Yes, none of that is a given at all and what has been left out is "according to my favourite interpretation". I would not presume to have a favorite interpretation of a subject in which I am not qualified, and this lack of confidence all the more so, since interpretations are apparently manifold and controversial among the experts..

Would you say that a philosophy that makes you a better and happier person is superior to one that doesn't? I would argue it is more than likely that some philosophies can do this much better than others. — Merkwurdichliebe

Sure, but what makes some better and happier may make others worse and unhappier. How can we justify saying that some philosophies are "superior" tout court? Couldn't we only justify such an opinion if we could show that adherence to such a philosophy would make everyone better and happier?

Plato certainly shows little favor towards "man as the measure" in Theaetetus. He goes so far as to have Socrates mock it sarcastically: — Merkwurdichliebe

Sure, Plato had his opinion, but Plato was just a man like any other. I don't see much argument in that passage you quoted there; why should I be convinced on account of it? What relevance, for example, do pigs or baboons have for the question? For pigs perhaps it is pigs that are the measure of all things, and for baboons, baboons. Why then for men, should men not, in some senses, be the measure of all things?

So, remember before I said it is a complex issue. In relation to any person, who is responsible for determining their views if not the person, assuming that they find themselves capable of thinking for themselves? Is it desirable that others should overrule and impose their authority against the freethinking individual (provided of course that the indivdual is not seeking to impose their own views on others)?

Why philosophical naturalism? It has just as many, and arguably worse, pitfalls as the others. — Merkwurdichliebe

Why philosophical naturalism? It has just as many, and arguably worse, pitfalls as the others. — Merkwurdichliebe

Philosophical naturalism has its benign and pernicious forms, as I see it. The pernicious form claims that everything about humans can be explained in scientific terms; and this is patently false and wrongheaded (in my view: so note that I am not denying anyone's right to believe that, but just as with religious faith, I am denying their right to impose that belief on others). The benign form eschews explanations that posit unknowable entities such as God, angels, or spirits as explanations and authorities that must or even should be believed and submitted to.

The pernicious form denies anyone the right to have faith in Gods or entities of their own choosing; the benign form accords anyone the right to have faith in such things, but not the right to impose their beliefs on others. This is particularly relevant today in regard to issues such as abortion and gay and transgender rights. The benign naturalistic denial is not an imposition on personal faith or belief, but a denial of the possibility of any such faith or belief being of an authoritative nature.

It is not denying that there are many streams in modern philosophy, it is saying that out of all those streams, its highest aspiration is in securing veridical cognitive events. — Merkwurdichliebe

And I think that's a simplistic and egregious generalization. The common aspiration of all philosophy is to understand, and if that were all that was meant by "veridical cognitive events" then I could agree. The point is there are many different kinds of understanding in many different contexts.

. However, those things are clearly not a priority in the modern philosophical paradigm, and I don't see it giving us many of those tools to work with. — Merkwurdichliebe

I disagree I think it's just that we often cannot relate to different understandings so they seem irrelevant to how we might conceive the human situation. People vary; it's "horses for courses".

I don't see much wisdom coming from man-as-the-measure of all things, especially combined with the upsurgence in the right to individual opinion. I would argue that the present world could use a little authoritative and life-altering wisdom to balance things out a bit. — Merkwurdichliebe

Man as the measure of all things is very much what is promoted primarily by those of an idealist bent. I think it's a complex issue, and there are ways in which humanity is the measure of all things, at least for us; or perhaps more accurately: 'man is the measurer of all things'. Because we are undoubtedly the measurers, the idealist (or as Meillassoux would say "the correlationist") argument is that we are also the measure, insofar as all we are held to know is our measurements (ratios, rationality, judgements).

If there is a cure for the pernicious aspect of this mindset it would be philosophical naturalism, not the kinds of idealist or religious philosophies that take humanity to be special, to be the privileged "crown of creation".

Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. — What's Wrong with Ockham, Joshua Hothschild

This is a an example of simplistic thinking at its worst. Philosophy today is not just one thing. There are many, many streams. The more important streams are those concerned with giving us the tools to understand what life is for us, and with ethics, with wisdom as to how to live. But the retrograde idea that there is just one answer is pernicious, toxic: it invites authority to the table, and authority and wisdom are terrible bedfellows; one or other of them will always be kicked out of bed.

You must mean one’s thoughts cannot be understood by another except as they are expressed in language. — Mww

No, I mean it is impossible to think anything complex, anything involving symbols,anything that involves more than simple sensory-motor images, without language.

What else it could be is precisely what it is. Content of any particular thought is the schema/schemata of the conception/s representing it. The schemata are represented by images. Therefore the content of thought is the schema/schemata of the conception/s contained in it. A symbolic, linguistic representation nowhere yet to be found. Images as representations are rational, imbued in all humans; language as representation is cultural imbued in particular humans. Images are common across all subjects, words are not.

But surely you know all that, so.....what gives? — Mww

None of this makes any sense to me, or accords with my own experience of what is involved in thinking. I don't know; maybe it's different for others, but I cannot see how it is possible to think anything discursive without language. I mean how would you think, for example, what I just wrote in that last sentence if you possessed no language? I have no idea why you would think that surely I would know something that I actually think is patently false. Complex concepts are possible only when there is language and via language, or so it seems to me, and I can think of absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

Yes, we’re thinking continuously while conscious, and the fact we’re not aware of most of it is reflection on our laziness on the one hand, and the simplistic, repetitive lives we lead on the other. So busy impressing everybody else we overlook ourselves. Got this one-of-a-kind intellectual gift, and don’t know shit about how it works.
(Wanders off, muttering insults, kicking the fake rubber tree pot and the way out.....) — Mww

How could we possibly be constantly aware of the stream of thought, when we need to be aware of other things, what we are doing, the environment around us, how we are feeling, how others are feeling and so on? My own experience tells me that conscious attention can only be focused on one thing at a time. The "internal dialogue" is like a sub-routine most of the time, or at least that's what reflection on my own experience tells me. I don't deny that maybe it's different for others, but the many people I have discussed this with over the years have confirmed that their experience is in accordance with my own experience, and I find it hard to believe that people are all that different.

I am curious as to whom your "muttered insults" are directed.

So to study a thought, considered as an abstract object in itself, and without regard to the content of it, it must be turned into a conception. How can we conceive of something that has no content? — Mww

Exactly, thoughts cannot be understood except as they are expressed in language. Is it meaningful to conceive of a thought as being a contentless "abstract object"? Sans content what else could we think of a thought as but an activity that has a certain quality or "feel" or image or set of images to it, or else as a neural process (which as such is outside of our awareness)? Content just is symbolic, linguistic; what else could it be?

All that does for us is confuse the matter, insofar as that which we re-create cannot be distinguished from that which is already in consciousness, which means we might not have re-created anything, but just recalled it. In which case, we’re studying something we already know all about. — Mww

This I don't agree with if I've understood what you're trying to say. It seems we are thinking all the time, while not being conscious of most of it, So to think is one thing; while to be aware of thinking is another. To have a thought is one thing, and to be aware of having that thought is another.

Which brings up another issue. If it is the case that thoughts are singular and successive, then each thought is of its own time. If it is impossible to jump back to the time of a thought and to jump to the future of a possible thought, then no thought can be studied insofar as its time is not the time of the thought that studies it. — Mww

I'm not sure what you are getting at here, so I'll just note that thoughts can be written down and studied at leisure, but of course that would be studying the content, not the experience, of thinking.

Much more parsimonious, and less self-contradictory, to study what it is to think, rather than study a thought. We might be alright if we limit introspection to the examination of the relation of faculties to each other, but introspection becomes hopelessly tangled if we use it to examine the faculties themselves. — Mww

I agree, and this is in line with what I said earlier: that phenomenology consists in reflecting on the general nature of experience. Thinking is one kind of experience, sensing is another. Because we are capable of self-awareness, we can reflect on how thinking and sensing are experienced. on how the doing of them seems to us, and how they differ from one another. But this is only ever going to tell us how they seem to us, not what they are in any imagined "absolute" sense.

