Braver wrote a great historical exposition of anti-realism. He also did a book on the intersection of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Groundless Grounds.

His general thesis is that, despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both insist upon our radical finitude as human beings, and that there is an unsurpassable limit to the reasons we give as to why things are the way they are. In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot ground itself, but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already "there" before the question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place. — review

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/groundless-grounds-a-study-of-wittgenstein-and-heidegger/

I mention him because I think his work plugs in to the theme here. A Thing of This World is one of my favorite texts.

Responding to your OP, I'd just recommend not taking words too seriously. I mean don't assume that they correspond to essences or concepts in some context-independent way. The same word means a million different things in a million different contexts. The whole game of 'what is real' and 'should we include unicorns' is a dead end. English is not like math. Sometimes the question itself is the mistake. What the question forgets to question is where the answer abandonment of the question hides. It's the unquestioned framework that makes the question possible that I'm talking about --a certain vision of language that philosophy questions from but forgets to check for its soundness.

In a different thread, Atheism was being defined, by some, as a belief that there is no God. Doesn’t this essentially equate to a belief in “nothing?” If so, isn’t that self-defeating? A belief requires an object, that is, something as opposed to nothing. If there is no object your “belief” is referring to, then you don’t have an actual belief. You can have beliefs about the premises leading up to the conclusion that there is no God (Theists haven’t provided evidence, it isn’t logical, etc.), but that isn’t the same thing. So, my question would be ”What is the object of the belief in the above definition of Atheism?” — Pinprick

Let's make this more concrete. A stranger tells me that he has millions in the bank. He just needs a little money (due to absurd circumstances) in the short term and will pay me back tenfold. Is it not sensible that I don't believe in his millions in the bank? An atheist doesn't believe that some invisible character from the good book is actually up there, watching every sparrow. He doesn't believe in a magical place that souls go when they die. He probably believes that personalities just vanish upon brain death. Just as he doesn't remember experiencing the world before birth, he doesn't expect to experience the world after death.

Because I find all of this obvious, I'm surprised at your linguistic objection.

Indeed, all this would do is intensify it greatly. For while there may allegedly exist a state of 'peace' amongst the ruled, there would still be the state of perpetual war between the rulers and the ruled; in fact, it would only be magnified, since the ruled are now in a totally asymmetrical position. — Alvin Capello

I'd say make this more concrete and personal. I'm in the US. The government is shitty, but I can imagine a far shittier situation in which a shitty government is replaced by lots of local warlords. Or the chaos in New Orleans after Katrina. Of course a powerful central government becoming completely evil is terrifying. Stalin is not what Hobbes had in mind, but it fits in with the danger you mention. As I understand Hobbes, it was less the state of nature that concerned him than civil war. He did have a grim view of human nature, but I think the state of nature fit into his system in which rights are radically contractual. Until there is a law against something, it was not evil. Hobbes at least pretended to identify sin or evil with what was forbidden by law. He was a truly eerie and fascinating thinker.

Where I would question Penrose, is in respect of his argument that the Universe pre-exists human consciousness. You see, this fantastically complex organ that we have - the brain - is actually an incredibly sophisticated simulator. The whole universe, including the ancient past, billions of years before h. Sapiens came along - is projected by this simulator. It is senseless to ask how or in what way the universe exists ‘outside of’ or ‘apart from’ that simulated act — because we’re never outside of it. — Wayfarer

Doesn't this open up the old can of worms? The brain in this case is just one more part of the simulation. The 'subject' is one more piece of the 'object.' And the simulation metaphor only has force against some background of actuality. How can the brain or the subject play this role? It's part of the dream. The intelligibility of the dream (our talk about) is a quilt of inter-related concepts.

But I like 'we are never outside it.' I'd just say that we are never outside of language. Or at least that we can't talk about being outside language without being threatened by a kind of glitch.

But there’s a deep cognitive or perceptual mistake going on in our minds. This is that we instinctively and reflexively divide the Universe into ‘self and other’. That is one of the fundamental daemons — automated configurations — of consciousness. It’s a self-executing routine that operates prior to any statement about ‘the world’. That sets up the backdrop of the ‘ancient universe’ with us as recently-arrived organisms. But where or what is that backdrop, if not in the brain-mind of h. sapiens? But naturalism doesn’t see that, for the obvious reason that it’s nowhere to be found in the objective domain; it is prior to or underlying any objective judgement. — Wayfarer

I think you are leaving out part of the Mobius strip. Where is the world that preceded the brain but in the brain? And yet where is the brain if not in the universe that preceded it? Why wouldn't your argument work against the prior existence of your own parents? Did they really exist before they engendered you? Or are they just your dream? I do see your point. I'm just emphasizing the problem that keeps a classic debate alive indefinitely.

I agree that we tend to ignore the backdrop of a functioning language, and this is precisely because it functions so well when we aren't doing philosophy.

That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all; and its ontological signification is constantly overlooked. — Heidegger

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. — Hegel

So maybe naturalism as a metaphysical position has its problems, but it's also and perhaps more importantly an attitude.

If it is 'the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted,' then what is the objection? But what does 'supernatural' even mean here? Are gods metaphors or physical objects? Or something in between? We might look not only at a bias against the supernatural but against a toothless philosophy in general. I suggest that the real issue is less ideological than technological. The gap is between the domain of opinion and the domains of expertise that create a cure for the current virus or replace fossil fuels as an energy source, for instance. The rest is politics, one might joke. Metaphysics, religion, literature. These answer who we are and more concrete what we should do. Naturalism as a theory seems more about a secular attitude (cultural politics, 'Inherit the Wind').

Just curious: do you like Lee Braver? I've really enjoyed a couple of his books.

I don't agree with all of it, and I think he exaggerates the extent to which philosophical texts are unintelligible (he may not be the best reader). — Snakes Alive

I agree, and that's one of the tricky things about criticizing philosophy. To do it well, one has to read oneself into the tradition. But this costs time. Philosophy loves to hate itself articulately. I didn't major in philosophy, but I've spent way too much time reading philosophy in terms of time that could have been spent on marketable skills.

That experiments had to be performed was dragged kicking and screaming from the philosophers, and people have had to drag a lot of good things kicking and screaming from them. — Snakes Alive

I agree. There's a theoretical leaning that I have to fight in myself. O the fantasy of the magic words! James is pretty great on that theme. We'd like to climb out of time on a ladder made of spit.

But I like the idea that the inclination to philosophy doesn't match its aims – if it really were about the most general truths, or about how the world as a whole hung together, and it delivered on learning about those things, how exciting it would be! — Snakes Alive

To me it seems that some of the classics are actually successful as literature on grand themes. Pascal, Nietzsche, Hobbes. But this is technology that only works if one believes in it. It's personality on the market for consumption/adoption. And it's also in literature proper and pop culture in general. And there's no great chasm for me between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. There's plenty of 'life philosophy' in The Possessed, embedded in the context of action and high stakes.

So theories of how the whole world hangs together are IMO to be found in certain 'philosophical' works, but those philosophical works aren't science. (I'm agreeing with how exciting it would be.)

