Basically I think I'd reject foundations, and also I'd loosen the love of certainty (but then the question is how do you maintain discipline such that we are not just daydreamers and mystics?) — Moliere

What I get from Karl-Otto Apel is that we mostly need to disallow performative contradiction. But there's got to be some categorical imperative in there somewhere too perhaps.

Ontology is one of those disciplines that I generally view with skepticism, but from the perspective that our knowledge doesn't touch what the ontologist cares about. If the ontologist is more circumspect in not claiming knowledge, though, then that's where I think ontology begins to be interesting — Moliere

I may be an eccentric in my use of 'ontology,' but I'm hopefully within the limits of decency. I'm focused on ontology as the study of the basic structure of being (biggest picture stuff). I think it's finally the place where we don't cut corners (holism, useful reductive fictions finally pay up.) We can sweep all kinds of things aside in 'proper' sciences, but in ontology we face those gnarly issues of how or whether the subject exists or is entangled with the object. We figure out whether indirect realism is confused baloney or the one sure starting point. Then there's lots of beautiful Heidegger stuff that is tangential here.

As I see it, epistemologies usually depend on ontological assumptions. My own foundational offering is skeptical about skepticism. I'm interested personally in the 'presumption' of the Kantian project, but I'm doing a Kantian project myself about such projects. It seems to me that many humble-sounding 'skeptical' positions ( psychologism , pragmatism, relativism ) are actually bold ontological claims about the subject. They are 'credulously incredulous.' In other words, philosophy marries its gravediggers, because its gravediggers are confused philosophers in denial about their ontological ambitions.

My foundationalism is therefore weirdly skeptical about skeptics who show up and try to pretend they are inside and outside of the game at the same time. Deeper than whatever we may call it is the normative game of giving and demanding reasons. It seems that I'm either appealing to authority of rational norms (perhaps to problematically attack those same norms), or I'm an outright joker or sophist (who need not be taken seriously, which don't mean they can't be fun.)

I think this assumes there's only one rationality. If there are two, though, then you could rationally challenge the possibility of critical discussion on the basis of the rationality chosen without contradiction. — Moliere

Fascinating point, which touches on whether Enlightenment rationalism is truly universal or ethnocentric hubris.

Possible objection, your honor. From what perspective can someone claim there are two rationalities ? Only (I think) from a higher and truer 'actual' synthesizing rationality.

Can a unified subject believe in two, truly opposed 'rationalities' ? In opposed inferential norms ?

In any case, you've opened a juicy can of worms right out of the gate !

*1. Nagel's query about "what is it like to be bat" : the subjective feeling of being a sound-seeing flying mammal? For us primarily visual mammals --- like all consciousness questions --- that un-experienced experience is hard to imagine, and even harder to explain in words. The bat is "entangled" in the same physical world, but experiences different subjective sensations, due to unique features of its embodiment. — Gnomon

In my opinion, the hard problem is made harder (pointlessly harder) by the confusions of dualism. I will perhaps please the Spiritual crowd by agreeing with them that the subject is absolutely crucial. I reject scientific realism understood as the dead pure object existing utterly apart from an embodied subject. But I say we should understand subjectivity as a perspective on worldly being. So consciousness is 'just' the being of the world 'for' or 'from' this or that perspective. And, far as we can say, as empirical rational-critical epistemically humble folk, that's the only way the world exists.

So I agree that a certain kind of scientistic ontology is very much blind to its dependence on subjectivity. From a practical point of view, it's a mostly harmless error, because it doesn't stop the next iPhone from being made, hence my other thread about the worldly foolishness of philosophy. But for the anal retentive fools who really like their stories straight, there's a logical foul in the thought of the mind-independent object. But there's the same foul, structurally speaking, in the independent fleshless outsideless communityless subject. Hence my OP and the thesis of interdependent entanglement ---correlationism with a new coat of paint.

In other words, Phenomenology vs Ontology. For example, "how do you feel about God" versus "do you believe that God is really out there?" — Gnomon

I'd say that people who haven't dipped their nose in the texts have a mistaken view of phenomenology. There's a mundane use of 'pragmatism' that's far from C. S. Peirce. Same with 'phenomenology.'

