There seems to me to be a fundamental tension in Quine's thinking about ontology, between his commitment to pragmatism (and hence to ontological relativity) and his view -- not prominently expressed in the essay On What There Is -- that experience marks an outside boundary to the conceptual sphere. Hence Quine is led to suggest that a phenomenological ontology (an ontology of sense data, or "surface irritations", is explanatorily primary relative to epistemological concerns, whereas a physicalist ontology is explanatorily primary relative to other sorts of concerns (e.g. concerns about laws governing the behaviors of re-identifiable material objects). But this way of characterizing epistemological concerns as concerns with "objects" that allegedly are closer to the experiential boundary of our web of beliefs betrays a commitment to indirect realism that is rather inimical to thoroughgoing forms of ontological pragmatism, or so it seems to me.

Interestingly, Davidson, while endorsing a view on radical interpretation that is broadly pragmatist, can't either countenance ontological relativity just because he challenges the Quinean dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content that sustains this relativity. Davidson still takes as point of departure for the (notional) process of radical interpretation of a language user her attitudes of assenting to, or dissenting from, declarative sentences in various perceptual contexts. The the view that emerges is coherentist, and non-foundationalist, since individual "perceptual beliefs" are open to challenge as much as are any other kinds of beliefs. But Davidson's view, while dispensing with sense data or surface irritations, still retains something of the idea of a perceptual boundary to the conceptually structured web of beliefs of a individual or community. (...Not entirely satisfactory, in my view, in accounting for the epistemic authority of experience, but still a progress over Quine's, possibly).

If we would ever arrive at a definitive consensus in any field of philosophy, then that would be the death of that field, it seems to me. Or, maybe, it could be a case of philosophical inquiry having spawned a domain of empirical inquiry, which is something that indeed occurs occasionally. But this intellectual (or technical) domain then moves outside of philosophy proper.

Something can't be an inquiry into the conceptual foundations, or basic presuppositions, of some area of thinking and yield propositions that are expressive of factual knowledge. This is not to say that some results of philosophy can't be enduring, and constitute intellectual progress of some sort. But the progress at issue is a progress in understanding, rather than an incremental addition to knowledge. And understanding, unlike empirical knowledge, always is liable to be challenged. When there is definitive progress, it mostly consists in highlighting habitual conceptual confusions that we are liable to fall into whenever we generalize or theorize about anything. But such confusions have a habit of re-emerging under new guises, and their standard modes of elucidation have a habit of settling down into rigid and systematic ways of thinking (philosophical "theories") that in turn spawn new confusions. The impetus to philosophize thus is more akin to a standing responsibility to unravel the confusions inevitably spawned by a constantly evolving understanding (of some domain of inquiry) rather than the expression of a desire, or need, to add to the enduring stock of human knowledge. Sciences, techniques and (conservative) arts can take care of the latter.

If ideology is as powerful as positions like this say, then whence all of the opposition to the "dominant paradigm" coming from liberal arts departments? Do academics have think-outside-the-box superpowers or something? — Pneumenon

One could suggest that those academics have the quite ordinary power to think from within a different box, that is, that they are reasoning under the impetus of a different, more progressive, ideology. However I think there also is some relevance here to Donald Davidson's insistence that there aren't several incommensurate conceptual schemes. And, at the same time, I much appreciate the Kuhnian notion of a plurality of paradigms. So, how can those various ideas be reconciled?

A slightly different suggestion might be devised for the case of the analysis of the theoretical paradigms of the natural sciences than the one that follows. In the case of the ideologies -- i.e. the practical/political paradigms that we encounter in the political arena -- I think it may be useful to distinguish (1) the abstract, general, principles that typically are adduced in support of an ideology (2) and the salient concerns that animate this ideology (and that motivate its adherents). It may be excessively narrow a focus on the general principles that makes it appear like competing political ideologies are incommensurate. However, generally, most of the basic individual concerns (for e.g. health, freedom, dignity, etc.) that animate them are shared among proponents of the clashing ideologies. The concerns being (mostly) shared is most evident in the vast amount of ordinary cases of daily life where citizens of various political persuasions easily agree about what is vitally needed, what is decent/indecent, and what it is reasonable to do in specific situations. This stock of shared concerns, and shared ideas regarding the proper arbitration between them, provides the vast background of agreement against with residual disagreements that are characteristic of specific ideologies are salient and intelligible. (This is the broadly Davidsonian point).

