Here are some of my beliefs on this matter :

1. All we ever have is beliefs.

2. We [ mostly ] use 'true' to say that we have or share a belief.

3. My belief is how the world is given to me ---reduced to its conceptual aspect, because I can't put the world in its sensual fullness in my talk.

4. The world is only given to individuals who experience it as meaningfully structured (who 'live' in those beliefs as simply the concept-aspect of world for them.)

5. All we can do is try to get better and better beliefs --- get a better 'view' on the one world we share -- often by discussing our beliefs with others to discover biases and inadequacy in those we currently have.

Note that truth doesn't matter. No one sees around their own perspective to some naked reality, because that reality would not be meaningfully/linguistically structured.

Belief is the intelligible structure [conceptual skeleton ] of the world as given to or grasped by a person.

Which in a way gets along with the spirit of Kant: We have knowledge of the empirical world, but that knowledge doesn't touch upon the metaphysical totality which grounds it. Or, in knowledge's multiplicity, they're all self-grounding projects which we are free to take up or leave, but which we're not really sure how to relate that to ontological claims. Or, at the very least, I'm not sure how to relate knowledge, scientific or historical, to ontological claims. — Moliere

If one accepts that the world, so far as we know, is given perspectively, then the being of the world is always for (ignoring other animals) an entire human personality. This world is always already meaningfully structured (for instance, the network of involvements above).

I myself, as an ontologist, even as an informal ontologist who 'hates philosophy' doesn't know the word 'ontology,' have to clarify the totality of the meaningstructure of the world as it is given to me. How does science fit within the grand scheme of things ? How do real numbers exist not only as tokens in a specialist games for me as a total personality ? Are electrons more real than marriage or even than my own thought of electrons ? Is there an afterlife ? Is there a truly truly true truth somewhere?

All this squishy stuff is just established empirically by refusing to take a useful fiction (view from anywhere/nowhere) as an ultimate ontology because it helps with making smartphones -- though we'd be silly to ignore what it gets right.

that knowledge doesn't touch upon the metaphysical totality which grounds it. — Moliere

If you are talking as Husserl might about the ignorance of science about its own rootedness in the lifeworld, then I agree. But the mention of Kant hints of something that I'd suspect of being more necessarily and therefore uselessly indeterminate in its disconnection from the inferential-semantic nexus. There's our blanket of involvements and sense, and within this blanket we can construct phrases like 'round square' on 'reality from no perspective' and 'this statement is false.' Embracing Kant as possibility rather than substance (in his best intention), I challenge the confusion in such phrases. We all too easily make phrases that only confuse us. We write checks that can never be cashed, except as a kind of mystical-emotional currency. It is of course difficult to perfect a criterion for excluding such stuff, so we just need the apriori freedom to challenge claims. 'What do you think you can even mean by that ? '

I'm not so sure there is a most rational rationality — Moliere

But who ever claimed there was ? I've stressed that it's a fundamentally infinite project. As an ideal, it's always on the horizon. We will never live the 'perfect circle' of its arrival except in the sense of our being 'haunted' by it. We will never stop clarifying concepts like justice, freedom, and rationality.

As I see it, it makes more sense to challenge the details of my explication of rationality then try to argue for the apriori impossibility of such an articulation.

I hear you on the multiple logics issue, and this is bit like the private language issue. I'd say that every human being has a sort of private language and private logic, but going too far in this direction (trying to argue for it) is paradoxical. If we are lost in choose-your-own-logic and choose-your-own-meanings, there is no point in even discussing or claiming precisely such lostness.

'Communication/rationality is impossible' but let's talk about this anyway is a performative contradiction.

'Communication/rationality' is completed/perfected so shut up and listen is a performative contradiction.

'Communication/rationality is never perfect or final,' so let's continue to try at least to make it better is reasonable.

