Yes, that's a good point. This is why dispensing with final causality in biology is so difficult. But final causality also goes off the rails when we decide that what constitutes "a being" is arbitrary. Then we end up with attempts to explain the telos of rocks, which have no organic unity and are more bundles of external causes (obviously, they do act in the way all mobile being acts, but not in the way animals do).

I think some of the more successful attempts to explain culture have followed on the doctrine of signs/semiotics, and the distinction between the umwelt and the human species-specific lebenswelt.

Sure, no "true Jew" has ever thought God became man in the very same sense that no "true Scotsman" has ever told a lie.



Right, that was exactly my point. The answer to question one does not entail any specific answer to question two.

The biology of the human eye is not a social practice, but it is a practice. The eye exists by functioning, and its functioning takes place within an integrated internal and external milieu which continually shape how it functions, in a way not unlike the way that linguistic practices shape the meaning of concepts for humans. We know now that environmental factors directly shape genetic structures, so any attempt to locate a pre-cultural explanation for the origin of an eye will be lacking.

I don't have any problem with the general description, because it seems to pretty much the insight that "act follows on being," that the eye has a function as part of a being, etc. However, exchanging "act" for "social practice" seems to introduce an equivocal usage of "practice" and "social," or "normative."

The "not unlike" highlighted above is important because, if how rocks interact with flowing water in riverbeds is "normativity all the way down," it is so in a way that apparently uses the term "normativity" in a way disconnected from what it normally means (or at the very least the likeness is not at all apparent). The likeness between say "river bed evolution and language evolution" seems at best analogical, but I am not even sure what the analogy is supposed to be because these things only seem "not unlike" each other in the very general sense that all things might be said to have something in common.



Same with the usage of "culture" wed to "environment" below. TBH, it seems like trying to say two different things at once. In what sense is a physical enviornment a "culture." The claim that environments effect genes or subatomic processes seems pretty uncontroversial, but what is "culture" even supposed to add here?

This doesn’t mean that linguistic practices directly influence the nature of DNA functioning in rats. It means that the physiological and environmental culture within which genes operate influence how they operate, and the environment within subatomic processes occur shape the nature of those processes and even their ‘lawfulness’.

If we cannot distinguish between what Jesus actually said and what is attributed to him that is because of the stories and claims that stands between them

This is simply an invalid inference. That there is not evidence available to confirm that a message has been transmitted faithfully is not evidence that a message hasn't been transmitted faithfully.

Thus, does it follow that if the world is the totality of facts, and counterfactual definiteness defines what the sum total of what a picture of a state of affairs is, then facts are composed of what things aren't, again being counterfactuals.

Sounds similar to the idea of participation in existence through limiting essence in scholastic thought. Essence is a limit on the fullness of being; in an important sense things are what they aren't.

Philosophy that relies heavily on information theory also tends to make this point. The game of "Twenty Questions" is a common example, the entire world of being narrowed to one particular with just a few questions because knowing what a thing is implies all that it is not.

But then we might consider that the positive "is" of things also refers outside of itself in another way, e.g. as the concept "red," to be fully intelligible ,must include an understanding of "color." So, aside from the idea that essence (what a thing is) doesn't explain existence (that a thing is), there is also a sense in which things rely on relations to other things for their identity. This is sort of the engine of Hegel's Logic when it comes to the doctrines of essence and concept, the inability of anything to be complete in-itself except for the true infinite. And you see the same sort of thing in Aristotle's Physics, with the insistence the motion/becoming be intelligible. Such a view is obviously at odds with Wittgenstein's (and much of modern philosophy's) atomism in TLP.

I find it particularly amusing that this was in response to a question about him tanking a "Ukraine aid for border control bill," termed by the Senate GOP as "the largest border bill in over 30 years." Of course, his failures and recalcitrance, even in terms of what his own base wants him to do, once again get nicely covered up by a debate on how much pet eating is going on in the US.

And then Deely has some very interesting stuff on the Doctrine of Signs lying prior to logic in John Poinsot that gets at the relationship between truth and existence, an understanding of signs acting as a scaffold for realism. And it seems to offer up simpler avenues for dealing with the truth of statements like "unicorns have one horn," or disconnects between intent/thought and utterance. But as much as I do appreciate his stuff I also think he has a tendency to bury the lead and get lost in minutia.



However, it seems to me that this still falls into the Aristotlean vein of truth being linked to the intelligibility of being. I'll have to try to remember where I found it but I remember reading a fairly compelling argument that this doesn't really square that well with correspondence theories of truth as often envisaged in analytic philosophy, but might be more profitably envisaged as a sort of identity theory. And this obviously has consequences for understanding formalism, the idea of the "proposition" as primary truth bearer, etc.

Catherine Pickstock and John Milbank have a neat book called "Aquinas on Truth," that gets at this same issue from a slightly different angle, claiming that Aquinas' heavily ontological conception of truth is neither in line with modern correspondence or coherence versions of truth, but rather contains elements of both. Knowledge of something (its truth) is analogically related to its being. The coherence element of course relates to the intelligibility of being and the intrinsic logic of thought.

I’ve been working with some ideas in Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being. Much of what he talks about concerns the nature of the relationship between predication and truth-assertion. It occurred to me that “Existence is not a predicate” has some obvious parallels with “Truth is not a predication.” That is, neither existence nor truth add anything, conceptually, to what they appear to be predicating ‛existence’ and ‛truth’ of. I can say “A hundred thalers exist” but this adds nothing to the concept ‛a hundred thalers’; I can say “It is true that there are a hundred thalers on the table” but this adds nothing to the proposition ‛There are a hundred thalers on the table’.

This is the exact thing Artistotle circles around in Book IV Chapter II of the Metaphysics, only vis-á-vis being and unity (truth comes into it later but I don't recall exactly where).

The text is available with Aquinas' commentary. But truth in particular and the "The true is that which is" thesis is most straightforwardly addressed in the Disputed Questions: https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVer1.htm


Anyhow, if you're interested in the parallel with unity (and thus goodness) it's below. Similar sort of observation.

549. Now the terms one and being signify one nature according to different concepts, and therefore they are like the terms principle and cause, and not like the terms tunic and garment, which are wholly synonymous. —Yet it makes no difference to his thesis if we consider them to be used in the same sense, as those things which are one both numerically and conceptually. In fact this will “rather support our undertaking,” i.e., it will serve his purpose better; for he intends to prove that unity and being belong to the same study, and that the species of the one correspond to those of the other. The proof of this would be clearer if unity and being were the same both numerically and conceptually rather than just numerically and not conceptually.

550. He proves that they are the same numerically by using two arguments. He gives the first where he says, “For one man,” and it runs as follows. Any two things which when added to some third thing cause no difference are wholly the same. But when one and being are added to man or to anything at all, they cause no difference. Therefore they are wholly the same. The truth of the minor premise is evident; for it is the same thing to say “man” and “one man.” And similarly it is the same thing to say “human being” and “the thing that is man;” and nothing different is expressed when in speaking we repeat the terms, saying, “This is a human being, a man, and one man.” He proves this as follows.

To be more precise, he is the image of the invisible God, first-born of all creation.

Yes, and I assume in copying that line you actually finished the sentence, which continues: "for by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything."

These are not statements that apply to angles or even Zeus. Christ is God "manifest in flesh," (1 Timothy 3:16), etc.

John leaves out the second part. If Jesus understood himself to be a son of God in this sense then he is not the one unique Son"

It is readily apparent that the "Son" is not one son among many in John.

