The point is that for them to count as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu­ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on pain of infinite regress.

Sounds like a pretty serious problem for an interpretation of Wittgenstein to have.

Is this supposed to be a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenstein ala Kirpke? IMO, these have seriously problems with plausibility, both as theories of meaning and as supposedly representing Wittgenstein's own view. But if you take a non-communitarian view, this sort of issue doesn't just exist across cultural lines, but potentially for communication between any individuals. And yet philosophy presupposes they such communication is possible.

Indeed, consider Wittgenstein's example re persuasion. IIRC, the king who has been told the world was created when he was born fifty years ago isn't described as being from some radically different culture or speaking a different language. His difference with Wittgenstein lies precisely in his having been told the world was created at his birth, making the problem individually situated.

But Wittgenstein doesn't describe a process whereby any such disconnects must be solved by some sort of purely affective maneuver. What the case highlights is the way justification hangs together, not that justification is some sort of unanalyzable primitive. Rather, PI basically sidesteps and ignores the issues of how practices arise. Yet presumably they do not spring from the ether uncaused, nor are their causes unknowable. Wittgenstein even provides a narrative of the reasons that the king holds this belief.

The claim that reason can transcend such differences is not the same as saying it always does. That people can reject discourse is obvious. So to is the fact that people can be convinced of things in ways unrelated to reason. A key point made by Plato is that people are generally not ruled over by the rational part of the soul. Nor is the claim that human rationality is bound up in language and practice equivalent with the claim that rationality as such is wholly reducible to "language-games." For example, Kant's reason, which sits prior to perception, is clearly not the type of thing to be defined in terms of language.

Getting stuck inside the box of language is quite akin to getting stuck inside the box of "mental representations," and I don't know how advocates of our being stuck in either box justify the one over the other. It seems like the same mistake in either case, mistaking the means through which something is grasped for the thing that is grasped. E.g., "we cannot drive a car, we can only push pedals and turn steering wheels; we do not experience the world we can only experience ideas; we do not exercise reason, we can only participate in language-games."

But consider someone raised on intuitionist mathematics, who has always taken it as gospel that proof by contradiction and non-constructive proofs are bad inference, illegitimate. It seems totally possible for this person to come to embrace a Platonist or formalist view of mathematics, perhaps for reasons related to emotion (they get married to a formalist, it is good for their career, etc.). But it seems completely implausible that reason plays no role in this jump between heterogeneous systems.

Sex expression = phenotype expression related to sex. IDK, sometimes it is used for sex-related gene expression too, but that's less common. Either way, it isn't gender, it's phenome, what someone's physical body looks/is like.

What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage

Well, you have to consider the framing here. Plato, for instance, lays this view out in the Timaeus as the goal of "becoming like God," and this would become even more central for later Christians like Augustine or Sufis like Rumi. Nothing that is intelligible is unintelligible for God, and henosis itself implies an accent to the height of intelligibility already. Consider where intelligibility is coming from in the first place in Neoplatonism, or where Maya is coming from in Shankara.

Strictly speaking, there isn't an other who can oppress God; God is fully self-determining. E.g., "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.



I don't disagree with:

experiences are heavily influenced by the individual's cultural, linguistic, and religious background

And I think it can be generalized to all sorts of experiences. I simply disagree that this difference cannot be transcended, that someone raised in an Orthodox society is unable to ever understand Islam, or that someone raised as a secular atheist will never grasp the intelligibility of Hinduism. This does not seem to be the case. Converts exist, and "a convert's zeal" is a common expression for a reason.

Moreover, I don't see why broad identity groups would be the defining line here. You could as well make the same sort of case for people from different families not understanding each other or individuals being unable to understand one another.

But if people can understand each other, I see no reason to understand this as people learning "Arab Reason," "Hindu Reason," or "Jewish Reason," through some sort of non-rational process so that they can then communicate. It would seem to be more the case that people learn these different contexts of reason through reason.

Nor are the conditions of each groups "reason" sui generis and primitive. There are commonalities across them. Where do you tend to see male-led households and polygamy? In resource scarce, less centralized societies where conflict is common — "warrior cultures" — which result in a high ratio of adult women to adult men. Which is to say, the differences between groups themselves aren't arbitrary and unanalyzable either. You can certainly make a lot of mistakes generalizing the "those who work/those who pray/those who fight," categories across Medieval Europe and India, but there are also obvious commonalities, e.g. that "those who work," is always the largest group, from Egypt to India to Europe, because of the physical realities of the amount of labor hours agriculture requires without access to modern technology, or that "those who fight," are always going to have a significant advantage in getting their way.

I could see an argument that the function of sex in the species is not the same as the sex of an individual, sentient animal of any sort, for whom sex is also identity. For all intents and purposes, this only applies to humans.

Because it's easy to say what the function of sex is in the species, in the same way that eyes "are for seeing," and yet "being a blind person" can obviously be part of someone's identity in the same way that "being intersex" can be. This is perhaps most obvious with deaf communities. Sex as function is discrete and binary. Sex as expression isn't even "a spectrum" it's more complex, probably something you'd have to plot in some-n-dimensional space.

But identity comes as much, if not more, from expression than function. E.g., for over a thousand years in the West, the most respected people in society were men and women who categorically gave up the functionality of sex by oath, along with the ownership of property, but who lived in sex segregated communities and were defined as monks versus nuns by their sex — the divorce of sex vis-á-vis identity from sex as a function in the species.

Side note: this just shows how disconnected we are from that past era. The idea of homeless, unemployed virgins being the most respected people is the most anathema thing I could think of for today's world. Consider the responses to homelessness in San Francisco, a city named after Saint Francis, a man who wore sack cloth and slept in the woods.

Mammalian sex is, in fact, 100% binary to our knowledge. Aberrations in sex development don't change, or 'partial alter' your sex. If you're saying they do, I'm open to the argument at least

It seems like this is less ambiguous in the aggregate. We wouldn't say the number of chromosomes humans have exists on a spectrum because trisomies occur, or that the number of kidneys a human has exists on a spectrum because some people are born missing one or both kidneys.

