apples don't have math-properties.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I'm a scientific realist, not a scientific instrumentalist, if that's what you're getting at.Michael

    I get that. But what can the scientific realist mean ? Indirect realism looks like dualism, so why does math get to poke through the veil of images ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I'm not saying that.Michael

    You think color is just in our head, right ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I think you're being pedantic here. If string theory is correct then the entities that the theory describes – superstring – are the constituents of all material things.Michael

    Semantic not pedantic. The scientific image is just that, an image, a model. But you seem to say that the map is the territory. That atoms are really there but color is not --- as if our nervous systems weren't giving you the idea of atoms indirectly like everything else (according to your theory.)
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I'm just saying that colours, like pain, are a type of brain activity, not a property of apples.Michael

    I understand why you would say that. I'm just saying that it's artificial to call color unreal and yet keep shape or mass. Kant went the whole hog and said the Real was utterly unknowable, because he saw (in my opinion) that there was no good reason to keep just half the apple.

    If all we ever have is Image, then all of our math scribbles and concepts are just image too. To say that your hand is 'really' strings is not far from painting the apple red.

    So there's Kant : the Real is hidden. Everything else is Image.
    You : the scientific image is Real, but Experience is Image.
    Me : We see and talk about the Real, which doesn't mean we can't be mistaken.

    My gripe is that string theory is part of Experience, hence just Image, so it's weird to say it's also the Real, because that's like half direct realism. Somehow our mathbrain is directly in touch with the Real but not our eyes...
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?


    I say 'in consciousness' as if from your point of view.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    If superstring theory is correct.Michael

    But string theory is just math. It's something in consciousness like redness.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I think the entities within the scientific image exist at the same time and in the same world as roses and promises and concepts.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?

    Why isn't math also just brain activity ? 'Appearance,' image, etc.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I'm not saying that math is more real than colour. I'm saying that colour is a type of sensation, i.e. brain activity, not a property of apples.Michael

    You said your hand is really something like strings from string theory. Is that correct ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?

    I read the Russell quote. I think it's a confused dualism.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Bundles of superstring according to one theory.Michael

    But that's just an image in your head, right ? Why would math be more real than color ?
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    Thanks to story telling and writing, yesfrank

    :up:

    Exactly. [ As you seemed to notice, I didn't mean anything supernatural -- just culture..] And now we have crazy electronic devices for recording everything. The historians of the future are going to be swamped.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I don't mean that.Michael

    OK. So...what is a fire then really ? What is your hand really ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?

    My gripe is that indirect realism smuggles in naive realism to set itself up with a world in which social organisms have sense organs and nervous systems. Taking all of that for granted, then intermediate images or some kind of dualism is postulated.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I feel pain when I put my hand in the fire.Michael

    You must mean (?) that you feel pain when an internal image shows you 'your' hand in a fire.

    Why would you trust such a image ? And how would your knowledge ever be more than a correlation between various private personal sensory experiences ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    And as far as I can tell you believe two things exist: science, and experience. Science is what is real, and experience is what is indirectly connected to science.Moliere

    This is how it seems to me as well.

    I also don't think it works. Ideas of scientific entities are experienced. That's why Kant was shrewd enough to say nothing at all about the Reality behind appearance. While I don't embrace Kant's approach, he deserves credit for seeing that, for dualism, Newton's science must be part of our representation of the Real and not the Real itself.

    I suggest that the ordinary world we talk about is Real --- and that real roses are red and made of atoms at the same time.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Wittgenstein's "The world is all that is the case" is poetry.RussellA

    Philosophy is often a serious kind of poetry. Yes, we like inferences. But metaphors do much of the lifting.

    Poetry is not always fiction. It makes explicit various aspects of the world. It helps us see with better eyes.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    The conditions of the possibility of there being an argument. In this case, the perspective of the self that is actually offering the idea and is engaged in a dialogic process with an "other self" or other.Pantagruel

    :up:

    Very close to my view. The rule is : I can disagree with you but not with me.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    That still affirms Geist as part of our world, it just recalls that it's a partial truth like everything else.frank

    :up:

    I agree: Geist is just natural stuff that moves in a special way. We make noises and marks and skyscrapers and religions.