Indirect realists [ dualists ] are pretty much doomed to misunderstand the project, thinking it focuses on appearances rather than realities. Actually it focuses on how realities are given. The lamp on my desk is real. I can see it as the same lamp from an infinity of shifting perspectives. Or I can look at a picture of Humphrey Bogart and understand that the picture intends (is of) Humphrey Bogart. Or I can grasp that talk of the Eiffel Tower is actually about the Eiffel Tower and not my idea of the Eiffel Tower. Or I can contemplate the difference between my idea of the number 2 just now and the publicly available number 2 which is not merely my idea. You might say that phenomenology is about the way that reality appears, but it is not about appearance as some layer that gets between us and reality. The big difference is that practical ordinary life just looks 'through' the way this stuff is given to what is given in its utility. So the phenomenologist foregrounds what's usually in the background.

Note that such direct realism doesn't pretend to infallibility or omniscience. Reality is profoundly horizonal (we know the mountain has another side, that we could definitely get clearer on Hegel, etc.) We can be wrong, confused, see things at different levels of clarity. The physicists sees the chair in the kitchen in ways that the child can't, for the physicist has learned to enrich the object by weaving it into the scientific image. A philosopher will also see the chair in more complex and complete way than the child.

My point is that indirect realism is often motivated by our fallibility as if the only way to explain being mistaken is in terms of not being mistaken [ about some incorrigible representative image that may or may not somehow (?) be congruent with the pre-psychical (?) unknowable 'Reality.' ] As an escapee from indirect realism's tentacular confusions, I can't help teasing on it.

I suppose you are talking about how we feel about the world of appearances*1, in which we are entangled & embodied, as opposed to what we believe about its ultimate objective cosmic reality. — Gnomon

I'm definitely more interested in what we think and ought to think. As a phenomenological direct realist (a phrase I may have made up), I don't believe in a world of appearances and yet some other world of realities.

I claim there's just the usual world of helicopters and toothaches and prime numbers and marriage vows ---all caught up in the same causal-semantic nexus. This suggests either a radical pluralism that minimizes the drama of the mental/physical dyad or a logical monism that celebrates the necessary if too often disavowed connection of all inferentially interdependent entities. It's so tapwater anti-mystical that it probably sounds mystical. I'd say the view is nothing but self-consciousness, nothing but what we are already doing all the time made explicit to us. It falls out of Brandom's Hegel, but it's implicit (folded up in) the very concept of philosophy as a critical-rational [onto-]logical enterprise.

In language, we refer to things with words, and there is a meaning to referring to something as something. That's all language is really. — Judaka

This sounds like the default 'nomenclature' theory effectively criticized by Saussure and Wittgenstein. I think language is far more complex than that, though it includes references to entities. To name one complexity, Saussure talks of the sign as the fusion of an arbitrary signifier and an arbitrary signified, but the signified is a concept (not the worldly thing that concept may be applied to), and the signifier is form rather than substance (because no one ever says a word exactly the same way twice.)

Then there's Brandom's inferentialism in which the meaning of concepts is caught up in the norms governing the inferential relationships of claims to other claims. Deep water. I'm not sure we'll ever get the bottom of it.

The logic of language is invented, all of it. — Judaka

Don't you think culture is somewhat constrained by biology ? Translation seems to be common and relatively successful. Is it by chance that invented logics are sufficiently close for this to be possible ? Derrida and others have made the point that philosophy pretty much depends on the idea of translatable content -- the idea of ideas, in other words.

The logic for P being true is invented. What does irreducible mean? — Judaka

How much can we say about the blueness of blue ? Blue is just blue. In the same way, assertion might be something so fundamental that assertions about assertions just muddy the water.

Another example : arithmetic with natural numbers is more convincing than any philosophy that might try to offer a foundation for such arithmetic. Candle in the sun.

