• Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    That science has not explained. I see no reason to believe it can't. — T Clark

    In order for science to do this, there must be in place at least some working concept of epistemic relations that is grounded in observational discovery. I can't imagine.
  • The ineffable
    I can't make sense of that. — Banno

    What do you suppose Witt had in mind when he said this?:

    It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental
  • The ineffable
    So what is it you can't say, show or do? — Banno

    Read what I wrote, with underlining:

    What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.

    And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
  • The ineffable
    But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno

    It is the ineffability in question. You say showing and doing are not ineffable, but is what is shown and done exhaustively effable? This was the point: no.
  • The ineffable
    If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno

    What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.

    And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
  • The ineffable
    Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...

    It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments!     — fdrake

    Yes, you can articulate the involvement, but only within the involvement. Outside the involvement, there is no X. This is why familiar models fail to grasp the issue.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    I disagree with this. Scientists don't generally say that biology is nothing but chemistry. In the same way, mental processes, including consciousness, are not nothing but biology. But they are bound by biology in the same way that recorded music is bound by a CD or MP3 reader or radio. Music is not nothing but electronic equipment and electrical processes. — T Clark

    The difference here is that compact disk's relation to musical sounds is clearly explained by the science. Here, it is precisely this relation that science cannot explain.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who studies the biological foundations of mental processes, including consciousness. The book I have is "The Feeling of What Happens." — T Clark

    Thanks! Got it just now on Kindle. I'll give it a good read, but the prospects are dim for this kind of thing. As i see it, if one goes by a physicalist model, there can be nothing but brain awareness of brain awareness, and, of course, all of this is NOT brain awareness at all, because the very idea of brain awareness is itself lost in the reductive process to the "impossible". Rorty thought like this. To break with this requires an entirely different paradigm of knowledge relations; radically different. Can't imagine a neurological approach finding this. Talk about brain cells, axonal fibers and so on, begs a question that, not only has not been addressed, but cannot be addressed in any concept I can imagine in the closed systems neurological functions.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Banno


    Elsewhere he says different things. I'm not interested in these when the OP is "The ineffable".
  • The ineffable
    This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness awaits. — Tom Storm

    Well, isn't that why they call the whole affair ineffable? Ineffability is entirely in the abstract until it is realized that it literally saturates our knowledge claims and therefore living itself.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Tom Storm

    One has to actually climb Wittgenstein's ladder out, and this takes a working through the Tractatus, and implicitly attending there are Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer....and not to forget, a suicidal drive to understand the world. To see things with genuine clarity, one simply has to be a bit insane, for the world is NOT, as the world, something that conforms the ready-mades of our understanding.
  • The ineffable
    f
    I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics. — Tom Storm

    Better, though, than that ode to aggression, The Star Spangled Banner: the music was lifted from a once a popular drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAIdVKv84g


    But on the matter of religion, not to forget that religion, beneath the robes of pomp and pretense, is metaphysics, and metaphysics is not nothing.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Neuroscience believes it is beginning to make headway, — Joshs

    I would be fascinated to read about this.
  • The ineffable
    By the way, I question whether religion ever satisfactorily provided solace or explanatory power. Religion was a compulsory, even totalitarian backdrop to human life for centuries and made many people unhappy. It was feared and obeyed, and although it dealt with tragedy and loss and meaning - the ostensibly ineffable - it generally did so in the most brutish of ways (obey God's will; have faith, etc) and seemed to make demands rather than provide consolation or integration. — Tom Storm

    See the above
  • The ineffable
    This seems to be an important for you. How would it look if it could be done? It's difficult for people to see past Biblical literalism or scientism or naïve realism for the most part, just how would such nuanced philosophical thinking enter people's lives?

    Philosophy giveth, and philosophy taketh away, and you are saying that philosophy is so taxing to understand it could never be the social institution religion has been. I recall reading that Wittgenstein once recommended going to church, participating in the rituals and so on, simply because this dimension of our existence was too important to reduce to utterances and argument. He also drew from Tolstoy's depth of conviction, and note the way his protagonists like Levin from Anna Karenina realize what is profoundly important in life in living a kind of holy life working on the farm, rather than talking about it. And you can hear Kierkegaard behind this in the praise of the Knight of Faith, a simply lived life, but lived so completely in, if you will, the light of God, in everything done. The doing, and not the thinking, theorizing: this thinking and theorizing UNDOES the, call it non-natural (not part of "states of affairs") and mystical bond with divinity. And, of course, to even say this in an explanatory context, is nonsense, because we have left the extraordinary intimations of myth and moved into propositional truths in doing so, and this does harm to the most important part of the Tractatus: that which should be passed over in silence.

