Moreover, we might think in terms of Searle's status functions and institutional facts. Language builds on itself, so that saying it is so makes it so, or counts as its being so. — Banno

Sounds like Brandom talking about Hegel. So it's back to those pesky Germans. [ Of course it doesn't really matter where the good ideas come from. ]

Philosophers are the thought police. — unenlightened

I would say they are special section of the thought police, perhaps internal affairs.

Thanks for the kind words !

Hegelian dialectics is the best philosophy for explicating the truth of concepts. — Jamal

it’s in the use of a term that we can understand the meaning of concepts, not primarily by definitions — Jamal

I picked up (probably from Kaufman's translation of the famous Hegel preface) that use/meaning shifts within the dialectic / conversation. One cannot sum up a conversation. One cannot summarize Hegel or Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Adorno. One has to live in the world of an essentially historical conversation to follow the shifts in use-meaning. So one can't walk away with a pocket of theorems in a universal neutral language. Instead one just has more skill, the ability to jump back into that world, maybe with a fellow traveler who's also been there, but not in exactly the same way.

I continue to advertise the wonders of my normative crowbar.
Try on the goggles of an abnormally normative approach.

The philosopher need only ask : what is a philosopher ?

Was ist das--die Philosophie?
What is this, this philosophy ?

Ah, so I got caught up on a tangent. Sorry 'bout that !

he would deflect and say that what is important is not his beliefs but thinking. — Fooloso4

ways not works

Why must it be a deflection ? If he said 'Being is God,' he'd just further confuse people who are already confused and eager to project.

Idle talk, gossip, chugging along in language, grasping the typical superficiality, falling immersion into hackneyed responses, curiosisties self-flattering delusions that not it's caught the butterfly, the problem of meaning, the reaching for with concepts, the agony and ecstasy of poesis....

god as the idea is understood. — Tom Storm

Pretty sure it's this. If God is just the most glorious thing, the cause and the ground of all other things even, it or he is still not nearly as rad as beyng [ the true God in impenetrable darkness and mist ? to be fair it's pretty god as theology goos... ]

art continues to perform magic but liberated from the need to claim that there are supernatural entities or that it has the power to influence nature and events. — Jamal

My reaction is that poets and artists maybe pull the strings in the long run. Even anemic abstract ideologies are still just magical enough to motivate. Art and poetry speak to entire visceral human being.

There are no spirits and demons. — Jamal

I wonder how exactly less sophisticated minds understand them to exist. Taken as metaphors or sigils or as tribal or family avatars to lived toward, they seem real enough. We talk of team spirit, being inspired. I do understand that asking a god to make it rain is something on the literal side (farther from art in Adorno's sense).

Sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. I'll try to retrace and see where I went wrong.

Here are some relevant strands from Dilthey [ note that an analogue of das Man is presented as 'objective spirit.']

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

The Kantian I-think that is the basis of the conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) of the natural sciences really derives from a direct knowing (Wissen) rooted in Dilthey’s more inclusive thinking-feeling-willing of lived experience (see 1883/SW.I, 228, and ca. 1880–93/SW.I, 263–68). The natural sciences merely construct a phenomenal or ideal world that abstracts from the real nexus of lived experience. The world that is formed by the human sciences is the historical-social reality in which human beings participate. It is a real world that is directly possessed or present in what Dilthey calls Innewerden. This term has sometimes been translated as “inner awareness,” but is is better to translate it as “reflexive awareness” to indicate how things are there-for-us. Reflexive awareness is a pre-reflective, indexical mode of consciousness that “does not place a content over against the subject of consciousness (it does not re-present it)” (ca. 1880–93/SW.I, 253). It is the direct know-how that reality is present-for-me prior to any of the reflective act-content, inner-outer, or subject-object distinctions that characterize the representational world of conceptual cognition.