But I can see arguments for how defining sex at the individual level might be different.

Yet another crowning achievement of 20th century trans-Atlantic "philosophy", to the podium along with JTB. I will stick to the continentals.

The only reason continentals haven't caught up here is because they're too busy debating if they exist or not or exactly how it is that the nothing nothings when it is nothing. That and inventing new languages for each subfield of inquiry. :smile:

We can never be radically surprised by the world.

The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter.

Phenylthiocarbamide tastes bitter to 70% of people and doesn't taste bitter to 30% of people.

What does the word "bitter" mean/refer to? What does the phrase "tastes bitter" mean/refer to?

That's a great example, and one I shall start using since it is a little nicer than the "shit smells like... well shit to humans; flies love it," I had been using. Cilantro is another good example, or how orange juice tastes terrible after you brush your teeth. Smell and taste are often considered the least real of all the senses for this reason.

IMO, "tastes bitter," is a relationship that obtains between some thing and some taster, the same way solubility is a relationship that obtains between salt and water. Salt doesn't dissolve in H2O unless its placed in water, the same way nothing tastes bitter unless it goes in your mouth. And the ambient enviornment matters too. Nothing tastes bitter in a room filled with nitrous oxide because presumably you're fully anesthetized (and dying of hypoxia), and salt isn't exactly going to dissolve well if you mix it into a bucket of H2O that is cooled to near absolute zero. Hell, salt won't event dissolve in water well if you use those big kosher salt crystals, they just sit there in boiling water.

Hence, what the relational view gets right. What it often misses, which adverbial theories sort of get at, is that experiencing is a process itself and the result of a process. We can talk about relationships between properties as a form of abstraction, but at the end of the day taking about sets of processes that produce given qualia is probably the better model.

I have a great deal of sympathy for some forms of adverbialism. It seems to get something right, namely that conciousness is processual, not a bunch of relationships between discrete things.

However, I also see problems with it. It's not just that no one talks like an adverbialism, it's that it's literally impossible to describe one's experiences to another person coherently in adverbial language, making zero reference to the objects of experience. I think I already mentioned ITT about how the Routledge introduction to phenomenology has a very funny set of excerpts of scientists and philosophers trying to explain perception without reference to its contents (objects) and failing miserably, either reverting to listing off the things that look yellow or taste like coffee, etc. or painting an entirely confused picture of what is being spoken of.

For example, the relational view of color does a good job explaining how the properties of the object perceived, the ambient enviornment, and the perceiver all go into the generation of an experience. Could an adverbial description do the same thing? Maybe, but not easily. And it's hard to see what the benefit would be.

In general though, the adverbial view tends to apply adverbs only to the perceiver, e.g., to people "seeing greenly," but not to plants "reflecting light greenly." But to the extent this brackets off the production of experience into the presupposed boundaries of the "perceiver who carries out the verbs," it seems doomed to miss things of importance, and this is my biggest qualm with it.

Your translations from Hegelese are excellent, thank you!

Thanks. I have practiced quite a bit because it's hard to place Hegel in dialogue with other ideas without breaking it out of its own weird way of speaking about the world.

Why would we expect “stepping outside belief” to be the criterion for knowing something about reality? What about the distinction between belief and justified true belief?

It would seem to come down to the "true" in JTB. JTB is only JTB if the T is in play. In conventional correspondence theories, this is where we make the jump outside the realm of belief. "The cat is on the mat" is true just in case the cat is "actually" on the mat. "Actually" is generally taken to mean "out there," outside the realm of phenomenal experience, without reference to belief or perception. If we ask, "in virtue of what is the proposition true," the common correspondence answer will make reference to facts that obtain simpliciter, outside any reference to belief.

A modest realism only asks that there be this difference.

Right, but then what is this difference? What does it mean for "the cat to be on the mat," outside of the realm of mind? We can only answer this question with beliefs. Consider the critique of the mereological nihilists. Where is the evidence for the cat existing outside of mind? The target of the proposition might be said to be "processes of fundemental forces arranged cat-wise." What does "on" mean in the frame where the three dimensional nature of our universe is said to also be a product of mind, nature simpliciter being "holographic?" Given the "Problem of the Many," how many cats can be said to be on the mat, one or billions? i.e., one for each ensemble of particles that meets some minimum definition of "cat-wise arrangement?"

It turns out that deciding what this truth would entail just leads us through circles of belief.

The opposing idea would seem to be that only an unmediated, “unbelieved” Reality with a capital R could be the proper goal of the search. Or perhaps the idea is that, unless we can make contact with such a reality, we’re in no position to judge whether a belief is a JTB.

Both views have been popular. I think there is a useful distinction here though.

There is the claim that "we’re in no position to judge whether a belief is a JTB" because we can't view reality as it is "in-itself," and then there is the view that we can't judge whether a belief is JTB under the simple correspondence definition of truth because we can't actually define what correspondence is without references to more beliefs. IMO, the first is arguably confused, positing the existence of things that are, in principle, unobservable and can never make a difference to any observer, and then using that as the measuring stick of the real and true.

The second view seems more damaging. "You say a belief is JTB just in case it is justified and true, but what do you mean by true?" Then "true" ends up being what "actually is, without reference to beliefs," but we then can only define the conditions under which this truth obtains in terms of beliefs.

Would such contact be the same thing as contacting what is “given” to the mind, “direct apprehension,” “unmediated knowledge,” etc., on this view? I suppose so, since it can be plausibly argued that we never do achieve such contact. But I don’t see why the realist needs to concede this equivalence between “direct apprehension” and reality. They can say instead that a phrase like “the experience of reality is always mediated by beliefs” is either incoherent – there is nothing to be experienced – or that it’s perhaps true of “givens” or “raw feels” or some such, but that this is not what we mean by reality.

