Just saw yours as I was posting mine. Gotta run now but will think it over. I want some way for Kripke to be on target here but it seems problematic . . .

This is helpful, thanks. But even if the domain is fixed to include only those worlds in which "that cloud" exists . . . must I (the "baptizer") necessarily be in that domain as well, in order for that cloud to be designated as "that cloud"? And there's still the question of what property I am picking out besides "'that-cloud'-ness."

there are possible worlds not blessed with my presence. — Banno

Good line for an obituary: "An eminent logician, the late X claimed he was necessary in all possible worlds, but alas, we now discover this is untrue."

OK. I want to try out some thoughts about this, but first I want to clarify something about demonstratives.

A proper name, according to Kripke, is a rigid designator. It picks out the thing named in all possible worlds. This does not mean, of course, that the thing named occurs in all possible worlds. It merely means that, if Banno exists in a world, the name must designate him and not some other. Importantly, Kripke points out that “the property we use to designate that man . . . need not be one which is regarded as in any way necessary or essential.” But at the same time, he says that the proper name itself won’t do as that property:

If one was determining the referent of a name like ‛Glunk’ to himself and made the following decision, “I shall use the term ‛Glunk’ to refer to the man that I call ‛Glunk’,” this would get one nowhere. One had better have some independent determination of the referent of ‛Glunk.’ This is a good example of a blatantly circular determination. — Naming and Necessity, 73

As we know, Kripke believes we should refer back to the origin story of a person in order to say what that “independent determination” is.

Now demonstratives are also rigid designators, according to Kripke. If I point out the window and say, “This cloud,” I have “baptized” the cloud and given it a rigid designation. The same caveat applies here as with proper names: The cloud may not appear in a given world, but if it appears, the designation “that cloud” is rigid.

I have two questions about this.

1) Is the “origin story” here simply a matter of my pointing and declaring? Doesn’t that seem the same as simply declaring a proper name, which Kripke says is circular? Then, if the “independent determination of the referent” is something else in the case of “that cloud”, what is it? Do we have to start talking in terms of molecular structure? But that is very un-Kripkean; that would be like “using a telescope” to identify a table; it’s not how we designate things.

2) Presumably there can be a possible world in which “that cloud” occurs but I do not. Does the cloud remain rigidly designated? There seems something odd about this. Do we want to say that, because I appear in a different possible world to baptize the cloud, my action carries over in some way to a world in which I never did so? There must be a better way to understand this.

Clarifications and insights welcome.

Daniel Dennett proposed that we don't dream, that we do not have an experience over a period of time while asleep, but that rather a memory of dreaming is confabulated on waking. Dreams are not lived but merely recalled as if they had been. — Banno

I remember this, and I believe there was at least one experiment that provided possible evidence: An experimenter awakened a subject by (doing something like) placing his hand in a bucket of cold water. The subject then described a dream he said he'd been having, with a complicated plot that led logically to his being thrown into a pond. The idea is that there was no time between the immersion of the hand and the awakening in which the subject could have had such a purportedly long dream. So he must have retro-fitted it somehow; perhaps dreams appear all in an instant, but can only be remembered as sequenced stories.

That is, you kicked in your dream as the result of a spasm and convinced your dream self you chose to strike your enemy in order to maintain the free will illusion we're programmed to have — Hanover

Yes, that would draw the arrow of causation from physical to mental, with an interesting twist: As may happen in waking life, I came up with a rationalization that posited a mental choice. If dreams really do contain important symbols, then the symbolism of "choosing to do something" is powerful. It would reinforce my desire, in waking life, to see myself as an agent with genuine choices.

The potassium and magnesium of bananas are said to reduce night kicking. Worth a try, but that would of course eliminate the higher plane of perception you've achieved through essential mineral depletion. — Hanover

Oh yes, tried that one. Couldn't find any correlation. I would gladly keep the kicks in exchange for that higher plane of perception . . . if I can persuade my wife not to make me sleep on the couch.

Strikes me that the mechanisms and processes of dreaming are not a suitable subject for philosophical speculation. As you have hinted, the answers to your questions can be examined empirically - there are facts of the matter. — T Clark

There is certainly a possibility that a scientific investigation would show which comes first, the REM event (dream) or the physical event (leg-kicking). Do you think the entire mental/physical causation problem may be similarly resolved? I could imagine that happening if it is indeed causation that we're dealing with, because we could demonstrate a temporal gap between cause and effect. But if we discovered no such gap, we'd be left with the problem of how to understand the supervenience of the mental on the physical, or vice versa.

