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Fascinating stuff.

Do I think any actual conversation is stably or reliably ideal ? No. But I don't think Apel does either. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of critical autonomous rationality. We await the descent of New Jerusalem.

it is a wrong or injustice that arises because the prevailing or hegemonic discourse actively precludes the possibility of this wrong being expressed. — Joshs

I mentioned an "ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument."

Are you sure we are disagreeing ? Is the target bad or do you just think we'll never hit that target ? Because I don't think we'll hit the target often or at all. But I've never drawn a perfect circle either. Yet the concept of the circle helps make those imperfect circles circles to begin with. I grasp the failure of a communication structure in the light an ideal or telos.

Cool. I’d go as far as to take it a step further, and call it the limits of reason. But then, I suppose speculation presupposes reason, so….close enough. — Mww

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Yours may be better. I also like to think about critical rationality explicating its own nature. The self-investigation of reason, which is naturally applied to this very investigation. Feedback. It's very beautiful and difficult and 'foolish.' One 'should' get rich using intelligence more productively. But I can't help it. Some people gotta play saxophone. I gotta try to do philosophy.

All very well said. I agree. And I'm not a Platonist, because my ontology is resolutely anthropocentric. Not on principle, but just on logical necessity. Don't want to speak beyond my experience. I never could figure out how to look around all human cognition and peep at Reality naked. And then I questioned what naked Reality could even mean.

But the diagonal proof is beautiful. No matter how many gods you worship, there are always more ... — unenlightened

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The resolution to this "hidden dualism" is to recognize that the brain and its functions are also representations and, thusly, the brain-in-itself is not what one ever studies in a lab. — Bob Ross

Undeniably fascinating insight, but I must object.

It's the familiar experience of the brain in causal relationships with other familiar objects that motivates [ a paradoxical ] indirect realism in the first place.

It's because indirect realism makes the brain it depends on an 'illusion' that it fails.

The brain-in-itself (if you continue bravely along the path as you seem to be doing) starts to sound 'mystical as fuck.' I don't think it can be given meaning that it doesn't steal from 'mere appearance.'

I can follow your thinking to some degree. Your point is justified and fascinating within the framework of indirect realism -- but the framework don't work, seems to me.

I claim that methodological solipsism only works properly at the level of the entire species. But this gives us an anthropocentric direct realism.

The fundamental condition of existence is alterity. (c) — Quixodian

It is a classic theme. Derrida tried to make difference god.

Is Reality is a self-differentiating self-perceiving self-thinking godstuff ? Maybe kinda sorta ?

Or Saussure: Language is a system of differences without positive elements. But this structuralism is like taking an X-ray of a language. Useful fiction. Abstraction.

It doesn't matter how we carve the chess pieces if we give them their usual roles. But we need to carve them in some way or another. Same deal with information that moves from medium to medium, or the conceptual content that moves from language to language. [ Pure information is the 'same' bad idea as pure matter without a subject. (Structurally speaking .) ]

Usually philosophy is critical of something, but Kantian philosophy on the other hand, is critical of philosophy itself. Or maybe the general metaphysical discipline specifically. — Mww

Well I admit I'm speaking a high and fuzzy level of generality. But I take critical philosophy to be interested in articulating the limits of speculation, the boundary between sense and nonsense.

I actually had the later positivists (Vienna circle) in mind. I think Popper's great, and he was on its circumference, reliably sober and realistic, in my view, while they sometimes went too far.

Husserl: the tricky thing is that experience in a direct realist framework is just being. But Husserl is not simply or obviously or consistently a direct realist. (I can't help but blur him with Heidegger, too, and also keep from doing my own damned ontology.) And I'm only looking more deeply into him recently. So I don't pretend to expertise. Extremely prolific/creative guy. I can say that much.

I think we can better understand subjectivity by perceiving individuals as being overburdened with truths and being required to organise them. In organising them, we must make choices, that is subjectivity. — Judaka

I agree that some serious organization is going on. 'Choices' seems correct, but I think we need to add a temporal dimension. I am responsible for what I have been and done. I am my past in the mode of no longer being it. I am my future in the mode of not being able yet to be it. [ Sartre ]. I am the history from which I'm trying to awake, thrown projection. Temporal, aspirational, responsible.

And what of this activity we're engaged in right now ? Critical rationality. You can disagree with me but not with yourself. Same for me. We both appeal to norms that transcend us both, finding our better self in a 'projected' 'ideal' perfected rational subject.