And of course there is always the danger of being "bewitched by language". It is interesting that Wittgenstein said: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” It is ambiguous as to whether it is the battle or the bewitchment which is "by means of our language"; I think it is both.

However, i must point out that the world of shared meanings has a massive subjective component, and is not necessarily universal like mathematics. — Merkwurdichliebe

Yes, each individual is unique; and has their own unique set of variations on the universal themes (some more interesting than others, of course)..

Not so. Your seven is exactly identical to mine. Otherwise nothing would ever work. — Wayfarer

Of course; we have words for the numbers one to seven, for example. If I have seven objects in front of me and remove one then the number left will be what we call six; if I divide the seven into groups of two there will always be three groups of two with one left over and so on

The fact that somewhat more complex calculations were originally done on an abacus shows that the operations can be physically instantiated in a non-symbolic way and that, in fact, the symbolization of number is derivative of what were originally physical operations of sorting and grouping.

A structure is a set of objects and relations between them. An ordered set is a special kind of set, and so a special kind of structure. — litewave

But then the set is not merely a collection of objects, but a particular arrangement. It depends on how you stipulate it: the set of even numbers is still the set of even numbers no matter how you arrange them, but of course the set of even numbers in their "natural" order only allows of their being arranged in one particular way out of an infinite number of possible ways. It is not part of the specification of any set that the members interact with one another in anything more than a logical or semantic way; which is to say they don't work together to form physical or self-organizing structures.

But are you saying something like that there are no individuals, only descriptions? That an individual is some sort of shorthand for a definite description? — Banno

Individuals are identified by means of descriptions.

Sets are collections. An apple is a collection of atoms. So apples "subsist"? — litewave

An apple is a structure, sets or collections are not structures; the elements may be arranged in any order without changing the set.

How do I know that my token means the same thing as your token? — Joshs

Isn't that shown by the fact that we can make sense of what the other says; follow instructions "to the letter" and so on?

A wise philosopher once told me: "there are interminable arguments in philosophy of mathematics as to whether maths is invented or discovered, whether it's in the mind of humans or is something real in the world." — Merkwurdichliebe

If the mind/body is "all of a piece" with the world, then it should not be surprising that mathematics has real world applications. If there is pattern then there is difference and similarity, and even sameness, and this is integral to human experience in that we experience quantity everywhere. So, I don't see an absolute distinction between discovery and invention; when I write a poem, do I discover it or invent it? I'd say it's one or the other or both depending on perspective.

How could the mind be a concept? The mind is the faculty by which concepts are grasped. — Wayfarer

We know there is an idea of mind, and we can stipulate that if there are ideas, there must be minds to "have" them, but since there is no mind to be found, we cannot rationally conclude that it is anything more than a stipulation, or a name for the process of generating and becoming aware of ideas.

Kant's idea of mind has been revisited in the latter half of the 20th Century in the form of functionalism according to the SEP:

In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

"The mind" is not an empirical object, to be sure, but it is also not determinably anything more than a concept. If we were going to study a purported mind we would need to study its operations, i.e. thoughts, images and behavior.

But how can thoughts be studied if not by examining them? Is it possible to examine thoughts by introspection? If we could do that it would involve putting the thoughts into language, which is a kind of behavior.

Is it possible to examine images by introspection? I don't know about others, but my experience tells me I cannot hold images in mind steadily enough to examine them, so I would need to draw or paint them, or describe then in writing; again behavior and its results. So, it does look like we are back to examining behavior and its products as the only means to understand the purported entity we call the mind.

When you think about it the same thing goes for matter: it also is not determinably anything more than a concept and the only way to study and understand it is via studying its behavior and resulting forms. So we are back to studying behavior, results, phenomena; in other words we are back to phenomenology.