I'm at least a realist. And I like direct realism in the phenomenological sense, but I wonder what's so direct about it if all I mean is that indirect realism is false? — Moliere

Rejecting indirect realism is a big move with the little unworldly world of metaphysics. Do we start doing philosophy trapped and isolated in a bubble, referring to private 'representations' ? Or do we start together in a single world, referring to objects in that world, the bridge over the river?

With Heidegger... — Moliere

If it helps, Heidegger is no infallible oracle for me. I only endorse certain parts of his work. The key for me is phenomenology's uncovering of the lifeworld and it's refusal to be seduced --- it's unhip willingness to question -- a counter-empiricism that pretends to be empirical in its reduction of the fullness of the world to what is convenient for its mere technical intentions. To me it's a truly scientific ontology that challenges scientistic ontologies. It's the true empiricism -- not the stuff full of posits like sensedata taken for granted.

Heidegger introduces the term that Macquarrie and Robinson translate as ‘involvement’ to express the roles that equipmental entities play—the ways in which they are involved—in Dasein's everyday patterns of activity. Crucially, for Heidegger, an involvement is not a stand-alone structure, but rather a link in a network of intelligibility that he calls a totality of involvements. Take the stock Heideggerian example: the hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering is involved in making something fast; and that making something fast is involved in protecting the human agent against bad weather. Such totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice. As such, they define equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully relates in Dasein's everyday practices. This relational ontology generates what Brandom (1983, 391–3) calls Heidegger's ‘strong systematicity condition’, as given voice in Heidegger's striking claim that “[t]aken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (Being and Time, 15: 97). And this radical holism spreads, because once one begins to trace a path through a network of involvements, one will inevitably traverse vast regions of involvement-space. Thus links will be traced not only from hammers to hammering to making fast to protection against the weather, but also from hammers to pulling out nails to dismantling wardrobes to moving house. This behaviour will refer back to many other behaviours (packing, van-driving) and thus to many other items of equipment (large boxes, removal vans), and so on. The result is a large-scale holistic network of interconnected relational significance. Such networks constitute worlds, in one of Heidegger's key senses of the term—an ontical sense that he describes as having a pre-ontological signification (Being and Time 14: 93).

We need only pay more attention to see the world as such a 'blanket.' Neutrinos and marriages and nostalgia and premises are all part of this same single involvement network. Entities are radically semantically and practically interdependent.

As an attitude, I think what you describe is great. Embrace the world and embodiment and the strangeness of the higher emerging from the lower, 'mind' from 'matter.'

I could dispute a belief for any number of reasons, but to call something untrue is a particular type of dispute. — Judaka

How is me disagreeing with you more than me expressing my own belief ?
I think (?) your are implicitly picturing some naked reality (from no perspective, but really still yours) that MAKES a statement true or untrue. But I'm saying that reality is only give to/thru perspectives, and that beliefs just are that given reality in its 'conceptual essence.' In that sense, all beliefs are true, as an expression of how the world is seen by the mind by a person at that time --- but only about their view on the world.

Discussing is people working together toward better beliefs. [People might say 'truer,' but this leads to confusion, because 'true' is simply [mostly] used to agree with 'mere' belief.]

So, something like catharsis, that results in a deep shift of your self-understanding and your view of life. I'm sure that would give rise to many feelings, but it's more than simply a feeling, as it is also something that you've come to understand about yourself and the world. — Quixodian

Yes, I'd personally think it'd involve the whole self. But this to me happens with 'normal' philosophy and 'literature.' This 'normal' stuff is as radical as one could ask for. Emerson sits on the shelf, a piece of dynamite. I'm not the first to reach for the metaphor of deafness. 'A wakefulness for Dasein.' I'm anti-alienation. I dig into the dirt of the so-called mundane. To me, and maybe I'm just wired this way, the idea of a forest behind all the trees just ends hiding the beauty or at least the ugly fascination of the trees. I suffered greatly at times, but I can't understand certain pessimists who speak of boredom. We can conjure the ghosts of the mighty dead with a paperback and the courage to paraphrase (I think writing is ideally part of reading). Speaking of these ghosts:

... if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. ...Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

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.

Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

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.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

This last part is about something like the ideal perspective I mention in another thread. Ontology is poetry approaching the condition of science.

A dog is a dog, an animal, a mammal, a loyal companion, a pet, but not a building. It's not true that a dog is a building, it's an incorrect reference. Even if dogs went extinct, it changes nothing, the rules are all made up, and they only change if we change them. — Judaka

OK.

But my point is that all we have is belief. The world is grasped as meaningfully structured. Humans may make up languages over time, but for the most part a child learns a language & then 'has' the world in terms of it. So I see my-keys-on-the-table-ness immediately. I hear my-alarm-clock-going-off. I watch that-Karen-being-a-bitch.

I'm saying that belief is like this seeing of my-keys-on-the-table-ness. I could turn out to be wrong, but the world from my perspective, while I believe my keys are on the table, does indeed feature, in its conceptual aspect, my keys on the table. I may also know god-is-love-ness. The world for me has God who is love in it. I'm talking about the same world and even the same God when I tell you this. The intentional token in the game is what links us and allows us to compare beliefs. You have your own perspective on the world. You tell me God is not love or that shit's too vague. [ I'm being playful here. I don't myself claim that God is love, tho it's not a terrible definition -- at least it's friendly.]

The point is that we all just have a perspective on the world which includes a conceptual aspect which is the belief of whoever has this perspective on it. There is no need to paste language on the world because the world is always already meaningfully conceptually structured. All we can do is compare, discuss, and modify such structures ---seek for better beliefs. Seek to see the world from a more better 'place' in 'belief space' or 'personality space' or whatever we want to call it. It includes even normal space, like walking around a building to literally see the back door, or whether there is one.

I think Schopenhauer works best as a man who saw the godless [ Darwinian ] deathfuck wheel. I open Dawkins and find Schopenhauer naturalized. In case it's obscure, I mean the loop of breeding and dying, and the generations that come and go like leaves on the tree. Lust leadeth to the horrors of aging, but the young and lusty have not seen this part of the wheel yet, not from the inside, not in the mirror.

Sages of old saw it too, the deathfuck wheel which was just there, shining and dripping. At his best, Schopenhauer was this old school kind of sage, seeing through the illusion of time to the form of the circle, the ancient indestructible Wheel. He believed in The Loop, thought reading Herodotus was enough. He took the world as spectacle, grasped its essence.

He did not need to descend from his balcony for the glory of the revolution. There would be no revolution, not a real one. Just the bloodflower sinwheel forever. He left graffiti for others who might be able to get there sometimes, maybe to help others get there.

I think a better interpretation is in terms of metacognition - the understanding of understanding. — Quixodian

Ah but that's already Kojeve/Hegel. I mean I agree, but that's our familiar autonomous creative rationality determining its own essence.

the core of Hegel’s philosophy is the idea that human history is the history of thought as it attempts to understand itself and its relation to its world.
https://iep.utm.edu/kojeve/#H2

There are innummerable maps and means developed in various cultures that address this. Feeling comes into it, but perhaps more as a consequence than cause. — Quixodian

Sure. Note that more than most I recognize that metaphysics is mythological and metaphorical. Rationality is not post-oracular. It's just a second-order synthetic-critical oracular tradition. Even in Popper there's a huge appreciation for the mysterious source of hypotheses (myths).

I don't deny that freemasons or monks can have esoteric traditions that are even partially rational in that some special set human beings are allowed to debate their modification.

Feeling seems to be a large part of how value is experienced in the world. The expression 'just' feelings is, for me, absurd, just to be clear. Because torture is just feelings, along with falling in love for the first time. As Schop noted, the great painters often painted a face of the liberated subject of knowledge. What more convincing proof can there be of wisdom than a loving serene demeanor ? As proof of almost constant sober joy and love ?