For example, the prayer in John 17: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so he can give glory back to you. For you have given him authority over everyone. He gives eternal life to each one you have given him. And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. I brought glory to you here on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. Now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began."

There is a distinction between the sheep and the Good Shepherd, e.g. John 10 "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me,[a] is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one.”

You are confirming my suspicion that you jump around texts looking for whatever lines support your fancy without actually reading them.

Yes. That is the point. They are not Jesus' Jewish disciples. If any of them were Jewish they still spoke to a gentile audience with gentile ears, that is, with gentile and/or pagan beliefs and understanding.

It really isn't. Jews spoke Greek and wrote in Greek. The Septuagint was motivated by the fact that they increasingly only wrote and read Greek. That the NT is in Greek says very little about the authorship of its contents.

But you can consult scholarship on this point to see that the claim that the entire NT (including, say James) was written by gentiles for gentiles, that Paul was a gentle, etc. is not even a fringe position. Nor is it in any sense definitive that none of the epistles attributed to Jesus disciples were written by them. I have no idea where you are getting this certitude.

We do not know what Jesus said or taught. Between Jesus and the Gospels stand many voices

Well no, this is also overreaching. You keep using the lack of definitive evidence as an excuse to make definitive claims. If Peter wrote either First or Second Peter then we have a direct account from someone who lived with Jesus for years, etc. Likewise for the quotations of Jesus. It is entirely plausible that they are direct citations of Jesus himself or direct quotes of people who knew Jesus (indeed, this is at least scholarly consensus on the origin of the quotes in the Synoptic Gospels). It's impossible to confirm either way however, you could just as well claim Jesus, Peter, etc. all never existed (indeed, this is a popular thesis to sell books).

The view that Yahweh can be man is shared by no Jewish sect ever but I grant you that it is possible that his followers believed it.

Wouldn't Christianity be a prime example to the contrary? Jesus and all of the initial Apostles were Jews. Unless we're going to claim that all the earliest sources are not credible, in which case there is nothing to be said on the issue one way or the other. There were also Jewish Christians who nonetheless followed Jewish law into the fifth century. And there is Messianic Judaism today

The question then is whether the term 'divine' as it is used by Paul when preaching to the Gentiles and by the Greek speaking authors of the Gospels are claiming that Jesus is God or a god or rather of God.

St. Paul states in unambiguous terms that Christ existed from before the foundations of the cosmos and that Christ is the active agent in the creation and sustainment of the entire cosmos (e.g. Colossians 1). This is clearly different from being something like a Greek demigod/god or angel.

Likewise, the Gospel of John's opening lines include: "And the Logos (Christ) was God," when discussing the creation of the cosmos, and claims that all beings are created through Christ. Revelation is equally explicit.

Later arguments about subordinationism, modalism, filioque etc. rest on ambiguities in what would become the Christian canon, or at times on rejecting some of those texts and/or holding to rejected texts. But clearly the type of divinity is quite different from the deification of Roman Emperors. Roman Emperors were not the creators and sustainers of the cosmos.

As for the "Greek authors," the entire New Testament is in Greek.

To be clear, Ehrman's thesis is that only certain parts of the NT give us a view of what the "real earliest beliefs of the Church were," and that he has reconstructed them. He doesn't apply his thesis to the NT as a whole because this would be ridiculous. It also rests on claims that the texts in question were later edited. So it's a claim about the "original" texts as recovered by scholars, and about which texts represent "earlier views" (as opposed to merely different views). It also relies on contesting the authorship of the Epistles, which has always been a point of interest/contention, even going back to folks like Origen. It doesn't make any sense to apply this thesis to the NT as a whole.

And certain contentions like "the NT authors made Christ God specifically because they were upset that Roman pagans ranked their emperors higher than Jesus," represent arguments from psychoanalysis made about authors we know virtually nothing about.

He himself in interviews and proponents of his view conflate the fact that some of his premises have "scholarly consensus," and that he is indeed a "respected scholar," with the idea that his speculative claims to have accurately reconstructed the views of the Apostles for a certain date range (a date range for which we have absolutely no sources) are also "scholarly consensus." But per his own reckoning, not one single word written by a Disciple has come down to us. But no one wants to buy a book that says "it's impossible to know," or one that says "this is speculation that is highly unlikely to be correct in all its details..."



John M. Frame's "A History of Western Philosophy and Theology," is a fine example of such a view. Frame is "unapologetically Reformed," as positive reviews put it. And this shows in things like him dismissing the whole of the Christian mystical tradition and the idea of divine union or theosis as "unbiblical" a term he uses even for writers who quote Scripture virtually every line. Obviously, the idea isn't that folks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux don't use the Bible. It's that they lost the original (correct) understanding of the Bible under the influence of Platonism, Stoicism, etc.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying if you think this is "controversial" because this isn't an accusation from the outside (although Catholics do bring it up, e.g. the Regensburg Address), but something Protestant authors are happy to put forth as a worthwhile goal: the recovery of the Christianity of the "early Church" (where this specifically means the Church of the first century or so, not necessarily the Church Fathers of the first five centuries, since the Patristics are very heavily influenced by classical philosophy).

Any treatment of the Reformation will include the anti-rationalism/anti-metaphysical trends and the reaction against classical metaphysics and its further evolution in scholasticism I imagine. They aren't small threads.

MacCulloch's "The Reformation" is one of my favorite surveys of the era. Durant's "The Reformation," isn't the best history, but since he focuses on ideas he has some pretty good coverage of stuff like the letters exchanged between Luther and Erasmus (which touch directly on this issue. Erasmus claims that predestination would cause us to suppose that God is evil, Luther counters with the claim that human reason is too corrupted to know true goodness, setting up an equivocity between the goodness of God and goodness as known and experienced by man that will become very pronounced in wholly voluntarist theology along the lines of "whatever is good is good simply in virtue of the fact that God wills it.")

Or, if you've spent any time in American Evangelical churches, you could just consider the view of first century Jews common there, something like universal literacy, memorization of the Scriptures, and obviously knowing them in Hebrew (which of course meant they spoke Hebrew). It's an image of the focus on the individual study of Scripture so important in these churches today, and it comes across in media depictions, e.g. in the Chosen the Apostles are literate, have memorized large sections of Scripture, etc. What is to be "recovered" as an ideal has to fit the ideal.

There are even helpful memes to poke fun at this https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fp0XQtsWcAMRJK1.jpg

Ehrman says that shortly after J's execution/resurrection discussions of his divinity occur among his followers and that there are a range of views towards J in the early church.

Sure, and that's possible, but what are likely the earliest documents that exist even mentioning Jesus mention him as divine.

I don't see any evidence that his followers viewed him as God during his lifetime.

Of course you don't. And you don't see any evidence to the contrary either because the Epistles and Gospels are the very first historical documents that mention Jesus. Suppositions about "what did people believe decades before we have a single scrap of evidence," are pretty much pure speculation.

I find the statements based on what "Jews of the era would have been willing to believe," to be particularly off-base given we have plenty of historical evidence, from both the Bible and other sources, to show that the Jews of antiquity very often engaged with surrounding religions, became followers of them (up to and including abandoning Judaism completely) or incorporated other faiths into Judaism. This is a recurring theme in the Hebrew scriptures and the Jewish works only included in the Septuagint. It's an obvious focal point of the religious class compiling the sources.