So, we don't study the mind? Or we don't rule out introspection? Note the claim in the paper is that Kant did rule out introspection, And this relates to the Zahavi paper which asserts that introspection is not the way of phenomenology, but rather reflection of the general nature of experience is.

:fire: Keepin' the flame alive...

What I mean by cosmic philosophy, is a philosophy in which life is integral to the Cosmos, not an accidental byproduct of a meaningless process. (Although it's arguable that the term 'cosmos' insofar as it refers to 'a unified whole' is no longer meaningful.) — Wayfarer

The science tells us that life first appeared on the Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. But since it is believed most of the stars were formed billions of years prior to our Sun life may have appeared well before that. Or there may be no other life in the Universe than Earth's, however unlikely that might sound.

However the life on Earth up until about 1.5 billion years ago is believed to have been only single cell organisms. And simple forms of sentient life are believed to have appeared about half a billion years ago. The problem is we don't (and arguably can't) know whether life is inevitable in all universes, or whether it was inevitable in this one.

All that said, since these questions are most likely unanswerable, it would seem to have no bearing on how we choose to live our lives and what values we choose to enact.

People kill, torture, punish and condemn
others based on such embedded assumptions that they don’t think matter to their daily choices — Joshs

I'm not so sure this is true. I mean, you're talking most specifically here about whether people subscribe to determinism or free will, I'm guessing. If you think people are radically free agents then they are radically responsible for all of their actions. If you think that their family circumstances and childhood conditioning are determining factors, that might soften your desire to punish or it might not. I think it's fair to say that many people are motivated simply by emotion; if you do something that hurts them they will wish to punish you, and their wishes do not depend at all on worldviews they might hold, rationally or otherwise.

Absolutely, but there's consistency too, we couldn't think two straight thoughts in a row if every time we thought something it changed the model of the thing we're thinking. — Isaac

Yes, it depends on how much it changes. Our faces are changing all the time, but I might still recognize someone I haven't seen for twenty years.

It distinguishes between the 'straw man' depiction of introspection as the mere 'reporting of what comes to mind', and the discipline involved in phenomenological analysis illustrated with reference to Husserl's Logical Investigations. — Wayfarer

I did read that paper at the time it was linked, and I'd have to go back to it to be sure, for which I don't have time right now, but from memory Zahavi points out that the practice of phenomenology does not consist in introspection as it is usually understood, but in reflection on the nature of experience just as it immediately seems to us,"back to the things themselves" (not the "things in themselves" :wink: ) . This latter would seem to consist in a kind of generalizing exercise of the memory. Maybe @Joshs will give his perspective here.

This is "true" mostly for perennialists, platonists, theists, idealists & naive realists. — 180 Proof

:up: Important inclusion of the naive realists, since the presumption that things should be just as they seem or are imagined to be is held in common with all those worldviews.

Note I did say "proto-behaviorist", not "behaviorist" and certainly not "radical behaviorist" (viz. Skinner). In any case in that paper it is asserted that Kant rejects introspection, while saying that behavior can only be understood subsequent to "studying the mind". How would it be possible to study the mind other than via observing behavior, if introspection is ruled out?

Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals.[1] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.

Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally, but derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect, a procedure that involved the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken behavior.

With a 1924 publication, John B. Watson devised methodological behaviorism, which rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior by only measuring observable behaviors and events. It was not until the 1930s that B. F. Skinner suggested that covert behavior—including cognition and emotions—is subject to the same controlling variables as observable behavior, which became the basis for his philosophy called radical behaviorism.[2][3] While Watson and Ivan Pavlov investigated how (conditioned) neutral stimuli elicit reflexes in respondent conditioning, Skinner assessed the reinforcement histories of the discriminative (antecedent) stimuli that emits behavior; the technique became known as operant conditioning.

The application of radical behaviorism—known as applied behavior analysis—is used in a variety of contexts, including, for example, applied animal behavior and organizational behavior management to treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and substance abuse.[4][5] In addition, while behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought do not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in the cognitive-behavior therapies, which have demonstrated utility in treating certain pathologies, including simple phobias, PTSD, and mood disorders.