Taking a view of what the reader needs to know, or what the report needs to convey is necessary, but demonstrates how the goal is not truth. — Judaka

Respectfully, is this statement itself a lie then ? Or should I at least be careful not to assume your intention to be honest with me ? Are you not telling me how things are ?

I grant that we curate for relevance.

In my experience, it's way too easy for us humans to wander into performative contradiction.

Given that all observation (perception) is theory-laden, in essence, learning new knowledge can be like opening a door that lets you peer into a completely new dimension of reality. — Pantagruel

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There is no subject without object, no object without subject. — Pantagruel

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Using a phenomenological method, having interviewed many people who have that same experience, one may come to the conclusion that time is indeed slower when you put your hand on a hot stove and quicker when you are spending time talking to someone you find attractive. This is saying something about time. — PhilosophyRunner

That's not phenomenology. Not if we mean Husserl & company. I recommend Zahavi's Husserl’s Phenomenology (Cultural Memory in the Present) if you are interested. Obviously primary texts are great, but Zahavi's book is map through the maze of a long career. Heidegger's The Concept of Time is also great. I mean the 100 page first-draft of Being and Time (there are several texts with that name, confusingly.) It's packed with the hits and less overwhelming than the final published draft.

I don't know where I sit precisely. I do believe we 'construct' the world, our cognitive apparatus has foibles and limitations and there is embodied cognition - along the lines of phenomenology. I'm not sure any of this matters to how I go about my daily business. — Tom Storm

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Hence the 'foolishness' of the philosopher who 'wastes time' on such things --and yet the intention is to write nonfiction.

Mind is, in this sense, ontologically prior to the physical, not in the sense of being a class of object or substance that temporally exists before the physical, but as the fundamental ground for which and in which the physical is made manifest. — Quixodian

I think you make an important point, but of course I say that there's entanglement and interdependence.

In some sense, spirit is a self-modification of nature, an emergence from nature (cultural beings emerged from subcultural beginnings, presumably by evolution). And in another sense, nature is a product of spirit (the concept of nature is cultural, developed within the timebinding Conversation of spirit).

An experiment is performed. A machine registers the outcome. This is when the "collapse" occurs. An hour later a scientist reads the measurement - his reading doesn't mystically create an answer. — jgill

This is great issue. Even without the collapse, it's still interesting.

At the moment, I don't think the 'answer' is complete or whole or intelligible apart from its place in the human project of physics.

I think the difficulty here is the red herring of independence of physics and its objects from any particular embodied physicist.

I think we are tempted to make a mistake of trying to 'see around' all physicists at the same time and then think we can still talk about a 'measurement.' It's subtle point, but I think we are smuggling in our own current brain-activity and cultural training when we imagine 'numbers' appearing on a screen and no one in the room ----except we are in that room (as security cameras?), and the room itself is in our imagination.

( As an empiricist, I'm compelled to question stories that aren't backed by human experience. In a certain sense, measurements without measurers are ghost stories. Along these lines, ain't no world to speak of without a living human brain around....)

Imagine a guy called Luke. It is fair enough if Luke takes after Feyeraband and it is fair enough if he takes after Popper. However I hope that whichever he takes after, he stays true to the assumptions underlying it. If Luke adopts Feyeraband but also believes strongly that many theories are pseudo-science, then I find that self contradictory. The same is true if Luke adopts Popper and believes there is no such thing as pseudo-science. And so on. — PhilosophyRunner

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Nice ! You are very close in this to my understanding of a minimal foundation for inquiry. Thou shalt not engage in performative contradiction. Also, Brandom writes about the discursive self as responsible for the coherence of its claims. A discursive self 'is' this time-smeared quest for coherence.

This is basically a genuine limit on skepticism and relativism. What can't be rationally doubted is the conditions for the possibility of rationality. Now people can be crazy, but that's a different issue.

As a first point of call, what I hope to get to myself, is a place where an understanding of science is self consistent. — PhilosophyRunner

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I still believe that the development of science would have been much slower without fossil fuels, but of course I wasn't wishing to deny the importance of mathematics and geometry in science. — Janus

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Pinker's Enlightenment Now ! (however one feels about its tone) is great on the importance of any radical change in the cost of energy. In a certain sense, energy 'is' food. Energy, like money, is exchangeable for whatever we need, in other words. So all kinds of leisure and scientific equipment become possible as a direct result of cheaper energy --- so I very much agree with you. And then scientific progress decreases the cost of energy further, and so on. Exponential timebinding primates. We 'had' to end up where we are, threatening our own biosphere, caught up in a prisoner's dilemma.