In any case, I agree with your term "speculation" -- that's all it is. And of course that dog is running! :smile:

. A feedback relation is not straightforward causation, nor is it a relation of supervenience. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, this connects with @Christoffer's idea, above, that the dream and the physical event may mutually stimulate each other.

Does anyone know whether there is a term for this "reciprocal causality"-type phenomenon, in either the scientific or the philosophical literature?

I like this. So, just to play it out, would that mean that, in waking life, we can acknowledge both "mental-to-physical" and "physical-to-mental" stimulation, with "volition" being a key parameter? That is certainly what we want to say, in giving a standard account of what it's like to experience things: Sometimes we get the idea to do a thing, and lo, it is done, while at other times the thing is done (to us, in the case of a leg moving involuntarily), and lo, we construct the image or idea of it. In very loose talk: either the idea or the event can cause the other, depending on volition.

...so saying that situation (b) is an illusion, what hard determinists say is nonsensical! — MoK

I'm just not following -- why is situation (b) but not situation (a) an illusion?

Thanks. Yes, I see the difference. Not sure how seeing a difference in possible outcomes means that I would any choice about what to do. But perhaps that wasn't your point.

sleep paralysis. I've suffered this experience and it is terrifying. — Christoffer

Wow, it certainly sounds like it.

Could you realize between two situations in which you are presented with one ball or two balls? — MoK

Sorry, could you clarify? What does "realize between two situations" mean?

Have you ever been in a maze? If yes then you realize that options are real when you reach a fork. — MoK

The problem here is that the hard determinist would deny that you genuinely have an option. They would reply, "Certainly it seems as if you are making a choice at the fork. But this is an illusion; the elaborate process you may go through in order to 'decide on your choice' is itself predetermined. You have no more actual choice in the matter than a vacuum robot has when it 'decides' in which direction to vacuum next. Even if you (and the robot) are choosing randomly, to do so was still not really 'your choice' -- it's the programming."

No, I don't think this picture is correct, but what should we say to the hard determinist about this? What error are they making?

you have both simulated senses grounding the generated experience of reality, as well as actual senses coming through from your body in bed. — Christoffer

Yes, I guess that's another possibility -- dream and body may switch roles, mutually reinforcing the experience. At one point the bodily sensation informs the dream, then at another point the dream that unfolds influences the body.

Good, and glad you like the post. Everyone, please add 4. to list of possibilities!

So let's be a bit pedantic and oppose necessity with possibility, and define these in terms of possible worlds, while also and distinctly opposing the analytic and the synthetic, such that the analytic is understood by definition while the synthetic is understood by checking out how things are in the world. — Banno

I'm fine with this, as long as we understand that this terminological clarification has only sharpened the questions; it's not an answer in itself. We still want to know which things that we learn about the world (synthetic knowledge) turn out to be necessary, a la Kripke and (I guess) Aristotle, and what this says about possible worlds. Is there a possible world in which water is not H2O? Kripke says no. So is there a possible world in which a human is not a rational animal? I don't know if Kripke weighed in on this, but I would say yes.

"must be seen..."
— J
is, then, what musty happen if modal logic is to avoid the issues with quantification that Quine raises - in this Quine is more or less correct, and the strategy Kripke adopts is pretty much the one Quine sets out - there are properties of things that are true of them in every possible world.

Whether these properties are "essential" is another question. — Banno

So my suggested paraphrase, "To be a bound variable in modal logic is to entail a choice of some necessary predicate(s)" would be correct. And I think we're both saying that "necessary predicates" might turn out to be so ontologically minimal that they wouldn't fit the concept of "essential properties" at all.

Good. This highlights the distinction.

I like the bead illustration as a guide to intension/extension.

Being a bead is part of the (Aristotelian?) essence of 1, but being red is not. — Banno

Interestingly, we could number a set of objects extensionally without knowing what they were. So "being a bead" (or any other common noun) wouldn't come into play. Must something serve as an "essence", though? "Object"? "The thing I am speaking about"? Relates to Kripke.

