Kornelius

Point taken !

I admitted nothing. On the contrary my implication was that the usage of those concepts was simplistic which an academic ought to have realised.

I'm surprised that having studied both psychology and philosophy you are using simplistic concepts like 'reason' and 'truth'.

Odd though, to talk of reason as if it were an actual thing, rather than merely a specific kind of procedure adopted by the human animal, intended solely to accomplish a specific task.

Well said !

IMO Since 'classical logic' can be problematic in general philosophy, it is likely to be even more so in theology !

You have made a 'logical error'. (Refer to 'fallacy of affirming the consequent').
(Your argument takes the form iF p THEN q....NOT q...therefore NOT p....which is invalid)

I concur with Gurdjieff's 'committee nature of self', but as for his 'levels of awareness' which come from a 'pyramid selling' structure to his esotericism, I think there is little of significance with that which cannot come from any general meditational practice.

...even more word salad !
There is a lot of rubbish here about 'the law of the excluded middle'. Since this is inapplicable in parts of quantum physics it is clear that classical logic is merely one form of limited rationality we apply to what we call 'ontology and epistemology'. There are other 'logics' and aspects of mathematical modelling like 'symmetry' which need to be considered. As Rorty indicated, philosophy has no authoritative claims in those areas.

Your pessimism is well understood. And the 'Gaia hypothesis' seems to imply the inevitability of wars as a limiting factor on population.

So you are appealing to what is commonly called 'a medical condition' to account for your 'word salad' ?
If so, I sympathize, but on an intellectual forum like this there is obviously a grey area of classification of comments, ranging from attention seeking to disruptive trolling, into which your convoluted texts could easily be placed.
On a lighter note, I am reminded of this comedy sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbnkY1tBvMU

There seems to be a lot of 'word salad' above surrounding the notion that what we call 'the world' is 'observer dependent'. From a species perspective, shared physiology and language gives much agreement which we tend to misleadingly call 'objective', and that sort of blinkered thinking can fuel a futile 'reality debate'. Beyond that relatively simple idea, I cannot see any substantive point being made.

Agreed.

I would say you are agreeing with a shifting world and shifting self where 'is-ness' amounts to little more than a snapshot memory or a projection in the mind. This matters little unless we are concerned with 'meaning' or 'purose of life', in which some sort of permanent anchor is being sought as in most religions or rigid political preferences. Unfortunately, the majority of the species may not have the time or intellect to understand this, and tribal conflicts will continue, perhaps resulting in eventual species extinction.

Okay three points...
1. Derrida (endorsed by Rorty) pointed out that the import of any assertion (pivileging) was contingent on its negation i.e. aporia was inevitable.
2. Genetic epistemology (Piaget's philosophical extension of his developmental psychology) suggests the limitless continuity/rolling scenario of state transitions between 'knowlege' and 'world' as each 'discovery' raises more questions.
3. Human language is 'generative' (Chomsky) which implies a potentially infinite set of meanings.

It's not the case that 'expectancy' is 'just another noun' because the expectancy associated with using a word like 'tree' can vary according to context across a vast range. Calling a tree 'an object' is merely to acknowledge that we can agree to contextually focus, or narrow down on the range of expectancies. In short, 'expectancy' is the common function associated with all nouns (Russell again...the class of all classes...etc)

'Getting clear about what's being said' may not be feasible from a transcendent pov which attempts to look at 'languaging' as behaviour rather than 'thought'. Such a pov is a bit like swimming without the buoyancy aids of fixed axioms.

No. I am claiming that objection to 'facts about facticity' is a futile issue akin to Russell's Paradox. The level of 'rationality' required to discuss these matters is transcendent of classical logic with its 'law if the excluded middle'. Such rationaliy is well known in QM, which would take us right back to the Bohr reference.
And as Von Glasersfeld implied in his analysis of Maturana, it is 'gut instinct' which tends to point the way towards a contoversial, yet potentially transcendent vantage point. After all, we are attempting to language about languaging !
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm

Re: your common sense view, I suggest you consider replacing 'objects existing whether perceived or not' by ' expectation of functional persistence evoked by the abstact persistence of a naming word'.
That 'functionality' can only be related to human needs, including the need to predict, say, animal behavior. Thus Maturana makes the point that ' a predatator stalking its prey' is meaningful for human purposes, but in the animal,world in which 'self awareness' is debateable, there may be no separation of roles, merely the automatic conjoint behavior we might call 'a chasing'. IMO, it is only by thinking about non human (language) species that we can understand the significance of talking about the relativity of 'existence'.

Sorry..no time to reply in detail. Read my comment above above about Russell's Paradox for a reply to your 'fact about facts'.
Back later.

The constructivist view of 'facts' is basically an anti 'naive realist' stance, which recognizes that 'facticity' can be negotiated and shifts over time. Facticity is basically about the human preoccupation with prediction and control which are aspects of another psychological construct we call 'time'.
You are correct in saying that this pov makes little difference to everyday transactions, except where 'facticity' is being disputed as in the recent topic of 'fake news'. I don't think logical contradiction' is a valid analysis involved in 'fact about fact'. Like with Wittgenstein's view of Russell's Paradox as 'aberrant language use', I think binary logic with its axioms fixed set membership, has its limits as a semantic tool.

[reply="Terrapin Station;298744"
Of course ! Languaging, like any other form of behavior can operate like a bodily habit (as in circling thoughts ), or merely for attention seeking

Because 'thinghood' can be assigned to irrelevancies by parties to an exchange in their attempts to 'lead' the dancing.