From here

So, the mind is not so much "eschewed" as it is understood in terms of reflexes and conditioning, and it is just on account of this understanding that introspection is ruled out, because the introspectively generated story that individuals tells themselves about their motivations and states of minds are not understood to give the "real picture" as to what is going on.

I'm not saying I agree with this view, but just seeking to get clear about what it entails.

Interesting paper, I was particularly struck by this:

To see the contrast, we need to return to a work mentioned earlier, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In this unjustly-neglected work, Kant tells us that anthropology is the study of human beings from the point of view of their behaviour, especially behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour. Anthropology in this sense contrasts with what Kant understood as empirical psychology, namely the introspective observations of our own mental states. Kant’s rejection of introspection and turn to behaviour have a very contemporary feel to them. (For more on Kant on introspection, see Brook
2004.)

The Anthropology is important for other reasons, too. In particular, it illuminates many things
in Kant’s picture of cognition. To make sense of behaviour, character, etc., Kant urges early in the
work, we must know something of the powers and faculties of the human mind: how it gains
knowledge and controls behaviour. Thus, before we can study character, etc., we must first study the
mind. In fact, this study of the mind (Anthropological Didactic, he calls it) ends up being three quarters of the book. In it, Kant discusses many topics more clearly than anywhere else. In one
amusing passage, Kant indicates that he was, if anything, even more hostile to the use of
introspection to understand the mind than I have indicated. Introspection, he tells us, can be a road to "mental illness" (Ak. VII:161). Strangely enough, Kant never seems to have asked whether
anthropology in his sense could be a science.

Did Kant become a proto-behaviorist?

Notice that when psychologists play ‘gotcha!’ and talk about how our naive perception is fooled by illusions and tricks, that the ‘real’ truth of what we experience is hidden from us , they are referring to a level of analysis that first needs to be constructed by us as a fresh perspective. In other words, in order for some some phenomenon to be declared ‘hidden’, the conceptual framework within which its hiddenness is intelligible must first be invented as a fresh form of conceptualization. Could one not then follow the phenomenologists and say that both the ‘naive’ and the hiddenness-savvy frameworks are different varieties of direct perception, the second being an elaboration and transformation of the former? — Joshs

It sounds right that both are different varieties of direct perception, but the naive view is a (direct) conception of directness, whereas the "hiddenness-savvy framework" is a (direct) conception of indirectness. All our perception and conception seems, experientially speaking, to be direct and that doesn't change even if the conception is of indirectness. We can conceive of indirectness, of hidden process, of lack of immediacy, but we cannot perceive indirectness, we cannot perceive hidden process or lack of immediacy, because if we perceived it it would not be hidden; it would seem immediate to us. That's my take anyway.

Vision seems quite clearly indirect to me, I imagine a world made of solid, clear object and yet many of the I can't see clearly. That's my day-to-day experience. Not a direct one at all. — Isaac

So, let's say you are sitting in a room, and you imagine, say, that room full of "solid, clear objects" and yet what you see at any moment is only what you are directly focused on, attending to. You can turn to any of these objects and see them clearly (if the light is sufficient of course). Say you're now staring at your computer screen; it's right there immediately in front of you. That's the sense of direct realism; just that anything you focus your attention on appears right there directly visible, immediately present to you. Of course, the science of perception tells a very different story.

Note, I'm not arguing for the "truth" of one perspective over the other. I also understand that you believe that all views are culturally mediated, but I think it is arguable that the "naive" view is "native", just on account of the fact that perception seems immediate, and it is only when detached, "objective" investigation and analysis is carried out that it is possible to come to the conclusion that perception is not "really" immediate.

One has a kindergarten constructed. One knows the kindergarten isn't constructed well and will collapse at some point in the future. — Tzeentch

That would just be profoundly unethical, regardless of the fact that you don't know whether when it collapses anyone will be injured. It is unethical because it shows you have no moral sense in regard to the quality of what you have been contracted to provide.