Much could be said about all of this, but I think one point that needs to be made is that 'higher states' are not conceptual in nature - there can be no concept of a higher stage of jhana/dhyana, which is a barrier to our normal discursive/analytical mode of analysis. — Quixodian

'Nonconceptual' suggests other aspects of experience, most plausibly a high and liberated feeling. We've discussed this issue before. If you say not feeling but not concept either, it starts to sound like round squares, or like a completely indefinite hope.

Recently I read What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. It's a beautiful book. I'm a fan of The Fire Sermon, and really I find so much to like. But what's not much discussed is the economic situation that supported the monks. I'm a married in 2023, so those bhikkus are almost escapist fantasies for me. I respect a lost beauty which is mostly no longer possible (which is not to deny living traditions where they are still feasible). I find enough comfort in what I see as a related affirming-forgiving transcendent 'pessimism.' Omnia vanitas. This vanitas is not simply emptiness. The original Hebrew is more suggestive/elusive.

All is hebel .

Not at all. Powerful and illuminating. Highly recommended. — jgill

Your experience suggests a kind of 'tunnel' between perspectives on reality. I've had some powerful experiences (largely on the level of feeling and 'spiritual' realizations), but I've not yet experienced anything as metaphysically radical as what you describe. Did you ever see Being John Malkovich ? It's about that kind of thing, and it's pretty great. It's a bit like Schopenhauer's idea of the illusion of individuality breaking down, but more visceral than metaphorical sounding.

We can say there is a discursive self, just as we might say there is a poetic self, a feeling self or an experiencing self, but are these selves anything more than ideas which overarch fields of inquiry or practice? — Janus

To me we can either call protons instrumental posits (useful fictions) -- or fallibly accept them as real. I use to choose instrumentalism, which is still reasonable, but I now prefer fallible realism.
All we ever have are beliefs, and we basically call beliefs true to say we share them. And that's it. And we can always be wrong. Or so I believe. And so maybe I'm wrong. But being wrong would mean (to me) getting a better view on the world that shows me how I'm wrong. The world-from-no-perspective is not something I can make sense of.

but highlighting the fact that in discourse every thought is an "I-think". Is that along the lines of what you are getting at? — Janus

It's more of an unfolding of what that actually means. In short, my dramaturgical-discursive self is organized as an essentially temporal being by making and keeping promises. I am held responsible as a temporal ideal-unity-in-progress of claims and deeds. Using a concept as a fully sapient being is understanding what the use of that concept commits one to. A parrot can repeat words without moving in this time-dimension of responsibility.

For instance, Bakhurst (2011, 2015), following McDowell and Brandom as well as Vygotsky, characterises Bildung as a process of enculturation during which the child, by means of acquiring conceptual abilities, is transformed from being in the world to being a subject capable of thinking and acting in light of reasons, thereby taking a view on the world and herself. As Bakhurst points out, this ‘gradual mastery of techniques of language that enable the giving and taking of reasons’ (2015, p. 310) is an essentially social process, because in acquiring concepts the child essentially learns to participate in a social praxis. Similarly, by adopting an approach to pedagogy that draws on both Vygotsky and Brandom, Derry (2008, 2013) emphasises the importance of a normatively structured learning environment in which adults provide opportunities for children to engage in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons in order to gain understanding of the inferential relations that govern our use of concepts.
...
It is also very close to Brandom's view, which interprets intentionality as a fundamentally social phenomenon, namely as the ability for deontic score-keeping, that is the ability to ascribe and acknowledge justifications to others and oneself. Thus, on this view, human thinking, understood in terms of the possession and use of concepts, consists essentially in the ability to participate in the—necessarily social—game of giving and asking for reasons.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407

I emphasize the temporality that is merely implied because I've been interested in why folks might accept so readily that a 'Cartesian' stream of thoughts should 'automatically' be a monologue that understands itself as such. What would unify this stream of thoughts ? And what kind of unity could be expected but a temporal unity ? Turns out William James discusses the same thing in his famous psychology book, my latest purchase.

I think we are trained into being virtual foci of responsibility.