I am tired from overworking; having reviewed my files, I worry about their unfinished contents, whose completion demands incalculably more work from me. All this “about”, “of”, and “toward”, all these references of what is remembered to what is experienced, in short, all these structural inner relations, must be apprehended by me, since I now want to apprehend the fullness of the lived experience exhaustively. And precisely in order to exhaust it, I must regress further in the structural network to the memories of other lived experiences. (1904–9/SW.III, 50)
...
Individuals can be studied as psychic productive systems inherently related to each other as well as to more inclusive productive systems that are also at work in history. These larger productive systems come about because of the need for communication, interaction, and cooperation among individuals. But they can also take on a life of their own and survive the individuals that formed and shaped them. Dilthey’s category of Wirkung or productivity is at the root of Gadamer’s theory of the productive history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of works of art that grants them new meanings over time that exceed those intended by their creators. In the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey had been unwilling to consider purposive social systems as subjects or carriers of history. In The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, he qualifies his opposition to the idea of a transpersonal subject such as the soul of a people by de-reifying it as the spirit of a people that is to be considered as a logical rather than a real subject. It is possible to regard cooperative productive systems as logical subjects that transcend individuals without positing them as super-empirical real subjects.
...
Whereas Hegel restricted objective spirit to the legal, economic and political aspects of historical life, Dilthey expands the concept to include not only the sciences, but also the triad of art, religion and philosophy that Hegel had assigned to absolute spirit. But most of all, objective spirit embodies the everyday, mundane aspects of life that we grow up with.

From earliest childhood, the self is nurtured by this world of objective spirit. It is also the medium in which the understanding of other persons and their life-manifestations takes place. For everything in which spirit has objectified itself contains something that is common to the I and the Thou. ...

This common background suffices for the elementary understanding of everyday life. But whenever the common meaning of life-manifestations is called into question for some reason, higher understanding becomes necessary. This can occur because of an apparent inconsistency among various claims being made, or because an ambiguity that needs to be resolved. In each case we discern an unexpected complexity that requires us to shift our frame of reference.

A little more:


Yorck's primary category of historical life does not only challenge transcendental philosophy as too-narrow a foothold for philosophy. A fortiori, it also challenges the entire metaphysical tradition, which presupposes or searches for an ultimate objective reality (being, idea, substance, and so on), divorced from the ground of the always shifting historical life. Yorck rejects claims to “knowledge” sub specie aeternitatis. For Yorck, metaphysics is a flight from the historical reality ‘on the ground.’ By making historical life primary, Yorck effectively aims to dismantle the predominance of Greek metaphysics, including the modes of thought of modern science derived from it.

But Yorck is not content with just opposing metaphysics and transcendental philosophy. Instead, he attempts to instill and to cultivate historical awareness in philosophy itself, based on the principle that all productions of life are as historical as life itself. He writes: Since “to philosophize is to live,” “there is no real philosophizing which would not be historical” (CR, p. 251). More radical than Dilthey, Yorck calls for the “historicization” [Vergeschichtlichung] of philosophy:

Just as physiology cannot abstract from physics, so philosophy—especially if it is critical—cannot abstract from historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]. After all, the uncritical Critique of Kant's can be understood historically only, and thus be overcome. [Human] behaviour and historicity are like breathing and air pressure—and—this may sound somewhat paradoxical—the failure to historicize philosophizing appears to me, in methodological respects, a metaphysical remnant. (CR, 69)

It is therefore not surprising that, unlike Dilthey, Yorck specifically appreciates the emphasis on historicity [Geschichtlichkeit][5] in Hegel and some of his followers, despite his rejection of Hegel's speculative or ontical superstructure (CR, 59).[6]
...
The separation [Trennung] of self and other, I and world, soul and lived body [Leib] is such an early separation, indeed, the first act of life, as it were, such that these derivatives appear as absolute, autonomous, and self-sufficient. (ST, pp. 11/12)