There's subjectivity in describing things. If you want to articulate the structure of reality, my view is that your aspiration is doomed from the start. Articulation is inherently subjective. — Judaka

This looks like a [ presumably accidental ] performative contradiction. You present the [ objective ] ontological thesis that articulation is inherently subjective. That is of course an articulation of the structure of reality, which by its own testimony is subjective (biased, unjustified, etc.) In my view, many forms of skepticism turn out to be precisely the kind of metaphysical claim they mean to forbid. I've held many such positions myself, especially a far-out neopragmatism, but also the default two-edged psychologism --- which one never abandons, because sometimes we have to think of people as clockwork rather than discursive responsible subjects. [ I'm not going to debate some drunk asshole at a bar --- not that I go to bars anymore -- but try to push buttons that allow for evasion, etc. ]

The word "truth" doesn't carry the weight many seem to think it does, it really needs to be contextualised. — Judaka

Yeah, the deflationists are probably mostly right. Being able to call a statement true has certain metacognitive uses, but mostly 'P is true' doesn't add anything to 'P.'

But what is it to assert P ? Is there something irreducible here ? Is there a raw bottom-most essence of language that just 'is' the conceptual aspect of the real ?

Ontology confuses me, I'm not sure I understand your claims. I may not be a great discussion partner for discussing ontology. — Judaka

I use 'ontology' as a synonym of 'philosophy' in its more 'scientific' ambition to articulate the structure of reality.

When a thing is referred to correctly, that creates "truth". In other words, truth is not a reflection of reality, it's a quality given to a reference. — Judaka

I think you are making the point that assertions are true or false. Some thinkers say that this means there is no truth without discursive beings like ourselves. I think they have a point. Indeed, I agree with thinkers who suggest that we ourselves 'provide' the conceptual aspect of the world. Along these lines, talk of a world independent of human experience is confused or absurd. So I reject scientific realism as nonempirical -- basically a useful fiction that ignores the normatively subjectivity it nevertheless depends on without being forced to notice it. Bad ontology doesn't necessarily prevent technology from improving.

I take it -- and I'm hoping you do too --that the point of the philosophical enterprise is getting clearer on reality. Paraphrasing Kant is related to this task, inasmuch as we find his work helpful, but given that Kant scholars don't agree on the details, it's not exactly newsworthy that you find something to object to in how Brandom transforms this or that piece of his work. But then who can't find something to object to in Kant's work and what he made of his own influences ? Kant makes sense organs their own product, does backflips trying to save his God from Newton. I've read a couple of Beiser's fat books on that era, so I'm not tempted toward anything like hero worship or scripture quoting, though I do count Kant as a hero. Let me stress that I don't think either of us are here to quote scripture.

I vote for Kant (and Brandom and Husserl) as possibility rather than substance. I mean we should look to their radical intention and forgive them their absurdities, build on what is strongest and purest in their work. I know you hate OLP, and I'll join you and Popper in my insistence on looking through imperfect expressions to charitably finding illuminating concepts. Lots of linguistic issues are probably just people being antisocial --not wanting to play nice.

Brandom's scorekeeping notion of rationality (or at least his shrewd emphasis on this notion) looks like a breakthrough to me. The judgment and not the concept is semantically fundamental because it's the minimum unit one can be responsibly for. Fucking illuminating, I say. Inferentialist semantics is also brilliant and a true continuation of the Copernican revolution in philosophy. The subject ( the criticial-rational ontological community )is not on the outside eavesdropping at some closed door like a servant. Our own normative conceptuality is profoundly entangled with (or even simply is ) the conceptual dimension or aspect of being / reality/ world.

The mistake I'm arguing against is precisely the 'naturalisation of reason' i.e. regarding the rational subject (you and I) as the object of natural science. — Quixodian

I can at least agree that approaching the discursive self as a mere piece of clockwork (a cog in the amoral machine or causal nexus of Nature) is a performative contradiction in its absurd cancellation of the normative dimension of reality that makes science science to begin with. Psychologism is tempting and common and ... self-undermining.

To be sure, there are contexts where we are practically motivated to think of others as machines, but a serious ontology must be holist ( honest ! not leave out something crucial ) and avoid this self-subverting ignorance of its own normative intention.