This is pretty close to Hegel's view. St. Aquinas as well actually. Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they relate to nothing else, is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. Things only make a difference to other things in the world to the extent that they interact with them, and these interactions are both what we care about and what we can know. Further, the preferencing of mindless interactions over ones involving phenomenal experience is arbitrary, and the rationale for it confused.

The correspondence we’re looking for is not between propositions and “unmediated” reality, but rather between certain beliefs about states of affairs, and whether those beliefs are warranted.

I'm not sure what you mean here. This doesn't sound like a correspondence theory of truth, i.e., "Theseus is standing" is true just in case Theseus is standing. Correspondence is between beliefs, statements, and propositions on the one hand, and the world on the other, not between beliefs and being warranted/unwarranted.

I am not sure how the latter would work. In virtue of what is a belief warranted or unwarranted? If it's in virtue of evidence that it corresponds to the world, the "way things actually are," we're back to correspondence. If it's in virtue of a belief corresponding to other beliefs then that's a coherence theory of truth, of the sort that was developed in order to get around problems with correspondence.

But Hegel is generally taken as a realist, whereas definitions of truth that only make reference to other beliefs are generally the theories that are taken to be more anti-realist. For under those theories, there is no truth "out there" in the world, as with correspondence, and no truth transcending mind/nature as in Hegel, but truth rather exists strictly in mind, as a status that obtains between beliefs.

IDK, at times moments of Hegel get closer to coherence. For what moves the progression of concept evolution? Contradiction. Beliefs, don't cohere; there is a contradiction of essence. But then truth doesn't begin and end here. The process of its development starts prior and carries on further than coherence, and it is global, historical coherence that is most important, not the coherence of an individual's beliefs.

If there was no such thing as phenomenality and all humans had was the functions of consciousness (without any accompanying awareness), there would still be indirectness to it, in the same way that a computer's data collection is indirect. If a computer listens to the sound of a bird, it converts the analog frequencies to a digital stream and subsequently manipulates that stream.

I actually considered bringing up the example of televisions, radios, etc. On the one hand, yes, we could say these are "indirect" in that they involve the transformation of energy types. Chemical energy, kinetic energy, sound waves, etc. are picked up by receivers in the body and transformed into EM energy and chemical energy in the nervous system.

But I am not sure that this is a good place to locate the "indirect" of the indirect realist account for a few reasons.

1. Shannon's model, developed for radios and telephones — for precisely this sort of transformation of energy types — is now applied to all physical interactions. So if the model entails indirectness, then everything is indirect.

2. These different types of energy turn out not to always be sui generis types. There has been a lot of work unifying these. We still have multiple "fundemental forces," but the goal/intuition, is that these can be unified as well, like electricity and magnetism, or then electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force.

3. This sort of indirectness, the transformation of energy types, multiple intermediaries, etc. also occurs in all sorts of relations that generally aren't considered indirect. E.g., the relationship between light and photosynthesis, or sex and pregnancy.

This would seem to leave too many relations as indirect. And if perception is an indirect experience of the world merely in the way that light has an indirect relationship with photosynthesis or sex has an indirect relationship with pregnancy, then the epistemological claims related to this sort of indirectness seem much less acute (maybe this is a feature, not a bug).

But more importantly for some forms of indirect realism, nothing in this categorization of "indirect" appears to lead to "perceiving representations." If the transformation of sound waves into patterns of electrical and chemical energy in the nervous system entails a "representation" then the cascade of chemical changes involved in photosynthesis are likewise "representations" of light, and representations seem to be everywhere in nature.

Again, this isn't necessarily a problem. I am a fan of pansemiotic views. I think it's true that signs can be said to be everywhere, that effects are signs of their causes, etc. But this would seem to be a problem for indirect realism in that the sign-signified relationship doesn't end up entailing indirectness, since it's how every physical interaction can be said to work. So what then is special about the sorts of representations in the brain re perception?

It's sort of like how pancomputationalism undermines the computational theory of mind. If everything is a computer, the universe one big computer, then claims about the brain's unique ability to produce conciousness grounded in its being a computer lose their purchase. Likewise, if everything is a sign, then we need to know what makes signs in brains representational in their indirect way.

Another wrinkle: wouldn't pain be the transformation of kinetic energy into electrochemical energy, and experience of our own pain thus also be indirect? But indirect realists generally say we experience pain "directly," which would seem to suggest that energy type transfers aren't what makes relations indirect. Thought too involves such changes in energy type. Stick a human body in a vacuum and thought stops. The relationship between enviornment and thought is less clear, but thought still clearly involves/requires the continual transformation of energy types across the body/enviornment line.



On a side note, my intuition is that the fundemental role of signs, information, and perspective in physical interactions will end up being essential to untangling the mysteries of consciousness — the abandonment of the God's eye view for the pleroma of all views.

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself.

No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures and transcend current boundaries" seemed to be negative - that the ideas changing would imply there was no real communication.

But if we're in agreement that there is meaningful communication there, then I don't see how different cultures are a barrier that reason can't transcend, or an area where reason fails to apply.

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence.

The truly groundless is not defined by anything else. To hate something else is to stand in a relation to it where you are defined by what you hate. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by something, for its boundaries are the limit of your being and interest. Only an attitude of love, the identification of the self in the other, avoids this limitation, allowing for what is truly unconditioned.

I've generally seen this explanation more in reference to Christian, Platonist, and Hindu thinkers, but I am fairly sure some Buddhists were mentioned as well. For example, indifference runs counter to henosis because it still acknowledges multiplicity in the objects of indifference that lie "over there," as it were.

You mean historically and throughout disparate cultures?

Yes, historically and throughout disparate cultures and eras, and through all different minds. Hegel lived before Darwin. I think his ideas could make significant use of natural selection, and might have spread to "all minds."

If we were to one day meet ETs and exchange ideas with them, I think we'd be including them as well. Being coming to know itself as self happens everywhere there is subjectivity.