Then isn't that somewhat trivially tautologous? — Isaac

No, it's not tautologous: what we perceive is experienced as being perceived immediately, or do you experience some time lag between turning to look at, say, a tree and seeing it?

As to how it "informs my art" it's the difference between accepting what you perceive just as it immediately appears to you, giving yourself over to it and becoming absorbed in it, and objectifying and analyzing the the experience; separating yourself from it, so to speak.

The difference is perfectly clear to me: if you don't understand the profound experiential difference between the two dispositions, then I can only conclude that perhaps you've never experienced it?

The simple idea that we just directly see what's there doesn't seem to be sufficient here. — Isaac

I get it that we don't always see what's there, In fact most of what is in the visual, auditory, olfactory and somato-sensory fields is generally not noticed; and I know this simply by self-reflection; I don't need scientific experiments to tell me that.

But that's not what I'm talking about anyway; I'm saying that what we are immediately aware of, we are immediately aware of; that's just what we experience, and I'm not attempting to draw any further conclusions from that.

So, to my way of thinking, direct realism is merely saying that what I am immediately consciously aware of is directly real for me, and I can acknowledge that the "independent" reality of the things I am aware of is not directly known, in the sense that my perception of those things is the result of a relatively extended process of which I am not at all aware and can only know "secondhand" via the data gained by other investigators..

As I said before it's just two different ways of looking at it. I am an artist, not a scientist, so I give priority to my immediate experience; I prefer to maintain an orientation that does not involve objectifying that experience. I also agree with Heidegger and other phenomenologists that that orientation is both temporally (historically) and experientially prior to the objectifying orientation, which is secondary and derivative. Each orientation delivers its own different possibilities for knowledge and understanding, to be sure.

I't's not a possibly real dilemma, so why would there be any need to "deal with it"?

Thanks. I'll need to think some more on this and undergo some digestion before replying. So, when I have more time...

Possibly, but then do you not also experience some of the optical illusions, weird filtering, and changes of perspective that the multi-stage scientific model gives an explanation for. Do these experiences not need accounting for in any phenomenological description? — Isaac

I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to. By "optical illusions" do you mean things like sticks appearing bent when they are part in and part out of water? If so, then I would say that we just directly see the stick as bent. It doesn't seem to be a problem for direct realism that the stick is not really bent; that can easily be established by taking the stick out of the water or feeling along its length; we don't need science to tell us it's not really bent, but we do need science to tell us exactly why it appears that way. Although, that said, the hunter gatherer might have said it appears that way because it is partially submerged. the scientific understanding of refraction, tying it in with other refractive phenomena, is just a further, more generalized explanation.

Possibly. I've never gotten clear how indirect realism is using the term 'indirect' (nor, for that matter how direct realism is using the term 'direct'). One of the things I thought might come out of this discussion. — Isaac

It's always seemed to me that they are arrived at on account of looking at the situation form different perspectives. So, the scientific understanding of visual perception tells us it is a multi-stage process, which means we don't see things "directly". But from the experiential point of view, we just see things immediately, directly. Which view is correct? In the senses relative to their proper contexts, both are, so there would seem to be no point arguing over whether indirect or direct realism is true is any absolute sense.

Interesting passages, thanks. I need a bit more time than I have right now to read them closely and respond.

Again, 'inference' is the term used to describe a particular type of cognitive process. If you don't like the terminology, fine, but the entire field of cognitive science seems fine with it, so I'm not sure that a particularly interesting point of discussion either and, again, too late to change it now anyway. — Isaac

All of your replies are based on the accepted usages within cognitive science. But this is not a cognitive science thread, and I would not presume to post in a cognitive science thread. I think if you want to bring cognitive science into the discussion you need to be able to explain in terms understandable to the reasonably philosophically educated layperson what relevance it has to philosophical questions which seem, at least on the face of it, to be outside its scope,

So the thread topic concerns whether or not there is an "external world". We already know that from a general scientific perspective, of course there is an external world, because it just is various aspects of what is understood to be the world external to our bodies and/or the world which is "external" in the sense of being the perceived object of conscious awareness, which is being studied by the various scientific disciplines. So, in that sense science is predicated upon there being an external world.