The self is the 'unknown knower, the unseen seer.' Granted, that is from Vedanta, rather than from Kant, but it is in this precise respect that Kant and Vedanta are said to converge. — Quixodian

To me the same kind of thing is maybe be said by being is not a being (the famous ontological difference.) Both Husserl and Heidegger had their own version of this. I prefer to say that subjectivity is the world (being) from/through a perspective. But I suspect you, like me, are aiming at the 'ineffable' (tautological) thereness of the there.

It seems we have reached the end of our disagreement such as it might have been. — Janus

:up:

Incidentally, précis of 'transcendental apperception' which might be relevant to the 'Apel' quotation. — Quixodian

Nice. And let me say that I count myself as a transcendental philosopher. Like you, I'll quote to clarify my meaning.

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

My latest thread is an attempt to let Y be the claim that 'I am a philosopher (an ontologist.)' Then X is everything that must come along with that, for Y to make sense. The enabling conditions of the ontologist are the necessary beginnings of his ontology.

More locally, I'm arguing that 'I am a subject' does not makes sense outside of all context. The notion of an interior depends on an exterior. That sort of thing.

Even the source you quote, David Hume, says that he never discerns a self, but only a stream of thoughts. — Quixodian

You quote David Hume to argue that David Hume does not exist.

I get it. I understand what's potent in Hume's attempted reduction of us to a stream of thoughts, but that seems to help my point more than yours. Why should a stream of thoughts be taken as (understand itself as ) a unified self-referential self ? This is where Brandon's take on Kant is so useful. The discursive self (you and me and David Hume doing philosophy) is temporally organized by a responsibility to keep its story straight. Ethics is [ part of ] first philosophy.

Since Brandom’s Kant also holds that an entity is responsible for its judgments and its acts just in case it is capable of taking responsibility for those acts and judgments, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that having a mind is a matter of the minded entity taking responsibility for what it believes and does. Put in slightly more Kantian terms, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that the unity of apperception is achieved through a process in which an agent unifies her judgments by coming to believe what she ought to believe (has reason to believe) given her other judgments and the content of the concepts ingredient in those judgments.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/

Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.
...
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.

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

The "Cartesian move" as you call it can, in fact, be performed by any person who makes up the human family who wishes to perform it. And the truth of the Cogito Sum can be verified by any person who wishes to verify it in the first person present tense mode. — charles ferraro

I don't think you understand me. Of course we currently living ( embodied ) subjects can make that move. The issue is whether some isolated worldly tribeless bodiless ghosts makes sense. I claim that it's just science fiction with a serious plot hole. We can imagine ourselves with no brains in our skull --but only when and because there is a brain in our skull. We can imagine a radically isolated bodiless subject, but only because we are genuine subjects. We can say 'round square' and 'circle without a perimeter,' but we can't take these phrases to the bank. We end up unwittingly babbling like mystics, sure that we are the opposite of credulous, accidentally pushing our skepticism into reckless fantasy -- not seeing that our fear of error is the error itself.

I agree that the argument is apodictic, that it can't be plausibly denied. But when you ask 'what is this "I"?, if you're seeking an objective response to that question, there won't be one, as the self is never an object of cognition (save for in a metaphorical sense of being an 'object of enquiry'. I take that as the meaning of the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl.) — Quixodian

Why say the 'I' is never an object of cognition ? You are making claims about it. Much of philosophy is an attempt to clarify the discursive self. Still more is about whether the world is given directly or indirectly the subject --- the kind of being awareness has. In this context, I claim that the subject is a the world from a perspective, and that we know only of a world which is given through perspectives in this way.

My point is that this 'pure' subject is a circle without a perimeter --- semantically broken, however tempting. It's a sci-fi trope that's entertaining but doesn't make sense.

As living embodied discursive subjects, you and I indeed find it absurd to deny ourselves. Karl-Otto Apel fixes the old move: we critically examine our situation, therefore we are (we exist) in an encompassing world together with a working language. Descartes assumed too little.

According to Apel,... the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived...Apel's strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification (1980).

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

I claim that the concept of philosophy itself has intense ontological implications. Human normative conceptuality is not outside looking in but the conceptual structure or aspect of reality. The alternative is irrationalism, if not obviously so.