For me science is something like technology that works whether one believes in it or not. It's not falsifiability that matters so much as the undeniability of its 'miracles', in war or peace, given our fragile and needy embodiment. Philosophy is 'just opinions.' Perhaps it can all be boiled down to the status of the average professor of philosophy these days. It's not terrible, but few look to them as sages.

I agree that there's a sloppiness in Rorty. I don't know the analytic tradition well. I have looked into the empiricists, and even they strike me as anti-philosophical in some sense. Perhaps that was the decisive era.

But I read people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer before all that. I see it as a literature of basic stances that one can take on existence. It's not essentially different than a different type of young man choosing a favorite rapper.

[just saw latest post, will now reply to that]

I thought Rorty was pretty radical. Reading him and the pragmatists he led me to especially informed my anti-philosophical leanings. I ended up not majoring in philosophy. Reading him suggested to me that the game of armchair 'science' was dead. You mention Wittgenstein. He strikes me as anti-philosophical and is yet considered one of the 20th century greats.

Paul Graham makes some interesting points about W.

Have you seen this critique of philosophy?

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Am I the only one who finds it unintuitive that a line segment can be shrunk for all eternity and never disappear? Just asking — Gregory

If something shrinks more and more slowly, it can continue to shrink without ever vanishing. This is an informal description of something that can be made mathematical.

Is pragmatism still philosophy? Rorty was mentioned, but we can go back to James. Is Nietzsche still a philosopher? It's my impression that philosophy has largely become its own target. I've enjoyed everyone's post, and I understand the attitude of the critic of philosophy. And yet I still treasure certain works (place them how you will) as the gossip of clever, creative personalities about 'life', politics, and themes that are too big and baggy in general for measuring effectively for effectiveness. The criticism of philosophy is a crucial life-philosophy (or folk philosophy) issue, even if it is decided against specialized academic philosophy.

I know people mean well by ignoring the feminine power, but I don't think the ignorance benefits us. — Athena

I just want to add/emphasize that perhaps men are using 'feminine' power, the power of spectacle. Perhaps even Trump is using feminine power. Pelosi was recently called a 'mama bear.'

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-ocasio-cortez-on-the-view-20200219-gcliuehkgbb77dovdjxt3j2p3i-story.html

Is it possible that women may think fundamentally different from men, unless they are pressured to think like men, and that that difference is important to humanity? What if it is our potential to be more like bonobo (female domination) and less like chimpanzees (male domination)? — Athena

This is an interesting but also dangerous thought. The idea that men and women are essentially (spiritually/intellectually) different was/is perhaps the basis of male supremacist ideology. Opposing matriarchal to patriarchal ideology just inverts the same hierarchical structure. FWIW, I do think that technology has empowered the 'feminine' (traditionally-associated-with-females) aspect of the human to become more important. What does it mean that POTUS is a reality TV star? Appearance and pageantry are more important than ever perhaps. Seduction has replaced violence in many ways perhaps, yet this seduction is often itself a virtual violence (more Mean Girls than a utopia of free love.)

Perhaps at one time to be an atheist or agnostic was being a rebel, however in this day and age such people are dime a dozen. The two main characters in the movie "Juno" describe most people who come out of high school in America.

But i should say being a rebel or different doesn't neccesarily equate to being an ethical person. — christian2017

I agree that it's no longer rebellious to be irreligious. I'd say that the dominant religion has simply changed. It's all on the front page of the culture war. The trans issue (to name just one) is a 'theological' problem. People were once terrified of being called atheists and are now terrified of being called racists, homophobes, etc. At the same time, someone like Jordan Peterson (who remembers him now?) could become almost instantly famous by casting himself as a rebel against the 'rebellion.'

I have seen Juno, and I agree with what I think is your implicit criticism of a certain predictable persona. I follow pop culture, and certain themes and heroes have been repeated, repeated, repeated. At the same time, godlessness is a difficult path, even as it becomes more common. The young, beautiful, and rich are living in the high-tech garden of delights, so they are exceptions perhaps.

Hi. This is the kind of question I was answering.

The point is, if you did not experience any of those things, what would compel another uninterested person to believe, or think, or infer, that those experiences were a result of some sense of Deity? — 3017amen

My answer addressed only one conception of religion. Personally I find religion to be symbolically true in many ways and cases. Various important repeatable insights are encoded in religious texts, art, and rituals. But I understand that to be a dominant and uncontroversial view.

For experiences of God/gods to be taken as more than metaphors for states of mind, I suggest that power is what would convince, if it were indeed manifest. Instead the so-called problem of evil suggests the rhetorical necessity for a hidden or mysterious God. The 'obvious' lack of benevolent divine rule has to be explained away somehow.

So for the 101 student, what are people looking for to prove God's existence? What domains of Philosophy are appropriate? What domains of Science are appropriate? — 3017amen

In a word: power. And that means prediction and control. We care about what can help or harm us. Feed the hungry. Foil the tyrant. Heal the sick. To an unbeliever like myself, religion taken literally looks like wishful thinking. I wish there was a benevolent god. It's such a nice idea that I'm amazed I haven't let myself believe it without evidence. The skeptical path is a dark one. It's a manifestation of elitism through a 'dietary restriction' (what the mind will accept as reliable.)

A thought: idealism, or the role of the mental in constructing (our?) reality, seems inevitable once you spend enough time philosophizing.

On the other hand, that mind is intrinsic and underlies everything, is exactly what creatures with minds would say. Especially after they spend a lot of time thinking.

"I am the center of the universe, and everything else moves around me." - how am I to disprove this to myself? — Pneumenon

I suggest replacing 'mental' with 'social.' If we are talking about reality, than our talk is indeed presupposed in our talking about reality. Yet we can talk about what happened before we were able to talk (before our species was here.)

This is something like a knot, glitch, or riddle. I don't think this glitch has been fixed or the knot untied. But it ends up being mostly ignored, because we are primarily practical animals. The malfunctions or ambiguities in our talk 'must' be ignored, since we prioritize effective speech, etc.

Which, in turn, has lead to a deep sense of 'otherness' from the natural world - a sense which was mostly absent from the ancient and medieval worldview, which presumed an affinity either between nous (intellect) and the natural order which it reflected, or between the divine intellect as reflected in the soul. There was an implicit conviction of a relationship between the cosmic, natural and human order, which is precisely what was undermined by the mechanist philosophy of Descartes, Galileo and Newton. — Wayfarer

I agree that nature-as-machine is a dominant metaphor, but this metaphor is as much shovel as lens. We haven't only changed our way of looking at the world but the world itself. So we've disenchanted the world but also modified it extensively.

The even more fundamental, or preliminary (thus, 'perennial'), question at the root (ῥάδιξ) of (Western and non-Western) "thought": "what is real?" - more precisely: what about 'any X' differentiates 'real X' from 'not-real X'? — 180 Proof

I suggest that we tend to use 'real' for what we have to take seriously. Or for what is worth acting on. It's all tied in with care. We are constantly forced to make decisions. Is an opportunity or a threat real or merely apparent?

