You said you had a retort but you seem to agree with me lol. I am aware it is clickbait but that was just to get people to start talking. It's the kind of clickbait where it's not REALLY a lie but kind of a half lie. I agree with everything you wrote except I think you are massively underestimating the number of people that are "Metaphysical prigs" as you put it. I'd even say most people ACT as metaphysical prigs at least. — khaled

Yes, I think we largely overlap when it comes to some sense that things have to be understood from 'within' various perspectives.

As far as 'metaphysical prigs,' I got that term from Rorty, a pretty great 'relativist' (or so he is interpreted.)
On this forum, there are lots of fans of philosophers who are critical of metaphysics. It seems to me that 'anti'-philosophy largely became philosophy --or became a big part of mainstream philosophy. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc.

And in some sense most 'great' philosophers are anti-philosophers. They are always trying to clean up the mess of those who came before them (like Kant destroying the older version of metaphysics to make room for his own.) One age's destroyers are the builders of the next age, themselves sure to become targets or a mess to be cleaned up.

It seems to me that promoting / defending nihilistic relativism is (when its intentions are friendliest) something like promoting / defending open-mindedness. When I first got into pragmatism / instrumentalism (call it what you will), I experienced it as liberating and enjoyed trying to find better and better words for it. These days I'm working on finding the right words for the value I find in holism.

The Tractatus was a good work. — Posty McPostface

I agree. It's a masterpiece. The tension between its motive and its form is endlessly fascinating. It's a young man's book, a radical book, an arrow aimed at God.

What are your thoughts about solipsism? — Posty McPostface

It doesn't really make sense. We are so deeply in a world with others that solipsism is like origami that we fold for others in the first place.

We might say that the sincere pessimist is a suicide and that the sincere solipsist is a madman. Of course I am not using 'sincere' technically or scientifically but expressing my own personality or grasp of the situation here.

Interesting. What do you have to say about Wittgenstein's flawed approach in the Tractatus? — Posty McPostface

I still like the TLP, so I just think it has its blindspots. And I haven't re-read it for a long time, so I am just informally gossiping about what it meant and means to me. What I have been trying to say in various ways is that language is not how philosophers often want it to be. IMV, this becomes 'obvious' if one really looks at it with fresh eyes.

The form of the TLP hints at a certain approach to philosophy. It's a spiderweb, with everything in its place. It attempts to nail certain words to certain meanings, so that it can run its strings from this essence to that essence. But this is an artificial approach that fundamentally misgrasps its object, which I think the later Wittgensein would agree with, though I don't appeal to him as an authority. The only authority is introspection and paying attention to how language is for us. [And why this is hard to do is because we are locked into a certain method that we haven't really consciously adopted. It is the water in which we swim, almost invisible to us.]

I agree with most of what you have said. I don't think fact making is really a big issue then. Or how do facts obtain in reality? — Posty McPostface

It's hard to know how to approach a question at that level of generality. I will say that I think life is ultimately mysterious. We understand things without understanding how we understand them. We learn how to use words like 'facts' in all kinds of particular contexts. Somehow things tend to go smoothly. People work together and build machines that fly through the air, without ever conclusively grounding science or solving the classic philosophical problems. Time hurtles on. Some of us use our free time to try and get clear about fundamental things. Some of us do manage to get clearer on this or that issue, perhaps by finally confessing a fundamental unclarity in our foundations (my approach.)

I think logic can lead to the wrong answer: GIGO. But if logic is part of our make-up because it provides a survival advantage, then our theories may also seem right to us because believing them provides a survival advantage, not because they're true. — frank

I understand you and agree with you in this context. I've been studying things like artificial neural networks lately. I think they are great metaphors. Our theories are trained on particular sets of data. We assume without being able to help it that our experience so far is useful for preparing for the future, even if we 'logically' know better. It gets very tangled, because we doubt what believe in part because of the theory of evolution. But theoretically that makes this same theory of evolution suspect, as one more theory. In practice, though, I 'believe' in the theory of evolution --and lots of other models that subvert themselves and one another at least a little bit. While we try to make it all cohere, one of my models tell me that we usually ignore all kinds of such self-subversion and interference between our models. At any given time, our attention is here or there. It just can't be all places at once, guarding against all possible dissonance. Instead it seems like the greatest or most currently relevant dissonance comes to the foreground. Our blanket is a little too small. Our feet get cold. We fix the blanket. Then our shoulders get cold.