1.Yes it does.

2.No it isn't.

3.Not necessarily.

4,Yes there is. — Isaac

I gave or at least implied arguments for all of these.

1, There is a clear distinction between knowledge and belief. If I know where the pub is that is different than believing the pub is at such and such a location, but am not sure. You are ironing over perfectly valid and useful distinctions by equating the two. Do you have an argument to justify doing that?

2, No one knows exactly how language evolved for obvious reasons. But I find it is more plausible to think it evolved in accordance with meaningful associations, in accordance with what people cared about, than in some merely arbitrary manner.

3.I've said I think it is necessarily the case that it is contradictory to say that we are familiar with what is hidden from us. Perhaps you could explain why you think it could make sense to say that isn't so. Who is the one who has failed to present an argument?

4. I know from self-reflection that making an inference is different than looking at something, and I gave examples of mistaking what I thought I saw due to pattern association, a matter of recognition not of inference, to support my contention. An inference is a process of logical deduction, how would you know such a process is going on unless you were conscious of it?

I've no interest at all in being lectured with a series of random assertions from nobodies off the internet. Provide arguments, cite sources, or at the very least show a little humility if you don't. I can't for the life of me think why you'd assume anyone would want to learn what some random people happen to 'reckon' about cognitive science and systems theory. — Isaac

We're are all "nobodies" here; there are no authoritative sources for ideas about the evolution of language. As to whether it is logically correct to say that a hidden state could be familiar it just is not because it is a contradiction in terms, or whether it is reasonable to use a term such as 'inference' with a common usage in a way that is, by fiat, not consistent with that usage; it is not because it is tendentious and inconsistent. Also I have no interest in being lectured by another dry, opinionated academic who thinks that cognitive science and systems theory have any priority, beyond their own personal set of prejudices, in respect of philosophical questions.

This is child's play. — Tzeentch

Yes, it is childish. How could you possibly know where a town will flourish in two hundred years?

Why would we want to reproduce given that path leads to disaster: overpopulation and its accompaniments like diseases (e.g. Covid), famine, ecological collapse, so on and so forth. — Agent Smith

Some people want to reproduce, others don't. There is no one rule or one set of acceptable conditions that should govern everyone's decision as to whether or not to procreate. It's self-righteous nonsense to imagine there could be

are you familiar with Kierkegaard's concept of repetition? It's a very interesting take on Socratic recollection. — Merkwurdichliebe

No, I'm not familiar with i, but I'm interested. Can you suggest a work that presents it?

This is where apophatic theology comes in, for example, Eiriugena, Tillich, , Whalon. S — Wayfarer

It's just a different way of talking, as I see it. In ordinary parlance to say that something does not exist is to say it is not real, but imaginary. We can ask if God is real or imaginary; would God exist if there were no humans? We don't have to ask such questions; we can just accept that we feel a presence we call God, or the divine, the sublime, the numinous, or whatever.

The same applies to familiar objects: we can ask if they are real or (collectively) imagined; would they exist without humans? How can we answer that, how could we know? Is the question even meaningful? Of course our familiar objects would not be familiar objects and wouldn't have names if there were no humans. We know that much.

Its nature is indeterminate. And so it can't be said to exist, because what exists is determinate (i.e. it is 'this' or 'that'.) — Wayfarer

If you stipulate that the usage of "exist" should only apply to determinate beings, then of course you're going to be right that it should not be used to refer to indeterminate beings. We can imagine the existence of things that are not determinable to us, though. For example gods can be imagined to exist. Or indeterminate noumena: things in themselves that are the real existences in themselves of the objects familiar to us. In common usage 'being' and 'existence' are understood to be synonymous; just as being is not a being, existence is not an existent.