I might have missed a response somewhere, but I'm still curious about this, from Part 3.

An object, of itself and by whatever name or none, must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily and others contingently, despite the fact the latter traits follow just as analytically from some ways of specifying the object as the former traits do from other ways of specifying it.
— Quine, 155

I have a number of questions about this analysis, but let me start with this: What does Quine mean by "must be seen"? Is this referring back to the act of quantification? Is this a doctrine (like "To be is to be the value of a bound variable") that would state, "To be a bound variable in modal logic is to entail a choice of some necessary predicate(s)"? — J

Certainly, on a common sense usage of "possible," I should not worry about the possibility that giving my child milk will transform them into a lobster — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agreed. But don't we also have to agree that this is not necessarily true? Otherwise, where do we draw a conceptual line between what is necessary and what is overwhelmingly likely? But by all means, let's not worry about any wildly unlikely things.

You have it that the specific individual proposition involving Washington's birth is necessarily true in virtue of the particular event of Washington's birth. This is not how it is normally put at least. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Bracketing whether this is ever normally put (!), I don't see what's wrong with it. Isn't it an instance of the general principle? It seems clear enough. The general principle, if I understand you, would be "a proposition is necessarily true if the fact that it describes obtains." (This invokes the "adequate to being" idea, which I find a bit opaque, but no more so than any other attempt at a correspondence theory of truth.)

"

I think the Principal of Non-Contradiction is enough. Something cannot happen and have not happened. George Washington cannot have been the first US President and not have been the first US President (p and ~p). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here's the real rub. I can't remember how much of the Kimhi thread you followed, but one of the major themes was whether PNC applies to both logical and physical space, and why. We know ~(p and ~p) (in most logics), but why is it that physical occurrences cannot both obtain and not obtain? Is it because of the PNC, or is the explanatory arrow reversed, with the PNC being as it is because it reflects something about the way the physical world must be actualized? Or, ideally, both -- we're equipped with rational equipment that is perfectly suited to the way the world in fact operates?

"GW was President in our world, but there are other worlds in which he was not." When we say this, are we saying the same thing as "The (logical version of the) PNC applies in our world, but there are other worlds in which it might not"? Or, if we don't like possible-worlds talk, is saying "GW might not have been president" the same kind of statement as "The (logical) PNC might not apply"? There's a pretty stark difference, seems to me, and it's tied directly to how we should understand "necessity." But I'll pause here and see what you think.

Okay, I see where you’re coming from, thanks.

This really gets to the heart of Quine's problem with modal logic. Going back a bit from the passage you quoted, Quine explains:

We can see pretty directly that any quantified modal logic is bound to show . . . favoritism among the traits of an object . . . — Quine, 155

The favoritism he has in mind, if we could quantify in modal logic, would be:

An object, of itself and by whatever name or none, must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily and others contingently, despite the fact the latter traits follow just as analytically from some ways of specifying the object as the former traits do from other ways of specifying it. — Quine, 155

I have a number of questions about this analysis, but let me start with this: What does Quine mean by "must be seen"? Is this referring back to the act of quantification? Is this a doctrine (like "To be is to be the value of a bound variable") that would state, "To be a bound variable in modal logic is to entail a choice of some necessary predicate(s)"?

body and mind would have to be ontologies. — Wolfgang

I assume you mean "separate ontological entities". But if they aren't (in some sense), then what is it that's being correlated?

The relationship between body and mind exists only at the level of description. There is no specific relationship between the two beyond a correlation. Identity theory makes the mistake of relating the two to each other one-to-one, but such an ontological reference does not exist. — Wolfgang

Could you say more about this? How do we know that there is no relationship between mind and body other than a correlation? There seems to be some pretty strong evidence for such a correlation, and it's fair to ask whether it's anything more than a correlation, but I'm confused as to why you think the issue has been settled.

I'm getting a lot out of the thread too, and I'm especially glad to see you pointing at the exchange between me and @Count Timothy von Icarus. I think this kind of "accidental disagreement" is extremely common, and not just on TPF. Sometimes, of course, people really do use terms differently and/or differ as to whether they refer to real things. But charitable interpretation stands a very good chance of straightening it out. I hate to see exchanges in which each person seems to want the other to be defending a dumb or inconsistent position. Count T is certainly not such a person, and I hope I'm not either.