Yorck concludes: “The self is only through the other, just as the other is only through the self” (ST, p. 11).
...
Yorck distinguishes between the feeling of transitoriness, i.e., that everything passes away [Vergänglichkeitsgefühl] (ST, p. 33), and the feeling or awareness of one's own mortality [Sterblichkeitsgefühl][14] (ST, p. 90). Acquiescence into one's own mortality constitutes the opposite pole to self-affirmation, “self-renunciation” [Selbsthingabe] (ST, p. 14), which is thus distinct from and even antithetical to the ethical impetus in philosophy and science. Yorck argues that the inversion of volitional and cognitive projection in feeling and its concentration in pure, passive interiority amounts to a “religious comportment” and the feeling of dependency (ST, 121). To the extent that the religious concentration of life in interiority is inversely related to projective representation, Yorck understands religious life in terms of its “freedom from the world” or Weltfreiheit (ST, p. 81 & 112). Psychologically, freedom from the world is the precondition for the consciousness of a world-transcendent God, or the consciousness of transcendence (ST, p. 105).
...
History has nothing of the isolation [Selbständigkeit] of the natural [order]” (ST, p. 6), but rather, in each of its phases, history is self-reflexively involved in its own historicity—“as the ferment of its aliveness”—and thus opens itself to the ever new “historical contrapposto” (ST, p. 6). Nothing is exempt from historical change. Philosophical categories through which the world is understood are historical products of life and hence inextricably bound up with the historicity of humankind. For instance, Yorck explicitly claims that the category of “being” is itself “a result of life” (ST, p. 8). This liberates history from all relation to an unchanging, fixed point of reference outside historical life.

Here's some info on Count Yorck which could be helpful.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/

Together with Dilthey, Yorck was the first philosopher to elaborate the specific concept of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] as a defining characteristic in the ontology of human beings. In particular, Yorck emphasized the generic difference between the ontic and the historical...Yorck aimed exclusively at the ontology of historical life, particularly the historical band (syndesmos) and effective connection (virtuality) that unites generational life. Based on the primacy of historical life, Yorck adopted a decidedly anti-metaphysical stance, rejecting all claims of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis.
...
According to Yorck, the analysis and evaluation of the contemporary intellectual-historical situation is integral to philosophy—all the more so if philosophy self-reflexively grasps its ineluctably historical nature, which in itself is one of Yorck's main philosophical objectives. The basic idea for the historicity of philosophy is straightforward. For Yorck, as for Dilthey, philosophy is “a manifestation of life” [Lebensmanifestation] (CR, p. 250), a product or an expression in which life articulates itself in a certain way. But all life is intrinsically historical. Life is inconceivable without its historical development. Yorck writes:

The entire given psycho-physical reality is not something that is, but something that lives: that is the germ cell of historicity. And self-reflection, which is directed not at an abstract I, but the entirety of my own self, will find that I am historically determined, just as physics grasps me as determined by the cosmos. Just as I am nature, I am history. And in this decisive sense we have to understand Goethe's dictum of [our] having lived [Gelebthaben] for at least three thousand years. Conversely, it follows that history as a scientific discipline exists only as psychology of history. (CR 71/72)

For Yorck, as for Dilthey, human life is incorrectly understood if it is subsumed under the generic catch-all category of “existence.” The first point is that human life is inconceivable without temporal and historical development, movement, and change; life always transcends itself, hence it never simply “is.” The mode of being for humans is “life,” not “existence.”[3] And life, unlike existence, is intrinsically historical.

Yorck emphasizes the “virtuality” or “effectivity” of history, i.e., the cumulative effects and results of individual persons exerting power and influence in transmitting the possibility and conception of life to their descendants. Successor-generations develop their own stance towards life in response to what they have inherited from the individuals and generations preceding them. History is the ongoing transmission of life's potentiality, including the transmission of power, ideas, and material conditions.