Note that the word 'fact' comes from the Latin facere-to construct
For me 'facts',are human constructions with a high degree of consensus.
Note that, in the literature, there is at least one paper discussing 'the half life of facts'.

There is no thing else, other than that which informs potential action.
( We've been round that thinging on the existence thread)

I can agree that 'philosophy' can be useful in assisting ethical decisions, but is pretty vacuous elsewhere.

Surely 'physicality' depends on the physiology of the observer. And 'time' is considered to be a 'psychological concept. So without humans and their psychological needs, what could 'the moon' mean prior to humans ?
Yes, of course we can imagine a pre-human moon in our current mind's eye, in order to explain current human observations....but do you not see the essential role of humanity in all that ?

I just did ! The fact that you responded means it matters to you.
Obviously other 'events' matter, for example had either of us been called away these actions would not have taken place.
(The printing of Jabberwocky, above, had no meaning for me... it was a like a bit of weird jiving in the corner).

At the risk of antagonizing most of the contributors above, I would say any 'bunch of words we care to utter or write', including this one, has one function only...to attempt to facilitate the choice of future action, including the next 'bunch of words'. From that pov, dichotomies like 'subjective-objective', 'truth-belief' have import only in their promoting 'what, if at all, happens next'. The only context that matters is this one, and unless these discussions impinge on our praxis of living, we are indulging in little more than a type of social dancing with a bit of jockeying about 'who leads'.

You miss the point. Thinghood always implies functionality. I'm currently sitting in a room in a friends house and have noticed a small hole in the wall opposite. (Note a hole contains no wall atoms). I immediately begin to speculate on its functionality/thinghood. Would I even notice a similar 'hole' in a lawn ? Indeed, would it 'exist' ?
If you cannot understand that even the 'physicality of atoms' depends on the utility of that concept for humans, we will fail to communicate.

Philosophica' 'progress' can nowadays only refer to 'ethical' matters. Its days of contributing to 'epistemology', as for example in promoting empiricism, are long gone, where it has been superceded
by a variety of rationalities applicable to 'science'.

To EricH

'Naive realism' can be thought of as a reporting mode which assumes that the 'thinghood' of what we call 'objects' has nothing to do with the needs of the observer who 'things' them.

Compare your breakfast scenario with one in which 'seamless coping' was interrupted.
Mugging scene from Crocodile Dundee
(...Punk pulls out stilleto and threatens Mick and Sue..)
SUE:' Careful Mick...he's got a knife'
MICK Knife ?(..pulls out his big bush knife...)'That's a knife !
(...Punk flees)

Note how the 'thinghood' of 'knife' is being negotiated according to its contextual utility.
It is my assertion that all 'things' are contextually defined and potentially subject to negotiation. You discard naive realism when you realize that.

Looks like your breakfast scenario was mostly 'seamless coping' .For example, I"m prepared to lay money that at least one or more of the words you used in your later report never came into your head at the time. Nor I suppose did you contemplate the existential dependency of your 'items"on a human cultural context even though they were.
Naive realism is the default mode for seamless coping. You don't need to work at it.

" Then maybe you can help me to get my point across. Existence is present at all levels of thought, linguistic or nonlinguistic"

Sorry, but for me ' existence' is merely a word like any other whose meaning/import is embedded in its context of usage, therefore I cannot argue for its non linguistic viability. The non philosophical contexts of its usage involve disputes about 'utility', which for the purposes of naive realistic posturing replace utility with the word 'existence' instead as though the disputed concept were independent of an observer.
Now once we entertain philosophical contexts of usage, I assert that 'existence' presupposes at least an element of naive realism.

In non philosophical situations, 'existence' is never attributed except in disputes about the utility of a concept on which the word 'existence' is invoked instead of 'utility' in order to suggest the authority of 'an absolute'. That is the whole crux of my thesis..

Of course you can operationally 'perceive colour', but it has been experimentally shown that that perception is ia funcrion of physiology, wavelenth, situational factors, and cultural experience. (Ref; Varela).

Hmmm...'language' and 'languaging' differ only in as much that the first implies the human version with a syntax which allows for 'reasoning'. The second, exmplified perhaps by the command 'no' to a dog, merely interrupts or facilitates changes in behavior. It looks like we don't require the word 'thought' at all, unless we take an anthropomorphic view of other species.

I have no idea what 'basic thought' can mean other than a state of suspension or interruption of an S-R sequence.

I think we can validly conceive of a sequence of 'perceptually receptive states' which are associated with shifting 'physiological needs', for all creatures, which defines for them the nature of their shifting world. Where 'language' might come in (at the crudest level) is as a facility to delay any automatici stimulus response linkage, by allowing for internal 'considering' (aka 'thinking') .
NB One psychological definition of 'intelligence' is 'the capacity to delay a response'.

But since the general view is that perception is 'active' not 'passive', whan can 'direct experience' mean ?

:smile:
How about 'non linguistic creatures' don't 'think' !

Surely the 'undermining of epistemology' can be more significantly attributed to pragmatists like Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) than by those who focus on ' consciousness' like Chalmers or Dennett. A significant aspect of the pragmatist position is that the 'reality debate' is futile. What matters is what works, and that is decided by paradigmatic consensus.
As for the references to 'color vision', this has certainly been a microcosm for epistemological debate between phenomenologists and physicalists. And it is interesting to me that Wittgenstein allegedly rejected aspects of his his own Tractatus after contemplating Goethe's (non Newtonian) 'color theory'.