A central idea in philosophy is fairness, but arguably, this term tells us absolutely nothing about the world. — Judaka

Our understanding of the word would, I claim, be an understanding of part of the world. As conceptual beings, we live not only in colorful objects but within meaningful institutions.

I understand truth as a correct reference, in other words, it can't be disentangled from language. — Judaka

What refers to what ? I thought you meant a word referring to nonword stuff.

My conclusion: There are no common internal perspective foundations. Even common beliefs vary from person to person.

Two cents worth. — jgill

:up:

To me one of the things that glues us together is language. We intend the same object from our differing perspectives. We talk at the world in common, but we only see/feel/smell it from a perspective. So language has a sociality that the rest of us lacks. So I agree with you that even common beliefs vary, but we can only know this by intending the same set of worldly objects ( I include concepts like justice and freedom in these objects, along with anything that is mixed up in the reasons we give for beliefs and actions.)

Instead of an old man in Colorado, I found "myself" in the mind of a woman living in a cabin in Ireland. The experience goes beyond words to express, and it lasted only a few brief moments. "I" looked out the window onto rolling green hills and everything was changed for me - I saw through another's eyes what I would not see through mine. — jgill

Sounds amazing and maybe scary.

I do have a better, more concise, view of what is the case than you do. — charles ferraro

:up:

I agree that all we ever have is belief, but truth is technically a function of logic, the term does not endorse or dispute but affirms or denies the conditions as being met. — Judaka

I think you were more correct when you said something seemingly very different:

You cannot say "it is raining" in a non-linguistic way. There is no "actually raining" or "actual state of raining. — Judaka

To me it seems like you are wavering between trying to explain what makes a true statement true and how 'true' is used. But I don't think the first mission is possible.

It does not work to talk about prelinguistic stuff making linguistic stuff true. It gets paradoxical, because 'prelinguistic stuff' is linguistic stuff.

The world just HAS a conceptual aspect for human beings, in the same way that it has a color aspect. We have a 'conceptual' sense in the way we have eyes, but really all of our senses work together to give us a meaningfully structured lifeworld. Not an image of one, but the world itself, which depends on us as we on it.

Schopenhauer argues that philosophy and religion have the same fundamental aim: to satisfy “man’s need for metaphysics,” which is a “strong and ineradicable” instinct to seek explanations for existence that arises from “the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life” (WWR I 161). Every system of metaphysics is a response to this realization of one’s finitude, and the function of those systems is to respond to that realization by letting individuals know their place in the universe, the purpose of their existence, and how they ought to act. All other philosophical principles (most importantly, ethics) follow from one’s metaphysical system. — Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion and his Critique of German Idealism by Nicholas Linares

:up:
Yes, and this is what I also try to get at with dramaturgical ontology. It's not some footnote where our ontology puts us and our role in the world. This basic 'heroic' narrative, which is always also a metaphor for the world entire, might even be necessary for sanity.

Both philosophers and theologians claim the authority to evaluate metaphysical principles, but the standards by which they conduct those evaluations are very different. Schopenhauer concludes that philosophers are ultimately in the position to critique principles that are advanced by theologians, not vice versa. — Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion and his Critique of German Idealism by Nicholas Linares

This suggests to me a loyalty to Enlightenment rationality as he understands it, though he rejects its optimism, choosing instead an ancient unworldliness, which also appeals to me, even though I moderately decently run enough of the rat race to not be a problem for others.