The child gains through the mother's sacrifice, her sacrifice benefits the child. Without such virtual transmission of power [Kraftübertragung] there is no history at all. (CR, p. 155)

Yorck does not refer to some anonymous bio-power or power structures, as discussed in much of contemporary philosophy, but to the authority, sacrifice, and direct action and communication through which an individual person or groups of persons form and shape the lives and behaviours of coming generations. It is for this reason that Yorck insists that “person” is the key historical category (CR, p. 109). History is the history of historical, individual agents, projecting their power and authority into the future.

For Yorck, there is one continuous and common line of historical life—a living syndesmos. Past generations and past persons are not “outside” a present horizon in a past world of their own. Rather, they live on, as it were, in their descendents. Moreover, because of this connecting band, one can go “backwards” by way of what Yorck calls “transposition” (CR, p. 61), transposing oneself into the lives of others and thus “re-enacting,” as Dilthey would say, the positions towards life that have been lived by one's predecessors. That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140).

Consequently, Yorck rejects from the start the transcendental method in philosophy as insufficient for grasping lived historical reality. Transcendental philosophy reduces historical life to the merely “subjective,” which misses the genuine characteristic of Geist, spirit or mind, namely its real, historical extension and connection.

The Concept of Time (tr. Ingo Farin) was written as something like commentary on the recently published (back then) Dilthey / Count York letters. Quotes from those letters are comment on. In my view, it's helpful to focus on what Heidegger says about us as timebinding (historical ) hermeneutic beings.

Hegel => Feuerbach => Heidegger

Heidegger articulates what 'kind' of thing we are (among other things we are self-articulating, what we take ourselves to be, but within the limits of our having been thrown.)

In the sense that the same practice carried on without that lie. — Jamal

Perhaps the dead are still raised, but it's only 'internally' ? Metaphorically.

Adorno means it almost literally though, — Jamal

As if casting a spell will actually raise the dead ? Or make it rain ?

Similarly, we can make arguments by beginning with a statement of the conclusion—indeed I think this is the clearest and most common way of presenting arguments in philosophy. — Jamal

:up:

It's cast forward into the future as result, organizing what logically precedes but chronologically follows it.

That is to say, it’s in the use of a term that we can understand the meaning of concepts, not primarily by definitions. — Jamal

I think we can look to how bots learn. (?) Structuralism was/is right. The meaning of an individual concept is never strictly and luminously present before some inner eye. Sentences are tools that have their meaning in the context of a lifeworld. We understand that a hammer is for driving nails. We can understand the what-for of a claim in this or that context in the same way. [ I could be wrong, but goodish style demands I punch out declarations. ]

The hermeneutic circle ( implicit in the above and letting concepts speak) is (I claim) just hanging around in a world (the world of baseball, the world of mathematics, the world of Heidegger scholarship) and picking up how and why various phrases are picked up and swung.

But art did not decline along with the decline of magic rituals and beliefs; and now, in invoking and manipulating the spirits of things in its works—in bringing out the meaning of things in their interconnectedness and in their irreducible particularity, in treating things as spiritual rather than as specimens for scientific study—art continues to perform magic but liberated from the need to claim that there are supernatural entities or that it has the power to influence nature and events. — Jamal

:up:

I must invoke Bordieu and maybe Berger though. Identity metaphors. Subtle sigils. Didactic art, concretely instilling the latest virtue. 'True' class is taste, conspicuous sublimated consumption. Maybe commodity fetishism ? Or fetishism of the appropriate consumption style ?

Perhaps its magic (art's) is trapped in a flaming circle. We keep artists from confusing the engineers who keep the air conditioning running the cathedral museum. (I love art, just to be clear.)

And as soon as you stipulate that, I want an artwork that doesn't teach you to see the world anew. — Banno

:up:

Sure. So now we bring in Hegel and talk about an unstable system of semantic norms (bag of memes) that always tumbles forward and yet upward as it gains complexity.

The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development.

...reason is purposive activity — plaque flag

The world, through us, comes to make its own nature or character more and more explicit. It comes to know itself. We are god's spies, god's eyes, god's authors.