No longer? What changed? — frank

With the help of various influences, I started to see language in a new way. The project of building a certain kind of 'word castle' appeared both less and less possible and important. Our 'natural' grasp of existence seems to be top-down, not bottom-up. We interpret one another with the whole of individual grasps of existence as a whole. The bottom-up approach starts with a mostly unquestioned project and grasp.

The 'groundless ground' that Lee Braver writes about is really fascinating to me right now. I think this 'groundless ground' is the big, dark think we depend on, nevermind the appeal of building everything up securely from atoms that are somehow intelligible apart from that big, dark ground. And then I got more formal scientific training, so that philosophy as super-science again became less plausible.

While the question 'What should I believe?' is indeed important, it seems to have an irreducibly personal dimension that connects it to 'Who shall I try to be as a whole?'

Could I rephrase this thought in terms of Kuhnian paradigms? Philosophy as a "precise science" is philosophy as prosecuted by 'technicians' within a given paradigm; philosophy as something broader is a discussion between individuals occupying different paradigms (or, within a single individual entertaining multiple paradigms). This picture would suggest that the latter kind of philosophy is much more vulnerable to merely verbal disagreements, insofar as different 'paradigms' involve different systems of language. — Welkin Rogue

Nice way of saying it and good point. But how about this situation: two individuals are both on the lookout for merely verbal disagreements, though otherwise quite different.

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How, then, did Hegel account for experience at all? — philosophy

Has anyone ever accounted for experience in the final analysis? Or do they just link one thing to another with equations, arguments, myths? We trace Z back to Y back to X. At some point we get to A, which is just there. (Maybe someone can argue for going back from 0 to -1 to -2 and so on infinitely, but I can't exactly call this a satisfying account.)

One could trace the etymology of the word chair, the use of it in different texts, dictionaries, situations, manufacture, marketing, and ergonomics instructions. On the contrary, the physical item “chair” does belong to the world of practical and aesthetic use, design, and production. Therefore, when one is in front of this given chair, it is not just about visual and tactile perceptions of it, one deals with a set of implicit cultural, economic, and social practices. — Number2018

Well said. And these practices might be 'in' the 'subject' in some sense but not explicitly verbal. The division of the word into objects and thoughts is arguably pretty naive.

But, according to the totality of things being facts, then all we have are symbols, models, and theories which we can devise about the world. — Posty McPostface

That's why I object to the world as the totality of facts if/when these 'facts' are understood as explicit propositions, etc. Exactly because I don't check and see if I have hands, and also what it is to drink coffee with those hands doesn't fit all that nicely under the word 'fact' or 'symbol' or 'model' or 'theory.' Is the experience of taking a hot bath on a cold day a fact? Is a smile from a girl who thinks you're clever a fact? That she smiled may be, but not the smile itself or the way it made you feel.

It seems to me that early Wittgenstein was especially concerned with the theoretical gaze. But this is a secondary feature of reality, merely one mode of being and language game among others. To talk about reality as a whole merely from a contemplation of man as the scientist is like talking about the beach and only mentioning the sand --and not the girls in bikinis or the sun and the breeze, etc.

I don't know what to make out of that superficial distinctions you have made. Thoughts — Posty McPostface

Could you go into detail, and say what you think is the same? (What is the illusion of difference that I am laboring under?)

How about this: if I point down the road at truck coming over the hill, then I'm not telling you to not lie down in the road, but you are less likely to lie in the road just then. Similarly, I see language in a way that doesn't match up with the way people tend to talk about it theoretically as they try to do philosophy with it, in this context of the vision of language that I find questionable.

Giving an account of why logic is innate would be structured by logic. Is that a problem? — frank

It might be if one insisted on the impossible project of working without presuppositions or history. I'm glad to no longer feel that itch.