He nonetheless recognizes that the metaphysical need of most people is satisfied by their religion. This is unsurprising because, he contends, the vast majority of people find existence “less puzzling and mysterious” than philosophers do, so they merely require a plausible explanation of their role in the universe that can be adopted “as a matter of course” (WWR II 162). — Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion and his Critique of German Idealism by Nicholas Linares

I'd say that philosophy proper is the dynamic 'religion' of an infinite 'self-eating' project. Philosophers (I think of phenomenologists especially) are masters of learning to find the mundane mysterious. I 'joke' that we are cyborgs, but I'm not joking. Language is weird, if one 'wakes up' not only to it as softwhere but, more crucially, as softwhen. You and I are both thousands of years old, in a genuine if atypical sense of age. Another example: I find in Husserl recently and just today in James' Principles of Psychology a potent illumination of the 'stretched moment' at the 'heart' of the world in its given-ness, but still we tend to babble unthinkingly about a punctiform realnumber now, simply because there's so much f(t) in our mathematical models. Shamelessly counterempirically and in the name of empiricism, we fall into hand-me-down fictions. But it's true that we don't want a painful identity crisis all the time. To me nonphilosophers are primarily just more practical (nurses who love their puppies and Taylor Swift) or less conceptual (I've known profound/intense musicians who were just passably literate.)

we can come to see that philosophers start from different places through the humble method of comparison and contrast after having read the philosophers. And that's why I have doubts on ultimate foundations: seems like there's a lot of possible foundations to go around claiming as ultimate foundations. — Moliere

Sure. To me what you are missing is your agreement with me. Which is to say that you yourself are offering a founding assumption. 'We should apiori rule out foundationalism.' The ICC is just a vision of maximum freedom, right to the edge it shares with potentially brutal esoteric anarchy. @Joshs seems to share your concern that any attempt to sketch rationality is somehow oppressive, but that itself is just occult superstition if not rationally supported.

The metaphor of foundation is, in this context, a metaphor for that which enables.

One of my motives for writing Against Method was to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract concepts such as “truth”, “reality”, or “objectivity”, which narrow people’s vision and ways of being in the world. Formulating what I thought were my own attitude and convictions, I unfortunately ended up by introducing concepts of similar rigidity, such as “democracy”, “tradition”, or “relative truth”. Now that I am aware of it, I wonder how it happened. The urge to explain one’s own ideas, not simply, not in a story, but by means of a “systematic account”, is powerful indeed.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#AgaiMeth1970

In my view, we can either drag along the current notion of rationality uncritically, or we can make it explicit and refine it. Feyerabend shouldn't have felt bad about reaching for freeing concepts. Having no method at all is a fantasy that, in my view, evaporates with a grasp of our being as thrown projection. Reality is given perspectively to historically discursive beings. I 'am' the 'living past' that 'leaps ahead' as a set of interpretive habits/prejudices.

It's just the "foundations" part I'm questioning. — Moliere

Understandable, but who said you could question things ? I'm joking of course. The point is that autonomy really is almost apriori. Will you ask me to justify my claim that justification, in a context of freedom, is necessary or foundational ? Is this not merely enacting an ICC ? Is the state of peaceful tolerant conversation another way to put it ? Are we afraid to begin to explicate dogmatism (defining the ICC is the same as defining its negative) ? Will we dogmatically forbid such articulation ?

But I don't think he's as guilty of stepping out to construct the world as much as Hegel is. — Moliere

I should stress that I am miles away from being an orthodox Hegelian. But I love certain passages in him, but I largely enjoy him transformed and in some ways purified by Kojeve, Brandom, and Heidegger. Braver's A Thing of This World is a tale of the journey of ICS, the impersonal conceptual scheme, at it set sail from Kant and only got freer and looser and finally fused with the world, so that this conceptual scheme was simply the conceptual aspect of the lifeworld, not some mediating image internal to a person or even a community. In Hegel, who managed the fusion mentioned above, it was evolving toward a goal. In the later Heidegger, the fusion is maintained, but it (now the lifeworld's way of being) drifts aimlessly.

At the very least I think you'd have to say it's what all our sense-organs do with respect to a sensible-intuition. — Moliere

In case it's unclear (and to further the conversation on fun stuff ) I'm a nondualist direct realist. I 'believe in' our sense organs. They are related inferentially and casually to all kinds of other entities in the one inferential nexus of a community's practice of demanding and offering reasons. To be clear, even prescientific communities give reasons, make excuses, promises, apologies. So the normative discursive self has been here since we started jabbering. It only obtains selfconsciousness progressively. Philosophy is a big part of that.