If we didn't have Philo and co. we'd probably hear similar things about how no Jew (or "no true Jew") would embrace Platonism or blend it with Judaism. Indeed, Protestant scholars tried to make exactly this sort of argument as they struggled to dislodge Greek thought from their form of Christianity (which is quite difficult given its influence is all over the NT and clearly in some OT books, such as the Wisdom of Solomon).

Besides, I have a suspicion that the designation of 'information' as being foundational to existence, goes back to Norbert Wiener saying 'Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' I'm sure this is what leads to the prevalence of information-as-foundation in contemporary discourse.

If information is thought of as form (actuality, quiddity) then the idea of information as a "foundation" of sorts is very old indeed. In Aristotle, form (act) has primacy over matter (potency).

But often it seems that attempts to use information in a hylomorphic sense are hamstrung by being unable to jettison the modern conception of matter as having form, and so you end up with reductionist versions of information-based ontologies where things are "made of bits," which seems to badly miss the point.

I suppose this subject is also haunted by the mistake of some scholastics, particularly later ones, of turning natures, species, genera, etc. into logical objects, when they are first and foremost the principles of actual, changing being (and the principles of the change therein). Hence, the idea that evolution is a problem for essences because it shows they can change—well this presupposes thinking of them in what is probably an unhelpful manner. I think this is an area where Deely's treatment of Aristotle is particularly helpful, even if he tends to neglect the "form as intellection," side that folks like Perl bring out well.

It's worth noting that the compilation dates of the Gospels
cover a wide period. One should not take "scholarly consensus" about the order and dates of their compilation as meaning "this is most likely right." Questions of dating, order, and authorship are all highly speculative.

Second, the dates and theories about authorship jump around over time despite no new evidence being introduced. It's a sad fact that novelty and provocative theses are how you sell books and get tenure in academia. Hence there are very strong incentives to embrace provocative theses because they are provocative or novel. The fact is, a book that says "honestly, we really don't know, we have to speculate with a high degree of uncertainty," doesn't sell books.

The other factor here is that this is obviously a politically charged subject. Catholics look to support their tradition. Atheists often have an incentive to poke holes in traditional interpretations regardless of the merits of their case. You have folks like Erhman who are both talented scholars but who also have deep personal issues with Christianity, a bone to pick with it, advancing highly speculative theses and presenting them as if they a fairly certain.

This sort of thing is endemic to virtually all ancient history. One problem is that, even if we can be 95% certain that x, y, z... etc. are each true premises when it comes to history, it will still be the case that a speculative theory built off of these premises has an extremely low likelihood of being free from significant material error. It's just like how if you roll a 10 sided die once, you can be pretty confident you won't roll a 9. Roll is 50 times and your confidence collapses. This is the sort of thing they teach when you do intelligence analysis and I really wish historians would get more of it, because they don't always seem to understand this.

I'll mention Ehrman here because I am familiar with his arguments. For his case to work, the dating of NT documents needs to be "just so." But, even ignoring that "scholarly consensus" (which Ehrman doesn't even appear to follow) is not a very good metric of certainty, we might consider that even if we are 90% confident of the dating of each part of the NT individually (and we are not nearly that confident), this would still make an argument for a very particular ordering very statistically unlikely to be correct. (Of course if St. Peter is the author of I Peter this point is moot anyhow, because that author thinks Christ is divine)

That all said, generally we have St. Paul's letters put forth as the earliest Christian documents. St. Paul clearly, in no ambiguous terms, thinks Christ is God. It is in Christ in which "all things hang together," (Colossians 1). James is often put forth as an earlier text (although there are counter arguments to this). James very clearly thinks Christ is God and deserving of worship. The author of I and II Peter clearly thinks Christ is God. The author of I John and the Gospel of John (very likely the same person) thinks that Christ is God, although this is less relevant because these are generally considered to be later writings (although their compilation dates overlap with Luke).

Point being, from what are likely the very earliest Christian sources Christ is seen as divine. The argument of folks like Erhman, that there is "no way" first century Jews would have ever thought their leader was God is undercut by the fact that the earliest source we have clearly shows a first century Jews who very obviously thinks Christ is God and thinks this despite close contact with the Apostles who followed Christ.

2. [As it turns out Jews also sometimes thought that a human could become divine.

This is simply playing with an equivocal usage of "divine." The way in which the authors of Colossians (widely agreed to be St. Paul) and John think of Christ's divinity is as being that through which the world is created and holds together. "Apart from him not one thing was created that has been created," and "in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos WAS God."

And even in the other Epistles you have advice to offer direct prayers to Christ, who judges mankind. By contrast, angels always reject prayer directed towards them. The type of divinity indicated is specific. It might not rule our some sort of subordination à la Arianism however.

The blog post might do well to point out that what are widely considered to be the earliest Christian texts, St. Paul's letters, refer to Christ in creating and sustaining the universe.

I don't disagree with the quote. However, I do disagree with your formulation that the world is "nothing but social practice," and "social practices all the way down." There is an important sense in which a rock or a horse is not a social practice. But you seem to be stretching the term "social practice," to the point where it has at best a merely analogical relationship to how the term is usually used, since it's straightforwardly ridiculous to claim a horse is a "social practice," given common usage of the term, so I may be missing something.

Is the idea at work here also a sort of panpsychism?

Anyhow, a rejection of subject/object dualism, a rejection of truth as mere correspondence, and embrace of enactivism and phenomenology (hallmarks of most pre-modern philosophy anyhow) need not require the assertion that a horse and its intelligibility have no principles/causation outside human social practice.

Here it is worth considering Kenneth Gallagher's summation of the metaphysical (as opposed to physical) principle of causation—“that the order of becoming and existence must be intelligible; that no phase of the process of contingent existence is intelligible in itself; and that therefore contingent existence is always relative existence, essentially referred, qua existing to another.” To be intelligible—to not be arbitrary—social practice must have its explanation in something other than itself since its essence does not explain its existence. On the view that the world is intelligible, such an explanation must be possible.

For example, human cultures have come up with different ways to categorize the colors. However, no cultures gave names to colors corresponding to light of ultraviolet wavelengths. Why? Because human beings, and our hominid ancestors, do not have photoreceptors capable of distinguishing UV light (unlike most insects). But the biology of the human eye, its lack of sensitivity to UV light, can only be considered a "social practice," if we use the term equivocally. Eyes are something humans have by nature, not an activity they engage in (except to the extent that all form is activity).

Also, the insight that a mind is needed to actualize space and time doesn't require a view like Kant's. For a t to be oriented up or down, or on either side, requires some observation points/observe. But this is consistent with something like saying Aristotle's view:

It has to come as a surprise to the new student of Aristotle to learn that time and space for Aristotle exist in nature only fundamentally. Formally and actually time and space exist as the action of thought completes nature by creating in memory a series or network of relations which constitute the experience of time and space. Thus the “continuum of space and time” belongs neither to the order of being as it exists independently of the human mind nor to the order of what exists only as a consequence of human thinking, but exists rather objectively as one of the most intimate comminglings of mind and nature in the constitution of experience.

Let us begin with time, that ever mysterious “entity” in which we live out our lives. What is time? How does time exist? According to Aristotle, apart from any finite mind, there is in nature only motion and change and the finite endurance of individuals sustained by their various interactions, as we shortly consider in more detail.

Enter mind or consciousness. Now some object changes its position or “moves in space”, and the mind remembers where the local motion began, sees the course of the movement, and notes where it terminates: the rabbit, for example, came out of that hole and ran behind that tree, where it is “now” hidden. The motion was not a “thing”; the rabbit is the “thing”. The motion exists nowhere apart from the rabbit’s actions – nowhere, that is, except in the memory of the perceiver which preserves as a continuous whole the transitory movement of the rabbit from its hole (the “before”) to the tree (the “after”).