    Think about what we mean by "voluntary" or "volition." How do you know a creature is moving by its own volition? Because it doesn't sway in the breeze. Because it gets up and moves to the bird feeder in a way a rock never will. In other words, volition is fundamentally identified by the way that it's counter to nature.frank

    I like that approach, because volition is not hidden away in some secret compartment. It's right there in the swimming upstream to breed, the climbing of a tree for safety.

    We can attribute volition to all of life in your terms, I think. But only humans bind time. That's our pseudodivinity: we've got a species-soul that's thousands of years old.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness

    All of that seems reasonable. At one time, the law of gravity just summed up how things were attracted to things. Then it got assimilated by the more comprehensive theory of GR. As we've discussed before, it's not clear why gravity has to keep working. We can't help trusting it, so it's a theoretical point.

    Frankly even vitalism, depending on the details, could work as guiding hypothesis. Popper's defense of metaphysics comes into play here.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?

    The underspecification of the world is also its endless openedness for philosophy. We can debate whether it is a flat black square, is really made of cheese, any kind of weird stuff. And who can predict what future philosophers might dream up ? But philosophy as a truthgiving intention specifies some world, which is always the world, 'target' of our claims. If you deny it, you tell me that such is not the case, which only supports my point.

    The [ minimally specified ] world [ World ] is what we are alwaysalready talking about.

    For more on this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13308/our-minimal-epistemic-commitment-fixing-descartes-cogito/p1

    I claim that the minimum rational intelligible epistemic situation is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. I intentionally leave open the details of persons and world and logic here, for these are very much part of what's discussed within this minimum assumption.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Users of the same language agree to a basic meaning of a word, even though they can have very different concepts as to its particular meaning. For example, an Australian living in Alice Springs will have a very different concept of the word "grass" to an American living in Spokane.RussellA

    Forget this superstition of the meanings of individual words. Also no one agrees. Language is received like the law and endlessly renegotiated.

    Look at which inferences are treated as valid. Look at which claims are treated as if no argument is necessary to use them as premises (as 'obviously' true.) There's so much baggage and assumption about this stuff that it's hard to just watch & see what you are doing already.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Not primordial, as language only began about 50,000 to 150,000 years ago.RussellA

    For us now primordial. The social normative worldly linguistic situation is as deep and central as it gets.

    My approach to "the world is all that is the case" is similar to that of Markus Gabriel:RussellA

    In my view, those totality of words do not refer to anything which is capable of having the property of existence"RussellA

    I think Gabriel is missing the point. The world as that which is the case is methodically minimally specified.

    If Gabriel says that that kind of metaphysics is vague, he is describing what is the case, talking about the world --- as whatever is the case.

    Finally, this property of existence he mentions seems like a less effective attempt to do the same job, given its ontological baggage (real versus unreal, etc.)

    To get my point is to see what we are doing right now, to see what underspecified world we are always already talking about, to see us as discursive selves arguing what is the case.
  • Hegel out of context
    There’s always a gem in Hegel such as the one aboveinvicta

    The emotion in his work is great. The translators tend to do a great job. Hegel could write one hell of a speech too.

    https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htm

    But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth.Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it. Whatever is true, great, and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of Ideas.[15]

    .... The courage of truth and faith in the power of the spirit is the primary condition of philosophical study;[16] man should honor himself and consider himself worthy of the highest [things]. He cannot overestimate the greatness and power of the spirit; the closed essence of the universe contains no force which could withstand the courage of cognition; it must open up before it, and afford it the spectacle and enjoyment of its riches and its depths.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    But language is a symbolic system, where words symbolise what they represent.RussellA

    I don't think so. Not essentially. I've provided links to alternatives.

    Therefore, the meaning of "world" must be relative to the users of the language.RussellA

    The language, its users, and the world are primordially unified. [ Heidegger writes about this. ]

    I claim that trying to shatter this unity leads to confusion.