    The reason Witt's Tractatus is so important, as I see it, is this: when he draws the line between the sayable and the unsayable, THEN calls the whole affair nonsense because such lines are impossible, and this is because a line implies something on both sides to make sense, and this contradicts the matter of something not being sayable as one has essentially just said it in talking about lines drawn. But what does this come down to? Extraordinary, and completely right, I say: lines cannot be drawn not because there is nothing THERE, but because the thereness is IN the world; the world IS metaphysics that comes to us when language is "bracketed", and this is, obviously, a term from Husserl and his reduction.

    And so I ignored your direct question, I know. Something like this: how can something--if you are on Witt's side, so deeply important that must remain silently possessed, or as to your thoughts that the saying it can be, in my thinking, spoken about and will one day replace religion-- put institutionalized in a society?

    The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.

    The way such a difficult philosophy will become the new religion I think is found in the way the 60's attempted a kind of interfaith movement, bringing Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, and so on into the fold. Buddhism, for example, is very close to the kind of alignment I try to conceive between Husserl's epoche and Wittgenstein's Tractatus' insistence on silence. Meditation IS silence; silence that keeps at bay (brackets) interposing thoughts that would steal attention away from the "pure" phenomenal encounter.     — Tom Storm
  • The ineffable
    This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts. — Joshs

    This is, to me, as Tom put it, "Wow." If I understand this, empirical science, and the naturalism usually associated with it, abstracts from "the wider relevance" in order to make sense of things. S is P is, if you will, the tip of an iceberg, and the "iceberg" is not something that can be made subject to the reductive, deflationary powers of logical placement, the "categories" of a totality (Levinas lifts this term from Heidegger, I am reading, and Levinas seems a bit aligned with your statement here) that in part determine meaning.

    Best my thoughts can take me thus far.

    Interesting to me is the way this matches up with divisions between religion and science. The latter has always left the intractable dimensions of our existence to religion; and gladly, because it had no clue as to how to deal with it. But now, religion's institutions are failing, and I see it as philosophy's mission to step up.
  • The ineffable
    Wow.. This is probably confronting for those of us who think that some stable meaning can be arrived at using language. I hadn't considered the 'transformative' power held by words like 'is' and 'as'. — Tom Storm

    I quite agree, and it is simply fascinating: As I see this, generally speaking, propositional differences are not analyzable in terms of parts and rules. Rather, each propositional construction a sui generis singularity. And consider that a proposition, while never conceived outside of the historical possibilities that constitute the foundational base of knowing something is the case, is never conceived in some neutral space of interconnectivity. It is always, for lack of a better word, subjective. Dogs, cats and traffic noise are always MY dogs, etc.; this "my" is more than simply a term on the logical grid of a language. It is always an embedded "my" in an existence that imposes powerfully from "outside" the totality of what language brings to heel. This is where one encounters ineffability: where questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? address, not this totality, but an entirely OTHER than this, which must go nameless, and nameless not because it belongs to another order of thinking, but because the question drives thought beneath or outside itself. We face this OTHER, and frankly, by my lights, this should be a profound struggle, because questions go to the depth of meaning, simply because we are creatures of depth, evidenced in the aesthetic/ethical/value of our affairs.
    And isn't this where philosophy must bring inquiry, finally, when the deflationary tendencies of the presumption of knowing yield to the extraordinary actualities of our existence?
  • The ineffable
    I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.

    Are we done?     — Banno

    Well, as Kierkegaard would put it, you seem to have forgotten that we exist, and Kierkegaard was a great inspiration to Wittgenstein. If curiosity ever enables you to do so, read his Concept of Anxiety. Here he explores the threshold of human depth and understanding as it is beheld in the withdrawal of categorical systems. Yes, such a thing is possible.