You said:

What could “accurately” mean in such a case of private experiences/sensations. — Richard B

I said:

it's trivially true that feeling just is not concept. A sentence is not really a painting. We include feelings in our 'inferential ontology' all the time. We can be more or less confident that someone 'gets it.' — plaque flag

I also quoted Eliot and said:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked — plaque flag

Then you inform me that:

We need words associated with particular circumstances; we need a common language to understand those circumstances; we need our fellow human being to react similarly to those circumstances — Richard B

Respectfully, that sounds like you repeating what I said back to me.

But as you imply, much of life’s experience would be diminished if everything ‘outside of logic and reason’ were ignored or devalued. — 0 thru 9

:up:

Striving to have some kind of supreme, impossible, godlike perspective of the world? — charles ferraro

For me, it's similar to the critical-synthetic tradition of science/philosophy. We work together to build the best set of beliefs we can by pointing out one's another's blindspots and biases. It's only 'godlike' in the sense that it's best thing we can sensibly hope for. There's nothing above it, but the project is selfconsciously revisionary down to its bones and never finished. Rationality is attempt to ameliorate our innate stupidity through a teamwork that requires both optimism (a better view is possible ) and humility (it won't be easy, and I'll need help).

Who the hell would know what "the best possible view" of anything was, even if it existed or they encountered it? — charles ferraro

I suggest you reread the opening post. I explicitly emphasized (fucking underlined) all we ever have is belief. I go on to mock the idea of some perspective-independent Final reality hidden behind all perspectives. I draw the conclusion, hopefully not so unwarranted, that we ought to do what we can to seek good beliefs. Such beliefs simply are the [ conceptual aspect of the ] world from our point of view. The world is only given thru/to such points of views. My beliefs are the 'linguistic' meaning-structure of the world as seen by me. So I see the world better (what once might have been called 'more truly') by seeing it from a better 'perspective.'

It's like me turning on a lamp and bringing an object close to my eyes in order to have it more completely. But instead of eyes seeing, we have the 'mind' 'seeing' the conceptual structure of the world, and this apprehended/given structure is belief.

Your last statement, " ... 'seeking the truth' is best made sense of as seeking the best possible 'view' on the 'infinite object' of the world -- in terms of becoming the/an ideal viewer.", I find overflowing with impossibility and delusions of grandeur. — charles ferraro

I welcome the criticism, but do you not see the performative contradiction ? Are you not advertising that you yourself have a better view on what is the case ? And what could 'delusions of grandeur' even mean if there were not better or worse ways of looking at things ?

Is what disturbs you the ambition, and the implicit elitism, involved ? Do you think people who spend years studying fish don't tend to see fish more clearly and completely than others ?

Just to be clear, I don't at all question your knowledge of Kant. I'm just pointing out what I find problematic in his work. I hope you experience the challenge as an opportunity for fun.

which is given to us through the combination of the categories through the schematism into the sensible intuition which we all share. — Moliere

My gripe against a tendency in Kant and a certain tendency in Husserl is what I see as their unwitting semantic cheating. What is sensible intuition supposed to be if not the 'input' of the sense organs ?

I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves...

So the worldly experience of sense organs, along with the worldly social experience of normative-discursive subjectivity, making a unified stream of experience meaningful in the first place, are smuggled in to a theory that thinks it can construct the world from inside out. Hence my OP which makes the ICC* our glorious fundamental ontology's 'necessary being' --an enworldled community of 'ontologists' sharing its founding intention.

*The notion of an “ideal communication community” [ICC] functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas/Philosophy-and-social-theory

I should reiterate that I think Kant is a hero. The theory of the subject is, in my view, the essence of philosophy, and Kant pushed it even slightly beyond its limits. I don't pretend to be an expert on Kant, and it's clear that there are better and worse interpretations, but he occasionally writes very clearly.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm

...the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that 'all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.' You will say: Is not this manifest idealism?