So the question "What is 'nature'?" ends up leading to a more fundamental question: "What is the 'physical'?" and that ultimately resides in the etymology of φῠ́σῐς and, finally, in the origins of Western thought: Greek thought.

The analysis of this concept is very important indeed to understand our current scientific conception of the world, and therefore the predominant world ontology (at least non-religious, or perhaps simply the de facto ontology ). Does anyone here have an analysis to share, original or otherwise? Full disclosure: I am particularly struck by Heidegger's take, especially in his Introduction to Metaphysics. But other analyses are certainly welcome. — Xtrix

How about science as the theory of technology that works whether or not one believes in it? And this involves the physical as that which is indifferent to our beliefs and hopes. And yet our beliefs and hopes are centered on the physical. The physical is what we care about that doesn't care about us. It's food or poison. It's the roof that keeps out the storm. It's the pill that stops the infection from killing us. It's the car that will or will not start when we need to go to work, already worried about next month's bills.

I like Heidegger's focus on care. As humans we care. Pure theory satisfies only an exceptional state of mind. For the most part we need results. Superstition is often like bad science in the sense that it has the same goals, prediction and control. The card lady tells me my future like the meteorologist. The prayer handkerchief is a substitute for chemotherapy.

So in order to get a good understanding of science, you would have to actually go through the process of it, just like it was done in the past, with errors and all. Its only then you can really grasp the truth. Same with morality, or put together, philosophy.

Just one example, some people will say God is good, but that is a kind of dogma, which is not obvious to experience. Its only by living existence, that you realize it is good, and in which way, and that it is a process, not a finality. If someone is simply taught God is good, then they will look around and find faults with the world, and say it is a lie, but the reason is because they haven't lived goodness, or don't realize they do. Putting it in the absolute like that, suggest that everything is perfect, while this perfection is not in the present, but in the future. Its only by taking the whole that it becomes perfect and good. Taking it as absolute stops the process of learning and living. You could say the same of any type of value or truth. — Episthene

I agree with you on this. One of the things that always sticks with me from Hegel is his contempt for summaries. Philosophy doesn't offer some tidy result. Only the entire journey is the (temporary) truth. And what is familiarly known is not well known. It's what we take for granted that blinds and traps us.

Sort of related: As I get older, I understand that various moral prohibitions --the ones I rebelled against in my arrogant and sloppy youth -- turn out to be more positive than negative. I mean that they aren't so much prohibitions as expressions of priorities. (My changing attitude toward sexual promiscuity comes to mind, but the issue is broader than that. )

You could say the notion is quasi-spiritual; but the salient point is that only the purely rational is (in principle at least) is free of prejudice or bias. And to be free of prejudice and bias in dealing with other humans would seem to be the highest ideal commonly aspired to cross-culturally. — Janus

To me the 'purely rational' just is the cross-cultural. This is the God's eye perspective, contingently (and accurately, perhaps) associated with Western philosophy and science. This is the 'transcendental pretense.' This is humanism. Husserl wrote some powerful passages on this.
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

I quote a passage that connects more with our mind and matter discussion, but the first part of the essay discusses the birth of what I call the transcendental pretense (God's eye view or idealized objective or transcultural view.) The 'transcultural' perspective is (strangely) a particular kind of culture, a piece that would dominate the whole.

How, then, did the intoxicating success of this discovery of physical infinity affect the scientific mastery of the realm of spirit? In the focus on the environing world, a constantly objective attitude, everything spiritual appeared to be based on physical corporeality. Thus an application of the mode of thought proper to natural science was obvious. For this reason we already find in the early stages Democritean materialism and determinism.47 However, the greatest minds recoiled from this and also from any newer style of psychophysics (Psychophysik). Since Socrates, man is made thematic precisely as human, man with his spiritual life in society. Man retains an orientation to the objective world, but with the advent of Plato and Aristotle this world becomes the great theme of investigations. At this point a remarkable cleavage makes itself felt: the human belongs to the universe of objective facts, but as persons, as egos, men have goals, aims. They have norms for tradition, truth norms - eternal norms. Though the development proceeded haltingly in ancient times, still it was not lost. Let us make the leap to so-called 'modern' times. With glowing enthusiasm the infinite task of a mathematical knowledge of nature and in general of a world knowledge is undertaken. The extraordinary successes of natural knowledge are now to be extended to knowledge of the spirit. Reason had proved its power in nature. 'As the sun is one all-illuminating and warming sun, so too is reason one' (Descartes).48 The method of natural science must also embrace the mysteries of spirit. The spirit is real49 and objectively in the world, founded as such in corporeality. With this the interpretation of the world immediately takes on a predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical, form. The same causality -only split in two- embraces the one world; the sense of rational explanation is everywhere the same, but in such a way that all explanation of spirit, in the only way in which it can be universal, involves the physical. There can be no pure, self-contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inneroriented psychology or theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical self-experience and extending to the other psyche.50 The way that must be traveled is the external one, the path of physics and chemistry. All the fond talk of common spirit, of the common will of a people, of nations' ideal political goals, and the like, are romanticism and mythology, derived from an analogous application of concepts that have a proper sense only in the individual personal sphere. Spiritual being is fragmentary. To the question regarding the source of all these difficulties the following answer is to be given: this objectivism or this psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such. To speak of the spirit as reality (Realitat), presumably a real (realen) annex to bodies and having its supposedly spatiotemporal being within nature, is an absurdity.

At this point, however, it is important for our problem of the crisis to show how it is that the 'modern age', that has for centuries been so proud of its successes in theory and practice, has itself finally fallen into a growing dissatisfaction and must even look upon its own situation as distressful. Want has invaded all the sciences, most recently as a want of method. Moreover, the want that grips us Europeans, even though it is not understood, involves very many persons.51

There are all sorts of problems that stem from naïveté, according to which objectivistic science holds what it calls the objective world to be the totality of what is, without paying any attention to the fact that no objective science can do justice to the subjectivity that achieves science. One who has been trained in the natural sciences finds it self-evident that whatever is merely subjective must be eliminated and that the method of natural science, formulated according to a subjective mode of representation, is objectively determined. In the same manner he seeks what is objectively true for the psychic too. By the same token, it is taken for granted that the subjective, eliminated by the physical scientist, is, precisely as psychic, to be investigated in psychology and of course in psychophysical psychology. The investigator of nature, however, does not make it clear to himself that the constant foundation of his admittedly subjective thinking activity is the environing world of life. This latter is constantly presupposed as the basic working area, in which alone his questions and his methodology make sense. Where, at the present time, is that powerful bit of method that leads from the intuitive environing world to the idealizing of mathematics and its interpretation as objective being, subjected to criticism and clarification? Einstein's revolutionary changes concern the formulas wherein idealized and naïvely objectivized nature (physis) is treated. But regarding the question of how formulas or mathematical objectification in general are given a sense based on life and the intuitive environing world, of this we hear nothing. Thus Einstein does nothing to reformulate the space and time in which our actual life takes place. — Husserl

The problem isn't trying to think how mind can arise from matter. The problem is thinking of the world as two different things - matter and mind. Everything is information. There is no need to explain how information arises from information. If you think that matter is something that exists and is directly opposed to mind and it's nature, then that is the problem. In all of these explanations, I have yet to see anyone explain how two opposing properties - matter and mind - interact. — Harry Hindu

I agree with your critique of strict dualism. I suggest that some philosophers have tried to transform a casual, loose distinction into a sharp, absolute distinction. If I dream that a lion is chasing me, that is 'mind' for practical reasons. Once I wake up, I don't need to organize my life to defend against lions. But the cancer diagnosed as the doctor's office is 'matter' because it's (practically speaking) killing me whether I am thinking of it or not.