I'm thinking of an account that says logic is divine, and so bound to lead to right answers. What's the alternative, I wonder. — frank

An answer may lurk in exploring the meaning of 'right answers.' Do we perhaps mean that the answer simply accords with our logic? Then logic is bound to lead to the right answers, since right answers are those we are led to by logic. (Of course this is circular, because I guess logic is the/a word that tries to get at exactly what we can't get 'behind' in our thinking. Logic is what it is, like God.)

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I'm more questioning the value of challenging the boundaries of the group consensus. I'm wondering what such challenging actually accomplishes beyond conflict. — Jake

I think that's why people form different friend groups, religions, and intellectual camps. If they can't agree on the ground rules, then communication breaks down. If certain ideas are outright prohibited and silenced, then clearly we'll get a schism. I suppose challenging the boundaries is likely to be most effective exactly on the line where the group as a whole is unsure whether to prohibit that talk. These troublemakers hold the space open, as if they were stretching out something that has a tendency to contract.

So if everyone could arrive at the same level of emotional maturity, we would all automatically have the ability to distinguish the logical from the illogical? — frank

No. It's not only emotional maturity. It is also (seems to me) something like math, especially pure math. Some have more of knack for this than others. Maybe it's something like a certain 'space' in the imagination. Some people have more of this kind of space and can 'turn around' more complicated objects for consideration.

How would you explain the innateness of logic? — frank

I don't know. Depends what you mean by explain. Ultimately I think we have lots of brute facts, or at least they are brute facts given the structure of our cognition (logic hardwiring.) In this case, I'm guessing that someone has studied it and found some predictive algorithms from some vector of attributes to some other vector of attributes --which is maybe what most mean by explanation. But I haven't looked into it. My sense of its innateness (that it is there for whatever reason) mostly comes from working with logic and math.

*We seem to assume some kind of mutual notion of logic and rationality whenever we sincerely communicate.

↪macrosoft So you believe logic is innate? — frank

Yes, roughly.

But then why do we teach students to detect illogical arguments? — frank

While the foundations are shared, intelligence is finite. In complicated cases, it's not always easy to parse the complexity. And then in a real world context there are usually emotions involved. To some degree teaching logic seems related to teaching adulthood. Think before you leap. Look carefully to avoid the kind of thinking that will lead to disaster.

Their logic textbooks were accidently misprinted and now they're all wrong about what's logical and what's not. — frank

This is a nice point. I've often found it amusing when folks accuse one another of logical fallacies without reflecting on the authority of the texts they read to get these fallacy objections. Personally I 'believe' in logical fallacies, but I'd say they have some kind of phenomenological/empirical foundation. When we remove the emotionally loaded concepts to generate examples, most of us I think tend to agree that this or that move is fallacy, at least after some reflection. So I think TS is right that logic is a kind of hardwired thing that we merely formalize in textbooks (which also makes a kind of calculus possible, convenient for complicated cases.)

By the fact that understanding and communication do not at all work via literally sharing meanings. — Terrapin Station

But why add this 'literally'? Doesn't this assume that uses of 'sharing meanings' are employing some kind of fancy metaphysical machinery that you object to? But I don't think they are. We have a kind of pre-theoretical familiarity and skill with language. That is what I'm aiming at, not an ought but the natural consequences of the perception of an is. To grasp language in a new way is to rethink what you have been asking it to do. An architect draws up plans for a house made of bricks, say, and then discoverers that the only material available is flesh, living flesh.

Why do you think that it's important for philosophizing to be consistent with the way that most people talk about something? What if the way that those people talk about something is based on incorrect beliefs — Terrapin Station

IMO, it's very tempting to understand an 'ordinary language' position in terms of an ought. And in some cases an ought may come along for the ride. But for me any kind of ought is secondary. I'm trying to describe what is, as I experience it. The 'way most people talk about something' is the metalanguage withing which we construct our ideal object languages (AKA says what counts as real). For the most part, these object languages are the concern of a few experts, academics or in-their-free-time, who largely see themselves as talking about what is really real and yet don't change their actions in the world significantly with the rise or the fall of a thesis. Do I see the tree? Or do I see my seeing of the tree? Either way I swerve my car to miss it, or I swerve my seeing of the car to miss the seeing of the tree. (My tiny ought sneaks in here as a preference for the simpler expression, but I understand why others emphasize mediation at the expense of style.)