I think selection-like processes at work in the cosmos more generally and the sort of fractal recurrence we see at different scales would have really interested Hegel. Astronomy was in its infancy in his day though, I don't even think our galaxy was known as a thing back then, although Kant had proposed the nebular theory of solar system development by then.



Well, if you read Magee's book, Hegel's entire corpus is primarily an exploration of mystical/esoteric, Hermetic ideas. IMO, the book suffers from the tendency of scholars to present maximalist theses for a sort of novelty factor. I think there is a difference between saying that Hegel was deeply influenced by folks like Eckhart, Cusa, and Boheme, and saying his natural philosophy and logic is 'based-on' alchemy or kabbalah. In many ways, it is deeply opposed to anything that relies on picture thinking and pure noetic intuition or a sort of extra rational gnosis.

But it's still a very interesting connection, especially since there is a dearth of scholarship on folks like Eckhart or Bonaventure as philosophers — generally they are treated primarily as mystics and some of their more philosophical material gets sidelined.

The trouble as I see it lies exactly in the unfolding itself, as if unfolding were a cognitive discovery.

I am not sure if I get your meaning. In Hegel's view at least, this unfolding isn't the cognitive discovery of some agent. It's the movement of all of being, which occurs because of what being is. The dialectical is ontological. Collective, emergent Spirit, is the key element of "mind" involved, not individuals.

At least this is according to Hegel scholars who tend to gravitate more to the Logic and take Hegel's invocations of Jacob Boheme and Miester Eckhart more seriously. Others disagree about the extent to which logic becomes ontology in the "objective logic," that sits prior to the (more familiar) subjective logic.

Which it certainly is, and I have to affirm this because agency requires this, meaning I can't imagine any account of ontology or epistemology without a structured self, which is what a science based metaphysics is

Right. It'd be impossible to know anything without some sort of memory and something in perception linking moments together. If things are totally discrete then there is nothing to say, each moment is sui generis. This is why Hume's bundle of perceptions can't be just that. Something has to link the moments together for there to be anything at all, which Kant recognized.

Although, returning to Hegel, it is the movement of Spirit, not individual selves, in which concepts develop, which makes perfect sense from a historical perspective since. I think Hegel has a bit of a problem when it comes to his political philosophy in this regard. The universal comes to overwhelm the particular. Plato has a similar problem. I have yet to find a thinker who really balances this well, who can take the intuition that institutions are substance in political life, individuals mere accidents, but then not lose sight of the importance of the person. Urs von Balthasar's theodrama concept is the best I've seen.

But knowledge certainly is not what is sought in all this. It is value. All of these endless ruminations in philosophy end here, in the pursuit of what can be generally called value. Any utterance made by a human dasein (or a fish, cat or cow dasein) has its telos in value, and value is the ONLY, I claim, no reducible phenomenological dimension of the world's presence. The only absolute.

I don't think I followed this. What sort of value? Survival value? Good versus bad? Aesthetic value?

This is all arguable to the death. Heidegger was right calling it a feast for thought, this endless inquiry.

Each type of value seems to have an open-ended character. Moore talks about the open-ended question of goodness. We can always ask if something is "truly good." Even if a divine command theory frame, we can ask if what God wants is "actually good."

But this is true for truth as well. This is why radical skepticism is always possible. "Is this really true?" And it seems true for aesthetic judgements as well. Which is perhaps why the Good, the Beautiful, and the True end up as the transcendentals, because they can always be pushed farther.

Do you really think God, soul, monad are Real I.e., not constructed by Minds over

A God constructed by minds wouldn't qualify as a God for many people. God, as fully transcendent and without limit, would exist over all minds and anything else, "within everything but contained in nothing," as St. Augustine puts it. This would entail that direct, knowledge of God by finite beings is impossible, leading to apophatic theology. But, as Jesus says "with men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible."

Right, I don't disagree with you, but that goes to my other point. If unconscious inference makes something indirect, then all knowledge is necessarily indirect, because concious awareness itself is undergirded by an extremely complex manifold of inferential processes, computation, and communications.

However, if all knowledge is necessarily "indirect," and "direct" knowledge is an impossibility because of what knowledge is, then it doesn't seem like the adjective does any lifting at all, regardless of if you think it should be "direct" or "indirect."

But to affirm P, and to have a justification for doing so, doesn't make P disappear into a vicious circle of linguistic/logical assumptions, unless you're a severe sort of Idealist . . . which is maybe what @Count Timothy von Icarus is getting at, above, with his Hegelian analysis.

I don't think the problem requires "severe idealism." Hegel's idealism is generally labeled "objective," because it affirms the existence of nature as nature, not as something reducible to mind.

So, to 's question, "why would we even want to get into this and bother attempting to transcend the mind/nature distinction," I will attempt a straightforward expression of Hegel's thesis, which I think is similar to what the OP is getting at.

I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on epistemology actually did a much better job at simplifying Hegel than most Hegel scholars (although they probably are one, come to think of it):

In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel criticized traditional empiricist epistemology for assuming that at least some of the sensory content of experience is simply “given” to the mind and apprehended directly as it is, without the mediation of concepts. According to Hegel, there is no such thing as direct apprehension, or unmediated knowledge. Although Kant also held that empirical knowledge necessarily involves concepts (as well as the mentally contributed forms of space and time), he nevertheless attributed too large a role to the given, according to Hegel.

Another mistake of earlier epistemological theories—both empiricist and rationalist—is the assumption that knowledge entails a kind of “correspondence” between belief and reality. The search for such a correspondence is logically absurd, Hegel argued, since every such search must end with some belief about whether the correspondence holds, in which case one has not advanced beyond belief. In other words, it is impossible to compare beliefs with reality, because the experience of reality is always mediated by beliefs. One cannot step outside belief altogether. For Hegel, the Kantian distinction between the phenomena of experience and the unknowable thing-in-itself is an instance of that absurdity.

I think this is similar to what the OP is trying to communicate. , you let me know if I am totally misreading here.