    No one is asking that language take up meanings that are not there. In the infinite malleability of a language, there are constraints that limit contextual plausibility, and among these restraints there are these "threshold" issues that emerge, in t he margins of meanings, but also, somehow (hence the term 'ineffible'), embedded in meanings, since this is the matrix in which all meaning is made. So my ability to speak about what objects are may have propositional limitations, and these limitations may be imposed by an existing body of default contextual possibilities (exclusively socially defined according to Rorty) of a language, but it is a foolish supposition that there is nothing else, or that anything else that may be doxastically coercive or imposing in some way is unqualifiedly possessed by standard meanings. In other words, while to talk about THE threshold of the meaning making resources is awkward and assailable, it is not the case that there is nothing at all "there". It is rather that what is there is inchoate and nascent, awaiting a new language category, a new philosophical conversation.

    Ineffability is what is there on the horizon of the openness of language possibilities as inquiry stands in the midst of a world. As I see it, it literally takes practice to understand this, and as long as analytic philosophy persists in philosophy, this will remain hidden to philosophers. Ineffability is there as a real imposition. Language games, it should be argued, are not closed games, nor are they restrained by logic to be settled within some arbitrary finitude, and reason, it should be added, does not constrain content.

    You actually believe "'snow is white' iff snow is white" is a fitting response to the most problematic philosophical questions. It is a partial response, a useful, localized response. But it is reductive to the point of a vacuous absurdity in the matter discussed here.
  • The ineffable
    Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world. — Joshs

    Rorty would say, if I read him right, that one can only be skeptical if there is something to be skeptical about. And there isn't. Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates.

    I think this right, actually. I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Constance, in your first post on this thread you gave us:
    The reduction I have in mind is Husserl's. The idea is to consciously dismiss presuppositions that implicitly give us the familiarity of the familiar world in a perceptual event.
    — Constance
    My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
    (it) pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus.
    — Banno
    Your response was
    You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
    — Constance
    To which I asked
    What?
    — Banno
    eliciting in turn your enigmatic response. If you think that T-sentences do not answer your question, then have a go at explaining what it is you are asking. "(H)ow epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world" is an ambiguous question.

    It's not enough just to read a bunch of philosophers and pick the bits you like. We are not doing philosophy until we engage with and critique those views. I think you agree with this.

    That is what this thread involves. It sets out various ways of understanding the notion of ineffability, and seeks comment on them. It gives folk enough rope, a place to set out a part of their thinking or the thinking of their betrothed, with the aim of identifying problems and inconsistencies therein.

    The problem is that you have still to set out what it is you are asking.     — Banno

    You were dismissive of the references in the Tractatus to the mysticism and transcendence; you ignored Quine's admission that he could not reconcile his naturalism with experiential phenomena; and you don't seem to grasp the essentials of phenomenology that you reject out of hand, given that you consistently misrepresent it in your statements.

    And you cannot handle basic questions. Asking you about the epistemic relation between brains and couches is elementary. Causality? Is this a carrier of what is essential for knowledge? I mean, you have to deliver yourself from arguments that encompass the question and have something that comes to mind when you step away from these and into an actual world encounter. Otherwise you are lost as a philosopher.

    So there you are, brain facing a couch. Obviously a knowledge relation is in place, some nexus of intimation. Do tell in a couple of sentences. It doesn't matter if there is more to say. Just say IT. No need to be slippery.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Banno


    Because, Banno, it is a banality, one that simply begs the question about the world and language. You need to return to earth.
  • The ineffable
    The cup has one handle" is true IFF the cup has one handle. — Banno

    Adorable. And predictable.
  • The ineffable
    What's difficult here is sorting out what it is you expect me to provide. — Banno

    But I underlined this:how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world.
    There is no question as to the embeddedness of the response. Just make the response.
  • The ineffable
    That, of course, is the wrong question.

    It's the wrong question because it is based on the presumption of an "in here" and an "out there".

    Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain.
    — Constance

    The cat would have difficulty getting onto your brain because your brain is enclosed in a skull.

    Yes, I understand that you want the question to be understood figuratively. But then, what is it that you are asking? How it is that you are aware of the cat? How it is that you divide the world up in such a way that there are cats and non-cats? How it is that your cat-sensations lead you to infer that there is a cat-in-itself? Which of these is supposedly represented by "How is it that anything out there gets in here?"