The problem is semantic. What is this 'I' ? The unity of a monologue ? How is such an assumption justified ? Why do we not just have a stream of words ? Or why isn't it 17 people arguing who gets to control the hand ? And what meaning can justification have in the absence of a community ? Or in the absence of the world that is other than me that I can be wrong about ?

The whole framework of autonomous rationality is smuggled in without apology, as if personhood wasn't essentially and fundamentally normative, discursive, and social.

To me the Cartesian move (if executed at the level of the single human and not the species) tacitly assumes the absurdity of a private logic, a private semantics, the intelligibility of truth or justification in the absence of an transcending other (encompassing community, encompassing world.)

The moral is, we see what we're culturally conditoned to see. We all have a consensus worldview, nowadays highly diverse and fractured, of course, due to the enormous variety of information and imagery we're now presented with. But even in that context, our understanding is conditioned by cultural consensus. — Quixodian

:up:

An important insight. Taken too far, one has a self-subverting relativism, yet culture clearly plays a role in perception. We might say that a community lives in its own lifeworld, just as thinkers have talk about the human Unwelt.

Some weird stuff happens here though. Because that means that we can't see around our community anymore than we can see around our species. But we keep pretending we can --presumably because philosophers (for instance) get more distance on their culture than some its other members.

What do you mean by methodological solipsism? And how does that lead to direct realism? By my lights, direct realism is only possible if we were not representing the world—and we clearly are (by my lights). — Bob Ross

This quote from Hume is what I have in mind:

We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.

With Kant, even time and space are placed 'in' the mind. So the brain-in-itself may not even be 3-dimensional. There may be no such brain. One can try to imagine (perhaps 'illegally') a radically different reality without brains that we experience as (represent as ) including brains.

But we only embraced this representational approach in the first place because of familiar causal relationships between brains and eyes and roses that we took for real.

,

Yeah, I don't agree with that at all; I think all the evidence points to the fact that the only world we share is the publicly accessible empirical world. — Janus

We might reflect too that evidence can only make sense as belonging within such a public world. Rational inquiry presupposes the world.

We all live with our own private mythologies, and I would not have it any other way. — Janus

:up:

Feuerbach is great on the beauty of this plurality, writing of

a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

I think there are things which are publicly available and things which are not, but I don't think of any of them as unreal or non-existent on account of that difference. For me the difference just consists in the degree of determinability with which we can talk about different things. — Janus

That sounds good to me. And there are real things that no everyone can see. A biologist or a mathematician has seen patterns that others haven't. Those patterns are part of potential human experience, connected causally and semantically to more familiar and publicly accessible entities.

So, as an example the idea of an infinite being could just be the dialectical counterpart of our experience of finite beings, or it could be an intellectual intuition of something transcendent: the problem being that there is no way to tell which is the case. — Janus

I agree. This goes along with my self-conscious embrace of an 'empirical' [skeptical, critical, rational] ontology as merely one path among others -- which doesn't mean that I wouldn't fight against those who tried to censor forcefully convert me, but it does mean I won't try to censor or forcefully convert others.

I'm not saying that we just see appearances, but that we just see things as they appear, and can appear, to us. — Janus

:up:

To me that sounds like direct realism. Respectfully, what work is being done by 'as they appear' ? Are you thinking in Flatland terms (a great little book) ? Perhaps in Reality there's a sphere, but we flatlander humans see only a circle, a projection of the sphere into our smaller world ? If so, it's a beautiful idea. But I still find it a bit paradoxical, as if a beautiful analogy is leading us astray.

First let me support me claim about indirect realism, because I think you raise a good but different issue.

The indirect realist agrees that the coffee cup exists independently of me. However, through perception I do not directly engage with this cup; there is a perceptual intermediary that comes between it and me. Ordinarily I see myself via an image in a mirror, or a football match via an image on the TV screen. The indirect realist claim is that all perception is mediated in something like this way.

https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/

Just to clarify, I'm saying that the indirect realist uses an 'image' of the brain and its (imaginary?) causal relationship with images of coffee cups to argue that all we get directly are images.