I think modern mereological nihilism and indirect realism are instructive here. Some people deny that colors truly exist "out there" in the world. The mind creates them. Mereological nihilists go a step further, denying any whole/part relations exist outside the mind. So, there simply are no cats on mats to be the targets of propositions or fact relations. The ideas like "cats" and "mats" are constructed in the mind. They are constructed from nature, yes, but the essence of catness or any distinct boundary of any specific cat is mind-dependent.

But Hegel doesn't stop here. He points out that it doesn't make sense to present mind as some sort of totally separate, unique things, distinct from nature. Again, modern views are instructive here. There is no indication that causation works any different for bodies than it does outside of them. Information, mass, energy, and cause flow right across these boundaries, which is why mereological nihilists would deny the boundary "really" exists in the first place. There is just one world, one type of being. "Multiple types of being," is an incoherent notion; what would be a discrete type of being? All multiplicity only shows up on the mind side of the mind/nature divide.

So, this means that when we talk about propositions and their targets, their truth-makers, and related facts, we aren't actually stepping into some external frame outside of mind. "The cat is on the mat just in case the cat is actually on the mat," is just a statement of our own confusion. What does it mean to be a cat or a mat? We'll never get outside belief asking what it is these propositions actually mean and what their truth-makers would actually be.

But here, Hegel would depart radically from mereological nihilists. He says "wait a minute, mind exists, this is obvious, it isn't somehow 'less real.'" Thus, the relationship between some part of nature and a mind's experience of color, cats, or mats, isn't some sort of less real relationship, it's as real as any other. Actually, it's the only possible sort of relationship through which any knowledge could possibly be given, so it is in ways, more real because it is more self-determining in terms of what it essentially is (the influence of Plato shows up here).

This means there aren't "really no cats." Cats exist, and they don't simply exist in some sort of less real realm of mind. They exist in the Absolute, the category that wraps around the subjective/objective distinction, since both sides of that distinction really do exist and neither can be reduced to the other.

Essentially, the whole truth of "the cat is on the mat," requires an elucidation of how the related concepts evolve and unfold globally, and how the subject comes to know these things as well as their own process of knowing.

Truth then, knowledge of how it is that "the cat is on the mat," involves knowledge of how it is we have come to know that the cat is on the mat. The truth is the whole. Both mind and nature play a role in defining truth, and the attempt to abstract propositions into mindless statements of fact simply miss this.

Hegel's argument is more convincing if you get into his arguments vis-á-vis ontology as logic (the Logics) and his theory of universals, but those are too much to elaborate here. I think Pinkhard's "Hegel's Naturalism," does a good job at outlining this reformulation of knowledge and truth in clear, concise terms, but at the cost of some major simplifications and deflations. Houlgate's commentary on the Greater Logic and Harris' "Hegel's Ladder," clarifies this better, at the cost of significantly longer and denser projects, and in Harris's case, significant use of Hegelese.

It's very hard to give an account of knowledge that transcends the nature/mind, subjective/objective divide. I would imagine this is why recourse to propositions, states of affairs, truth-maker, etc. remain significantly more popular, even though the view where these are actually existent, eternal abstract objects has declined a good deal.

This is a major concern of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," and the Logics. "The truth is the whole," being coming to know its self as self — a broader view.

But "the fruit does not refute the bud nor the oak tree the acorn." I think it's asking too much of more conventional theories of truth to adapt themselves to the "speculative moment," i.e., that place where the mind/nature divide is transcended. Those theories are earlier moments.

They have a significant pragmatic value in the same way the formal logic retains its utility and internal validity in the face of the dialectical. I think the speculative moment probably requires leaving truth-makers behind, rather than trying to reform them.

So a project like:

Consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and, on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the true, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not. (PhS 54/77–8)

Hegel’s analysis continues until consciousness discovers that its understanding of its object does not actually correspond to the stated definition of an object
of consciousness at all. An object of consciousness is stated to be something known by, but standing over against, consciousness. Consciousness eventually
discovers, however, that it actually understands its object to have one and the same categorial structure as itself and so not simply to stand over against consciousness after all. At that point, consciousness realizes that it is no longer mere consciousness but has become speculative thought, or absolute knowing.

Houlgate's commentary on the Greater Logic

...is simply working at different aims. Knowledge is simply no longer justified true belief, its a process being unfolding itself.

The Direct Realist also believes that we directly perceive a hand, but then ignores any philosophical questioning in favour of the language of the "ordinary man".

This certainly covers some of them, although I would replace "ignore" with "sidestep" or "discount as confused." I would tend to associate this view more with adverbial and intentional theories of perception though. Particularly, this view tends to rely on a certain view of what language is, born out of the influence of Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein was a major influence on adverbial theories.

Even though the brain is part of the world, there is a distinct boundary between the brain and the world outside the brain. The brain only "knows" about the world outside the brain because of the information that passes through this boundary, ie, the five senses, and these five senses are the intermediary between the brain and the world outside the brain.

Per our prior conversation, is this boundary a real, ontological boundary, or one that only exists in mind?

Since cause, matter, energy, and information appear to flow across this boundary in the same manner as any other, I am not sure how movement across the boundary is supposed to be more "indirect." Information exchange only occurs across the surface of systems. This is as true for billiard balls and rain drops as it is for brains.

If outside the brain is a wavelength of 500nm, and inside the brain is the perception of green, even though the chain of events from outside to inside is direct, it does not of necessity follow that there is a direct relationship between what is on the outside and what is on the inside, and by linguistic convection, if the relationship is not direct then it must be indirect.

I am not sure what is supposed to be demonstrated here. Is the claim that there has to be some sort of necessity for a relationship to be "direct?" What sort of necessity? Sex doesn't necessarily entail pregnancy. You can have either in the absence of the other (e.g. IVF), but the relationship between the two seems pretty direct. Fertilization doesn't entail birth, but again, the relationship between the two seems direct. Neither does sunlight entail fructose production, but sunlight and photosynthesis seems to have a direct relationship.