    Our situation is being-in-the-world-in-language-with-others as one phenomenon with different aspects (we can focus on this or that.)

    In fact as many meanings as there are people using that language.RussellA

    Claims are semantic atoms, not concepts. That I claim is a better way.

    There is the epistemological problem of how we know the nature of reality, given the problem that between our mind and the external world are our senses, and the senses alter any information arriving at our minds from the external world. But we can only discuss these things using language.RussellA

    That's just a fake problem made up by long dead philosophers who didn't notice the structure of their own game (philosophy.)

    The world is all that is the case. There is genius in that simple statement.
    We may be worlds apart in our world views, but then again, the world is a strange and mysterious place.RussellA

    :up:
  • A Normative Crowbar
    Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69).plaque flag

    This to me is the 'open region.' Thrown into and embedded within spirit we did not choose, we also thereby have the means not only for a serious twist of that spirit but also for play.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness


    Seems interesting. He does seem to exaggerate the resistance to teleology in biology, which looks a bit crankish, though clearly he's a smart guy.
    The curious thing, however, is that despite this emphatic recognition of the purposive organism, we find in textbooks of biology virtually no mention of purpose — or of the meaning and value presupposed by purpose. To refer to such “unbiological” realities is, it seems, to stumble into the unsavory company of mystics. Yet we might want to ask: if purposiveness in the life of organisms is as obvious as many in addition to Monod and Dobzhansky have admitted, why should it be impermissible for working biologists to reckon seriously with what everyone seems to know?

    It’s a question we will ask. Be aware, however, that in struggling to answer it we may stir up unsettling doubts about the central biological concepts of evolution and natural selection.
    — Talbott


    The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role.
    ...
    Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
  • Definitions have no place in philosophy
    However, he cannot “define” it for you, even for himself. It takes the whole book for him to bring you along with him, to show us the differences to the ordinary use through examplesAntony Nickles

    I propose that he creates a miniature form of life in his works. One hangs out in his world and gradually groks when and how to use the phrases (as tools) in his workshop, just by watching, or even better trying to philosophize originally in a same-ish style by paraphrasing.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning,Stephen L. Talbott

    FWIW, Brandom frames the situation as concepts themselves getting their meanings from how claims involving them are linked inferentially. The claim is semantically fundamental. [Can we ever say what it is to say what it is ? ] In either case, the semantic-inferential situation of the philosopher is made explicit as that which of course [in retrospect] is primary. Discursive selves negotiate in terms of soft principles softly established in previous negotiations.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation.Pierre-Normand

    :up:
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation.Wayfarer

    :up:

    I agree that many simply ignore their own situation as philosopher or scientist. They ignore their what they themselves are made of ---or rather what they perform.

    Found this:
    https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229403462.pdf
    Geist refers to the normative in general. As such reference to the spiritual is a reference to the normative; correspondingly talk of normativity is talk of Hegelian Spirit... In this view, Geist arises with intersubjectivity; Geist has intersubjectivity as its ground and could not exist outside of it.
    ...
    If we understand Geist correctly then we will understand that all human institutions, written and unwritten, all laws, all customs, all duties, all systems of meaning, all language is normative. Now if Geist is just a way of referring to the normative then it seems as if, to borrow from Pippin, we have left nature behind and are entering a world of pure thought. For on Pippin’s reading the Hegelian trajectory is away from nature and towards Spirit or Geist.... It seems to suggest that Spirit ‘transcends’ nature and such transcendence of nature seems to imply a break with nature. Of course, as is well known, Hegel sees Geist as a sublation or Aufhebung of nature. But the term sublation implies that what is sublated, nature, is preserved within that which sublates it, Geist. The term sublation never implies a breach. Thus Geist develops out of nature, whilst preserving nature, and does not leave it behind. Geist is a modification of nature.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures


    I found a great source that seems relevant here. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229403462.pdf
    *********************
    Further the process of acculturation that we undergo is a process of orientating us to the norms of our life-world; acculturation is a process of internalising values and meanings. This is something that happens socially. It requires others; it is an intersubjective process. The normative life of our community helps to form us, but we are not so embedded in that form of life that we cannot register tensions and inconsistencies within its norms. In so far as we can do this we can help in the process of reforming our
    norms. In so far as we see certain norms as good, or correct, we acquiesce in their goodness or correctness, they pass over into customary life. Yet, this does not mean that we cannot assess certain norms negatively; as pejorative, or ineffectual and so on. In so far as we can negatively assess our own normative life we can challenge the norms by which we live; but whether our challenge to such norms is effective, whether it is sufficient to bring about normative revision, is not up to us but is rather up to the community in which we live.

    If our challenge is effective then we help to reorientate our community on that value. If our challenge is not successful than the norm holds firm and we are seen as perverse for challenging it. We are both the authors of and authored by our norms. An influential feature of Hegelian thought is that it breaks down
    the distinction between norm and nature. They become two sides of one coin. The normative is second nature; arising out of, but not reducible to, first nature. Culture is natural; it has the natural as its precondition. But the normative transcends the natural because the normative cannot be reduced to a description of states of affairs. Thus, as Pinkard points out, the mature Hegel tells us, in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 'For us, spirit has nature as its presupposition, and it is thereby its truth and its antecedent.'

    But, if there is continuity between the natural and the normative, then this implies that for Hegel the
    distinction between the normative and the natural is a normative one, a product of human culture, and being a normative distinction, it is one that we are not compelled to make, one that we can revise.
    ...
    If we understand Geist correctly then we will understand that all human institutions, written and unwritten, all laws, all customs, all duties, all systems of meaning, all language is normative. Now if
    Geist is just a way of referring to the normative then it seems as if, to borrow from Pippin, we have left nature behind and are entering a world of pure thought. For on Pippin’s reading the
    Hegelian trajectory is away from nature and towards Spirit or Geist. But the very locution 'away from "nature" and "towards" "Spirit," Geist…' seems to indicate that there is something nonnatural about Spirit. It seems to suggest that Spirit ‘transcends’ nature and such transcendence of nature seems to imply a break with nature. Of course, as is well known, Hegel sees Geist as a sublation or Aufhebung of nature. But the term sublation implies that what is sublated, nature, is preserved within that which
    sublates it, Geist. The term sublation never implies a breach. Thus Geist develops out of nature, whilst preserving nature, and does not leave it behind. Geist is a modification of nature.
  • A Normative Crowbar
    the priority of sociality

    Fixing belief is perhaps like fixing a policy for action and response, for both individuals and communities. Rationality is a quest to do this with power and confidence through teamwork. Sociality is primary. I have to give a fuck about other people. I have to admit that I give a fuck about other people. But, as Peirce notes, the reasonable cannot bother too much with the unreasonable (who are, in their unreasonableness, antisocial). The danger is mistaking a reasonable innovator for an antisocial dogmatist. Peirce's interest in continuity might be relevant here. If a person is too far out, too 'ahead' or 'outside' of their own time, they are not yet intelligible. This seems to have happened to Peirce himself. If we largely create our own logic ,admittedly always within the constraints of its history, then it's only time that can tell us whether an eccentric was 'ahead' or merely forever 'outside' of their time. If they catch on, we can describe this catching-on as intellectual progress, an update of the community's 'softwhere.' History is, to some degree, a random walk (Tychism).
  • A Normative Crowbar
    Excellent passage from C S Peirce:


    https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/logic/ms179.htm
    The only justification for reasoning is that it settles doubts, and when doubt finally ceases, no matter how, the end of reasoning is attained. Let a man resolve never to change his existing opinions, let him obstinately shut his eyes to all evidence against them, and if his will is strong enough so that he actually does not waver in his faith, he has no motive for reasoning at all, and it would be absurd for him to do it. That is method number one for attaining the end of reasoning, and it is a method which has been much practised and highly approved, especially by people whose experience has been that reasoning only leads from doubt to doubt. There is no valid objection to this procedure if it only succeeds. It is true it is utterly irrational; that is to say, it is foolish from the point of view of those who do reason. But to assume that point of view is to beg the question. In fact, however, it does not succeed; and the first cause of failure is that different people have different opinions and the man who sees this begins to feel uncertain.