I’m a firm supporter of the relation between the human intellect, and the method by which the world is understood by means of it. It’s not weird at all, it’s impossible that is could be otherwise. — Mww

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Well I shouldn't be surprised. I think we both appreciate Kant and (in my case, anyway) the Kantian 'intention' or project in general. Positivism and phenomenology are 'basically' Kantian, seems to me. Perhaps all [ critical ] philosophy is.

YIKES!!! A Young Hegelian?!?! Schopenhaur’s favorite targets, and he t’weren’t proper gentlemanly about it, neither. — Mww

Feuerbach is underrated, I think.

Mathematics is fabulous! — unenlightened

It really is (even if there is some irony in your remark.) Ever look into Cantor's ordinals and cardinals ? Beautiful stuff. Just finding a way to enumerate the rationals. Or seeing that a single infinite sequence of bits is also (is easily read as ) a countably infinite list of sequences of bits.The impossibly of enumerating all such sequences. Seductive apriori formal-intuitive science.

For Husserl, the brain is indeed ‘real’, but then he analyzed the real as a higher level construction of intentional acts, just as real spatial objects are constituted out of correlated perceptions. — Joshs

Constituted without the help of brains ? I love Husserl, but I won't follow him just anywhere.

I continue to claim that we can't circumvent the assumption of an embodied social-linguistic community in an environment together. Bracketing is fine, but we can't forget that bracketing is a reduction, resulting therefore in a potentially useful fiction / map.

All facts of nature for Husserl are contingent and relative. Consequently, we can’t use the ‘reality’ of the brain as an explanatory grounding for the constitutive process out of which it emerges as an ideal object. — Joshs

Note that you write we can’t use the ‘reality’. Who is this brainless we ? I think it's Feuerbach's 'we' of 'Reason.' It floats 'above' (independently) of any particular embodied human subject, but it is simply not intelligible as independent of all such flesh.

In Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, then, the lived body is a lived center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world.
https://iep.utm.edu/husspemb/

This lived body is always with us, even if we ignore it for this or that purpose. I cannot make sense of human experience that doesn't involve a living brain. Some people believe in ghosts and that Christ rose from the dead. I don't.

I can make sense of studying how the world is given to us rather than focusing on what is given. This 'how' tends to be 'transparent.' It's undervalued and ignored, until a Husserl comes along.

Form is the general, and substance the particular, and they are two aspects on one world. — unenlightened

Mathematicians might use a minimal substance of symbols in order to play with form with the 'weight' of substance minimized.

As for philosophy itself, I think it is reducible to every other subject and their interrelations. — sime

I guess my issue is that this itself is a philosophical claim. Yet I don't care about academic departments. So I'm talking about a mode of discourse that digs into the most basic concepts.

Gödel studied Husserl. It's easy to understand why. One of the basic questions for me in philosophy is : what the f*** are we talking about, really ? It's not just whether a statement is warranted that matters, but also what it means in the fullest and most robust sense.

I think it is most useful to consider the academic disciplines of pure Mathematics and logic as not having subject matter in themselves, but as defining semantical norms of representation that facilitate the translation, coordination and comparison of language games that do possess subject matter. — sime

Again, reasonable. But I'm tempted to say that they articulate norms that are 'found' or 'given.' This is not to deny creativity altogether. I just personally think there's an 'intuitive constraint' on our freedom. I can't put it under a microscope of course.

Mathematicians are also "spiritual advisors", for mathematics and logic are normative disciplines. — sime

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That's a reasonable claim. I don't think it's the whole story though. I have some of Cantor's original work in translation, and it's very much an 'intuitive' enterprise. The structures are 'there' for other mathematicians and he's studying them ---does not see himself as an inventor or a formalist.

The enterprise is normative in the sense that a scientist strives for the truth. But he's like a naturalist counting spider's eggs. He is articulating or disclosing a reality that was there waiting for the light to find it. [ I'd say it was implicit in human cognition or something, avoiding all-out Platonism. ]

I don't deny that other workers in the field had very different intentions.