Is this logical necessity or causal? If it's causal necessity, then it seems like this point doesn't stand. At least at the macro scale, the effects of light vis-á-vis the human eye and brain are deterministic. Logical necessity seems impossible to determine here. Does it even apply? In a pancomputationalist view it would, but then the logical necessity just is the causal one, and that appears to be here.

My belief is that to say that inferred knowledge is direct knowledge is ungrammatical.

Is there any knowledge that doesn't involve inference? Pure intuition? But then people's prephilosophical intuition is that they know objects directly through perception. The Mars example is not generally how knowledge of external objects works. We don't see various shapes and hues and then, through some concious inferential process decide that we have knowledge of a chair in front us. We just see chairs.

So, on the one hand, it seems like this standard doesn't work because you can say unconscious inference is involved in any judgement. On the other, it doesn't seem like concious inference is involved in most knowledge of external objects. When I see a blue car, I don't feel the need to go through any concious inference to know it's a blue car. But if you say "do you really know it's a car?" switching to a philosophical frame, then I'd say this is just one particular way of knowing.

The larger problem I see is that this definition would seem to imply that any sort of concious introspection is also indirect, since this also requires inference. Do I understand my relationship with my father indirectly? Do I know that I like my co-workers indirectly because I have to reflect on the question?

Wasn't he charged for unrelated sex crimes? He wasn't convicted if I recall, rather there was a warrant out for him to be questioned in regards to criminal claims resulting from alleged victims reporting the crimes. Nor were the crimes dredged up from the past, but from preceding months. Then he skipped bail and hid in the Ecuadorian embassy.

US charges related to conspiring with hackers came like a decade later.

Maybe these were politically motivated, but considering all the prior MeToo cases, it doesn't seem implausible to me that Assange was both a thorn in the side of the security apparatus and a legitimate sex pest with a valid warrant out for his questioning that he ran from.

I made a thread a while back on a related point. Essentially, I was looking for a formal way to state that it doesn't make sense to posit things/properties whose existence or non-existence is indiscernible for all possible observers.

I think you get at a confusion that comes up with correspondence definitions of truth. We say a belief is true if it corresponds to reality. No problem here, beliefs can be true or false - same for statements.

The problem comes when we try to switch to an external frame, outside the realm of beliefs, perceptions, statements, etc. Now we need new things to be true or false - abstract propositions that exist outside of any person who can make/hold propositions, beliefs, statements, etc.

In virtue of what are such personless propositions true? In virtue of other abstract entities: facts, events, and states of affairs.

I am not sure if there is a problem with this view, but I can see why people have a problem with it. It seems that, in a hypothetical lifeless universe, there should be no possibility of falsehood, and so no meaning in "truth." Truth, like good and bad, seems like it should only arrive on the scene with someone there.

The proliferation of abstract entities is eyebrow raising while claims that we should treat propositions like they were abstract entities, as a useful fiction, doesn't seem to resolve the frame problem. How are things true or false outside the subjective/intersubjective plane where beliefs, statements, etc. have their existence?

You might be interested in Husserl's zig-zag explanation of the emergence of correspondence truth in phenomenology.

In general though, I think you might be confusing "justification" with what makes something true. Justification is what makes some person think something is true. The "truth-maker" is supposed to be the externally existing state of affairs in virtue of which a proposition is true. If there are problems with placing us into such an abstract realm, it wouldn't seem to be one of justification though.

You tend to do these oblique attacks instead of swapping argument for argument. I'd rather you set out why indirect realism is necessarily dualist (property dualism? substance dualism?) rather than imply it as a concern. Maybe it's just a difference in style.

Sorry, I don't mean to be oblique. It's that I think accusations of dualism really depend heavily on the exact formulation involved, so I don't want to be overly direct because I don't think it's always an issue.

The issue of dualism comes in when mind appears to take on a role that is sui generis and unique vis-á-vis how it interacts with the rest of the world. This is a tricky area because, barring panpsychism, mind is clearly unique in some respects.

It comes down to what makes experience indirect, what makes the relationship between people and lemons vis-á-vis seeing yellow different from the relationship between people's breathing and air vis-á-vis oxygenating blood. If that difference just is that one is phenomenal, and that a relations involving phenomenal experience is what makes it indirect, then that looks a lot like mind having its own sorts of sui generis causal relations, essentially being a different substance from other entities, etc.

Because appeals to the complexity of the interaction don't seem to be enough. The process through which pregnancy occurs is extremely complex and mediated through many different pathways, but no one says "sexual intercourse has an indirect relationship with pregnancy," or "sperm have an indirect relationship with pregnancy." Or "sunlight has an indirect relationship with photosynthesis."

Just in normal usage, a common indirect relationship would be something like drinking alcohol and pregnancy. The two don't necessarily go together, but ingesting alcohol leads to more risk taking behavior. Sex and pregnancy as an "indirect" relationship?

Without a way to specify the "indirectness" it seems to reduce to "being phenomenal is indirect because phenomenal awareness is a special type of relation," which is where a sort of dualism seems to come in, along with begging the question.



See above. I don't see how "science says" one thing or another here. If the relationship between sex and pregnancy, light and photosynthesis, breathing and oxygenated blood, the sensation of deciding to make a voluntary movement and movement, etc. are all direct, despite complex intermediaries, what makes perception different? Or maybe those are all also indirect relationships?

Do we experience our own thoughts directly or indirectly? It would seem it would have to be indirectly if the argument is that complex intermediaries make a relationship indirect.



Science and metaphysics are different from one another, but they bleed over into one another all the time. The first time I heard of "emergent properties" was in a molecular biology class, not a philosophy lecture. Metaphysics and ontology tend to touch science on the theory side.

So, any book on quantum foundations is going to discuss metaphysical ideas. Any discussion of "what is a species and how do we define it," gets into the same sort of territory. "What is complexity?" and "what is information?" or "is there biological information?" are not uncommon questions for journal articles to focus on. Debates over methods, frequentism in particular, are another area of overlap. This isn't the bread and butter of 101 classes — although in Bio 101 we were asked to write an essay on "what life is?" and consider if viruses or prions were alive, a philosophical question — but it's also not absent from scientific considerations either.