The problems arise when we understand this (and other distinctions) as more than just historically evolved 'instruments.'

The 'information' approach is still a little vague. If you could define what you mean by it, that would help me. If it's the stuff of information theory, then your theory sounds like a mathematical ontology.

I agree that the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual is a relatively modern phenomenon, and as such it is a public, socially mediated phenomenon. But there is also no purely rational justification for any institution's right to enforce, or even coerce, individual's beliefs and allegiances when it comes to matters of faith. — Janus

I agree. At the same time I'd include the notion of the 'purely rational' as itself quasi-spiritual.

Yes, but what is the mind? According to science the mind is a function of the brain; so we are back to physical investigations in order to understand anything definite about the mind. — Janus

I agree that it's useful in some contexts to think of the mind as a function of the brain. At the same time, note that you are arguing this point in language, in the mental realm. I've been stressing that the linguistic realm is a social realm. Let us consider sociology and political science. And then of course psychology explicitly deals with consciousness in its own right (excepting behaviorists who attempt a fascinating kind of ideological purity.)

I agree that, in the context of so-called "folk" understandings of the mind, the physical is "defined in the negative" or more accurately as derivative of the mind; insofar as it is defined as "what can be sensed and measured" and it is understood under that paradigm that it is always a mind which measures. But we can equally say that it is the body/brain which measures; that it is something physical which measures something physical, and there is no contradiction in that. If it were really something non-physical doing the measuring then that would be dualism. — Janus

Roughly I think we agree that the physical is category of especially uncontroversial phenomena, if we forget how difficult modern science is. It takes years of training to understand it, so most people just trust those associated with technology they can't deny. (No one has seen a quark. If memory serves, their discoverer/inventor was an instrumentalist about them at first but slow became more of a realist as the instrument performed well.)

We can say that the body/brain measures, but this seems like a contortion in the name of an unnecessary physicalism. I'm questioning the project of declaring 'X is what is really there.' I do this from a position of a (necessarily) vague structural holism. I'm not against reductionism in particular contexts, but I think metaphysical reductionism doesn't serve much of a purpose now. Except maybe as a cultural marker. I'm in the awkward position of being pro-science and anti-woo and at the same time finding anti-realist arguments (as presented, for instance, in A Thing of This World) convincing.

The idea seems to be that physics is a kind of root or ground science, and it's not an absurd idea. But physics is a historical socio-linguistic practice, an evolved system of technology ( including techniques of theory-editing and calculation) While the success of physics tempts philosophers toward a monism of the physical, physics itself is 'non-physical.' It's a realm of ghosts like 'energy' and 'force' that command our respect. Its intelligibility depends on a life-world that exceeds and includes it as one human practice among others in a complicated system. One can say that society is made of the 'physical,' but one can equally emphasize that 'physical' is one sign among others within a social system. We don't need to promote one explanatory practice to a position of ontological authority --thought perhaps 'philosophy' points better than 'physics' to our itch and attempt to do so.


On science: my approach is a substitute for falsifiability, which sounds good at first. But one can always tweak the structure as a whole or doubt the experiment. That's why I suggest understanding science as technology works independently of one's belief in it. This excludes religion, which works only if one believes in it. It also focuses on power, which IMV more accurately captures the prestige of science as 'magic' that actually works and allows me to post this message and communicate almost instantly to many potential if not actual readers.

But we do know what it means, just as much as we know what any category means. The usual objection
is that we don't know what it "really" means, whatever that means. — Janus

I agree that we 'don't know what we really mean' when we use the phrase 'don't know what we really mean.' The assumption I am questioning here is that 'physical' and 'mental' refer to clear concepts. That we can offer imperfect definitions is clear, but I suggest that improvising definitions is quite secondary to the use of these words in ten million contexts.

Science only deals with it insofar as it is believed to manifest as observable behavior or neural process, though, and that is not what we seem, by default as it were, to imagine the mental to be. We actually don't have any positive conception of the mental; it is usually defined merely apophatically (emptily) as "not physical". — Janus

I like to understand science as the theory of technology that works whether one believes in it or not.

And then science depends on ordinary language, so science deals with the mental in a quotidian way at the sub-scientific level so that the scientific level is possible. Bohr saw this. Husserl focused on it.

I don't think that the mental is defined as you say except perhaps by certain philosophers in a metaphysical mode. Let's check the dictionary.

mental : relating to the mind.

mind : the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.

physical :relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete.

So it's actually physical that's defined as the negative here, perhaps because human conversation prioritizes the social.

Yes I'd agree with you that it is only in those terms that we can have any positive conception of the so-called spiritual. — Janus

This is an important thing for us to agree on. Our dispute on secondary matters is perhaps the narcissism of small differences.

If you mean that although spirituality (faith) is a matter for the individual, nonetheless forms of spirituality, spiritual life, are never "private' but socially evolved, then I'd agree. — Janus

I agree that faith is a matter for the individual, but I'm stressing that that principle itself involves a faith that does not understand itself as a private issue. People with many different faiths can share this faith that religion is a private matter and go to war to keep it that way (against a tyranny of this or that religion imposed as a public religion.)

It's easy to overlook that the faith in faith being a private matter is itself a dominant public matter, which is to say a kind of meta-religion that is enforced by the government of a 'free' people. For instance, I expect the state to defend me against religious fanatics who violate my rights for should-be-private religious reasons. As a rough approximation, I'm suggesting that living religion is potentially violent. That religion is something we shouldn't fight about is a meta-religion that we have fought and will continue to fight about.

This blends with your second point. This meta-religion of religious freedom has evolved socially, just like all the traditional religions that it dominates in certain places and times.

Yes, but as a hypothetical entity. We can talk about ghosts as hypothetical entities as well, but we should resist the temptation to treat them as real. — Andrew M

I don't think what the blare of a trumpet sounds like is all that comparable to a ghost. As for the word 'real,' that's a can of worms in itself. Out of all context, 'real' has no clear meaning at all. In this context, I think you inferring that the 'beetle' does not exist simply because it's 'invisible' in a certain way to language.

I call fire engines 'red' - what do you call them? — Andrew M

As I suggested to Wayf, the sign 'red' functions because we call the same things red. That is necessary and sufficient to ground the concept, it seems. At the same time, we have the word 'quale' to point at what almost escapes the language game. Paintings, music...these aren't just what we can say about them. To be sure, it looks impossible to be objective or scientific about qualia --more or less by definition. I assume non-sociopathically that you are not a moist robot and 'experience' life, no matter the constraints of what you can fit into ideal public intelligibility.