Don't get me wrong. I think meanings are important, even if they don't change our actions. Maybe they make us happier to do the things we were going to do anyway. The 'value' of life is maybe mostly in the so-called subjective realm. A person might be happy in a clam living in a single-wide trailer, smoking weed, and misreading Hegel on the typewriter. (That's not me, but I can think of far worse fates.)

The response is only thought insofar as we're talking about things like "this is pleasurable"/"this is more than pleasurable" etc.

I suppose you're otherwise referring to non-mental physiological responses they might have, or actions they make take--like if it's a painting and they walk to view it at a different angle, etc — Terrapin Station

Well for me a simple continuum of pleasure doesn't get it right. What I have in mind are different kinds of feelings that we experience as we also experience the work sensually -- along with thoughts. We can reasonably say that the work is there to provide pleasure, but IMO only if we allow for some complex pleasures that don't only vary quantitatively.

Hmm, this is ambiguous. Don't you agree that because I have two hands (fortunately) that the external world exists? — Posty McPostface

Yeah, I'd say that of course the external world exists. My point is maybe that it doesn't exist as a theoretical object. It's not like we have complicated metaphysical theses tucked in our 'subconscious.' No. I'd say that we start with a blurry or rough sense of the shared world as well as a shared language and then we build our spiderwebs to 'prove'(absurdly) the things we have to take for granted in order to build these webs in the first place. It's something like methodological stupidity (or methodological skepticism, more generously.)

Kind of like proofs of God. Usually they are constructed by believers who don't need proof but would like to scratch a peculiar intellectual itch.

*I'm also out of time for now, so I'll just add a methodological comment. Note that I am not trying to 'prove' my statements. Why not? Because my claim is that I am only pointing out what we already know but mostly don't notice. What gets in the way of this noticing is lots of inherited baggage, seductive images of what things 'must' be. The 'cure' is introspection and just looking at how 'you' (my skeptical reader in general) experience ordinary meaning in ordinary life, the 'external world,' the presence of others, etc. Non-theoretical living made visible to a theorizing that often only looks to itself as an exhaustive image of life.

Yeah, or the stuff we can all agree on that we stand upon. — Posty McPostface

Right. And for me this is the real ground. And it's not an exact ground. It is a fuzzy darkness, though we can always shine a light here or there when necessary. I don't check to see if I have hands before I reach for my coffee.

I mean to assert that things are really just facts that we can agree on. There are also bedrock beliefs we can agree on. — Posty McPostface

Oh, OK. Then yes. I like that. I would just add that we don't have to 'have them in mind.' They are there like a dark background for the most part. Just think about how much we take for granted as we glide around the furniture on the way to the fridge.

But, I have expressed holism by stating that the totality of the world are facts. — Posty McPostface

If you mean that all the facts are entangled in a system, then that is my cup of tea. If you mean that the world is 'primordially' intelligible, then I agree. If you mean that the world is made up of sharp and clear propositions that are the case, then I don't agree.

Sounds that people can make with their mouths, things they can type or handwrite, body motions they can make, etc. are not at all the same as ideas they have. Those things are correlated to ideas, but they're not the same as them. — Terrapin Station

Agreed, and the light that hits are eyes is not the tree. But one can say that we see the tree, that the light reveals the tree to us through our eyes. So the marks and noises communicate something we call meaning. On the level of preferences, I lean this way.

Indeed. But, what's wrong with stating that the world is the totality of facts and not things? This seems elementary to me. — Posty McPostface

I'm not even saying I disagree, but what is a fact for you? Merely offering the phrase out of context doesn't say much. This is my tedious meaning holism. To figure out what that sentence means to you, I have to get to know you. By all means, tell me how it exists for you in context.