We cannot know something we can't remember. Socrates was correct. — Merkwurdichliebe

I think that's a different point.Socrates' claim is that (some?) knowledge is accessed via recollections of past lives.

That's not how we use the word 'know'. We use the word 'know' to refer to successful models of hidden states. I say something like "I know where the pub is", by which I mean that if I go to the place I believe the pub is, I will find it there. — Isaac

It has nothing to do with belief. If you know where the pub is, you know you will find it there, excluding possibilities such as that your memory is faulty or the pub has been demolished or moved. The word 'know' is used in many different ways. 'Know that', 'know how' and the knowing of familiarity. There is also 'knowing with': knowing via images, concepts or methodologies. Some knowings are bloodless and calculating, others rich and meaningful.

Yes. all language is by fiat. There's no book of what things 'really' mean. — Isaac

All language can be subjected to fiat. But the evolution of language is not by fiat, but by meaningful association and image.

Uh huh. And why can we not be familiar with hidden states? If we have good models of them, we can be very familiar with them. — Isaac

It's very simple: if we are familiar with them then they are not hidden.

Active inference describes, for example, what 'seeing' is. The intention is not that we say "Ah so we don't really 'see' things then", what 'see' means doesn't change, we're just describing what goes on in the process in more detail. — Isaac

Seeing is not a matter of inference; that is an inapt use of the term. An inference is a rational conjecture; there us no conjecture involved when I am looking at something; I simply see it. That said, of course sometimes we may think we see something that is not there or is something else, but that is caused by image association (what looks like a person turns out to be a tree, or what looks like a snake turns out to be a stick).

Well, if we're not 'overstating', you only know what you currently remember about what happened when you tested the model.

All thought is post hoc by at least a few milliseconds. — Isaac

There is no point questioning memory as such; if we have no faith at all in memory, then we can have no faith in any knowledge at all. Memory is the foundation of who we are, to question it in a general way would be absurd.

You say we know hidden states, via inference; that our actual experience just is inference, if I've understood you. This makes no sense to me. We infer that there are hidden states, and by definition, they being hidden, we don't know them in the common sense of "knowing'. We don't know what those inferred hidden states are; if we did they would not be hidden.

You haven't addressed this earlier response:

...is exactly what I'm arguing for. There is nothing whatsoever about these 'hidden states' which prevents us from naming them. In fact, I think that's exactly what we do. The 'hidden state' I'm sitting on right now is called a chair. It's hidden from my neural network because the final nodes of it's Markov boundary are my sensorimotor systems. It's not hidden from me, I'm sat right on it. — Isaac


If you are the body is it not, along with the chair, a hidden state (or as I would prefer to say hidden process)? Of course we can name them, but it seems we are doing so from within the familiarity which constitutes our common and also individual experience. — Janus

So, I am saying that naming is just a matter of fiat: we can call the hidden state a chair, or we can call it the unknown whatever that appears to us a chair. But if we want to say it is a hidden state at all, then it seems contradictory to say that it is "really" a chair, since we have already acknowledged that we think it is "really" a hidden state, and a chair cannot be anything but a familiar object.

...is exactly what I'm arguing for. There is nothing whatsoever about these 'hidden states' which prevents us from naming them. In fact, I think that's exactly what we do. The 'hidden state' I'm sitting on right now is called a chair. It's hidden from my neural network because the final nodes of it's Markov boundary are my sensorimotor systems. It's not hidden from me, I'm sat right on it. — Isaac

If you are the body is it not, along with the chair, a hidden state (or as I would prefer to say hidden process)? Of course we can name them, but it seems we are doing so from within the familiarity which constitutes our common and also individual experience.

Yes that seems to be one conception of philosophy. I think its more in the domain of art, literature, music and religion. But then there is a long philosophical history of trust in intellectual intuition from the Presocratics through Plato, the Neoplatonists through to Spinoza. Hegel, Whitehead and arguably some continental philosophy.