"In fact, before I develop this any further, let me ask whether you think (2) is a fair elaboration of what you meant by "If it is not possible, then it is in some sense necessary."

- J

it seems accurate in the sense that something that has happened cannot possibly have not happened. It has already been actualized. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good, glad I understood you.

So we're working here with a sense of "necessary" that means "impossible to change." As you point out, past events may not be the only things about which this can be said, but let's stick to that for now.

The first point which arises about this usage is that it seems to rely for its truth on certain beliefs about the physical world. I'm thinking of something like: "The causal 'flow of time' is unidirectional, toward what we call the future. Nothing can reverse this causality, and nothing can return to a previous moment in the flow and 're-cause' something in a different manner."

Do we know this to be true? I would say we do not -- we know so little about how time functions, physically -- but let's grant it. Is it, then, a necessary truth? This, notice, would be a necessary truth that guarantees a whole host of other necessary truths, but on quite different grounds. Do we need it to be a necessary truth? Could the (in 2025 allegedly necessary) truth that "Washington was born in 1732" depend for its necessity on a contingent truth that "Nothing can be uncaused or re-caused"? Well, why not?, we might reply. Why shouldn't a contingent truth ground a necessary truth? Isn't it the same case as the (contingent) truth that GW was born in 1732 causing the (now necessary) truth that "GW was born in 1732"?

But there's a flaw here. We're equivocating. We don't want to say that GW's birth in 1732 caused anything here other than the truth of a subsequent statement to that effect. Whereas, with a law about "causality and the flow of time," we do want to say that this law, whether necessary or contingent, literally causes events to become necessary subsequent to time T1 -- that is, when they in fact occur.

So, pausing again before I go on -- do you think this is a reasonable analysis of some of the issues involved in "necessity" statements involving the past? I know that some of this is modeled more precisely in Logicalese but I have my reasons for wanting to stay with English, as you'll see . . .

As naming a convention, sure. Not otherwise. In fact, that 'A' has been designated at various frequencies over the centuries. Kind of like the "standard meter." Relatedly, people with absolute pitch don't miraculously hear some out-there entity called 'A'. They're told the names of pitches as they hear them but, unlike the rest of us, they can recall and re-identify them.

However, notice that I spoke of a "designated range". Having a range of frequency which provide the criteria for any specific "pitch", adds another parameter. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I see where you're going with this. A sound engineer could say (quite correctly), "Well, we hear a range of frequencies between A430 and A450 as an 'A', so even though this range includes mostly pitches that are technically sharp or flat, for all practical purposes we can specify this range as 'A'; just about no one can hear the difference." Is that what you mean?

mis-post

This analogy is not about music or composition. It's about the fact that music comprises individual sounds which, by themselves, are not music. — Wayfarer

I know. I just thought the point about composition was interesting, sorry.

the organism is not just matter in motion but something that cares about its own persistence — Wayfarer

Yes! But . . . no! For me, a good example of how inadequate our current concepts are for thinking about these questions. A microbe "cares"? Absurd! we say. And yet it certainly behaves as if it does. Well, it must just be a machine then, that "acts as if." But it's alive, and a machine is not . . .

(I'm deploring the paucity of our philosophical talk in general here, not targeting you own [always interesting] thoughts in particular.)

The image that comes to my mind is of a toddler trying to arrange blocks to her satisfaction, while adults look on at this charming stab at set theory. Some day, if the species survives, we will be the adults, looking back on our kiddy selves and saying, "So cute! They thought they could understand what they called 'life' and 'consciousness' with terms like 'care', 'behave', 'causality' . . . adorable!"

The problem is that the machine would not be distinguishing that as a distinct and separate note, it would just be registering the time when the transmitted frequency passes the designated range. So it's an artificial and arbitrary creation of "a pitch". — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. I'm tempted to respond, "Well, if 'a frequency passing into a designated range' is not a standard understanding of what pitch is . . . then what would you suggest?" This would be too glib, but I am curious what you have in mind that would not be "artificial and arbitrary." Or does any use of "pitch" have to be that way?

. . . the question of whether we sense distinct and discrete perceptions, impressions, or ideas, (as described by Hume), or whether we sense a continuity of changing information. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Music makes a good laboratory to examine some of our intuitions here, because (most?) acousticians accept the idea that the "movement of sound" is an illusion. We could just as well use film, I suppose, and talk about how individual frames do not move, but taken together create the illusion of a "moving picture."