    What is it that you actualy want an answer for?     — Banno

    It can go several ways, but here I am asking a simple question, which is how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world. I certainly don't defend anything like, heh heh, cat-in-itself. But that is in another world of thought
    If you think your philosophy is too complicated and nuanced to give a simple response, I understand. For the same holds for me. But then, if the question were put to me, I would have a succinct reply, one that subsumes the details.
    It really shouldn't be so difficult, really. If I asked Rorty or Quine or Dewey, e.g.s, a reply would be readily forthcoming, though they would have a lot of explaining ready to hand.
  • The ineffable
    “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” From Mill, On Liberty — Richard B

    Suggesting that something is fair game even if it cannot be conceived clearly or as a genuine interest at the outset. Quite right. But then, there is the matter of being dismissive of that which is taken up and not being stifled. Is one not being disingenuous if the determination that something is false when set up for analysis, is dismissive of that which gave rise to the inquiry in the first place? In other words, why bother opening a discussion about ineffability, if philosophical occasions of this are rejected out of hand? Or are not reviewed at all?
  • The ineffable
    What? — Banno

    In response to "What?" I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.
    No need for a thesis, just jot me a sentence or two, if you would.
  • The ineffable
    The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of Joshs and @Constance, too. — Banno

    You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
  • The ineffable
    But for now, I think it best to leave things here, and think the thoughts that come. — Moliere

    K:blush:
  • The ineffable
    The household meaning is the important meaning -- not the philosophers meaning. It's the household meaning that holds the house together, that connects the family to the community, that provides consolation and guidance and a means for talking about and to one another so that the family can live its life in economic productivity and safety. — Moliere

    But those important ideas of family solidarity are incidental to God as a concept. It could be sort of thing that works like this that holds people together. The idea here is, is it an idea that is defensible when brought before inquiry. This is an important question, as, for one thing, religions have a great deal of influence on how we deal with our general affairs, and foolish beliefs can engender prejudice and impaired judgment in social issues. For another, clear thinking about religion can actually bring about startling insights.

    I am in a minority position in holding that there actually IS a Truth with a capital T, so to speak, notwithstanding how this sits with modern thinking.
  • The ineffable
    And then it's pretty easy to see how people experience these things differently, upon listening to them. In some way I'd have to accommodate the apparent inconsistency. — Moliere

    I don't see this. Other people see things differently, true. But this doesn't mean there is no objective basis for comparison. My view is that phenomenology gets overlooked due to the overwhelming privileging of empirical science in our society. If one has any philosophical inclinations at all in an anglo american setting, one is simply not introduced to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and so on.
    Philosophy struggles with acceptance, and the continental tradition seems too fuzzy compared to what is popular, which is in our time the kind of thing that makes cell phones work. What they, philosophy departments, have done is sacrifice content for clarity. So people in the profession are clear headed and logical, e.g., read Rorty's The Social Hope. He was logically gifted and really, could have done anything academic. He chose philosophy because it suited him. Just that. there are lots of puzzles and localized problematic entanglements, but, as I have seen, little of broad thematic works of continental philosophy. It has all moved away from the Husserl and the Heidegger and the rest because in the age of reason, science rules.

    And they were sick of over a hundred years of Kantian based thinking. But idealism was never refuted. Complained about, certainly, with good cause, the the idea that the world is phenomena is not refutable'

    But it's not consistent. And so it seems we've left the standards of reason behind in seeking to speak truth about the mystical, when the mystical is neither true nor false. — Moliere

    But again, true and false are propositional terms. Reason has no biases and nothing to say; it is an empty form of judgment. Not reason, content of culture.

    Heh, that might be a agree-to-disagree. We can mark our departure, at least. If philosophy has a grounding, I do not see it. Maybe it's firm. But I think it just goes back to an individual's convictions and desires (themself a social product of the process of life). — Moliere

    I know you think like this, and all I can say is, it isn't true that just anything is okay and that philosophers are just talking about themselves and their cultures. If I ask you one of my favorite questions, How does anything out there, get in here (in one's brain)? I am not asking about what one should wear for a wedding in Kenya. The former is objectively demonstrable, the latter is made up in historical affairs. There is, however, a dividing line, but take Quine, the quintessential analytic philosopher and consider my previous quotes. You can see that his thesis indeterminacy in translation is actually very close to the kinds of things Derrida says! And for this, you would have to read these guys (not that I am so well read myself, remember. I mean, I am an amateur philosopher, like most others here. But I have read the things I talk about).