Consider that Hegel was a Romantic rationalist. He wanted to heal his generation's sense of alienation. It was common at that time (as it is in ours) to bemoan our loss of the garden. We missed an immediacy that we probably never had to begin with. We are stardust, we are golden.

Hegel's problem (like Joyce's) was to wake people up to the divine in their own dirty little lives, embedded in a history of violence and superstition, but hopeful for utopia. Things were looking up back then. Maybe it'll help to share this key piece of his aesthetics again:
******************************************************************************************************************************
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom.

This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.

Yet absolute subjectivity as such would elude art and be accessible to thinking alone if, in order to be actual subjectivity in correspondence with its essence, it did not also proceed into external existence...

...the Absolute does not turn out to be the one jealous God who merely cancels nature and finite human existence without shaping himself there in appearance as actual divine subjectivity; on the contrary, the true Absolute reveals itself and thereby gains an aspect in virtue of which it can be apprehended and represented by art.

...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself.

God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

.

hat is because, I say, there is a normative dimension that had collapsed in Western philosophy — Wayfarer

That's just not true. If you mean philosophy isn't theology, I'd say just go for it. As I see it, what I consider mischaracterizing philosophy weakens your rhetorical position.

I think Wittgenstein was nominalist — Wayfarer

I don't think that's correct. Norms aren't names.

**********

In general, I think something (very) like what you are aiming at is already right there in the tradition. But it is presented without the trappings of traditional religion. So you don't see it / like it / greet it as a friend. (I am just reporting how it seems to me.)

Hegel seemed to see the lifeworld as an organism that was increasing in complexity and becoming able to understand its own nature. Forward, upward. Now we are building digital gods. Reality swells. Baby godworld is going to be a big boy. The timebinding Conversation we mostly are thickens on the climb to godhead. Any nostalgic philosophy is therefore suspect. As boundtime or fattened Zeitgeist, the past is always with us, and we are this past in the mode of transcending it. With that in mind, how do you address acknowledge appreciate our ascension ? Even if in some dimensions you count it a regressive, certainly we some kind of monster spreading its wings, some kind of tower being erected.

Here's some hopefully helpful Hegel:
***
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.[/i]
***


Now it's going to get muddy (I think I can tentatively paraphrase this, if that becomes relevant.)
...
everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.
...
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite.
...
The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development.
....
Reason is purposive activity.

As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). — Ed Feser

:up:

Yes ! These are enacted semantic norms, patterns in our doings (marking and barking and parking) --patterns that bots can 'internalize' (encode as floating point parameters), generating novel and helpful sentences. Our brain must encode these norms somehow. We also create and adjust these norms. Time just is (human intellectual existence just is) the critical self-confrontation of semantic norms. Thus spake @plaque flag.

<smile>

That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. — Ed Feser

:up:

Yes, of course. I'm a bit of a rationalist myself in Brandom's updated sense. I claim that we are deeply and fundamentally normative and discursive creatures and that philosophy is a particular kind of moralizing --a normative imposition, a push on our way of doing things from the inside.

'One, as a rational person, ought to think of concepts this way.'

That is an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of the individual, the hallmark of modernity. — Wayfarer

Yes. I focus on this issue, this apparently addictive prejudice that isolated subjectivity makes sense.

Hegel => Feuerbach => Heidegger / Wittgenstein

After all, the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual.

What is form ? What is concept ?

Perhaps we agree here : I don't think we can 'really' peel apart us from not-us. This is (I think) Hegelian idealism. This is idealism as holism, a denial of isolated entities (those which can make sense when yanked out of the total context.) All abstraction (extraction, yankingout) does a certain 'violence' or methodical forgetting or ignoring or deworlding --- which may be convenient and practically justified.

in the world i.e. constituents of reality. 'The ligatures of reason', is how I put it. — Wayfarer

OK. Well I'm not so averse to that. Our lifeworld is conceptually articulated. We and our semantic and perceptive norms are 'one' with it. We see the waterfall (also) in terms of Newtonian physics. The waterfall 'is' those physics (and other stuff) in this sense.