. . . attempts to help Banno to resist the bad habit of equivocation — Metaphysician Undercover

Speaking of bad habits, I don't know why so many on this forum seem compelled toward personal disparagement. It is perfectly possible, and surely preferable, to respond post by post without deleterious characterization of others' alleged strengths and weaknesses.

Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational. — Aeon.co

Nice. As you may know, this question of how we retain previous moments as we listen, and project future moments, is integral to a composer's skill. Can I reasonably expect a listener to remember that a song chorus has been played twice before, and recognize (at least part of) it the third time? Can I expect her, hearing it for the first time in the song, to project the likelihood of its repetition? The answers to these kinds of questions in turn depend on how a composer imagines their audience -- what cultural familiarities and listening skills are presupposed.

Terminology again . . . we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can.
— J

As I said, there is only a series of tones in conception, and when that conception is applied. That's what the software program does, applies the conception. We do not hear a series of tones, evidenced by what you say, we "can't recognize them". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm fine, then, with adopting the other usage I suggested:

But if you'd rather reserve the term "hear" to mean "can distinguish acoustically," that's fine. Then we would say that I don't hear a series of tones when I hear a slide, I "process them auditorially" or some such, and when I do that, being human, I don't hear the discrete pitches — J

But I think you're questioning whether even the most sophisticated software can "hear the pitches." That is, you're wondering if "discrete pitches" is something a perceiver brings to the auditory stream, rather than locating or identifying them there. A fair question, but then there would be nothing special about this question as applied to music. It would be the huge, overhanging question of the extent to which our subjectivity creates the reality it seems to encounter.

2) A slide moves from D to E.
— J

The pitch moved from D to E. — Banno

But see above. The pitch changed. There is nothing called "pitch" that can move yet be self-identical. Unless we're OK with saying, e.g., "The logic of the argument deteriorated as he went along" and maintaining that "the logic" is an item that holds steady, and be said to deteriorate (compared to what standard?). Sure, there's something like "logic" in the world, but it isn't much like Achilles in terms of what we can say about it.

Are we gnashing over usage here? To some extent. I talk about pitches and melodies "moving" all the time; it's standard English. I just wanted us to reflect on how differently this idea of movement must be understood in such a context. And I firmly hold out for the position that, literally, acoustically, a pitch cannot move. In what (conceptual?) space is it moving? Why can't my software detect the movement?

@Banno Yes.

Did you not study calculus? — Banno

Actually, no! :grin: But I recognize why calculus would be relevant here. Thinking about it, I realize I may have been wrong in saying that pitches are theoretically divisible ad infinitum. There must come an interval too short for a sound wave to vibrate. So, unlike numbers in that regard.

Here's why I don't think "movement" is the right way to describe what a slide does:

1) Achilles moves from point D to point E.
2) A slide moves from D to E.

These look the same but are not. In 1), Achilles goes on a journey from D to E. We could call that "the journey of Achilles". In 2), "slide" is the name of the journey; it's the equivalent of "the journey of Achilles." Unlike with 1), we're not describing a situation in which some entity (call it Slide) stands ready to set off from D, does so, and then arrives at E. There is no guy called Slide doing this. "Slide" is what happens, just as "the journey of Achilles" is what happens. But in 1), there is a guy called Achilles that we can additionally talk about. I maintain there is no such comparable figure in 2). If you try to substitute "pitch" as the protagonist, the thing that moves, you run into the basic acoustical fact that if a pitch moved, it would no longer be the same pitch. We can again see the dissimilarity with Achilles -- he doesn't change every time he moves on his journey (at least with common ontological commitments). We hold him constant; but there is nothing to hold constant in 2).

Sound produces the illusion of movement -- it fools us into believing that something is going from D to E, where in fact there is only the going, which proceeds pitch by pitch.