What you're referring to, of course, is how something appears to you. But in this case, it's more or less certain that things appear differently to each of us, at least to some degree, since a lot of things can affect that. We can appreciate this when we wear sunglasses. — Andrew M

It seems to me by the first part of your post that 'how something appears to [me]' is not supposed to exist at all (is a hypothetical entity, like a ghost.) This 'we' seems to embrace the almost automatic transcendental pretense, which is that our inner lives share in the same structure. It's hard for me to believe that you and other human beings see the redness of the rose differently than me, though I don't see any proof could ever be given for or against. I also assume that when you put on sunglasses that the world looks dimmer to you, but that is talk of ghosts!

Yes, knowledge is not possible without intelligibility. So the point at issue is whether that's because the conditions of experience transcend the natural world or because they are immanent in it.

For Kant, the a priori imposes controls on "the pryings of introspection". For Ryle, logical conditions are implicit in our practical experiences and observations. — Andrew M

I like where you are coming from here. I haven't studied Ryle, but I find something like this in my favorite thinkers. I don't think there is clean break between the mental and the physical or between the self and others.

It's about what we know (in the everyday, not in some absolutely certain, sense); we know there is physical stuff and that we can measure it, model it, theorize and make predictions about it. — Janus

Sure. I know what you are getting at, and I agree. We have prediction and control, technology. Ordinary language deals with this stuff successfully, practically. No one has to know exactly what 'physical' is supposed to mean in order to employ the sign in context to get things done.

There is no analogous situation with any mysterious mental stuff that cannot be understood to consist in physical processes; i.e. neural structures and networks, and so on). — Janus

My point is that mental stuff is quotidian, and we deal with it in the same casual way. Science also deals with it.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language.[1] It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context.[2] Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning.[3] — Wiki

In particular, signs are not material/physical. The notion of the same word being used by different humans with different physical vocalizations is already 'immaterial.' I gave an informal argument for this above. Even just counting employs the ideal identity of different objects.

We can and do have a science of form and meaning. Indeed, science exists within something like form and meaning. Our models themselves are conceptual and mathematical and not physical, even if they are (only sometimes) about what we conveniently if vaguely categorize as physical. The temptation seems to be to identify the physical with that which we can talk objectively about. I don't think the reduction of objectivity to (physical) objects works. To be objective is to be unbiased, 'not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.'

None of this diminishes in any way what we can feel in aesthetic, poetic or spiritual ways. We cannot understand (fully, at least) how such experiences are possible for physical systems, but that ignorance does [not] give us any justification for believing in any mystical stuff, any justification for metaphysical dualism in other words. — Janus

I agree. I'd just add that our position is not some neutral position. Others can and have taken such feelings for justifications. That we exclude such 'justifications' as invalid says something about our own commitments. Our ontological prejudices (our pre-grasp of the situation) tend to understand the 'spiritual' in terms of mundane things like feelings, thoughts, myths. (Or I think we agree here.) I'd probably stress the sociality of the 'spiritual,' and include my own anti-metaphysical biases as an expression of a Baconian (anti-)spirtuality. The reason for being skeptical about 'mystical' stuff is (to overstate it) because it does not give us reliable technology, including techniques for reliable prediction. Instead the 'mystical stuff' is more like a technology of morale --it works if and because you believe in it. In contrast, we have a more objective science that works whether or not one believes in it. We distrust it at our own risk.

Now I may have or have had experiences which lead me to believe in such mystical ideas, or at least entertain them as ideas, but such experiences can never be offered as inter-subjectively justifiable statements about some matters of fact or other.

That's all I've been trying to point out. — Janus

We are basically on the same page on this particular issue. The essence seems to be that 'spirituality' is private matter. What's interesting is that such a view is public/dominant form of spirituality. Politics is applied religion, in other words, and the privatization of religion (which I am fine with) is the triumph of a particular (metaphorically) spiritual view.

There is nothing 'immaterial' about it. You just find the center of the training cluster and establish a linguistic category variance boundary (e.g., 1 standard deviation) to achieve a certain maximum error rate and you still have language based on actual raw data that is just characterized to be tolerant to parametric variation. Nothing to do with signs or abstractions creating immateriality. Please clarify further where my thinking is wrong there. — Sir Philo Sophia

What is this center? The center of a category? Let's say you want to sort examples into 10 categories. It's that notion of the category that would be 'immaterial.' How is the category physical ? To reiterate, this is less about a defense of spooky objects than it is a challenge to the complacent use of 'physical.' In general I don't think we know exactly what we mean by words. We instead employ a know-how that was trained into us. So for me it's not obvious that there is some clean division between purely mental and purely physical realms. What we may share is a suspicion of traditional metaphysics. Where we may differ is that I know what 'idealists' are trying to point (the 'element of thought' in which tokens like 'physical' have any purchase in the first place.)

The word 'physical' is a token within our being-in-language-with-others and being-in-the-world Even if we can profitably understand the 'life world' as founded on the physical (which of course we can and do), this kind of reductive understanding depends on what it reduces. For practical purposes, one can be philosophically lazy and embrace the 'physical' as what 'really' is. Why this is fine is IMV simply because the technology works. We might not know whether reality is 'ultimately' so-called mind or so-called matter or whether 'reality is really made of X' is a bogus approach in the first place. We can live and die without resolution of these fancy metaphysical issues. There's money and power in tech that works. Primarily practical animals are impatient with the 'pure' or merely theoretical tensions in concept systems. Philosophers are itchy artists, unreasonably reasonable, perhaps 'uselessly' fussy. To make this more concrete (the earlier point):

Husserl’s most important point here, which I think is not explicitly made in the present collection, is that the standpoint or attitude that gives us the life-world (whether the same as the natural attitude of Ideas, I or not) is not just another one of the various possible standpoints on the world. Husserl’s view is that the world must first be given to us, experienced by us, in some “natural,” pre-theoretical, way and that only on the basis of that pre-given world can we adopt more specific standpoints from which we may examine the world. (See Crisis, §34e.)