The two seem related in that both inform one another. Physicists have informed opinions re the question of substance versus process based metaphysics for example, or mereological nihilism — i.e., "is the world a collection of things with properties or one thing/process?"

In what sense is inferred knowledge direct knowledge?

If "direct knowledge" is aphenomenal knowledge, it wouldn't seem to make sense as a concept. So I think the disagreement is about the relevance of the adjective. If knowledge only exists phenomenally, calling phenomenal knowledge indirect would be like saying we only experience indirect pain, because we don't experience the "in-itselfness" of damage to our bodies. There doesn't seem to be a real direct/indirect distinction.

But I think there is perhaps a more compelling metaphysical objection here. We wouldn't tend to say that "we can only indirectly throw baseballs because, in reality, it is always our arm that does the throwing." That wouldn't make sense because our arm is part of us. So when our arm throws a ball, we throw the ball.

Likewise, minds are part of the world. So, sans dualism, a mind perceiving something is the world perceiving itself. If brains and sense organs perceive, and they are part of the world, wherein lies the separation that makes the relationship between brains and the world indirect? How is it different from other physical processes?

The obvious answer is that in one type of process, there is phenomenal awareness. But we can't define what it means for an interaction to be "indirect" in terms of phenomenological awareness, because that just begs the question by saying that phenomenal = indirect.


And I think this is where demands to define "indirect" in terms of physical interactions becomes relevant. Perhaps there is some way to demarcate direct and indirect physical processes, although I am skeptical of this.

So, humoncular regress concerns aside, I think there is a more general concern that the "indirect" term is smuggling dualism in.

Under any ordinary reading, the flower is not "directly presented in" or "a constituent of" the photo. The photo is just a photosensitive surface that has chemically reacted to light.

I'll share my favorite phenomenology-based explanation:

A curious kind of identity occurs in pictures. A picture does not simply present something that looks like the thing depicted. The thing pictured is not just similar to the thing itself. It is identically and individually the same, not just similar. Suppose I have a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower on my desk. The figure in the picture is Dwight Eisenhower himself (as pictured). It is not merely similar to Eisenhower, as his brother or son, or someone else from Kansas who happens to look like him might be. Dwight Eisenhower’s brother is similar to him, but he is not a picture of him. Similarity alone does not make something a picture. Picturing involves individual identity, not just similarity

But, you may say, the picture really is not Dwight Eisenhower; he has been dead for many a year. The picture is really only a piece of paper. Of course, the two are different entities, different substances;but when we take them that way, we are not taking them as picture and pictured. We are taking them just as things. Once we get into the logic of pictures and appearances, something else happens, and we have to report the phenomenon as it is, not as we would wish it to be. In the metaphysics of picturing, in the metaphysics of this kind of appearance, the thing pictured and Dwight Eisenhower are identically the same. The picture presents or represents that man; it does not present something just similar to him.

We should also note that the picturing relationship is one-sided. The photograph pictures Eisenhower, but Eisenhower does not picture the photograph. This is another way in which picturing differs from mere similarity, which is a reciprocal relationship. If Dwight Eisenhower’s brother is similar to him, he also is similar to his brother, but Eisenhower is not a picture of his image. Why not? I cannot give you a reason, but I know that it could not be otherwise. Neither can I give you a reason why things have predicates, but I know that they do have them when they are spoken about. Such necessities are involved in the metaphysics of appearance.

We should also note that picturing is an exhibition of intelligence or reason. To depict something is not just to copy it but to identify it and to think about it. It does not just make the thing present; it also brings out what that thing is.

Robert Sokolowski - Phenomenology of the Human Person

Sokolowski's real focus in thought and language though, not perception. He goes on to elucidate how names, words, and syntax, are used intersubjectively to present the intelligibility of objects. Roughly speaking, the intelligibility of an object is exactly what we can truthfully say about it, what can be unfolded through the entire history of "the human conversation."

But, if I find Sokolowski's use of phenomenology, particularly Husserl, and philosophy of language very useful for avoiding dicey metaphysical issues, it nonetheless feels frustratingly incomplete.

Here, I think Nathan Lyons is more helpful, even if he has to go further out on a limb. At the very least, his explanation goes with the intuition that causation does not work in a sui generis manner when it comes to perceiving subjects.

[The] particular expression of intentional existence—intentional species existing in a material medium between cogniser and cognised thing— will be our focus...

In order to retrieve this aspect of Aquinas’ thought today we must reformulate his medieval understanding of species transmission and reception in the terms of modern physics and physiology.11 On the modern picture organisms receive information from the environment in the form of what we can describe roughly as energy and chemical patterns. 12 These patterns are detected by particular senses:  electromagnetic radiation  =  vision, mechanical energy = touch, sound waves = hearing, olfactory and gustatory chemicals = smell and taste.13 When they impinge on an appropriate sensory organ, these patterns are transformed (‘transduced’ is the technical term) into signals (neuronal ‘action potentials’) in the nervous system, and then delivered to the brain and processed. To illustrate, suppose you walk into a clearing in the bush and see a eucalyptus tree on the far side. Your perception of the eucalypt is effected by means of ambient light—that is, ambient electromagnetic energy—in the environment bouncing off the tree and taking on a new pattern of organisation. The different chemical structure of the leaves, the bark, and the sap reflect certain wavelengths of light and not others; this selective reflection modifies the structure of the energy as it bounces off the tree, and this patterned structure is perceived by your eye and brain as colour....

These energy and chemical patterns revealed by modern empirical science are the place that we should locate Aquinas’ sensory species today.14 The patterns are physical structures in physical media, but they are also the locus of intentional species, because their structure is determined by the structure of the real things that cause them. The patterns thus have a representational character in the sense that they disperse a representative form of the thing into the surrounding media. In Thomistic perception, therefore, the form of the tree does not ‘teleport’ into your mind; it is communicated through normal physical mechanisms as a pattern of physical matter and energy.