Actually, we do not hear a series of tones, we here a slide, which is a sound of changing pitch, consisting of no distinct tones. That's the point of my discussion of Hume's misrepresentation of sense perception. Hume describes sensation as a succession of impressions, which is consistent with "a series of tones". But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide. It is only when we apply the conception of distinct tones, to the sound which is heard, that we conclude there is a series of tones. — Metaphysician Undercover

This fits nicely with what I was saying to @Banno. Terminology again . . . we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can. But if you'd rather reserve the term "hear" to mean "can distinguish acoustically," that's fine. Then we would say that I don't hear a series of tones when I hear a slide, I "process them auditorially" or some such, and when I do that, being human, I don't hear the discrete pitches. If a hundred people all speak at once, do I "hear what they're saying"? Depends how you want to divvy up the terminology. It doesn't really matter.

"But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide."

OK -- again, as long as we don't take the illusion of movement as real.

No, I'm familiar with how slide guitar works, and counterintuitive as it seems, when you slide from the D to the E, you really are producing a series of notes that can be discretely specified, though not, as I said, by the human ear. The "movement" is no less illusory than a standard non-slide move from D to E in which, because there are no intervening notes, we can hear the moment of the (only) pitch change. Now granted, there is a limit to pitch identification by any "ear," even the ultra-sophisticated software I might use in my studio. (I have a modest home recording studio, and used to make my living as a musician.) In that regard, it's Achilles and the Tortoise -- you can keep drilling down on microtones until you run out of bits, but wherever you stop, it's still a specific, determinate pitch that could, in theory, be further subdivided.

Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong. — Banno

This is where it gets philosophically interesting. A slide from D to E is composed of nothing but physical stuff. But then lots of items that aren't physical as such are also composed of physical stuff. The familiar example of the football game . . . no ghostly material in use, yet it seems completely wrong to say that the game is a physical item, or least it does to me. I would argue roughly the same thing for musical "movement." No surprise, this gets us into terminology, because it comes down to whether "entity" is the right thing to call a slide. If you're not happy with "perception," how about calling it an "event"? The main thing I care about, in such talk, is that we don't picture a tone moving from T1 to T2 in the same way that a rabbit moves from P(lace)1 to P2. If asked, in the latter case, "What's moving?" we can point to the rabbit. The same question, in the former case, can't be answered at all. There's no entity or object that has the attribute "moves from D to E".

What you're interested in just seems outside of the scope of phenomenological analysis, so we'd need some other frame of reference. — Dawnstorm

That may well be right. I was alluding to that possibility when I speculated that "an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our 'higher' capacities" might be incompatible with phenomenological method -- that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. To me, it remains an open question, but your point of view has a lot of merit.

As for Kant vs. Husserl, it's true that Husserl didn't feel the need to postulate any noumena. The reason I linked the two philosophers together in this context was that both seem to favor an account of subjective experience that lacks development; both noumena and the lifeworld are somehow "present to consciousness" (or deducible from it, if you prefer) whenever there is consciousness. This is questionable, I think.

Some further thoughts . . .

But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. — The Neural Binding Problem, Jerome S. Feldman

I don't think he's formulating it radically enough. Yes, this is part of the hard problem, but even more basic is the question, Why do we experience the world at all? Why aren't we robots, or philosophical zombies? If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? What we want to say about this, of course, is that it's impossible -- the idea of an organism "just reacting" without any form of subjectivity is offensive somehow. Or maybe we want to say that the very concept of "reacting" presupposes experience. But none of this is obvious; we can't just declare this picture it to be impossible. If it is, we need to know why -- back to the hard problem.

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons

(Sokolowski)

Once again I want to raise the question of infants and psychological development. Sokolowski clearly means, by "we", fully-functioning adult humans. Infants do not do what he describes. They don't have a recognizable "thoughtful activity," and they don't reach anything that enters logical or rational space. So what story must we tell about this? None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. James's "blooming buzzing confusion" has to give way to something like what Sokolowski is describing.

So why does it happen? And is there some way to transform what looks like a scientific question into a phenomenological one? That is, we want an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our "higher" capacities. Yet at the same time we'd like a transcendental argument that shows why all this must characterize human being-in-the-world. Are the two desires mutually exclusive? Or the same thing, on some basic level?

More worrying, will a semi-naturalistic account of this development tend to reduce Sokolowski's "space of reasons" to a strictly functional concept? I'd like a way to understand rationality as both a biologically inevitable phenomenon and a doorway into knowledge that really does provide reasons and justifications. This is a tall order, and thus far unreached, as far as I know.

Sorry, didn't see you guys on this sub-thread. See my reply to @Banno, above.