This is like a lawyer using documents as evidence to argue that the documents are forgeries. It's some perverse twist on people quoting the bible to prove the bible is the word of God.

Only when considered as objects - when you look at the brain as a neuroscientist or eyes as an ophthalmologist, then you’re viewing them as objects. But in the act of seeing, the eyes and the central nervous system are not objects but integral constituents. — Quixodian

We agree that the human nervous system is special. The question here might be where or what is the self ? In this context it's the being of the world in its fused sensual and conceptual fullness from a certain 'perspective' [literally in the visual sense, metaphorically in many others.]

But the free/responsible discursive subject is radically temporal --- fundamentally dragging a past behind and on the way to an ideal future, keeping and making promises. To say discursive is to say conceptual. This is where timebinding is crucial and all the beautiful Hegelian stuff about the cloud self comes in : Zeitgeist, delocalized spirt, the immortal graveleaping self-explicating Conversation, dependent on human nervous systems in general but on no particular nervous system.

The brain-in-itself is represented as the brain-for-us. It is ‘mystical’ only insofar as we will never come to know it absolutely with our currently evolved minds (i.e., brains-in-themselves). — Bob Ross

In my estimation, it's much cleaner to say that we'll never run out of things to learn about the brain.

Given that we can't look around our own cognition, the brain-for-us just is the brain-in-itself. I think we have a nonobvious roundsquare situation here.

Perhaps it's because we can look around one another's cognition [ biases , limitations ] that we try to radicalize this and look around all human cognition.

What experience have or could we have apart from the [ life-world-entangled ] human nervous system ? Yet philosophers talk of a radically and explicitly anti-empirical concept as the truly real instead of as a sort of liar's paradox or outright mysticism.

The charitable expression of circularity, which is indeed foolish, yet at the same time, inescapable. — Mww

:up:

Hermeneutic circle comes to mind. Also early Heidegger's talk on 'prescience' about coming into the circle the right way. It'd be weird maybe if first philosophy wasn't circular.

But what physical properties, at any level, explain the various aspects of consciousness - such as my experience of blueness, or my awareness at different levels - that exist on top of the physical properties that explain vision and behavior? — Patterner

I think there's a nondualist way to do justice to subjectivity. If we think of consciousness as the being of the world 'for' a subject and from a perspective, then of course the world is blue in some places and sounds like a trumpet in other places. We can even explain my seeing blue in terms of wavelengths and explain wavelengths in terms of mathematical intuitions and witnessings of successful experiments.

All of these entities are already in the same causal-inferential nexus. Flat ontology. Equal dignity for promises and quarks.

Because we're only getting appearances from organs that are, themselves, appearances. — Patterner

Right. They take the sense organs as real in order to argue they are not real. But they don't notice the dependence on the thing they cancel --- because the move was inherited, traditional. And because it captures the way the world is given perspectively but misunderstands that it's the world that's given and not some mediating image.

People felt compelled to interpret our fallibility in terms of us being wrapped up like a humunculus in a bubblescreen about which we could not be wrong, though the screen could fail to match up with a reality that was now utterly inaccessible.

He did inherit from others the so-called methodological solipsism…..how could he not, being immersed in academia — Mww

Indeed, and I myself think there's something profound in MS, but it must be applied to the species as a whole. Part of it is true 'locally,' in that the world is only given perspectively. But the time-binding sociality of reason must be acknowledged. Even given perspectively the world is given to a cultural being that sees a shofar or a tobacco pipe, not some random shape.

I am me because there are others who are not me. I am 'inside' because there's stuff on the outside I'm not responsible for or in control of in the same way. My internal monologue is 'one' (mono) because 'one is one around here.' I am held responsible as a single body for keeping my story straight. Two or three souls per body would make reward and punishment difficult.

More to the point you mention, our common sense understanding of sense organs and brains and worldly objects is what inspires the thesis of mediation. An image between us and Reality is postulated --an iron curtain. So now the eyes and ears and brain are mere representations of who knows what. Yet they inspired the very hypothesis that negates their evidentiary value. Note that all else that makes a subject meaningful as such is also mere representation of who knows what.