    It is therefore desirable to produce unanimity of opinion and this gives rise to method number two, which is to force people by fire and sword to adopt one belief, to massacre all who dissent from it and burn their books. This way of bringing about a catholic consent has proved highly successful for centuries in some cases, but it is not practicable in our days.

    A modification of this is method number three, to cultivate a public opinion by oratory and preaching and by fostering certain sentiments and passions in the minds of the young. This method is the most generally successful in our day.

    The fourth and last method is that of reasoning. It will never be adopted when any of the others will succeed and it has itself been successful only in certain spheres of thought. Nevertheless those who reason think that it must be successful in the end, and so it would if all men could reason. There is this to be said in favor of it. He who reasons will regard the opinions of the majority of mankind with contemptuous indifference; they will not in the least disturb his opinions. He will also neglect the beliefs of those who are not informed, and among the small residue he may fairly expect some unanimity on many questions..
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Helpful Brandom quote:

    ***************************************************
    For Kant, our normative status as autonomous, our possession of the authority to make ourselves responsible, to bind ourselves by conceptual norms (either cognitively in judgment or practically in exercises of intentional agency) is simply an ontological fact about us, definitive of creatures like us. Hegel takes a large step to naturalizing this fundamental discursive normativity by treating the possession of this normative status as a social achievement. Indeed, for him, all normative statuses are understood as social statuses. (Slogan: “All transcendental constitution is social institution.”) More specifically, he understands normative statuses, including those corresponding to Kantian autonomy, as socially instituted by practical normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition. Norms are understood as implicit in social practices. This is his understanding of the Enlightenment insight that there were no normative statuses of authority or responsibility, no commitments or obligations, before or apart from our practices of taking or treating each other as authoritative, responsible, committed, and obliged.

    These are lessons the classical American pragmatists take over from Kant and Hegel. They, too, see intentionality in all its guises as fundamentally a normative phenomenon. One of their master-ideas is to further naturalize the normativity of intentionality (both discursive andpractical) by construing it as arising from the role intentional states play in the generically selectional processes whose paradigms are Darwinian evolution and individual learning (both supervised and unsupervised). These have in common the feedback-loop, Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) structure. The pragmatists’ model and emblem for the faculty of reason is neither the Enlightenment’s reflectively representational mirror nor Romanticism’s creatively illuminating lamp, but the flywheel governor that is the flexible instrument of control for the engines of the Industrial Revolution.

    Placed in the context of Kant’s normative insight, it is the methodological strategy of giving explanatory priority to norms implicit in practices or practical abilities to norms explicit in the form of principles. The converse explanatory strategy, which looks for something explicit in the form of a rule or principle behind every practical capacity deployed in cognition and agency, is what Dewey called “intellectualism,” (or “Platonism”).

    The stage-setting for pragmatism of this sort is the notion of practical intentionality. This is the sort of skillful practical coping nonlinguistic organisms exhibit—epitomized at the high end by the efficient foraging strategies of orangutans and the stalking exploits of apex predators, but discernible at the low end even in the TOTE-based behavior of radar-guided missiles. Nonlinguistic animals are already in a distinctive way oriented to or directed at (“onto”) the environing objects in their world that play significant roles in their lives. In its most basic form, fundamental pragmatism seeks to situate discursive intentionality within the larger field of this sort of practical intentionality. This project can take the form of exhibiting discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality: a species of that genus. Or it can take the form of trying to show how discursively intentional abilities can arise out of more primitive sorts of skillful doing.

    https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Inferentialism_Normative_Pragmatism_and.pdf

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

    There's what Heidegger called 'understanding' at the bottom.
  • Hegel out of context
    As a man who as of a few hours ago become acquainted with Hegel I have to say i am impressed.invicta

    So many many roads lead back to Hegel, lead forward to Hegel maybe. There's not only the stuff he wrote. There's also how others have twisted him this way or that.