Ideas are mental phenomena. As such, they occur "in persons' heads." They're literally brain states that the person has--it's what it's like to BE that brain (or rather those parts of that brain), in those dynamic states. — Terrapin Station

I don't think this does justice to what we mean and experience. I can totally relate, though, to relating our experiences of being a brain to measurable aspects of the brain as an object. I know that I can swallow certain pills and make pain go away. But really we don't talk about our thoughts and feelings in the same way that we talk about objects. We can say that thoughts and feelings are 'really' just objects, but this seems to add too much to the uncontroversial relationship of thoughts/feelings and brains.

Are you a Tractarian by any chance? The world is the totality of facts not things. Therefore, we must analyze the state space we both inhabit. This can only be done through perfect asymmetrical information sharing. — Posty McPostface

I love the later Wittgenstein, though the aesthetic/ethical thrust of the TLP is great. To me it's not particularly useful to say that the world is the totality of facts. Or it's useful for only one particular kind of purpose. I think roughly that Wittgenstein was annoyed at people being scientistic about religion and art, and that that was part of his goal, to reveal the mystery by clearing out the confusion.

Some people think that meaning is llterally "embedded" in objective stuff. For one, I'd guess that you're familiar with Putnam's work on meaning, no? — Terrapin Station

No. But I've read lots of Rorty, if that helps. I think he's pretty great, and I also have lots of respect for instrumentalism, pragmatism, etc. Holism just happens to be the horse I'm riding at the moment. But I can feel my way into what someone might mean by that embeddedness.

At any rate, when people "share ideas," they're of course not doing that literally. — Terrapin Station

Not to be difficult, but why not? They participate in the idea at the same time. I'll agree that this isn't exactly true, but I don't think it has an exact meaning in the first place. So we can't be exactly wrong or right about it. We just get a sense of what is appropriate to say or do and say or do it, never 'completely' or 'exactly' grasping some clear and distinct essence. Meaning flows through time and sentences inexactly but 'sharp' enough so that we constantly move on with our lives. My central point would be maybe that it's distributed. It's not 'in' the words but 'between' and 'around' them. And time is crucial: as you read this sentence there is a kind of memory of what has been read and an expectation of what is to follow, so that meaning is not instantaneous.

So 'being' is temporal and historical. It's only within the unnoticed temporality that we can imagine a subset of being that is neither temporal nor historical, dead stuff that is just there. This is an extremely useful subset and way of looking at things, but it is parasitic or dependent on something more mysterious. (But I have no intention of dragging in 'supernatural' entities to bury this mystery in more entities that explain nothing really but only draw a smiley face on the mystery.)

And how does this relate to semantic holism that is an attitude? — Posty McPostface

If one wants philosophy to address the 'highest' things, then one is naturally going to be drawn to existentialism, the philosophy of religion and art, etc. One will probably think (just an example) Nietzsche is a philosopher, very much a philosopher, else philosophy is some boring technical pursuit, a kind of word math for experts, another dog trick to learn in STEM (and I have a job in STEM.)

So if one wants to think about the highest things, life and death matters, with a kind of 'religious' seriousness, then one is going to quickly get impatient with just staring at bugs in the source code. One wants to talk about the total human situation. And one pretty soon figures out that people have their own little words for this or that and nevertheless fundamentally agree somehow on their basic grasp of what it means or should mean to exist, etc. And I don't mean what it means for a hair dryer to exist: I mean what it means for you or me to exist in this world with other people, in time, mortal, full of desire and fear.

Hmm, one cannot be certain of wants; but, needs are apparent. What does that mean to you? — Posty McPostface

My understanding of humans includes that they will die without water and feel pretty bad on the way to that thirsty grave. It also includes the idea that humans can individually become fixated on objects or ideas that leave others cold. One man will die for what another considers a joke or a bore. Roughly, needs are based in biology. Wants exist on upper levels of the human being (which are still maybe founded on biology, but in a more complicated way.)