John Deely - Four Ages of Understanding

The problem I see is that the conclusion Kant draws from this example is completely unwarranted. Chirality is a property of shapes. So is rotational symmetry. This is true even on the Leibnizian view of geometry. The role of the mind vis-á-vis perspective doesn't entail that space and time do not exist fundamentally in nature qua nature. Indeed, if nature is "mobile being," time must exist in it fundamentally as the dimension across which change occurs.

Apparently, Kant had long been interested in incongruous counterparts. Prior to his "critical turn," Kant had used a similar argument to support the Newtonian view of "absolute space" against Leibniz view of space as essentially relational.

Understanding Leibniz' view is helpful for understanding where Kant is coming from here. Given Section 12 of the Prolegomena, Kant seems to be thinking of geometry in these rationalist terms, at least in terms of the "pure understanding." Chriality, "handedness," does not seem to show up in these terms, which look only at the points and their distance from one another. Hence, chirality must have to do with how the mind "represents" things rather than how things are.

Personally, I am not convinced by this argument. I have either misunderstood it, or perhaps it makes more sense in the context of how people though about mathematics at the time. The fact that the letter "q" can be rigidly rotated to become congruous with a "b" (at least in simple fonts) is a property of that shape itself. Kant seems to agree with this because he doesn't put forth rotational asymmetry as an example here, which would be a far more simple example, but instead points to chirality in particular.

However, the fact that you can flip a "q" or "b" over a mirror line (i.e. reflection) and that the resulting shape will not be congruent with the original shapes through rigid rotation also seems to be a property of that shape. That is, just from the shape, taken alone, you can tell if it has chiral asymmetry, just as you can tell just from a shape alone if it has rotational symmetry or not (e.g. a circle looks the same regardless of how rotate it, and this a property of that shape). I am not sure if Kant thinks relations involving reflection are different from those involving rotation, such that reflection does not relate to the "in-itself" of shapes?

There certainly is a sense in which a mind must be present to determine which shape (or spin) will be considered "left" or "right," but it seems to me that the asymmetry is already always there, implied by the relations between the points that make up the shape themselves.

Anyhow, this little example has spawned a lot of literature, some of which gets very into the weeds (e.g. discussing how a disembodied hand must be made of subatomic particles, which themselves have chiral asymmetry), and is a pretty interesting topic. You can also imagine a very similar argument based on rotational asymmetry. For example, we can't imagine a "t" that isn't right-side up, upside-down, or on its side. It's orientation cannot be determined from the points that make it up alone. However, this seems to reduce to the triviality that nothing is observable without an observed, not that chirality must be a sui generis product of the mind.

I suppose a key difference I see is that Moore is ultimately concerned with the truth. It's not just that he knows he has a body, but also that it's true—it really is the case that he has a body. What bothers him isn't just the doubt of the obvious.

Whereas, I at least try to read "On Certainty," as being about, well... certainty—justification, etc. After all, Wittgenstein didn't title it "On Truth." At least, I think this is a more charitable reading. Certainly, there are folks like Rorty who think Wittgenstein is telling us about truth. Indeed, Rorty argues that the main benefit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is that it has shown us that questions about “which pieces of our language lock on to reality and which do not,” and the questions of metaphysics and truth more generally, are “simply... a waste of time.”

Likewise there are post-structuralist readers of Wittgenstein who claim that his findings suggest cognitive relativism, discussed in the other Wittgenstein thread on nested forms of life.

Either of these views deflate truth. Yet in doing so they seem to recreate the same sort of skepticism that Wittgenstein is at pains to try to correct.

I'd argue that it is possible for us to accept that our notions of truth are inextricably bound up in malleable social practices and language games without jettisoning the idea that there is something external to human social practices grounding such notions, that our language games are not arbitrary, nor are they determined by "nothing but" social practices (i.e., the principles of social practice are not self-contained and subsistent, nor arbitrary and untinelligible). So, we can agree that claims as basic as "I have hands," require the use of some language game, that they always take place in the context of such a game, without having to conclude that our having hands or not is merely a matter of language games. All such systems have first principles, but this only implies a sort of deflation if one assumes first principles are arbitrary.

Ultimately, it seems to me that Wittgenstein is circling around the same ideas Aristotle grapples with in his writings on discourse and the instruments of reason. A crucial question here then, which I do think Wittgenstein leaves vague, is if reason is "nothing but" these tools and instruments.

Obviously for Aristotle the two are not equivalent. Logic isn't just about speech. Logic isn't just formal logic. By Wittgenstein's time logic has largely been reduced to mere form. Yet material logic is important too; there is form and matter. So he will tell us things like this in the Prior Analytics:

"All syllogism, and a fortiori demonstration, is addressed not to the spoken word, but to the discourse within the soul, and though we can always raise objections to the spoken word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object."

Basically, we can speak the untinelligible. We can say "square circle," or "A is B and ~B," but this is not equivalent with believing the untinelligible.

In a way, "On Certainty" is an excellent demonstration of the foibles of reducing logic, and discourse as a whole, to form (although it is perhaps not intended that way).

I'm with Kant on this. A broader perspective recognizes the nature and extent of a priori knowledge applies to more than just space and time. Perception of color begins in the eye itself and grows to include a big piece of real estate in the brain. Babies are instinctively attracted to human voices and faces before they have had a chance to learn to make the categorization. There is also strong evidence that infants in the first months of life have inherent moral and numerical senses. If you have any interest in this subject, I recommend Konrad Lorenz's "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology." Its much shorter than the book I referenced. Here's a link.

https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

As I noted above, you can't be, strictly speaking, a Kantian and claim that neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the like are telling you things about the causes of the structure of experience. For Kant, the natural sciences can only ever tell you about the world of phenomenal awareness, not what lies prior to it. This firewall needs to be in place so that he can hide "free will ," as he understood it, in the noumenal realm, while maintaining the phenomenal world is rigidly deterministic (see the end of the Prolegomena).

So I see the position you are advocating as:

A. Dropping core elements of Kant's thought;
B. Largely revolving around ideas that are neither unique to Kant nor new with him.

What I remain unconvinced by is not that "whatever is received is received in the manner of the receiver," that, as you say, "color has to do with the eye and brain," but rather the claim that it is impossible to say that space and time exist fundamentally (but not actually) in nature, or that it is impossible to apply the findings of neuroscience, genetics, etc. to anything outside that which lies inside phenomenal awareness.

If the view you like is one where evolutionary biology and neuroscience is telling us about the mind-independent world and the causal origins of the contents of experience then you are also closer to Aristotle than Kant (or at least as Kant as most people interpret him).

There is evidence that perception of motion is also affected by instinctive, genetic mechanisms in the nervous system. It's not learned after birth.

It's both for many animals. Sew a cat's eye shut from birth and it will go blind in that eye, even after the eyelid is allowed to open again. After birth there is still a "critical period," in most mammals where stimulus is required for a sensory organ to develop properly.

But obviously there is also a formal component, having to do with genetics, etc., as well, i.e. the essential versus the accidental. The genes of a fern or flower will never produce a functioning eye regardless of the environment.

Sort of aside the point, this finding is consistent with a lot of philosophies of perception.

I'm confused. Given this understanding, I don't see why you reject the position I'm describing.