    Frankly, I don't see your point on this at all.

    Yeh, but here I'm saying -- bury the hatchet. This distinction will be forgotten because it's just a blip in the history of philosophy. — Moliere

    Grrrr. It's not a blip. Phenomenology holds the key to the final resolution of the human religious condition. Buddha was the ultimate phenomenologist. As popular religions' narratives lose standing, the essential religious situation will rise to awareness, and then, basic questions, rid of the burden of myths and history, will be clear.

    Heh, heh....you'll see. Or, no you won't, because it will never happen in our life time.
    This probably goes some way to our disagreement, too, and goes some way to elucidate what I mean by everyday/exotic experience.

    I was raised in a very religious household. I figured out science later. The arguments from experience and all that were my bread and butter, and I've seen how people in communities react to and use such arguments "in the wild", outside of the philosophers concerns. My skepticism in such things is based in experience -- hence my doubts about phenomenology leading one to God, but rather, from my story, it leads one to nature.     — Moliere

    But God in the "household" meaning of the term is instantly assailable. Religious households are the worst places to discover phenomenological inquiry. Worse than empirical science classrooms, perhaps. Tell me you were raised in a household where Kierkegaard's arguments with Hegel were discussed regularly, say, then you will have been somewhat prepared.
  • The ineffable
    Language does not prohibit hallucinations either. — Richard B

    But hallucinations aren't God. It's a supposition, so one has to play along.

    So if p then q, p, therefore q is based on intuition. I don’t think we are using “intuition” correctly. — Richard B

    How do you know the conditional works at all? Or the disjunction? It comes and is not analyzable, not reducible, this intuition qua intuition, for any analysis that would be brought to bear on this would beg the question given that it would itself presuppose just that which is being analyzed. Heidegger would give an historical account of this, but this dismisses the ineffable intuition as ineffable. Witt affirmed this as mystical (in the Tractatus).

    No, I would say he was bound by the success of make predictions of future stimuli. — Richard B

    Which is the litmus for establishing the consensus.

    This is incorrect, we encounter trees, apples, humans. Also, it does not make sense to say ALL we ever encounter in the phenomena, is phenomena. — Richard B

    Phenomenology is a second order of analysis. It first takes the encounter of trees, apples, etc., then gives analysis of the presuppositional claims that go to the totality of the claim, and not just an aspect of it. But it no more conflicts with encountering trees and apples than does Newtonian physics. It simply says something ABOUT encountering trees and apples. That they are, at the level of basic questions, phenomena.

    In science, there is a certain inaccuracy with measurements. Is this a concern? Should it impede progress? No, they march forward. They apply the measurement, where there is practical gain, and live with the uncertainty, or strive to improve. Some philosophers could learn from this example. — Richard B

    Don't make objections where there is no claim to make them about. These phenomenologists do not take issue with scientific progress, I mean, not even by the wildest sane interpretation. It is simply another order of thinking. Either one is interested in this kind of inquiry or not. Regarding phenomenology, it is almost always the case that one has no interest because one has not done the reading. Understandable, as it is difficult and alien to what is familiar, but it makes criticism vacuous.
  • The ineffable
    In that light, I'd say that neither materialism nor phenomenology are terms worth fighting over, because only people educated in this stuff would really get something out of the distinction, — Moliere

    Hmmm, true. But just because it is not a popular issue doesn't help here. All that we know and accept as true was once not popular.


