:up:Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal. — Joshs
I don't learn how to feel pain as a result of the social world I may happen to live in, but suffer pain, am able to see the colour red, feel anger, — RussellA
If Structuralism focuses on the way that human experience and behaviour is determined by various structures external to the individual, then it is suffers from the same problem as Behaviourism. — RussellA
Does Husserl’s categorial intuition help us ? Do we just see the plums in the icebox --and 'see' this seeing ?. The inferentialist (structuralist) insight is powerful, but is it not finally grounded in the individual subject’s immersion in the (our) sensual world which is categorically structured ? Does it not otherwise 'float' without its deepest [non-inferential ] 'meaning.' — plaque flag
What other ways are you thinking of, of how the subjective mind of colours, pains, fears and hopes relates to the objective world of rocks, mountains, supernova and gravity. — RussellA
Wittgenstein wrote in PI 43 "For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
As Joseph Rouse wrote about a postmodern view of science - "we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality" — RussellA
Grammar does not reveal the being of things as they are, but as they are for us, that is, how we regard them, what they mean for us. — Fooloso4
But if we regard the differences between species as a matter of degree or variation then we begin to take into account facts that were previously overlooked or disregarded. — Fooloso4
He accepts that there are facts, but facts do not determine concepts. We do not have the concepts we have because the facts are as they are, but if the facts were not as they are our concepts would not be as they are. — Fooloso4
Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions? — Joshs
I think the cult of the "genius" is something that we can do without, and arguably often holds back progress. — Janus
Yet 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. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
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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.
I agree except I don't hold with the idea of "genius" especially the stink of authority it always seems to carry. — Janus
some think that their own faith-based beliefs must be amenable to being rationally argued for. If someone comes on a philosophy forum and tries to argue for such beliefs, they commit a category error and are fair game for rigorous critique. — Janus
the assessment of what seems most plausible ...i s always an individual matter. — Janus
I don't think it follows that everything experienced is available for public scrutiny and assessment in the way that. for example, the observations of the natural sciences, mathematics and logic are. — Janus
I do believe skepticism of phenomenal properties is the way to go. — goremand
Feeling and sight can be accounted for functionally, so yes I have feelings and yes I see colors. — goremand
He critiques the superstition in religion. — Joshs
:up:The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. — Joshs
You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary — Joshs
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComActA theory of rationality thus attempts to reconstruct the practical knowledge necessary for being a knowledgeable social actor among other knowledgeable social actors.
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From a social-scientific point of view, language is a medium for coordinating action, although not the only such medium. The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas, requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding,” which he regards as the “inherent telos” of speech.
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Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
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According to the core principle of his pragmatic theory of meaning, “we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance—in short, when we know what makes it acceptable” (1998b, 232). With this principle, Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to the practice of reason giving: speech acts inherently involve claims that are in need of reasons—claims that are open to both criticism and justification. In our everyday speech (and in much of our action), speakers tacitly commit themselves to explaining and justifying themselves, if necessary. To understand what one is doing in making a speech act, therefore, one must have some sense of the appropriate response that would justify one's speech act, were one challenged to do so.
A speech act succeeds in reaching understanding when the hearer takes up “an affirmative position” toward the claim made by the speaker (TCA 1: 95–97; 282; 297). In doing so, the hearer presumes that the claims in the speech act could be supported by good reasons (even if she has not asked for them). When the offer made by the speaker fails to receive uptake, speaker and hearer may shift reflexive levels, from ordinary speech to “discourse”—processes of argumentation and dialogue in which the claims implicit in the speech act are tested for their rational justifiability as true, correct or authentic.
Another victim of the mighty Amazon. — Quixodian
Fair enough. A quick Googling has me saying that makes sense.I came into philosophy through the Adyar Bookshop. — Quixodian
in the sphere of ethics, or the qualitative dimension, we have a kind of view that all opinions about it are equal. — Quixodian
hat reminds me of something we discussed previously, in an essay by Edward Conze about perennial philosophy - the belief that 'as far as worth-while knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted than others.' — Quixodian
there's a real tension between that and liberal democracies. — Quixodian
I'm certainly frustrated with a lot of what passes as philosophy in our society. — Quixodian
So, I think the answer is, 'very many', and I think it's directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension, the qualitative dimension. — Quixodian
There is a kind of understanding that requires a transformation in the knower, that can only be known first-person. — Quixodian
So it might seem 'mystical or esoteric' in the absence of that. — Quixodian
But the salient point here is that such an ability is 'above nature', so to speak. It is 'above' it, in the same sense that the explanans is above the explanadum - it grasps the underlying causes (logos, in the archaic sense) which make general observations, and therefore explanatory principles, possible. So, I'm persuaded that this faculty is linked to the ability to grasp universals (which have generally been rejected by philosophers since the Enlightenment). For Aristotle, this faculty - 'nous' - was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals possess. For him, nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind grasps definitions in a consistent and communicable way (hence universals as a theory of predication) and whether the mind possesses an innate potential to understand them. And in the broader platonist tradition (philosophy generally) there is undoubtedly an heirarchy of being and knowing, but which has been generally occluded by the over-emphasis on empiricism. — Quixodian
I haven't fully explored that book, either, but suffice to say for this post, that I think the faculty of rational judgement is indeed 'ethereal' or at least incorporeal - and that this is the original meaning of the 'rational soul' in Aristotle and the Western tradition. It was originally understood as the faculty which discerns the real, albeit in a sense that was subsequently lost to contemporary culture (although arguably preserved in Hegel). That faculty, to grasp meaning or essences, is associated with 'nous' which is the source of rationality. — Quixodian
But given that, he recognises the need for levels of being, which correspond also to different levels and kinds of knowing, to which end he adopts and adapts a version of neoplatonic ontology, culminating in what he describes in a later series of talks as 'transcendent naturalism' (that is, naturalism not confined to materialist reductionism). — Quixodian
But can't see any choice but to do that in order to arrive at a meaningful ontology. And that inevitably provokes this kind of response. That's a kind of unstated premise in the description 'flat' - no levels! — Quixodian
In this particular thread, I'm talking about both inferential role semantics (actual inferential norms) and the crucial role they play for philosophers subject to the rationality of the ideal communication community.Isn't what you mean by 'rational' in this thread empirically or scientifically justifiable? — Quixodian
If what you’re striving for is immanence without transcendence, then you’d need a triadic relational structure without pre-existing relata. Consider: rationality (logic) - quality (ideal) - energy (affect). It presents rationality as mutually fundamental, while also allowing for its limitations and doing away with humanism and its hubris without ‘suffocating’ our capacity. And it’s simultaneously dynamic, stable and symmetrical. — Possibility
These are the fields of sense, realms of discourse, where ignorance, unknowing, tears open the horizons for the imagination and intuition to play at will. Fields of faith, if you like. — Janus
I think that disagreement is over the "in itself' that dialectical counterpart to the "for us" that you seem intent on restricting us to in all domains. — Janus
coupled with the demand that if you are going to participate you must be minimally acquainted with the current state of the art, or risk being irrelevant. — Janus
I cannot see "the field of normativity" as consisting in anything more than the principle of consistency. — Janus
from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement. — Joshs
When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. — Joshs
... his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim — Joshs