The defining principles of ideologies are stated in quite general terms and are acknowledged by the proponents of them not to apply universally, that is, to have exceptions or to require the open ended adjonction of ceteris paribus clauses in order to be sensibly applied. Those principles can be conceived as attempts to articulate broad guidelines about which specific concerns should be accorded priority in specific practical decision contexts (executive actions, judgments, enactment of specific policies, etc.) So, while proponents of competing ideologies share most of the same individual concerns, they disagree in specific cases (necessarily a minority of cases, if Davidson is right) about which among several concerns, or practical ends -- that can't all be simultaneously met in a specific situation -- must be accorded priority. The root of those disagreements often are understood by the proponents of ideology-A, say, not as stemming from illegitimate concerns stressed by proponents of ideology-B, but rather are blamed on too rigid an adhesion from them to the general, abstract, principles that articulate their ideology. Simply put, liberals (say) accuse conservatives of systematic bias and vice versa.

This may seem like a rather trivial conclusion, and in a way it is, but what I want to stress is that blaming the impasse (when there is an impasse) on the rival ideology, misconstrued as being rigidly embodied by its generally stated guiding principles, often mislocates the source of the disagreement. The genuine disagreement rather often concerns which among several (mostly shared) concerns ought to be accorded priority in specific cases. Explicit ideological 'principles' only are rough attempts to articulate or systematize, a posteriori, systems of priority primarily founded on practical reason and tested in specific cases (and then enshrined in case law, jurisprudence, or embodied in practical wisdom). Practical reason doesn't proceed from the top-down, starting from highly general principles in order to apply them to specific cases. The explicit principles of an ideology lack too much specificity in order to be applied like that. Practical reason rather operates dialectically from the mutual adjustment between specific concerns (e.g. acknowledgment of specific needs of individuals) and more general concerns such as the concerns for justice or fairness. The general party lines, and statements found in national constitutions, are lame attempts to codify this.

I found a compact definition of neo-liberalism on Quora, answering a question regarding the way it differs from neo-conservatism. The description seems reasonable but I was puzzled by the claim that it is under attack from the right by US Republicans (my bold in the quote below):

"...Neo-liberalism is a much broader philosophic outlook for governance which advocates a reduced role for the state in economic affairs, particularly in the developing world, combined with competitive markets and liberal trade policies in each country with the rest of the world. While neo-liberalism supports the use of state institutions for social welfare where needed, it opposes government-protected monopolies and state ownership of productive industries and resources. It is characterized by conceptualizing even the political world as a kind of market, and terms like the "marketplace of ideas," or "policy market" come from the neo-liberal framework.

While neo-conservative policies are largely confined to the right-wing of the political spectrum, neo-liberalism ranges from the social-democratic parties of the center left in Europe and Latin America to the center right parties such as Christian Democratic parties in Europe, the US Democratic Party, and the Social Christian parties of Latin America. Socialist parties tend to advocate against neo-liberalism from the left, and far right-wing parties, which now include much of the US Republican party, tends to advocate against neo-liberalism from the right." --Quora answer, by James Kielkopf.

I don't have much to say about Paul Churchland, who seems to have inherited the worst from his much more interesting teacher, Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars was committed to a form of scientism -- the project of articulating the scientific image of man -- but could recognize this conception as problematically articulated with the equally indispensable manifest image of man ("the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase, man first encountered himself...") Being skeptical of any area of philosophy that can't be 'naturalized', Churchland has seemingly turned an already questionable project into a form of unabashed scientism. That seems to be a rebellion against philosophy; which is not to say Churchland doesn't have anything interesting to say, of course. It's just that I can't muster much sympathy for his overarching project.

Hi John,

Very nice post. The world/environment distinction that I use is borrowed from John McDowell who himself borrowed it from Gadamer... who himself, of course, is very close to Heidegger. In my thinking about objectivity, I was also influenced by John Haugeland who himself was much indebted to Heidegger. I also thought about drawing on the notion of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) -- which is what you probably want to refer to rather than presence-[at]-hand (Vorhandenheit) -- as not quite the equivalent of animal affordances, but as basic, though rational, forms of engagement with the world that animal affordances are the primitive or pre-linguistic forms of. The idea of a totality-of-involvements (Bewandnisganzheit), as exemplified by our mastery of items that are part of, and have circumstantial functions, within a whole workshop, indeed singles out what is distinctive of our own world of 'affordances' as distinguished from the mere environmental affordances immediately graspable (and exploitable) by non-rational animals.

Animals also have some mastery of some of the primitive links that tie up elements of (what would genuinely be for us) a totality-of-involvements. That is, they can pursue affordance A (e.g. walking along some path) because pursuing affordance A is an effective means to pursuing affordance B (e.g. drinking water). But they are passively drawn into those links and can't pull back from them, as it were, to reflect on them as mere practical or theoretical options -- unactualized possibilities -- that can be generalized, problematized, systematized, etc. Hence they can't found a mode of readiness-to-hand (on the basis of which to freely theorize) on their basic 'world' (i.e. environment) of affordances.