I'm pointing out that your position isn't Kantian. Kant also was not a relativist. The mind does not varry between individuals the way your initial post implies, which is why for Kant we can discover laws of nature that are universally applicable for all observers across phenomenal awareness. I've even seen readings of Kant where the "mind" is more a global/shared Avoresean agent intellect (although this seems to be a stretch).

Consider ethics for instance. The rational agents all come to embrace the same maxims, the good will willing itself is not relativistic.

I never found Kant's arguments here particularly convincing. It always seemed to me like a strange twist on the Aristotlean conception of space and time motivated by the English empiricists' conflation of the sign and the sign vehicle, which led folks like Locke to the conclusion that "we only know our ideas/experiences of things, not things." The mistake here is missing that experience is "that through which we know," not "what we know."

The other mistake I see in the empiricists is their preferencing of knowledge of "things in themselves." What things are outside of all interaction with anything else is not only epistemically inaccessible, but also makes no difference to the rest of the world. The old scholastic doctrine that "act follows on being," has to be true for anything whose being or not being makes any difference in the world.

Hence, space and time exist in nature fundamentally, but not actually:

It has to come as a surprise to the new student of Aristotle to learn that time and space for Aristotle exist in nature only fundamentally. Formally and actually time and space exist as the action of thought completes nature by creating in memory a series or network of relations which constitute the experience of time and space. Thus the “continuum of space and time” belongs neither to the order of being as it exists independently of the human mind nor to the order of what exists only as a consequence of human thinking, but exists rather objectively* as one of the most intimate comminglings of mind and nature in the constitution of experience.

Let us begin with time, that ever mysterious “entity” in which we live out our lives. What is time? How does time exist? According to Aristotle, apart from any finite mind, there is in nature only motion and change and the finite endurance of individuals sustained by their various interactions, as we shortly consider in more detail.

Enter mind or consciousness. Now some object changes its position or “moves in space”, and the mind remembers where the local motion began, sees the course of the movement, and notes where it terminates: the rabbit, for example, came out of that hole and ran behind that tree, where it is “now” hidden. The motion was not a “thing”; the rabbit is the “thing”. The motion exists nowhere apart from the rabbit’s actions – nowhere, that is, except in the memory of the perceiver which preserves as a continuous whole the transitory movement of the rabbit from its hole (the “before”) to the tree (the “after”).

John Deely - Four Ages of Understanding

* It's worth noting that Deely uses "objective" according to its meaning in classical metaphysics, derived from "objects," the things experienced in the umwelt. The term "objective" morphing into meaning something like "mind-independent" or "noumenal" being fairly unhelpful, and at the very least very far from its original meaning, similar to how "substance" for Descartes has become something entirely different. It's almost like A Canticle For Leibowitz, where an apocalypse (or in this case the Reformation) had people using the terminology of science with no real understanding of the system it was created for.

Anyhow, your second quote would not be strictly Kantian, no? For Kant, evolutionary biology tells us absolutely nothing about the noumenal world. It tells us what is true within experience. It can shed no light outside the realm of phenomenal awareness.

I can see perfectly well why people aren't willing to follow Kant on this however. However, I do not understand why he is frequently credited like this with the idea that our sense organs/minds shape how we experience the world. This is a very old intuition. It's in Aristotle for one. It's an old scholastic doctrine as well, "everything is received in the manner of the receiver." If anything Kant confuses this insight by placing knowledge of the processes underlying experience out of the reach of man (which is precisely the reason why attributing this insight to him can be misleading, the quality insight gets packaged with a dualism people might be less keen on).

For instance, in matters of morality, what is considered right or wrong can vary depending on cultural or historical contexts, reinforcing the idea that truth is relative.

What is considered true or false also varies depending on cultural or historical context. Does the fact that many people throughout history thought that the Earth was flat constitute good evidence that the shape of the Earth varies with social context?

Anyhow, on the original question:

1. The problem with asserting a completely relativistic notion of truth is that such an assertion is straightforwardly self-refuting. Such a claim will itself only be "true" relative to some social context, "language game," etc. Not to mention that such a notion of truth seems entirely implausible in the face of sense experience. As J.S. Mill once quipped, "one would have to have made some significant advances in philosophy to believe it."

2. The problem with many formulations of the "objective view," is that truth is properly absolute. The absolute is not reality as set over and against appearances. Being absolute it must include all of both reality and appearances. Plato gets at this in the Republic when Socrates presents Glaucon with the tripartite distinction between:

A. Things that are good only relative to something else;
B. Things which are good in themselves, and;
C. Those which are both.

The image of truth as the "view from nowhere," leads to the incoherent conclusion that a complete view of truth would be "knowing the world as one would know it without any sense organs and without a mind."

Appearances are not unrelated to things. Appearances are the appearances of things. Consider the word for form used by Aristotle—eidos—"image." Yet the eidos of a thing, it intelligibility, is what is "most real" in it. Form has priority over matter. The latter is mere potency; form is act. The quiddity—whatness—of things is tied to their appearances. Indeed, if being is to mean anything, it must refer to that which is given to phenomenal awareness, the intelligibility of things. And things' forms are accessible to us, as appearance.

IMO, the issue is the reduction of logic to "formal logic," the form of argument, without any concern for the matter of an argument (what Scholastics called "material logic).

As Aristotle says:

All syllogism, and a fortiori demonstration, is addressed not to the spoken word, but to the discourse within the soul, and though we can always raise objections to the spoken word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object.

And St. Thomas says something similar in the commentary on the Metaphysics

It is impossible for anyone to actually adopt or believe the view that one and the same thing both is and is not in a given respect, even though some have attributed this opinion to Heraclitus. For while it is true that Heraclitus said this, yet it was not possible for him to believe what he said.Nor is it necessary that everyone has in mind or really believes everything that they say.Nor is it necessary that everyone has in mind or really believes everything that they say.

But if "logic" means only the study of words, language games, and not discourse/argument, then contradiction plays a different role, for surely we can speak the assertion of a contradiction, even if we cannot believe it.

I'll have to check those out. Fantasy can be very hot or miss like that. I'm a big fan of R. Scott Bakker's fantasy novels but I have had a few people I've recommended them to hate them for being too misanthropic and "edgy," which is a fair criticism IMO, it just didn't bother me as much.


It is a great title; there is an Iron Maiden song about it too. Hasn't quite hit the high notes of the Abolition of Man, which mixed a brilliant title with a brilliant essay, but I've enjoyed it so far.

For either of you, there is a somewhat similar book called the Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell that is pretty good. Less of a fantasy book, more purely sci-fi. It is about man's initial contact with two alien species. The first team to make it to the planet is a missionary group, with specialists and a priest.

I agree with your sentiment. It makes sense on the view that the "external" world is intelligible in itself. It does not, however, make sense on the view that the external world is unintelligible.

I mean, re your example, per Kant space is a creation of the mind. So you can't make maps of the noumena in this way. Obviously Kantians aren't going to argue against your point, that we can make accurate phenomenally accessible maps of phenomenally accessible territories. Consider that there were very, very many ways to confirm that maps corresponded to the world before the first satellites. Now how exactly do you check that experience corresponds to what is outside experience? Can you step outside experience to check?

Sure, you can do that if you can compare the territory with the map. But now what is to be done when the territory is unobservable by definition?

This is precisely why Fichte and Hegel take Kant in a radically new direction.

Well, on the error point, I don't think someone like Berkeley has the same problem here. For Berkeley, we see the world as it is under normal conditions, although of course we see it from our individual perspective. Error is its own category.