Form and substance - the first dualism. I sometimes call them 'stuff and arrangements'. I would say that mathematicians explore the possible arrangements of anything- pattern, chaos, order, disorder, symmetry, asymmetry. whereas physicists and biologists look to explore the actual arrangement of stuff. — unenlightened

Yeah that sounds right !

Some mathematicians seem to think that there can be, or are arrangements of nothing. It makes no sense to me. — unenlightened

As you may know, set theory brilliantly (weirdly) builds everything from the empty set. I visualized it as Bubbleverse. The empty set is an empty circle. So it's circles inside circles inside circles, and one can build up to the real numbers and beyond. Nothing but circles. Empty circle at the center.

Cantor used vertical bars above his symbols of sets to indicate an act of abstraction. I respect that he included the subject in this sense.

Anyway, I understand your objection, but I'm partial to something like mathematical structuralism. Numbers are basically roles in structures. Their essence is in their relationship to other such roles. Holism. We don't say what a number is without describing the whole system. Same with objects in the lifeworld and the meanings of linguistic concepts, in my view. A single continuous semantic blanket.

It is this constant category error that trips people up into not understanding any "hard problem" — schopenhauer1

This is a rich issue. Many purveyors of the hard problem are way too cocky about their grip on the concept of consciousness. But I understand their gripe as a reaction to certain thinkers on the other side who might make things too easy for themselves. My musings on the worship of technology are in a similar spirit. Philosophy is 'silly' to the degree that it doesn't help/hinder technology.

I personally found it clarifying to think of consciousness in terms of the being of the world grasped from a certain perspective. Direct realism. We all peep at the one and only world. The rest is round squares.

Too many purveyors of the hard problem take indirect realism for granted. They also take a sort of private language thesis for granted, missing that critical rationality is deeply dependent on the publicity or trans-egoic validity of its concepts.

Yet there 'is' sensation and feeling. Right ? Yes? Or at least roses are red and trumpets are blaring.

so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Ed Feser

I agree that they can't be identified. We need only look at the different roles the concepts play.

On the other hand, my ignorant presupposition is that the brain is profoundly necessary for the world to be 'given' to a personality. I don't think the dead see hear feel or think -- because their brains are dead.

We seem to agree that some thinkers get a little sloppy and pretend they can do away with subjectivity altogether.

I try to do justice to subjectivity without embracing dualism. I reject indirect realism as confused. [ It's parasitic on direct realism, takes the sense organs for granted, etc. ]

My ontology is 'flat' in the sense that all entities are semantically interdependent. Toothaches are not on a different 'plane' than quarks. Promises are not on a different 'layer' that talons.

The cartoon lightbulb appeared above my head on this issue when I was studying Brandom's inferentialism. Philosophers always already assume the philosophical situation itself, often without noticing it and appreciating the significance of this assumption.

Giving and asking for reasons is absolutely fundamental : More fundamental than any other ontological thesis.

I appeal to toothaches and earthquakes in the one and only inferential-semantic nexus available. All intelligible entities get their intelligibility from this single 'planar' nexus.

The 'logical sin' is bad philosophy is, as Hegel saw, almost always blind or unwitting abstraction. Basically we mistake a reductive map for the whole. We lose ourselves in a usefully simplifying fiction (map) of our situation.

The scientist and philosopher both often forget / ignore the mostly 'transparent' fact of their own project as participants in a discursive normative social enterprise. They think they can paint a picture of reality that doesn't include the painter. In many situations, it's best to not include the painter. But the ontologist can't do that.

Also, everyone grapples with questions of purpose, meaning, ethics, duty, etc. I think these questions are a lot more important to people than hoe old the universe is or what Dark Matter/Energy are. — RogueAI

Yes, I agree. And this is why I like to use 'ontology' for the more technical-scientific aspect of philosophy. Husserl is, for instance, not writing self-help books. It's fucking hard work to get relative clarity on foundational concepts like subjectivity and meaning and so on. Fussy stuff that bores the average person to tears, akin to pure mathematics. Outsiders don't respect it much because where's the gear, bro ? And anyone can do it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with self-help books, just to be clear. I love Epictetus and Epicurus, etc. For those who don't choose the particular existential path of 'scientific' philosophy ('ontology'), the literary or dramaturgical aspect of philosophy is indeed to be preferred. I read Nietzsche intensely in my 20s. My problem then was figuring out what kind of person to be (ethics, values, authority, identity).

I'm not bored with such issues now, but I'm more interested in fussy conceptual details than I once was, probably because youth's identity issues are relatively settled for me.