I mean to highlight that we both share needs and not wants. We can agree that I'm thirsty if I'm dying out of dehydration. Not so much about wants. — Posty McPostface

Oh, I agree with that, roughly or sufficiently. (I think it's pretty much always possible to qualify, qualify, qualify --but not always appropriate, else we'd never finish one thing and start another. )

Meaning occurs only in individual's heads. It can't be shared in any manner. It's something inherently mental. — Terrapin Station

For me, though, 'mental' doesn't have some sharp meaning. Sure, we have a rough categorization, but I don't think it's sharp enough for what philosophy often wants to do with it. Now you can understand the mental so that meaning is trapped in heads, but to some degree that seems like a grammar preference. Because people commonly talk of sharing ideas, without all the metaphysical baggage of intending something exact, as if they are sharing some identical entity.

Communication does not at all require literally sharing meanings. That's not how it works. — Terrapin Station

I believe that if I understand the terms in exactly the way you'd prefer that I'd also agree with your point. But for me this just cuts the knot instead of untying it. Our primary situation involves interpreting words that are not used exactly to our preference, and we also are forced to use words that don't conform to others' preferences on the 'atomic' level. So I think we are constantly trying to interpret an approach as a whole to make sense of to-us-suspect uses of words, and we are constantly asking others to do the same for us.

In that sense there are only private languages (no perfect overlap).

On my view there is ONLY private language.

(I'm not a Wittgenstein fan. At all.) — Terrapin Station

I'd say it's a terminological dispute, because here we are talking, pretty much intelligible to one another. And I'm guessing you think in English that I could pretty much sense of.

Well, I'm lost on what we disagree on here. We seem to be saying the same thing to some degree. — Posty McPostface

Perhaps. But if I'm honest, I'm not getting a clear picture of your perspective.

But, I suppose there are hinge propositions or a priori truth that we must deal with first, and guarantee the intersubjectivity of meaning. — Posty McPostface

But there is no private language. We start with a profound sense of the inter-subjectivity of meaning.

We are already where some of us think we need to prove we are. And those who want to prove we really are there are already assuming we are as they try to prove it, in the mere concern with proof (which is implicitly for others in a shared world.)

What troubles people is that our experience of being there is inexact, receding, automatic. The fantasy is to make it explicit. But we end up betraying the living system of language by grabbing at 'atomic meanings' for the bricks of the castle we didn't need in the first place. Except that we conceived the philosopher as a kind of knowledge knower, or scientist of science itself, with perfect certainty and clarity as replacements for God. (In short, it's an implicitly theological project.)

But do numbers exist? — Purple Pond

To me the way to frame this question from the very beginning is how numbers exist, because if they don't exist in some way then what are we talking about in the first place?

Cool. I thought so myself. I just have a gripe with our lack of agreement on what abstract concepts such as "justice", is. — Posty McPostface

I don't deny that there is a little drop of something like atomic meaning associated with words. For instance, 'apple' will likely activate an image of an apple in our minds. My point is that this kind of atomic meaning is faint and not worth much. Words get their force as they work together, and you can't interpret a sentence by looking at the words individually but only by taking them as a whole. We do this all the time, and I don't think we can make explicit exactly what is going on --what it is to understand a sentence.

What's funny is that we 'live' what I call 'meaning holism' even as we debate it. And arguing against its existence requires its living application. We tend to stare at an object language and take the metalanguage that makes that staring possible for granted. The eye is not in its own field of vision. But there are mirrors.

But, that doesn't mean that method's fail us every time. — Posty McPostface

But I never said that they did. That obscure ground works for us almost every time. It only breaks down all the time in philosophy, where we are constantly pushing against it.

A private language in principle could not exist. — Posty McPostface

Not only do I agree, that actually illuminates the position I'm trying to communicate. We live in language which is social and 'enworlded.'

Haha, I understand. So, the point of your posts is to highlight that we can't have an attitude independent of meaning obtained in an abstract sense? — Posty McPostface

That sounds kinda-like what I mean. I am saying that attitude is entangled with method. And I am saying that the functioning ground is global and largely automatic or unconscious.