The problem comes up only when it is assumed that it is impossible to see the world as it "really is," because such knowledge would require "knowing the world without a mind." The problem is not only that both experience under normal conditions and conditions of error share in unreality, but that we have no means of saying which is closer to "what things are really like." If the way things "really are" is inaccessible, if even space and time are the unique products of the mind, then there is no possible comparison of experience and reality. Correspondence is out. Nor will an identity theory work. We can't say that there is an identity shared by experience and reality—that, as Aristotle says in De Anima, the "mind (potentially) becomes all things," because this possibility is also excluded.

An ancillary issue might be the justification for proposing "properties in-themselves," since properties that don't involve interaction are not only epistemically inaccessible, but also make no difference to the world. They might as well be locked away in their own sui generis sort of being.

Now, if the intelligibility of things and the intelligibility of our experiences and our knowledge of things is the same, there is no problem. Reason is perhaps the glue that holds things together (rather than a sort of "bridge between them" that we must build). On this view, we are never separated. But on this view it isn't true that we don't see things as they are. To be sure, we don't see things perfectly. There is a difference between discursive human reason and simple divine apprehension of all truths. Truth, with being, is inherently bound up in intelligibility though (e.g. St. Thomas' disputed questions on truth).

So the idea of construction in Kant’s usage becomes objectionable because the intelligibility of things is constructed out of the unintelligible?

Well, I see two distinct problems. On the one hand is the focus on arelational "in-itselfness" that Kant inherited from Locke and Co. I don't think this makes sense.

The other problem is that of the "construction" of intelligibility, if this is to mean something like "construction ex nihilo," where what is contained in the construction cannot be said to be present in what it is constructed from. There are other problems here. For example, might we not be locked in our own worlds? What's to say all minds don't construct radically different worlds? Because we understand each other? But we are supposedly constructing all understanding, and we construct our experience of other people communicating with us just as much as we construct our sensory perceptions of nature. Maybe natural selection and biology explain why our minds are similar? But these are phenomena and can say nothing of the noumenal.

And then in Kant's case the noumena becomes the solution to that pesky "free will and determinism problem" at the end of the Prolegomena, but it seems to me that this move is totally unjustified (this is I suppose an ancillary problem).

Yeah, it's a moniker because Kripkenstein doesn't really seem like Kripke (in his other work) or Wittgenstein, but rather a (by some accounts monstrous) fusion of the two.

I don't know Kripke well enough to know if the book is sort of an elaborate bracketed thought experiment or if it's an elaborate trolling operation. Certainly the idea of ridgid designators for which he is famous (e.g. water is H2O in all possible worlds) and essentialism doesn't seem to straightforwardly work all that well with the nihilism set up for the skeptical problem.

Is this his "A New History?" That's probably my favorite survey of Western Philosophy (although Durant has the best prose), and the topical organization is good, but it's a mile wide and an inch deep (sort of by necessity).


The question your asking isn't an easy one to answer easily. I could recommend sources. Eric Perl's "Thinking Being," would be a good one, even if you just read the Parmenides, Plato, and Plotinus chapters. It has its own particular view of things, but it is a compelling one and his couching of ancient philosophy in the terms of contemporary phenomenology is useful.

Another one I always recommend for its accessibility is Robert Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato and Hegel, but this is doesn't touch on Plotinus much.

Schindler's "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason" is good on the Plato side of the equation as well, maybe a bit much to try to absorb in a short time period though. Your school might have any of these in a digital library.

Or, sometimes it's helpful to listen to things. The Teaching Company has a really great series of lectures by Michael Sugrue on Plato. For your question you could focus on the ones on the Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus/Symposium, and Timaeus. These are free with an Audible membership, which I think you could sign up for and cancel (and then you also get one free book). There is a lot less stuff on Plotinus, but the free podcast "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps," has some decent episodes on Plotinus and they are short. Since these are made for listening, it's easier to drive, etc. while absorbing them than many audiobooks.

I mean, I would highly advise reading them closely and sitting with the texts themselves, but it can be helpful to start with some text that is more accessible and lays out the historical context and connections.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the other obvious place to go. And the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They should both have articles on the "One and the Many."

Well I think it is certainly a better story than just appealing to reason or metaphysical truth without any explanation of how people do it and without being open to the subtleties of people being fallible or interacting with the world in a perspective-dependent way.

To be clear, "metaphysical truth" isn't some vague term I've concocted. It's the term used to denote "truth" in the sense that the term has been used in philosophy for most of history, covering correspondence theories, identity theories, etc. This is as juxtaposed with with deflationary theories of truth where "truth" is simply defined in terms of the word's use within the context of a specific language game in which it appears. On the deflationary view, "truth" has no explanatory or metaphysical import.

Rorty fits this mold and he reads Wittgenstein as suggesting such a view of truth, claiming Wittgenstein's main value to us lies in demonstrating that metaphysics isn't "meaningless" but rather "simply a waste of time." I don't think this is a good reading of Wittgenstein, but it's obviously not too uncommon (and tends to draw most from On Certainty).

Perhaps I should have been a bit clearer that I had turned my attention that way. Kripke is not a deflationist. Theories like causal baptism don't suggest deflation. I am not sure if the same can be said of Kripkenstein, and this is one of my major issues with that reading of Wittgenstein. I don't recall Kripke addressing the issue directly. However, given the idea that meaning is nothing but the expectations of members of the community, and the assumption that communities can vary in their conceptual schemes and hinge propositions, it would seem that deflation would follow.

So my point isn't meant to be handwavey. It's a straightforward denial of the idea that "reason" should be thought of as simply the ability to follow the rules within the context of any specific language game—that there is not a sui generis version of reason for each language-game or conceptual scheme (Joshs and I have had this conversation before).

I personally like Sokolowski's image here, that we should think of language (and our senses) as a lens we use to investigate the world. A lens is of course something you tend to look through not at. Hence, reason would ground the ability to translate between disparate conceptual schemes. Reason might be said to be transcedent in very many ways, and we could think of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, etc. here. But for the purposes of this conversation re deflation, I think it's enough to say here that it transcends any specific language game or conceptual scheme, and in doing so allows us to approach truth. We could also speak of a "family resemblance" vis-á-vis truth across different schemes, but that doesn't seem as helpful to me.

To be sure, any statements of truth will be in a language game and no language game will be divorced from changeable use, history, culture, etc. But the assumption that this precludes access to a non-deflationary version of truth seems to need to assume that statements in language games are "what we know," not a means of knowing, or else that a short-lived positivist notion of correspondence truth is the only possible notion of metaphysical truth and that once it is defeated deflation must follow. This is reason (and so us) transformed into a fly trapped in a fly bottle, a bottle whose walls are the limits of a specific language game. Or rather, reason becomes a whole host of flies, pacing in tight circles within the confines of their individual bottles.

By my reckoning, the key value of On Certainty is its demonstration of the problems inherit in a certain narrow view of truth and reason of the sort that Wittgenstein was surrounded by early in his career. Although not new (Aristotle tackles the issue of an infinite regress of justifications and the need of axioms in the Posterior Analytics) On Certainty acts as an updated diagnosis more specific to the woes of early 20th century analytic philosophy.

Of course, I'm certainly open to the argument that Rorty ends up closer to what Wittgenstein intended. Much of Wittgenstein's writing suggests at least deflation vis-á-vis practical reason.

And certainly, yes, I would believe my claims were better pr more correct than the immaterial soul. Better arguments in favour of it

Well, better in virtue of what is the question, right? Better at approaching truth? Or better because they can be demonstrated from dominant hinge propositions in a given community? Is the goodness of an argument determine solely by the expectations of the people who are going to hear it?