***
I don't think it makes sense to doubt as a philosopher and not a madman the conditions of possibility for rational conversation. So we gotta be in the same world, gotta be talking about the same objects and not private representations of them. We gotta mostly have concepts in the same way. Things can be blurry and imperfect. Direct realism doesn't mean no mistakes. Your eyes are better than mind. Joey is deaf. Timmy didn't grasp the drama of the situation. Indeed we never exhaustively see even familiar objects. So I think we see eyes and not representations of eyes, though I don't doubt the complexity of the seeing process. But the 'I' that sees is a discursive social self, best understood perhaps in terms of responsibility for the claims it makes --instead of via the red herring of biological details, as if I'm in my own skull, waiting for electric signals to get to me. Though electric signals are just representational illusion, so what am I talking about ? I might not have a brain, etc. [ I'm not saying this is your belief. I'm reacting to common hyperskeptical indirect realisms that appear on the forum -- also arguing for direct realism by arguing against the rival.]

n the simplest terms, if a method achieves its goal then that is a truth, and it's this kind of truth we seek, not "that which is in accordance with reality", barely anyone gives a shit about that. — Judaka

I applaud the insistence of relevance. I agree with your cynicism (hence my thread on the foolishness of ontology). But you seem to be on the edge of performative contradiction. What's the truth about the goal you have in making that very claim ? Let's assume you want to convince me. Then the statement is true because I believe it ?

Let's imagine many different individuals have basically the same belief or method, but some of them succeed and others fail their goal. Is the statement both true and false ? I like the idea that 'P is true' is largely just asserting P. Now the essence of assertion can be clarified endlessly, I suspect.

But maybe let's shift from the relationship between language and the world to that between one claimant and another.

The parrot, the photocell, and the chunk of iron can serve as instruments for the detection of red things or wet things, because they respond differentially to them. But those responses are not claims that things are red or wet, precisely because they do not understand those responses as having that meaning or content. By contrast, when you respond to red things or wet things by saying “That’s red,” or “That’s wet,” you do understand what you are saying, you do grasp the content, and you are applying the concepts red and wet. What is the difference that makes the difference here? What practical know-how have you got that the parrot, the photocell, and the chunk of iron do not? I think the answer is that you, but not they, can use your response as the premise in inferences. For you, but not for them, your reponse is situated in a network of connections to other sentences, connections that underwrite inferential moves to it and from it. You are disposed to accept the inference from “That’s red,” to “That’s colored,”, to reject the move to “That’s green,”, and to accept the move to it from “That’s a stoplight.” You are willing to make the move from “It’s wet,” to “There is water about,” to infer it from “It is raining,” to take it as ruling out the claim “We are in a desert,” and so on. Because you have the practical ability to sort inferences in which it appears as a premise or conclusion into good ones and bad ones, your response “That’s red,” or “It’s wet,” is the making of a move in a language game, the staking of a claim, the taking of a stand that commits you to other such claims, precludes some others, and that could be justified by still others. Having practical mastery of that inferentially articulated space—what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the space of reasons”—is what understanding the concepts red and wet consists in. The responsive, merely classificatory, non-inferential ability to respond differentially to red and wet things is at most a necessary condition of exercising that understanding, not a sufficient one. — Brandom

So this is more of what I'd call us realizing our ontological centrality. This entangles the conceptual aspect of the world with the human community's inferential standards.

I think it's fair to say that language isn't part of reality, and the categorisation of a dog as a dog isn't either. — Judaka

I can understand the motivation, but I'd say that a crucial ontological breakthrough occurs precisely when we stop pretending that we as philosophers are ever on the outside looking in. I made such a big deal about critical rationality because the concept of the project of philosophy has profound implications with tend to go unnoticed. Any ontological thesis that contradicts a condition for the possibility of rational discourse is a performative contradiction.

This means that our inquiry is not outside of reality looking in but rather its logical center. Semantic inferentialism suggests that we think of all entities (itches and cows and complex numbers) on the same 'layer' of reality. Scrap dualism, I say, because no entity or concept is intelligible apart from the entire network of all other concepts. 'Mental and 'physical' entities are semantically and causally interdependent, so the distinction is a mere tool among so many others, nothing absolute.