    I found Kojeve's lectures on Hegel at the public library, and they blew my mind. The cat catches its own tail. In Hegel, the timebinding software that we are .... got to look in the mirror, see itself as historical software trying to know itself ---knowing itself as this endless self-knowing. But these lectures also about political evolution toward free societies, as well as in what way philosophy is 'slavish' (escapist) ideology that finally, eventually, faces death and become a citizen (fusion of master and slave into something better.). A systematic thinker just tells a story that fits together beautifully leaving very little out. Here's a bit of K.

    By bringing together Hegel with Heidegger, Kojève attempts to radically historicise existentialism, while simultaneously giving Hegelian historicity a radically existential twist, wherein man’s existential freedom defines his being. Freedom is understood as the ontological relation of ‘negativity’, the incompleteness of human being, its constitutive ‘lack’. It is precisely because of this lack of a fully constituted being that man experiences (or, more properly is nothing other than) desire. The negativity of being, manifest as desire, makes possible man’s self-making, the process of ‘becoming’. This position can be see to draw inspiration from Heidegger’s critique of the transcendental preoccupations of Western thought, which he claims set reified, metaphysically assured figurations of Being over and above the processes of Becoming (wherein the ‘Being of Beings’, das Sein des Seieinden, is variously revealed within the horizon of temporality). The disavowal of such metaphysically anchored and ultimately timeless configurations of human being frees man from determinism and ‘throws’ him into his existential freedom. In Kojève’s thinking, man’s struggle is to exercise this freedom in order to produce a world in which his desires are satisfied, in the course of which he comes to accept his own freedom, ridding himself of the illusions of religion and superstition, ‘heroically’ claiming his own finitude or mortality.

    We can see, then, how Kojève attempts to synthesise Hegel, Marx and Heidegger. From Hegel he takes the notion of a universal historical process within which reconciliation unfolds through an intersubjective dialectic, resulting in unity. From Marx he takes a secularised, de-theologised, and productivist philosophical anthropology, one that places the transformative activity of a desiring being centre stage in the historical process. From Heidegger, he takes the existentialist interpretation of human being as free, negative, and radically temporal. Pulling three together, he presents a vision of human history in which man grasps his freedom to produce himself and his world in pursuit of his desires, and in doing so drives history toward its end (understood both as culmination or exhaustion, and its goal or completion).
    https://iep.utm.edu/kojeve/

    Also:
    Kojève argues that Hegel is the first to understand that the Concept = Time itself. Human Reason or thinking itself, "the Concept," is the concrete location where Time becomes capable of grasping itself, where Existence grasps its own Temporality.
    https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/04/10/kojeve-on-hegel-the-concept-is-time-itself/

    Lately Robert Brandom has given us a different but just as powerful interpretation (creative misreading) of Hegel. It's something like pragmatic neorationalism --- highly focused on us as creatures who offer and demand reasons for what we say and do. This is again us seeing what we've been doing all along without bothering to notice it in detail.
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    This is Brandom on what I call Hegel's liquid logic. Braver writes of impersonal conceptual schemes, which I take as unstable historical articulations of a lifeworld (something like the discursive spine of such a form of life, personified by the way one [ das Man ] operates almost automatically within a 'transparent' network of equipment and (shifting now in to gossip /idletalk) knows everything and nothing already in the form of platitudes and what's 'obvious.' Philosophy is something one's [the Anyone's] uncanny self-confrontation, with the philosopher trying to slide out of a having been thrown like a snake getting free from a dead skin.
    ***
    Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
    ...
    All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    .
    Did you really think I was unaware of evolutionary theory, and the prevalence of "everyman prejudices" about immaterial ideas? Are you aware of any Material Ideas? What kind of atoms are Concepts made of? Did Darwin propose a theory to explain the origin of Reason?Gnomon

    You are just proving my point.