    Husserl is one I've read selections from -- I have a reader I've read but I haven't done the deep work. So, yes I've read parts, but no I haven't read it all. He's someone I need to, but he's still far enough away from present interests that I've sorta just kept him there — Moliere

    You know, it really does take the reading. Consider that empirical science was there at the beginning of our acculturation and we were, in those early years, exposed to nothing but, through high school and beyond. Phenomenology is a radical departure from this, beginning with Kant and onward. A monumental task it was for me to finally understand why it is so important: it is about the totality of our being here, and it is able to look closely at the metaphysics, if you will, of our existence. It is not confined in any way. It does not deny science at all, but simply understands that this is not the revelation of our existence at the basic level that philosophy seeks.
  • The ineffable
    I think the differences are institutional, and what's more what is institutionalized are aesthetics of reason. Aesthetics are a necessary component to human judgment, and certainly needed to teach human judgment -- but are they true? Are they the sorts of things which lead us to say, this is the one way to do philosophy? I think not. — Moliere

    It is an interesting way to think. But the "institutions" are in some relation of connectivity to actualities, even though the very idea of an actuality is itself part of the institutional construct. This is not to think in correspondence terms, not as if our words somehow slink up with "things". It is rather to think as Quine does, that language is a tool. I have thought this right for some time now: the "scientific method" is a forward looking confirmation of a "theory" about the world, and this is at the most basic level, like walking down the street. the foot moves forward, anticipating the resistance of the sidewalk, descends, carries the weight to the next step, and so on. All knowledge claims at the basic level are like this; temporal events of problem solving.
    But there is always the impossible "givenness" of the world that is intractable to the understanding. Always keeping in mind that this pragmatic view itself is conceived in this abiding indeterminacy. My position is that philosophy is right to the extent that it serves to disclose foundation. The spirit of empirical science simply DOES NOT possess this capacity for disclosure. It is not even ABOUT the world we experience. At the level of ontology, it is just bad metaphysics.
  • The ineffable
    Truth is bound to language. And if the mystical is not true, because it is outside of language, in what way can we claim that it is reasonable? — Moliere

    The mystical cannot be true or false because this is a feature of propositions, not states of mind or existential encounters. It is what is said about these that can be true or false. So what if God actually appeared before me and intimated HER eternal grandeur and power? Language does not prohibit this; it is the content of language that prohibits this, that is, what is familiar and usual. Language is entirely open and even the Wittgensteinian Tractatusian prohibitions are not categorical. They rest on intuitions about logic, and these are, in Heidegger's terms, taking up the world AS: When logic speaks of logic's own delimitations, this is an imposition that occurs within the finitude of logic's application.

    But if one is seeking the mystical, to be unbound by language, then I think that's likely when we've hit the boundary of philosophy. (also, something funny here -- when mystics disagree) — Moliere

    They do. On the one hand there is Meister Eckhart who prays to God to be rid of God, in his apparent frustration with the way familiar finitudes seem to bar the way to actual realization. then there are the tibetan monks who, as I read in an intro to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, would talk freely of their "subterranean" experiences. And pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite in The Cloud of Unknowing reveals a remedy:

    How a man shall have him in this work against all thoughts, and specially against all
    those that arise of his own curiosity, of cunning, and of natural wit.
    AND if any thought rise and will press continually above thee betwixt thee and that darkness, and
    ask thee saying, “What seekest thou, and what wouldest thou have?” say thou, that it is God that
    thou wouldest have. “Him I covet, Him I seek, and nought but Him.”
    And if he ask thee, “What is that God?” say thou, that it is God that made thee and bought
    thee, and that graciously hath called thee to thy degree. “And in Him,” say, “thou hast no skill.”
    91
    And therefore say, “Go thou down again,” and tread him fast down with a stirring of love, although
    he seem to thee right holy, and seem to thee as he would help thee to seek Him. For peradventure
    he will bring to thy mind diverse full fair and wonderful points of His kindness, and say that He is
    full sweet, and full loving, full gracious, and full mercifu

    It is not an event in a reaffirmation of the ordinary forms of knowing, but of something outside of this, and yet, accessible? Of course, this is generally taken as a bunch of religious drivel, but this is the spirit of empirical science talking. It reminds me of something Quine famously said:

    “As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”

    Extraordinary!

    Did he say the "myth" of physical objects? He is right, isn't he, in this pragmatic epistemic view?: All that "comes to us" is, well, mystical. Wittgenstein wrote (inspiring Quine?): "The world is the totality of facts, not of things," and, "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

    Of course, not included in this statement is the possibility that the "that it exists" could be presented in deeper more profound ways, the kind of thing Eckhart was looking for. As an empiricist philosopher, Quine was bound to a scientific consensus, but he knew this simply fell apart when examining, let's call it dasein: "semantical and intentional phenomena cannot be incorporated within the science of nature as I would wish," add to this the entire range of human experience. And again, ALL we ever encounter in the world, is phenomena. Materialism, a derivation and kind of embodiment of science's objective claims, is just, to borrow from Quine's own critical words, epistemically inferior in accounting for all we actually witness!!