Bearing in mind we all routinely do things that would have been thought ‘excluded from reality’ by our forbears. — Quixodian

Yes, so it's very difficult. Rorty viewed [ critical, secular ] philosophy as essentially Kantian. It is theory of knowledge, of the structure of all possible inquiry or experience. It seeks apriori truths about the deep structure of human existence. I still embrace this project, but he saw himself as moving beyond it.

Your own statement features the complexity of the enterprise, because you are speaking to the necessity of the possibility of surprise. Braver's book on antirealism follows the 'explosion' of Kantianism into a thinking that is more and more historical. The transhistorical center of the subject is shrunken along the way. Less and less of the traditional universal subject functions as a reliable immobile center. More and more the subject is deemed a creature of its time --often to the point of performative contradiction, which is my fundamental gripe about some 'pomo.'

Physics necessarily leads to metaphysics. Philosophy can't be avoided. — RogueAI

I can definitely agree that anyone who wants to deeply understand reality is going to end up shoulder-deep in metaphysics. But it's almost a tautology. Foundation. Radicality. All of these metaphors of the basis and the basic.

I perhaps foolishly very much wave the flag of philosophy.

Whatever reality is, reality necessarily excludes – negates – unreality (i.e. ontological impossibles (e.g. un-condittionals, un-changeables, reified ideas ('ideals'), etc)). — 180 Proof

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The necessary exclusion you mention is also my approach. A minimalist foundation (reasaonable starting point) is precisely the outlawing of performative and logical contradiction.

I've been thinking lately that positivism, phenomenology, Kantianism ---all of these movements share in this properly exclusive spirit. Don't talk nonsense.

But it's hard to get right. Because (I claim) it's necessarily ontological. Can't do 'pure' epistemology first, because there's always some at least implicit ontology one argues from to establish that epistemology.

Yet I'm confident about the general approach of excluding nonsense. The identity of critical thought is blurry but weighty and solid. The task is endless clarification.

It's better they are unaware that's what they're doing. :roll: — jgill

You might be right. I'm supposed to be a mathematician (by formal education), but I mostly read and write philosophy. I'm corrupted.

Maps are not "far from" models yet neither are equivalent to the territory as (sub)personal – existential – biases would have us believe (re: folk psychology). — 180 Proof

Perhaps you could elaborate ? One possible interpretation: life ain't just discourse. It is feeling and seeing and hearing and not just reports of such things. Conceptuality is just one 'dimension' or 'aspect' of life.

... or minimally egoic (e.g. Laozi's wu wei, Epicurus' aponia, Pyrrho's epochē, Spinoza's scientia intuitiva, Nietzsche's amor fati, Zapffe-Camus' absurd, Rosset's cruelty ...) — 180 Proof

How about you – second person plural – such as Buber's Ich-Du (or even Dao)? — 180 Proof

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Yes, all of this. Sort of part of what I mean by endlessly clarifying the radical intention. The 'project' comes in many flavors.

IIRC, Husserl begins as a mathematician ... I imagine Spinoza, like Epicurus, would "take" thinking – reflective inquiry/practice – impersonally. — 180 Proof

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Absolutely. So there's an existential decision to live in a beautifully impersonal way, which I understand as maximally social. I want to be us and not just me. I want to strive heroically against my own petty finitude, toward the relative infinity of Feuerbach's species-essence.

This immanentist agrees. — 180 Proof

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That's the spirit of my recent topics. Down in it. Hopefully the opposite of escapism. Trying to tell the essence of the whole truth. Can't spell out every fact.

I suppose to the degree one believes the path is not the destination. — 180 Proof

How about the destination being a kind of horizon ? Always forward. 'On.' An intention toward the clarification of that very intention.

Flesh (facticity). — 180 Proof

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Yes, and I'd elaborate with a community of creatures of flesh in its surrounding environment -- and autonomous normative rationality itself. I'm not saying that Apel has the final word, but I take Husserl and Apel and all defenders of the Enlightenment Castle to be trying to show that a certain style of (pseudo-)skeptical irrationalism is a performative contradiction (Rorty, etc.) There is a perhaps necessarily blurry foundation implicit in the [ heroic, autonomous ] concept of philosophy, which is essentially normative and aspirational. I live toward an ideal when I strive philosophically. An intention. Futuricity. Temporal normative discursive beings, directed from and at the clarification and intensification of our autonomy.

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