Majer and Føllesdal do emphasize the pre-givenness of the life-world as the background, usually unarticulated and unthematized, against which all our human activities are carried out and without which they would be impossible. Majer, relating Husserl’s ideas to those of David Hilbert and Hermann Weyl, emphasizes that even the activities involved in doing science presuppose an “irreducible fundament” (Weyl’s term) of ordinary, pre-theoretical, abilities. He quotes Weyl: “In physics, when we perform measurements and their necessary operations, we manipulate boards, wires, screws, cog-wheels, point and scale. We move here on the same level of understanding and action as the cabinet-maker or the mechanic in his workshop.” (Quoted by Majer, p. 58.) "’Lebenswelt‘," says Majer, "means a mode of life in which no theoretical knowledge is required, but only some practical abilities of understanding and acting are supposed, like those of the craftsman" (p. 58). These practical abilities — e.g., to use chalk to write symbols on a blackboard, to use a scale for measuring — are enablers of science as a cultural product, and it is the practical rather than the theoretical characteristics of chalk and scale, e.g., that explains their role here. Føllesdal and Friedman note, too, that it is the life-world that provides the ultimate justification for the claims of science: these claims rise or fall on how well predictions match up with life-world experience. — link

The contrast between the subjectivity of the life-world and the “objective,” the “true” world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical-logical substruction … of something that is in principle not perceivable, in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually experienceable. — Husserl

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/science-and-the-life-world-essays-on-husserl-s-crisis-of-european-sciences/

We don't experience electrons directly. They are theoretical entities that somehow are what is 'really' there. But I prefer instrumentalism. We have ways of talking that allow us to create useful technology. The issue of what is 'really' this or that seems secondary, except as it plays a role in worldviews (technologies of morale like religion or attachment to universal rationality and humanism.)

Semiotics seems to be much more about dogma, and its ardent supports much more interested in being in the cult of that dogma than seeking the reality of how practical cognitive systems can and do robustly work. Until a Semiotics supporter logically and sensible overcomes my counter examples, I'll pay little respect/credence for it as a viable explanatory principle. — Sir Philo Sophia

It's fine with me if you have no use for it. I suspect that dogma are functioning with your perspective as well. I find the idea of some perfectly neutral and presuppositionless perspective highly suspect.

I agree that disciplines concerned with prediction and control might not need much from semiotics or philosophy. A person can use the word 'physical' with a certain naivety (from my perspective) and still do important work, precisely because metaphysical concerns are often detached from differences that make a (practical) difference.

But anti-philosophy doesn't untie but merely cuts knots.

The fact that verbal communication is done using symbols does not mean that the word "High Pitch" is purely ‘psychological’ having no material substance analog for which is represents exists in the external world b/c conveying 'I hear a High Pitch" is equal to the physical fact that a 10 KHz sound wave impacted your ear. — Sir Philo Sophia

I think you are missing the argument for the 'immateriality' of the sign. Let's record 100 different Americans speaking the word 'calculator.' No two of those Americans will say calculator in exactly the same way. The vibrations in the air will differ in each case. Yet we are also experts at recognizing the 'same' word in an 'infinity' of possible vocalizations. That sameness is 'ideal.'

Or consider a classifier for handwritten digits. There are many ways to write a 7. None of these are the official or perfect way. The classifier learns from labelled examples to simulate the human ability of finding the ideally same in the concretely different.

A second issue is the supposed physicality of 10 KHz sound. That mathematics is projected on the physical seems natural enough, but mathematics has the same kind of 'ideality' or 'immateriality' discussed above. To be clear, I'm not trying to derive the physical from the mental/ideal or the mental/ideal from the physical. I'm just trying to point out the complexity of the situation. I do not believe that the so-called 'physical' is as simple as some would like.

What is reason? How do we know what things mean? Especially ambiguous things - handwritten things, ambiguous signs? We make judgments, we say ‘this means that’. And that can never have a materialist explanation. Materialism only ever talks in terms of physical causality - that’s what materialism means. But ‘cause’ in a rational sense, in the sense deployed by reason and language, comprises solely the relations between ideas. That’s why you can represent the same idea in completely diverse ways. — Wayfarer

From my perspective, 'matter' and 'mind' are two more signs employed in our life-world or form of life. What you call 'reason' sounds like what I call being-in-language-with-others.

https://teachlearn.pagesperso-orange.fr/Heidlang.pdf

Man is said to have language by nature. It is held that man, in distinction from plant and animal, is the living being capable of speech. This statement does not mean only that, along with other faculties, man also possesses the faculty of speech. It means to say that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as one who speaks that man is-man. These are Wilhelm von Humboldt's words. Yet it remains to consider what it is to be called-man. — Heidegger

He eventually quotes Haman.

If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. — Haman

Then comments:

For Hamann, this abyss consists in the fact that reason is language. Hamann returns to language in his attempt to say what reason is. His glance, aimed at reason, falls into the depths of an abyss. Does this abyss consist only in the fact that reason resides in language, or is language itself the abyss? We speak of an abyss where the ground falls away and a ground is lacking to us, where we seek the ground and set out to arrive at a ground, to get to the bottom of something. But we do not ask now what reason may be; here we reflect immediately on language and take as our main clue the curious statement, "Language is language." This statement does not lead us to something else in which language is grounded. Nor does it say anything about whether language itself may be a ground for something else. The sentence, "Language is language," leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it says. — Heidegger

To me the tautology language is language aims it emphasizing its primacy. An idealist might pose nature as derivative of 'spirit,' and the focus on language and the social is adjacent to idealism. A linguistic community can develop a tradition of explaining part of the world 'mechanically.' This part of the world, nature, ends up threatening 'spirit' as thinkers note that 'atoms and void' or their modern equivalent must somehow be the substratum of the human organism. So 'nature' is a creation of 'spirit' (a reasoning life-world-sharing community) and yet 'spirit' is (from a certain potent explanatory perspective) an epiphenomenon of nature. This gives us something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip . But only perhaps if we insist that certain sentences remain forceful and true outside of all contexts. The world is 'really' mind or the world is 'really' matter. There's this stuff called 'meaning' or 'matter' that we are suppose to construct everything else out of. But language is neither/both, one might say. One is never done exploring this abyss.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
...
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life. — Wittgenstein

I disagree, at least b/c in reality/practice there are a very finite set of linguistic object categories. Also, it is quite easy for a cNN to be trained to learn the hyper-planes that separate/clusters into the various object categories, and those could be linguistically labelled as such. — Sir Philo Sophia

That sounds like you agreeing! My point was/is that we use a finite set of signs. Perhaps re-read and see if it makes more sense. And I know about such classifiers. Funny you mention them. I just used them as an example in my previous post.

I don't understand. Seems way too vague to be useful. can you pls clarify in concrete terms, example(s) like I did mine. — Sir Philo Sophia

I'll share a link with you. It's pointless to debate Saussure without you looking into him and getting the big picture. Also, if you read over the last few pages of this thread, you'll have some context. Without that context, of course it's vague! And that's one of the points made in this thread, that context is crucial. (And I also don't want to repeat all the stuff I've already said on this thread and clog it up.)

https://slavicgf.sitehost.iu.edu/assignments/Chandler_ch1_pt1.pdf

One last point worth mentioning I hope (and connected to the subject) is that, for Saussure, the sign is immaterial. Not just the signified but also the signifier!

A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept [signified] and a sound pattern [signifier]. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a ‘material’ element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept. — Saussure

To make this concrete and to amplify it, consider that voices vary. The word 'fish' sounds different as different individuals pronounce it. We can recognize a friend's voice over the telephone for instance. So it's not just that the sound 'image' is immaterial. It also has to be classified.

And then handwriting also varies. We don't all write zipcodes on envelopes the same way. Software can be trained to classify handwritten digits. Add to this the arbitrariness of the sign (what sound or shape we use doesn't matter) and the 'immateriality' of language becomes vivid. All the same it needs a medium.