So even space itself is 'nowhere but in our thoughts.' They are 'mere representations in us.'
I am not in the world, the world is in me.

...things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses.

Kant takes the function of the sense organs for granted (a tacit-disavowed direct-realist foundation), yet the sense organs we can know anything about (the familiar eyes and ears of mundane life) are only given as appearance, and yet this appearance is made the source of ...this appearance and the world itself.

If space is 'just in our head,' why would we think sense organs mediate/represent an 'outside' (things-in-themselves, presensuous urstuff) ?

What could “accurately” mean in such a case of private experiences/sensations. — Richard B

I'm not saying this is the final word by any means, but we can't ignore poetry and music.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Notice that it's trivially true that feeling just is not concept. A sentence is not really a painting. We include feelings in our 'inferential ontology' all the time. We can be more or less confident that someone 'gets it.' But our belief about states of affairs of medium size dry goods is also fallible.

No-one knows the true colours of these two objects. — RussellA

Overall I agree with your post, but what can true color even mean here ?

How will I know what you think if your argument is not coherent, consistent and does not contradict itself? This has nothing to do with faith, but with coherency and intelligibility. — Janus

:up:
The discursive self 'is' this coherence. Continual self-contradiction is no longer self-contradiction, but the discursive self dissolving into confusion. First philosophy is explication as much as inference. One need not prove a condition for the possibility of proof, though it seems like one of philosophy's job to fallibly make these conditions explicit.

I offer what I hope is a solid perspectivism within a 'phenomenological direct realist' framework. — plaque flag

You and I can see the same object at the same time. We see the same object in the intentional sense (it's that one shared object we talk about), and yet this single object is given to us differently, as a function of our perspective in a generalized sense, not just in terms of spatial location, but also in terms of a 'prejudicial' position in 'personality space.' And of course I might be nearsighted and you might be colorblind.

..let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as 'pure reason', 'absolute spirituality', 'knowledge in itself': these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity' be...

This passage from Nietzsche is extremely close to Zahavi's understanding of Husserl's direct realism. I haven't emphasized entanglement yet, but to me the subject only makes sense within the same world that it perceives, so that seen and the seer are interdependent like a donut and donuthole, like up and down.

(Times of doubt and exhaustion from the Apollonian-Dionysian dual may be soothed by the jovial and husky voice and insights of Joseph Campbell, along with some fine brandy). — 0 thru 9

:up:
I love Joseph Campbell.

Relevant to the OP:

The so-called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid criticism and argumentation. Similarly, he argues, even the "principle of fallibilism" (which holds that any claim can, in principle, be doubted) is only meaningful within an "institution of argumentation," where some pragmatic rules and norms are not open to question. Thus, contrary to the claim of critical rationalism, the principle of fallibilism does not exclude the notion of philosophical foundations and, Apel argues, certainly could not replace it as the basic principle of rational discourse (1998, chapter 4).
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

You mean, how did we invent writing and other means of information exchange? Do you believe that without qualia, the invention and use of writing becomes inexplicable? — goremand

I don't go out of my way to hate on qualia, 'cuz there's an inferentialist defense of them probably, but I'm not a qualia-slinger myself. I'm a [ phenomenological ] direct realists. Roses are red. I see roses. I don't see some internal image of the rose. I just see the rose. I don't 'believe' in consciousness ---except as the being of the world for a sentient creature. In the human case, the world exists for (is seen by) dramaturgical-discursive subjects responsible for their claims about this world, who experience this one shared world not as a chaos of swirling sound and color but as meaningful totality of equipment and institutions.

Qualia aren't needed here. That concept tempts us toward a mystified understanding of the forest as somehow hidden behind the trees. The world itself appears in (as) the colors of the rainbow and the tweeting of birds, as colorful rainbows and tweeting birds (as a system of already meaningfully related entities).

So we need working eyes that see color (at least shades of gray, to pick out shapes) to invent writing systems. Yes. And we need ears that work to develop a rich musical tradition.