We can never see it as it is.

If we can never see the world "as it really is," then how shall we explain things like mistakes? For instance, if I mistake my car for one that looks like it in the parking lot. In the case I was not experiencing things as they "really were." But on the view that all sensation is somehow illusory, it's also the case that when I later properly identify my car I have also failed to see things as they really are.

The same holds for illusions. When I look at the famous checkerboard illusion and I see the square in the shadow labeled A as darker than the square outside the shadow labeled B, I am "not seeing things as they are." Actually, the two shades of gray are identical. But then when I put them side by side, and see that they are the same exact gray, it seems I would still not be seeing them as they are.

Are there gradations of illusion here? Do we rank perceptions by their approximation of truth? But if getting a view of truth is impossible (as it must be if the truth of things is "how things are conceived of without a mind") then how do we ever make a proper comparison by which to rank approximations of truth? It seems quite impossible. This is the difficulty with a correspondence theory of truth, particularly if paired with subject/object dualism. And then it also seems like the intelligibility of the world ends up coming down on the subject side of our ledger, since we are "constructing" the quiddity of the objects of experience.

It's a thorny issue. I think it is possible to maintain the old scholastic mantra that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," without setting up such issues, but it's difficult. The term "objective" is particularly thorny because it has become a sort of chimera of Lockean objectivity (properties that exist 'in-themselves') and Kant's "noumenal," with the less loaded definition of "the view with relevant subjective biases removed" lumped in with these. I do think philosophy could benefit from using C.S Pierce's terminology re "objective," as being placed in the umwelt (and for man the lebenswelt) but it's fairly technical and has the problem that "subject" and "subjective" used to mean pretty much the opposite of what it is used for now (in the scholastics Pierce is relying heavily upon).

But maybe a start would be to say that "men see things as many sees things," rather than "man sees things not as they really are." The issue of models and theories is also put into better focus if these are seen as tools for knowing rather than the subjects of knowledge. The idea of "constructing" seems unobjectionable if it is kept in mind that the intelligibility of things is not being constructed out of the unintelligible, but of course the exact opposite is true for Kant's usage.

Well, this seems to me like more of the same problem. That is, starting off with subject-object dualism and a correspondence view of truth, and then concluding that if this view has problems we must simply do away with metaphysics and truth. But this of course targets a very narrow segment of "realist theories." Plotinus, for instance, is already launching a somewhat similar critique of correspondence theories of truth in the 200s.

Does realism imply that "what is real is indepen­dent of what we do or say?" Independent in what way? Certainly, its generally a realist view that looking at the moon doesn't cause it to exist, or that Mt. Everest existed, and was even experienced, prior to anyone coining a name for it. The contrary of these claims would indeed be implausible. So, there is some sort of independence there.

Yet this isn't any sort of absolute independence, else we could never come to know these things. On the scholastic view that all created things exist within a web of relations, and are defined in terms of these relations, the whatness of the moon or a mountain cannot be independent of the mind. Indeed, if their "being real" is to mean anything at all it must mean what is given to thought.

To have any linkage, the intelligibility of thoughts and language must run through all things, and indeed the argument is that here is generally no good reason to create a cleavage through being between knower and known in the first place. Unity is one of the transcendental properties of being, going back to the doctrine's embryonic form in Aristotle (or even Parmenides).

So, even if we accept the claim that "words acquire meaning only in their performance or use," it doesn't seem that we have to accept deflation. Intelligibility must lie prior to words acquiring meaning through acts, since we don't use words arbitrarily and "for no reason at all." The claim that words get their meaning from use need not imply that use has no relation to anything outside use.

The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense

This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exist. It amounts to a demand that contingent being be wholly subsistent if it is to be being at all.

Or as if it must be the case that a truth cannot be truth unless it can expressed in a language spoken by nobody from nowhere.

Such an atomistic view of propositional truth was dominant in a relatively small community for a fairly short period of time. I think it's now had a far longer and more widespread life as a sort of ready made foil than it ever did as a position actually embraced by anyone.

hence no way to get outside of language.

To paraphrase Big Heg: to have recognized a limit is to have already stepped over it.

The two big finds I've found recently are "The Place of the Lion" and "Out of the Silent Planet."

The first was the subject of all sorts of superlatives by T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, which is how it caught my eye on some algorithm derived list of recommendations. The plot revolves around an esoteric group's actions, which result in Platonic forms, such as the form of the lion, "breaking lose" and roaming the English countryside. One character, obviously a stand in for reducing knowledge to utility, is a scholar focused on the connections between the Pythagorean's and Abelard, who only thinks of her work in terms of career advancement. I looked up her name out of curiosity and it's the name of the woman who was converted by St. Paul with Dionysus the Areopagite (of Pseudo-Dionysus game) in Acts, which sort of gives you an idea of the allegorical flavor of the book. But despite this the fantasy elements come through quite well, it's an interesting book.

The latter is also quite good. I had always written Lewis off on account of mostly seeing him as a children's author and due to his association with Evangelical devotionals (which reprint snippets of his work quite often). But I've quickly come around on him. The Abolition of Man for instance is a wonderful essay, and the guy knows his classics and medieval philosophy/literature through and through.

Out of the Silent Planet is not hard sci-fi. I think it's probably more enjoyable if you go in realizing one of Lewis's big inspirations is Seneca's Platonist myth of Scipio ascending into the heavens in a vision the night before his final showdown with Hannibal and the forces of Carthage (plus Calcidius' commentary). It's a bit of fantasy sci-fi. The story gets moving quickly and the plot is propulsive. Prose is pretty good too.

Also, currently Audible has most of the Oxford "A Very Short Introduction to..." tiles for free (with a membership). I have generally found these to be quite high quality. They get great people, Floridi for information (although I didn't love this one TBH), Scruton for beauty, etc.

They cover a topic in about 4-6 hours or 80-120 pages. The one on objectivity is very good. The one on continental philosophy too. The one on post-modernism is a bit too broad, and the one on post-structuralism managed to be less substantial despite having a tighter focus. The one on Wittgenstein (originally its own book by Grayling) and the one on Heidegger are both good. The one on Aristotle is pretty weak.

Maybe the difference is you place "metaphysical truth" at the center where I place an instrumentalist brain.

Well, the similarity might be that you seem to be saying that all your talk of brains is true in the sense of metaphysical truth. For instance, suppose I were a member of a community that had a different conceptual scheme from yours, accepted different hinge propositions, and whose members had different expectations of how words were used. And suppose I claimed that brains don't perform any of the key functions you ascribe to them, that this is all tied to an immaterial
soul. Would my claims be equally true as yours, "truth" being merely how the term is used with some given language-game? So the brain would both have and not have the properties you ascribe to it, depending on where one stands?

Kripke's other philosophy seems a lot more consistent with that sort of naturalism than the Kripkenstein stuff. On a conventional naturalistic view there is no indeterminism problem or finitude issues. Everything is determined. All experiences of meaning are describable in terms of determinant physical interactions. Any instance of the experience of meaning is uniquely specified by facts about the relevant physical system. How language evolves can be explained entirely in terms of physical interactions, which of course involve the environment and not just language users' expectations. Presumably if you had all the data Leplace's demon could tell you how everyone experiences meaning, the casual linkages between experienced meaning, use, users, and the environment, and it could predict exactly how use will evolve in the future.

But the conventional view would also tend to assert that it is true in a way the substance dualism or deflationary relativism is not.