    Rather, given I don't even have institutional ambitions, philosophy is more personal, social, and connective. It is something done for pleasure, rather than a competition. — Moliere

    I do disagree here: Philosophy does have its grounding, which is firmly there before inquiry. This is the foundational indeterminacy of all things. It appears to us as trivial because we are all like Quine, at the basic level of analysis: full of certainty and faith regarding our societal collective knowledge claims. All inquiry ABOUT these claims leads to indeterminacy. Philosophy's job, I argue, is to bring this to the fore and understand it.

    This opens, not avenues into empty space, logical or otherwise; but value revelations. I.e., wha has been traditionally called God, here, divested of its "myths" as Quine put it.
  • The ineffable
    Well, that at least gave me a laugh. — Banno

    That I will yield to.
  • The ineffable
    Certainly not of one like the third — Philosophical Investigations

    How does a clarinet sound? Of course, you can describe this, but this would be a contingent description, relying other said things, each of which would present yet a new context that needed to be explained. Even the height of Mont Blanc moves like this through definitional routing and rerouting. Circular. Heidegger understood this. In his Origin of the Work of Art, he discusses What comes first, the work of art or the nature of art that informs us what art is? He writes,

    Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
    To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
    thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
    circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
    this circle.

    It is really well said-- this "strength of thought" is a true intellectual's delight through which art's meaning is wrought.
  • The ineffable
    There's something very unconvincing about using biography to impute philosophical argument. It results in simplistic overgeneralisation. I'll leave you to your misleading biographical speculation. — Banno

    No no, Banno; you simply have it all wrong. The Tractatus is not a biography: "6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."

    His biography does, however, confirm the weight he gives this, and other things he says in the same vein. Perfectly honest?: I think you protest too much.
  • The ineffable
    You asked how "foundational matters" are worked out in analytic philosophy. On Certainty sets out why foundations do not matter... indeed, are — Banno

    See my responses to Richard B
  • The ineffable
    "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is." Wittgenstein PI124 — Richard B

    And yet, there are all those occasions where he acknowledges what is "there" to be left "as it is". This is why I take him up in a discussion about ineffability. He rarely comments on it, but this is because it is too important to do so. One can infer a strong claim about the primacy of ethics/aesthetics/value that cannot be spoken: certainly what ineffability is all about.

    Then there is Husserl. And here your objections may have their relevance. But then, phenomenology certainly does "leave everything as it is." It is a descriptive account. Any foundation Husserl posited was simply there, to be acknowledged.
  • The ineffable
    o say that science needs a foundation that only phenomenology can supply because there appears to be a "philosophical problem"-yet science manages to successfully march forward with progress- is itself the problem you should examine. Your longing for foundations is due to what Wittgenstein said "when language goes on holiday" — Richard B

    Well, you should know that Wittgentein's falling out with Russell was all about the latter's failure to understand that the Tractatus' importance was in that-which-should-be-passed-over-in-silence, and not the prohibitive delimitations analytic philosophers are so fond of. Russell thought he was a mystic! Witt thought he and Russell should sever correspondence on their difference regarding the matter of the question of value in ethics and aesthetics. Consider further that Witt's favorite philosopher was Kierkegaard, whose foundational longings are legendary (and terrifying to theologians). Did you know Witt held that divinity was found in "the Good"?

    You should take a hard look at the simplicity of this, which I repeat: All anyone has ever witnessed is phenomena. This isn't contestable, and science is not in competition with this. What alternative is there to this, materialism (one form or another)? Pure metaphysics, materialism. Naturalism? Better. Dewey, Quine, Rorty were in this camp (in their own way), but note, the pragmatism that underlies this is what hs to be called pragmatic phenomenology.

    Wittgenstein himself has been called a phenomenologist in his Tractatus. States of affairs are not a scientist's conception. A fact is a logical entity, which reminds us of the grandfather of phenomenology, Kant.
Home » Constance