Is it there like that without us ? Does that question even mean much ?

Not only 'our doings'. — Wayfarer

Why not, if one includes talking and writing ?

If so, then how is it that a property as fundamental as "consciousness" is so easily and frequently lost (e.g. sleep, head trauma, coma, blackout, etc) as well as altered by commonplace stressors (e.g. drugs, alcohol, sugar, emotions, violence, sex, illness, video games, porn, gambling, social media, etc) if "consciousness is closest to the ultimate ground of existence"? — 180 Proof

:up:

This is why 'consciousness' doesn't quite work. Maybe even 'being' doesn't 'work,' doesn't say anything more than cat's meow.

You will recognize the source, but for others it's Wittgenstein.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
...

But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Saying that the brain and mind are different things is not the same as saying the brain has nothing to do with the mind or that neuroscience has nothing to do with human consciousness. — T Clark

:up:

Are they the same thing? No. One is biology, neurology. The other is psychology, self-awareness. We use different terms to describe them, but then we use different terms to describe chemistry and biology too. — T Clark

:up:



I suggest that, for humans, norms are primary, as deep as anything else. The self is something that ought to be good, ought to be rational. Our talk of freedom and responsibility and autonomy is foundational. The philosophical situation takes it for granted.

I'd put self-awareness in this normative sphere. We hold ourselves accountable. We learn to be and think of ourselves as selves, as capable of unified (relatively internal and private) monologues.

Up until quite recently, 'realism' in philosophy meant 'realism with respect to universals' i.e. some form of Platonic or Aristotelian realism. Today's realism, 'realism with respect to mind-independent objects of perception', is a very recent arrival. — Wayfarer

I'm beginning to see how they are the same thing.

We can drop 'mindindepent' as confusing. We can grasp language in terms of embodied enacted social norms which are out there in the world as patterns in our doings. Our brains evolved to play such games, so there are 'marks' also on our brain as we learn to enact community meanings (universals as 'material' or worldly patterns.) Talk of 'selves,' talk of 'minds,' is all part of a worldly enactment of semantic and other norms.

What about reproduction, eating, and death but without a first person perspective makes something valuable or invaluable. I mean, we evaluate it from the perspective of someone who experiences. — schopenhauer1

I think we agree that giving-a-damn is central to human being-there. We are temporal because we want stuff, fear stuff, seek stuff. 'Want' and 'fear' are like projections of an interior. So we can say we seek and avoid. We learn from getting hurt, getting food. We 'remember' (find shorter, safer paths, etc.)

If plants aren't conscious, do they have "problems"? Does reproduction and fitness not occurring present a problem or another event like a rock breaking? — schopenhauer1

I'd say a problem within a teleological projection.

when asked if I believe in God, I usually (and honestly) say "sometimes." — Arne

:up:

it's hard to deny that there are both "inside" ideas (concepts) and "outside" objects (percepts). — Gnomon

But consider that philosophers deny such a thing all the time. I'd even say that dualism is a default view, what people vaguely assume before they study philosophy seriously. I'm not denying that philosophers can engage in a sophisticated defense of dualism, but it's a tough position to play.

Clearly what is meant by 'perceive' is relevant here. I don't see how to avoid the involvement of semantic norms. I claim that we are negotiating how public concepts ought to be applied.

But again, direct and indirect realism are positions about the nature of perception, not about what we talk about. — Michael

I'm defending direct realism by focusing on implicit semantic norms. Other direct realists may hate my defense. I do not identity direct realism with my defense of it.

I’m aware of the cat hiding under the covers. Doesn’t mean I directly see it. — Michael

Why would it ? No one promised a clear line of sight to every intentional object.

This is why I consider 'we talk about the cat and not about our image of the cat' as a less confusing approach to direct realism.