Sure. So then what is "useful" is not "whatever we think is useful." There is some truth of the matter, even if it is hard to discover.

The problem only crops up when it is denied that there is any truth about practical goodness.

The question we have been circling around is why language should be the way it is instead of any other way? Social practices seem malleable and contingent, soin virtue of what are they the way they are? Here it is worth considering Kenneth Gallagher's summation of the metaphysical (as opposed to physical) principle of causation—“that the order of becoming and existence must be intelligible; that no phase of the process of contingent existence is intelligible in itself; and that therefore contingent existence is always relative existence, essentially referred, qua existing to another.”

To be intelligible—to not be arbitrary—social practice must have its explanation in something outside itself. On the view that being is intelligible, such an explanation must be possible. My position is that the tools of reason (language, theories, logic, etc.) are what join us to these explanations—to metaphysical truth. (Of course, on the view that being is unintelligible I fear that we are simply left with misology and nihilism).

Early in On Certainty, Wittgenstein argues that claims as basic as Moore's “I have hands” can only be satisfied as “part of a language game.” If this is taken as merely entailing that all statements about truth require the use of a language game, deflation is not necessarily an issue. Thus, the crucial consideration here comes down to our view of reason and the tools of reason. If reason is ecstatic, if it pushes beyond itself, joining us to what lies beyond, then we can look at language games as a means through which we access a truth that is not confined to the small quarters offered by any individual game or set of axiomatic hinge propositions.

One difficulty of modern subject/object dualism is that it requires that different elements of being be assigned to one or the other. The result is what C.S. Lewis terms “the bloated subject,” the subject who is the sui generis source of all goodness, beauty, and truth. If the source of all intelligibility is placed on the “subject” side of the ledger it seems it will be impossible to know what lies outside ourselves (and so impossible to use reason to transcend what we already are; hence the view that reason is simply and always a slave of the passions and that arguments are merely a question of power).

The question then is whether such a separation was ever warranted. I would argue that it is not. If “being” is to mean anything at all then it must refer to that which is apprehended by or given to thought. Hence, intelligibility must run through both.

I will not assert that such a position can be meaningfully demonstrated within any specific language game. After all, the assertion in question is the very ability of language games to join us to what is other than them, namely metaphysical truth. Indeed, it is reason’s very transcendence that precludes our ability to capture what it does for us within the confines of any language game.

Here, it might be helpful return to G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the “madman.". As Chesterton points out, the madman, can always make any observation consistent with his delusions “If [the] man says… that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny [it]; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.” Expressing the man’s error is not easy; his thoughts are consistent. They run in a “perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle… though… it is not so large.” The man’s account “explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”

For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it runs in tight, isolated circles. On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but is instead the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell.

As Wittgenstein puts it: "one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or
symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says
something like: "That's how it must be."

Obviously, we can't justify reason with reason in a non-circular manner. This is why for Plato reason is "defenseless."



Well no, the point isn't that we "just know." The claim is that the subject should never have been separated off and set over and against the world in the first place.

See the above for a summary of the position. The crucial point is that reason, and its various tools (e.g. language) joins us to the intelligibility of the world. This is a metaphysical position quite different from the presuppositions that enable Kripke's plunge into nihilism.

Now, if you want to say it is "blind" or must assume "we just know" because it cannot give a demonstration of the "nature of reason as a whole" or "reason's transcendence" in terms of any single language game, that seems to me to be missing the point. The point is that reason cannot be locked down within the confines of any finite axiomatized game. I could indeed provide such a demonstration, provided the right axiomatic hinge propositions, I could even put it into a valid syllogism, but it wouldn't demonstrate the thing in question.

You might consider here Plato's comments in Letter VII about why he cannot explain metaphysical truths in a dissertation.

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

IDK, in isolation this to me does not suggest truth or meaning is "social practice all the way down," nor a deflationary vision of truth.

I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be a metaphysical vision of truth, as opposed to one where: "all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ in our speech," or of truth being in a way dependent on hinge propositions for its existence.

To be sure, one way to deal with the charge that one has recreated the Cartesian mistake by assuming that words are "what we know" instead of a tool used for knowing is to claim there is "nothing but words." It's consistent, but then again there are lots of ways to be consistent. It reminds me a bit of GK Chesterton's comments on the madman in Orthodoxy, which really appeals to the entire underdetermination problem and the demand for a certain sort of certainty.

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.

Not that the minds of such theorists are necessarily "morbid." I cite the example because it's a good illustration of the dangers in putting too much of a premium on a certain sort of certainty (one I imagine many post-structuralist might agree with, at least in principle). And yet in the context of discussing Kripke this sort of certainty comes up. I recall at one point he throws up the example "skaddition," where skaddition is identical to addition for any number small enough to be added up in any finite lifetime, but then differs from addition at some infinite limit. The invention of such a "problem" seems a little much. Surely, it's possible to ask of literally anything "but what if we're wrong about it," and this seems to boil down to doing something quite similar.

I mean, what is the counterpoint here. If we ask: "why do social practices evolve the way they do?" "Why do we find certain things useful? E.g. why is mathematics useful? or Why did disparate cultures break down and label animal species in a similar fashion?" Is the only appropriate answer "expectations and social practices," and these become explanatory primitives? Is it impossible to explain usefulness in terms of anything else? Does it have causes?

There seems to be a risk here of confusing "meaning is always bound up in social practices," with "meaning is explicable in terms of nothing but social practice."

Trying to ground language games in the sovereignty of empirical truth (how the world is) misunderstands the larger
ontological implications of the concept of language games, reducing them to the human side of a mind-world divide and treating world as sovereign legitimator.

Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find useful has causes/explanations outside of social practices themselves. There is no need to divide the mind and world at all. The world is indeed sovereign, because minds are part of the world.

Anyhow, Kripke's other work is of a realist bent, so I'm not totally sure where Kripkenstein fits in his development. I would think, given his other work, that Kripke would think: "but why is human practice the way it is?" and "why do people find such and such useful?" are completely valid questions that might be explained fruitfully by "facts" about biology, physics, etc. That such facts are ultimately expressed in a language grounded in social practices should not be a barrier to "knowing the world outside of language," unless language, words, theories, etc. are exclusively "what we know," instead of being the "tools we use to know."

But then the difficulty is that underdetermination is as much of a problem for making any inferences about nature as it is for inferring meaning. For example, all the observations consistent with Newton's Laws or quantum theory are also consistent with an infinite number of other rule-like descriptions of nature. Yet the same sort of solution doesn't seem open to us here. It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness.

From whence this usefulness? Usefulness is defined in terms of nature and then nature is defined in terms of expectations and usefulness. This is circular, but perhaps not viciously so if we allow that expectations are shaped by things outside practices. Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything.

Re causal closure, the position that descriptions of mental phenomena are "just describing the same thing" as physical descriptions, runs into problems with the idea that mental states (or "intervals of experience") are multiply realizable in physical systems. It's generally accepted in theorizing about superveniance that mental states should be multiply realizable. If this is the case, then it isn't true that "I went to the store because I was hungry," is just another way to describe a single group of physical interactions. Rather, it's another way of describing an entire set of physical systems consistent with some given interval of experience.

So, on that far extreme of the possibility of a "brain in a vat," or "the Matrix," etc., there would be instances of P, the set of possible physical states consistent with some mental state, that vary very far from our assumptions about what the mental state says about P. But more realistically we have problems like Hoffman's, questions of inverted qualia, etc. and the overarching problem of psycho-physical harmony.