Here's a great video by a great maker of videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

Perhaps this 'immateriality' of language has tempted us to think of an immaterial subject.

A bush is just a parametric variant of a linguistic tree concept, so there is no need to instantiate one as a negative of the other b/c they are in fact on a continuum of the same parametric variables on the same model (e.g., has roots, trunk, branches, leaves, etc.) where the bush might be a shorter, wider, more leaf/branching density, less trunk thickness, etc. — Sir Philo Sophia

I understand your point, but expressing such a continuum would require an infinite number of signs. To be sure, individual human beings might have trouble choosing between 'bush' or 'shrub' in a particular situation. The boundary might be undecidable. The quote below might clarify the issue (difference between the system and its use.)

I think a better argument against Saussure is our intuitive notion that individual signs hook up to individual intuitive content. But I don't think Saussure would deny it. Instead he stressed what might not be obvious to a non-linguist. (I'm not a linguist. I'm just studying Saussure lately and finding it illuminating.)

Langue (French, meaning "language") and parole (meaning "speaking") are linguistic terms distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users. Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, "parole", would be possible. Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue. This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject.[1] Saussure did not concern himself overly with parole; however, the structure of langue is revealed through the study of parole. — link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_and_parole

I did say re Derrida's rejection of metaphysics "unless I am mistaken", so I haven't made any blanket claim such as Wayfer has re Dennett.. — Janus

Fair enough.

As to there being or not being mental "stuff": remember the point I made was that there is no determinate mental "stuff". — Janus

Fair enough. I think we agree on that point. But I don't see why there should be some kind of determinate physical stuff either. (I don't really want to say that 'there is not determinate stuff' but that other approaches seem more promising.)

But if the indeterminate mental stuff going on is really just an emergent property or attribute of the the determinate physical stuff (which given what we know, seems most reasonable), then we have no need of, or rational justification for, dualistic metaphysics. — Janus

To be clear, I'm not defending a dualistic metaphysics. Personally I'm not crazy about the 'really just as emergent property.' It's still too metaphysical. Better to say perhaps that treating mind as a function of matter in certain contexts is useful. I like the spirit of the empiricists. I love Hobbes.

Here is more of the subject being 'spoken by language' (a 'product' of the sign system).
From the same book:https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8261/6adfe3d796df144ba6e3ef8300e160c54635.pdf

When I say /, even in solitary speech, can I give my statement meaning without implying, there as always, the possible absence of the object of speech—in this case, myself? When I tell myself "I am," this expression, like any other according to Husserl, has the status of speech only if it is intelligible in the absence of its object, in the absence of intuitive presence—here, in the absence of myself. Moreover, it is in this way that the ergo sum is introduced into the philosophical tradition and that a discourse about the transcendental ego is possible. Whether or not I have a present intuition of myself, "I" expresses something; whether or not I am alive, I am 'means something' — Derrida

I also requote Culler in this new context, for there is no perfect repetition.

What Freud, Saussure and Durkheim seem to have recognized is that social sciences could make little progress until society was considered a reality in itself: a set of institutions or systems which are more than the contingent manifestations of the spirit or the sum of individual activities. It is as though they had asked: “what makes individual experience possible? what enables men to perceive not just physical objects but objects with a meaning? what enables them to communicate and act meaningfully?” And the answer which they postulated was social institutions which, though formed by human activities, are the conditions of experience. To understand individual experience one must study the social norms which make it possible. — Culler

links quoted in previous post

That what I vaguely mean by 'socialized Kantianism.' The story of anti-realism largely moves in this direction.

Here's Jameson's emphasis on the holism involved.

It is not so much the individual word or sentence that ‘stands for’ or ‘reflects’ the individual object or event in the real world, but rather that the entire system of signs, the entire field of the langue, lies parallel to reality itself; that it is the totality of systematic language, in other words, which is analogous to whatever organized structures exist in the world of reality, and that our understanding proceeds from one whole or Gestalt to the other, rather than on a one-to-one basis. — Jameson

https://slavicgf.sitehost.iu.edu/assignments/Chandler_ch1_pt1.pdf

I think what he's wanting to argue is that symbolic communication (of any kind) must have real meaning, or a real reference, if it is not simply idiosyncratic to the one who generates it. (Note - the root of 'idiot' is the same as 'idiosyncratic', i.e. someone who cannot be understood by anyone else or who speaks in a language that only he understands). — Wayfarer

As I understand him, I agree with you that symbolic communication cannot by purely idiomatic, and this is close to Wittgenstein's denial of private language. In this special sense, the community is prior to the individual subject as speaker of the language. 'Language speaks the subject' means, as I read it, that the 'subject' is one more sign caught up in norms of intelligibility.

But Derrida argues against a pure ideality. And the system of language is more important than the individual sign. I'll quote from a translator's intro to one of Derrida's classic and early works, Speech and Phenomenon.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8261/6adfe3d796df144ba6e3ef8300e160c54635.pdf

Following Saussure, Derrida maintains that linguistic meaning is not so much the product of an explicit meaning-intention as it is the arbitrary configuration of differences between signs. Meaning derives from the distance that extends between one particular sign and the system of other signs in linguistic use. It is this differential character of signs which must first be reckoned with, and this results from conventions existing within language; it is not a matter of meaning-intentions that supervene from without. There is no meaning, no signified content, that stands above and is free from this play of differences. Nor could meaning withstand the continuous shifting of differences, the continuous sedimenting of traces, as some ideal identity. For Derrida, there is only a likeness or sameness to meaning, which is constituted across the history of everchanging usage. Absolute objectivity, therefore, could never be claimed for meaning (yet for Husserl, the highest degree of objectivity is that of absolute ideality, the perfect identity of an omnitemporal meaning). What is striking in Derrida's claim is the objection that linguistic meaning can never be completely present. There can never be an absolutely signified content, an absolutely identical or univocal meaning in language. All these values are denied to meaning once we admit its dependence upon nonpresent elements. Meaning can never be isolated or held in abstraction from its context, e.g., its linguistic, semiotic, or historical context. Each such context, for example, is a system of reference, a system of signifiers, whose function and reality point beyond the present. What is signified in the present, then, necessarily includes the differentiating and nonpresent system of signifiers in its very meaning. We can only assemble and recall the traces of what went before; we stand within language, not outside it. — link

We might say that there is a system of quasi-forms (signifieds), but its ideality is not pure and the system is subject to modification. Historicity & finitude. We stand within the talk of our time, not outside, though we try. That (present) signs are largely their differences from other (nonpresent) signs becomes more concrete if one reads in more detail from Saussure. Surprises follow from the arbitrary nature of the sign. But it goes back to Aristotle, who is quoted in the intro.