Logic/semantics is fundamental, not something trapped outside looking in --- not for 'we the logical' who assume before any ontological claim that such a claim must be justified. This is not to say that the world is only concepts. Of course it's not. But philosophers traffic in concepts. Ontology is conceptual. We still want composers and painters. And even here the critique of logocentrism is rational as a reminder that being (the world) is not merely conceptual.

My point is that this argument of mine is the product of my creative effort, it involves my biases, and my intentions and serves my goals. It is not mere truth. — Judaka

Agreed.

I imagine you are using the word "truth" to roughly reference "being in accordance with reality". — Judaka

A deep issue ! Articulating the essence of articulation.

Let me ask a simple question, is a dog a dog? I think most people would agree, that it's objectively true, that a dog is a dog. But why? I think it's fair to say that language isn't part of reality, and the categorisation of a dog as a dog isn't either. So, it must be logic that makes it true. — Judaka

I think you bring up a fascinating issue. The concept dog is different from any actual dog, yet in some sense it makes that actual dog possible as a dog. This last claim is controversial, and I would defend it from within an anthropocentric phenomenological direct realist framework.

In such a framework, conceptuality (language) is very much a part of a reality. The world apart from human conceptuality is a sometimes useful fiction --and an ontological mistake? That's part of the essence of the OP. Our culture-loaded human nervous system is profoundly entangled with the world.

I take you to be saying something nobody in their right mind would disagree with, so long as you think of it that way, then we're probably on the same page. — Judaka

:up:

Yes, it's intended to make explicit what is obvious once we notice/recall it.

We need a framework, we need goals, we need selection biases, and philosophy provides these, these and not the "whole truth". I say it's a limitation, but that may have been misleading, my intention is to say it can't be the whole truth. Having to "arrange truth" isn't a flaw, it's just necessary. — Judaka

We agree very much on this. One of my pet themes is the 'hero myth' that structures a personality. We need a grand metanarrative or basic map to navigate this world. I'd call this the ontological necessity of existentialism. The world is given to or through entire personalities which seem to be organized around 'ego ideals' or a sense of the heroic. I live toward some conception or image or 'statue' of the virtuous person. I suffer from a sense of distance from this ideal, when I've made a serious mistake.

But I'd stress that we also contrast ourselves with others. Virtue is purity from taint. I'm not irrational, racist, stupid, greedy, ugly, incompetent, unspiritual, superstitious, uptight, sloppy....like all those other people. I call this finite personality because it's bounded and exclusive -- defined by exclusion, projecting a hated shadow --- its disavowed temptations and tendencies.

We have a goal, an aim, and to accomplish it, one must have the right understanding, using the right logic. What is "right" is what accomplishes the goal. You're demonstrating that you're doing this in every response to me. — Judaka

I take you to be articulating a valuable pragmatist insight. I read the neopragmatist Rorty very intensely and closely, and I was strongly influenced by his anarchism. Here's a taste:

In Rorty’s view, both Dewey’s pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, “have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater’s snout or the bowerbird’s skill at weaving” (TP, 48).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/

There's something liberating and 'transcendent' in this (allowing us to see our vocabularies more from the outside), but there's also something absurd in this kind of seductively sophisticated irrationalism. Rorty's intention is to tell the truth about how things are --- about the intrinsic nature of things. In my view, antiphilosophers turn out to be philosophers with a new lever for prying at old issues. But in their vanity they think they've transcended the game that buries its gravediggers.

You say that : what is "right" is what accomplishes the goal. I see the value in this, but I maintain that you are still trying to tell me a truth here. It's not just instrumental. If it is, it has no authority. It's only true if I believe it, in other words, given that your desire is presumably to persuade.

I think it is easier to honestly express the views we are conscious of holding, than it is to determine whether the views we consciously hold are coming from a place of honesty or dishonesty, meaning from a place of impartial rationality as opposed to other motivations. — Janus

I'm very much with you on the angst and difficultly of self-critical self-knowledge.