Hi John,

I don't think Damasio's inference from the observation of brain damaged patients is conclusive. It would be conclusive if we could fully ascribe all of our linguistic abilities to definite regions of the brain that are, for all we know, merely crucially involved in their acquisition and normal actualization. Localized brain damage occasion all sorts of dissociative behavior and degradation of performances that don't necessarily challenge the view that linguistic skills are central to the development of full-blown conceptual abilities. (See Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, by Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, for more on this, including some discussion of Damasio). Also, what is crucial to linguistically mediated conceptual skill is grasp of logical grammar (including the recombinant structure of general and singular terms), something that implicates people and their brains much beyond mere abilities to verbalise things fluently. Verbal behavior is one main locus of the embodiment of logical grammar, but so are activities such practical reasoning, dance, music, etc., that are narratively structured.

I don't think animals pick out the same items that we normally do, though the items that they do pick out, we can also empathetically pick out for them in a different manner, since we, unlike them, can conceptualize what their animal needs, and, correspondingly, their perceptually salient 'categories' (affordances) are. Those categories, as picked up by us, have a much higher grade of objectivity, as it were, since they rest on individuation criteria (i.e. criteria that determine what is numerically identical with what). The ball, for instance, if it goes hidden for a time and then emerges back (say, it is thrown over a fence and then thrown back to us) may be the same ball or a different though qualitatively identical one. This distinction is intelligible to us but unintelligible to a dog. The ball thrown back either still affords playing for the dog or doesn't. But a dog never would fathom that it might be a different ball that smells and looks just the same or, indeed, the same one. If two balls, instead of one, are thrown back, the dog may be indecisive (better, conflicted) for an instant about what to do, but he won't be puzzled.

Very many years ago there was a British TV show where they decided to prank passing dogs through lifting up with a crane the tree that the dogs were attempting to pee on. This turned out to be rather unfunny because as soon as the tree was being raised in the air, and didn't afford peeing on anymore, the dogs would immediately move on to the next tree to pee on and never look back for so much of a second to inquire about the peculiar flying tree. I think this tells us something about the categorical distinctness of the items that we pick up as trees (and that we conceptualize as enduring re-identifiable beings of specific sorts) and the items that dogs pick up merely as affording peeing on at that very instant.

Cavacava, I agree with much of what you say, but would like to stress a categorical difference between the way in which non-rational animals spontaneously mark differences in their perceptual worlds and the way we (rational, language users) do.

Birds may, in part instinctively, and in part through learning -- largely thanks to unthinking conditioning, but also, granted, through active and motivated exploration -- come to perceive some fruits as edible and others (which may have made then sick) as non-edible. What if, though, a bird sees another bird eat some prima facie 'toxic fruit' (that is, a fruit that this first bird is disinclined to eat) with no ill effect, or, conversely, sees another bird eat a prima facie 'edible fruit' and then drop dead? For the most part, nothing happens. That's because the bird lacks self awareness, knowledge that he is one individual among many individuals of the same kind, and that similar causes often have similar effects etc. The edible, and non-edible, are perceived by the bird as immediately affording eating, or not, respectively, (and in the later case, the toxic fruits are scarcely perceived at all, and mostly go unnoticed as part of the perceptual background to more immediately appealing affordances).

This discriminatory ability may be a proto-conceptual ability with quite a bit of aesthetic sub-structure, but what makes it categorically distinct from the full blown conceptual ability of a language using creature is that anomalies can only be perceived by us as such (i.e. as troublesome occurrences calling for some rational explanation) and thus may serve as ground for questioning appearances, and challenging some of our beliefs, concepts, laws and/or causal categories. Full-blown conceptuality enables mastery of the appearance/reality distinction and thus also the grounding of objective judgment together with responsible concept use. Aesthetic judgment still makes relevant differences salient in the perceptual world of whoever has been suitably trained and encultured into a rational form of life. This is the extension of an ability also possessed by non-rational animals. But challenges to, and rationally motivated revisions of, perceptual categories (extent systems of similarity and difference) are enabled by linguistically mediated concept use, as are our correlative abilities to withhold judgment about what merely appears to be thus and so when we have reason to think it isn't as it appears to be.