A name is a spoken sound significant by convention, without time, none of whose parts is significant in separation. .. . I say 'by convention' because no name is a name naturally but only when it has become a symbol. Even inarticulate [agrammatoi] noises (of beasts, for instance) do indeed reveal something, yet none of them is a name. — Aristotle in De Interpretatione

Derrida rejects metaphysics and ontology altogether unless I am mistaken, so the question for him would have no definite meaning; and this makes your reference to him irrelevant to the context of this discussion, as far as I can see. — Janus

I believe Wayf was criticized for not quoting Dennett. Perhaps you should quote Derrida to support your notion of his rejection of 'metaphysics and ontology altogether.' While I don't claim to be a expert on his work, I've read enough of it (in English translation) to see how badly he tends to be caricatured.
I will requote for your convenience what I quoted before.

In order for my "written communication" to retain it function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable -- iterable -- in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability...structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories). A writing that is not structurally readable -- iterable -- beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.
...
What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten. When I say "my future disappearance", it is in order to render this proposition more immediately acceptable. I ought to be able to say my disappearance, pure and simple, my nonpresence in general, for instance the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful , of my wish to communicate, from the emission or production of the mark. For a writing to be a writing it must continue to "act" and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written "in his name. " One could repeat at this point the analysis outlined above this time with regard to the addressee. The situation of the writer and of the underwriter is, concerning the written text, basically the same as that of the reader. This essential drift bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority, orphaned and separated at birth from the assistance of its father, is precisely what Plato condemns in the Phaedrus. If Plato's gesture is, as I believe, the philosophical movement par excellence, one can measure what is at stake here. — Derrida

How am I applying this in our context? The point is that we don't look into our souls or the realm of forms to find some magical meaning that corresponds to 'mental' or 'physical.' Both signs are caught up in social conventions, ways they tend to be and are intelligibly used in various contexts. The vice of philosophers is the fantasy of the celestial dictionary, crammed with one size definition fits all (contexts.) And we also then need the subject as meaning-organ to scoop up all of these essences of Pure Mind. An alternative approach is understand 'subject' and 'meaning' as more signs in the system.

The salient point is: we know there is physical, material "stuff", "for us" at least, because that is what science can observe, measure and model. Do we know (in any kind of analogous inter-subjective way) that there is any other kind of "stuff"? Spiritual or mental stuff, for example? Do we even have any idea what it could mean for there to be such "stuff" ("stuff" that could be inter-subjectively dealt with in determinate ways as we do with physical "stuff")? — Janus

Note that you use 'stuff.' Then you use 'for us.' All this takes us right back into metaphysical confusion. There is 'stuff' ---for us. ' It's all physical.' 'Ah, but it's physical for us. So it's all mental!' And then you imply that science can only observe 'physical' stuff, but that would make psychology (which claims to study behavior and mind) and Dennett's work impossible too --unless we are back to the caricature of Dennett denying consciousness. Then there's sociology. Physics isn't all of science. More practically, aspirin and Novocain are judged/tested in terms of the 'mental.' We include both 'mind' and 'matter' in our explanatory causal nexus all of the time. 'The surgery didn't hurt because they put me under.' And as Husserl & Bohr note in quotes above, science only makes sense in a life-world that includes ordinary language.

You also ask whether we have any idea of what other kind of stuff than the 'physical' there could be or what we could mean by that. But then you use 'intersubjectively' without hesitation, as if this didn't invoke that other kind of stuff at least in a loose way.

As I have already said we don't know how to answer any question that asks whether there is any kind of stuff at all in any absolute "in itself" sense, but that is irrelevant to the question under discussion, which is concerned with what we can justifiably say relative to our inter-subjective experience of things. — Janus

'Our intersubjective experience of things' is already loaded with idealism. So the real world is the intersection of our 'dreamworlds'? Or (where I think we agree) 'intersubjective' hints at social conventions , norms of intelligibility and epistemic norms. It's only in terms of such norms that they can be questioned and modified (Neurath's boat.) And it's only in terms of ordinary talk about 'mind' and 'matter' (largely a matter of blind skill that is trained into us) can be rarefied into metaphysical exaggeration: 'All is mental' or 'the mind is the brain.' To some degree we can make our tacit skill in navigating social conventions and life itself explicit. But it's not clear that we need to figure out the cosmic truths of the 'mental' and 'physical' and 'the thing-in-itself' outside of all contexts.

And if what science can deal with is, by definition, only the physical, and there is no other substance, realm or dimension, then a monistic materialism would seem to logically follow. — Janus

If one insists on identifying what science deals with as the physical, then perhaps. I still find that too metaphysical, though I guess the 'physical' is a codeword for an anti-metaphysical attitude that I can relate to.

35. But can’t it be imagined that there should be no physical objects? I don’t know. And yet “there are physical objects” is nonsense. Is it supposed to be an empirical proposition?—And is this an empirical proposition: “There seem to be physical objects”?

36. “A is a physical object” is a piece of instruction which we give only to someone who doesn’t yet understand either what “A” means, or what “physical object” means. Thus it is instruction about the use of words, and “physical object” is a logical concept. (Like colour, quantity, …) And that is why no such proposition as: “There are physical objects” can be formulated. Yet we encounter such unsuccessful shots at every turn.
...
476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books,
sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a
unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding
question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence
of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?

477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition
exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the
opposite?

For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?

478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a
mouse exists?

479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late? — Wittgenstein On Certainty

https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/files/wittgenstein-on-certainty.pdf

I'm tempted to say that metaphysics believes and traffics in the fantasy of context-independent meanings, as if 'mental' or 'physical' out of all context were much worth talking about.

'The mind is [just] the brain' is a nice aphorism if the point is to explain the mind as much as possible in terms of the brain, but it's also a bit trollish. Exaggeration, click-bait?

Of course we can do the Kantian move and say that we don't, and can't, know what that which appears to us as the physical "really is in itself"; but since that can never be known it is irrelevant to our inquiries, unless we want to illegitimately use it to reify our spiritualist fantasias (in other words practice traditional metaphysics and theology which are the very things Kant is working against).

(I am aware that Kant offers what he sees as practical reasons for believing in God, Freedom and Immortality, but that is a separate entirely ethical issue and has nothing to do with what we are justified in thinking regarding either ontology or metaphysics).

I also acknowledge that there can be a profound aesthetic dimension to "spiritualist fantasias", but again that fact says nothing about what we ought to believe regarding metaphysics or ontology. — Janus

I like that you mention Kant's belief in God, Freedom, and Immortality. Perhaps such beliefs motivated to some degree his distance from Locke. I also agree that Kant was working against traditional metaphysics and theology. My own POV is maybe a kind of naturalized and socialized post-Kantianism. For me, the spiritual dimension is also roughly aesthetic. At the same time, that is in my view a kind of ontological-metaphysical commitment. 'Spirituality is [just] thoughts, metaphors, feelings, rituals.' I mostly agree, but that 'just' is not some neutral judgment. As I see it, my atheism is not perfectly justified or justifiable. Top-level frameworks are perhaps always leaps to some degree. And the 'we' of science tacitly involves some commitment to a rationality that is something like a spiritual project. (I embrace this project, but that too could be worked into a causal nexus or metaphorical top-level vision of reality.)