John McDowell has an account of the conceptually structured content of perceptual experience -- Kantian in spirit -- whereby he speaks of experiences as involving the passive actualization of conceptual abilities (the very same abilities that are actively actualized in judgments -- Kantian acts of spontaneity). In that sense, since they are actualized rational capabilities, they are a priori (i.e. conceptual, or 'logical', in a broad sense) features of experiences that are indeed acts, as John suggests. But since those acts are acts of receptivity, their conceptually structured contents still are constrained by what is there to be perceived in the world. This properly accounts for experiences affording a rational constraint on judgment (albeit a constraint that is somewhat holistic, and comes short from being compelling in singular cases of perceptual experience, since they ground defeasible perceptual judgments).

Coming back to John's inquiry about the 'logical' (e.g. conceptual) component of experience without which, it would seem, non-rational creatures such as dogs or cows, would be blind, on a Kantian account: I think we can indeed acknowledge that, in a quite definite sense, dogs and cows are blind to the world. They can't make any objective judgments that are warranted by their experiences (such that they could defend or genuinely question them). This is not to deny that they have perceptual experiences. They indeed have. But those aren't experiences of an objective world, but rather of an immediate environment consisting in (Gibsonian) affordances, that is, consisting in features that can immediately engage primitive forms of behaviors that belong to an animal's passively inherited form of life. Non-rational animals are (mostly) unable to distance themselves from their natural needs and impulses, and hence can't either distance themselves reflectively from features of their environment such as to constitute them as objective items (including properties) that can be questioned, reshaped or inquired about (beyond what mere appearances present to them).

I think most of the primitive features of our perceptual experiences also are Gibsonian affordances that reflect features of our animal form of life, that is, of our essentially embodied mode of existence. This is what our perceptual experiences can be analysed into, rather than, say, sense data. Our acquisition of language, and linguistically mediated conceptual abilities, reshape those (forms of) affordances such that we can responsibly ground or question our plans, intentions, or our conceptions of the empirical world, on the basis of our perceptions of them. In that way, we come not only to question the warrantedness of immediately acting as the environment (and our matching needs/desires) incline us to, but also to (sometimes directly) discern possibilities for rational (and delayed) action that we were formerly blind to. On that view, we could say that the primitive (forms of) affordances that non-rational animals (and human infants) can discern in their environments are proto-concepts and, as such, indispensable features of the contents of animal experiences just as much as conceptual forms comes to be indispensable features of our own experiences, not just contingently, but a priori.

I have been a member quite early but haven't posted anything significant yet. This is in part because I have been busy but also in part because it is a bit intimidating for me to post here. I'll explain why.

I had wanted to post in the thread discussing the paper The Extended Mind by Clark and Chalmers since I had already read it twice. I tried to find my copy of the book by Clark in which it is reprinted, since I annotate rather heavily all my philosophical readings. I couldn't find it, was quite annoyed (...felt a little bit like Otto without his notebook), and thus I printed another copy and read it a third time. In the thread, some comments by Jamalrob and others already were expressing quite acute criticisms that I was agreeing with (and were often sharper than some of my own reservations). I wanted to add a few remarks (regarding what seemed to me like a tacit and troublesome commitment to representationalism by the authors) but never got round to doing it.

In the old forum, at least until about a year ago, I was often appalled by the level of discussion, and the fact that most posters wouldn't seem to know that one can actually read some philosophical books or papers before expounding ex cathedra on a topic. When I posted, I didn't need to make much of an effort merely to raise the level of the discussion or buttress my claims with arguments and references. But here, the proportion of posters who are acquainted with the philosophical literature is much higher. I am am thus less inclined to simply bring up my own views without taking care to indicate precisely how they align with or differ from the views of the thinkers being discussed, or the views of the other posters. So, in short, I may find it more intimidating to discuss with smart and knowledgeable people, though, no doubt, it ought to prove more rewarding in the long run.

I read the Quine paper on the prompting of the recent thread. I hadn't read any other complete paper by Quine appart from his celebrated Two Dogmas. Before I could even comment, I was also motivated by Moliere to read again Davidson's On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, which I hadn't read since 2004. I have now finished re-reading that, so it would be time for me to make a few comments in the thread (On What There Is) while it's still somewhat active.

So, the point of this post just was to express my worry that increasing the popularity of this site might bring the level of the discussion down. The level is remarkable as is it is right now (judging from reading just a few threads). But this worry is mitigated by the fact that, in my case at least, an increase in attendance, and a wider range of level of expertise, might make it less intimidating to post here. I hope some balance will be achieved, more (but not too many) posters will be inclined to join, or post more often, and the very smart people already here will persevere.

Dmitri Shostakovitch, Symphony no.7, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein.

The paper is a bit repetitive but contains many nuggets of wisdom nonetheless.