The interpretation of intentions in the medium I  am suggesting here is in keeping with a number of recent readers of Aquinas who construe his notion of extra-mental species as information communicated by physical means.18 Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein. 19... Gyula Klima argues that ‘for Aquinas, intentionality or aboutness is the property of any form of information carried by anything about anything’, so that ‘ordinary causal processes, besides producing their ordinary physical effects according to the ordinary laws of nature, at the same time serve to transfer information about the causes of these processes in a natural system of encoding’.22

The upshot of this reading of Aquinas is that intentional being is in play even in situations where there is not a thinking, perceiving, or even sensing subject present. The phenomenon of representation which is characteristic of knowledge can thus occur in any physical media and between any existing thing, including inanimate things, because for Aquinas the domain of the intentional is not limited to mind or even to life, but includes to some degree even inanimate corporeality.

This interpretation of intentions in the medium in terms of information can be reformulated in terms of the semiotics we have retrieved from Aquinas, Cusa, and Poinsot to produce an account of signs in the medium. On this analysis, Aquinas’ intentions in the medium, which are embeded chemical patterns diffused through environments, are signs. More precisely, these patterns are sign-vehicles that refer to signifieds, namely the real things (like eucalyptus trees) that have patterned the sign-vehicles in ways that reflect their physical form.24 It is through these semiotic patterns that the form of real things is communicated intentionally through inanimate media. This is the way that we can understand, for example, Cusa’s observation that if sensation is to occur ‘between the perceptible object and the senses there must be a medium through which the object can replicate a form [speciem] of itself, or a sign [signum] of itself ’ (Comp. 4.8). This process of sensory semiosis proceeds on my analysis through the intentional replication of real things in energy and chemical sign-patterns, which are dispersed around the inanimate media of physical environments

In phenomenal experience, it’s crystal clear to me that when I hear spoken language, I directly hear words, questions, commands, and so on—generally, people speaking—and only indirectly if at all hear the sounds of speech as such (where “indirect” could mean something like, through the intellect or by an effort of will). Our perceptual faculties produce this phenomenal directness in response to the environment and our action in it.

Maybe an example from vision is less controversial. When you walk around a table, you don’t see it metamorphose as the shape and area of the projected light subtending your retina changes. On the contrary, you see it as constant in size and shape.

I think this is precisely where indirect realists make their hay. When you hear a foreign language you don't know, you hear sounds, not words. If you suffer some sort of brain injury and develop agnosia, you see a confusing melange of shapes and colors, not tables.

This, so their reasoning goes, the mind/brain must be creating the words, objects, etc., and this act of creation or construction then implies a relationship between perception and things that is "mediated" and in being mediated it is indirect.

And I do believe they are on to something very important and interesting here. The struggle to define how the world can possess both unity and multiplicity is as old as philosophy, as are attempts to elucidate the nature of the appearance/reality distinction. However, as you note here , these tend to end up in a confused melange.

1. Their notion of directness, seldom stated and even seldomer relevant or coherent.

Right. Where is a direct interaction in nature? They seem hard to find. If the mediation involved in perception excluded "experiencing external objects," then it seems like we also can't "drive cars," but rather merely "push pedals and turn steering wheels." We don't "turn lights on," but rather flip switches. The Sun does not heat the Earth and fuel photosynthesis, but rather its light does. Nor can water erode the ground. Rather, electrons exchange virtual photos. Hemoglobin cannot "bind oxygen," but rather this is mediated by the activity of electrons, etc.

Is these strawman comparisons? Perhaps. But determining if they are would require a firm definition of what constitutes the level of mediation at which something becomes indirect.

2. Their notions of “as it is” and “what it's really like.”

"To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute (in reality), consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one." (Phenomenology of Spirit §16). The truth rests in "the night in which all cows are black."

But to my mind this sets up two problems. The first is justifying that experience is somehow "less real" than this night of in-itselfness. The second is defining the meaning of truth in a context where falsity is not a possibility. A third might be justifying the existence of "things as they really are," when it seems more appropriate to say there is just a thing (singular) as it is.

4. Their motivation: where they’re coming from is really unclear.

So, this is the most interesting case. I think the position generally comes from a simple desire for an adequate explanation of perception in most cases. But for more systematic thinkers, I believe there is often deeper motivations.

If all definiteness, the existence of cats, trees, etc., is a creation of minds, or a creation of language, then this has implications for ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc. It is a view that can support a certain flavor of humanism, since man has now become the origin point of the world as we know it and nothing, or nothing definite at least, "stands behind" him.

On the one hand, since minds and language are malleable, it suggests a sort of freedom to restructure the world in ways that might not be available otherwise. Certainly, it's also been taken as an avenue for attacking the validity of religion as well. On the other, it helps frame existentialism that is grounded on the assumption that the universe is essentially meaningless, absurd, etc. It can be a stepping off point for moral relativism or nihilism, although it isn't necessarily, nor is it the only path there. It helps for claims that knowledge is essentially power, or that power relations define the reality of the world, etc. In general, it seems to be a major route for challenging naturalism.

Your criterion for a direct perception seems to be that the perception must be identical with the physical object. By that standard, no perception can be direct.

It doesn't really work for knowledge either. Having your head turn into an apple wouldn't seem to grant you direct knowledge of being an apple. Chiseling propositions into a rock doesn't cause the rock to know those propositions.

Knowing is relational, but so are all other physical properties. No one sees blue cars without there being someone who is looking, but neither do things float in water without being placed in water, or conduct electricity in the absence of current. So that knowledge or perception require a certain sort of relation to be instantiated isn't unique.

But then smallism and reductionism would also seem to be routes to a sort of indirect realism. "Seeing red," would be a process related to a whole. However, if all facts about wholes are explainable in terms of facts about smaller parts, and we don't think molecules and light waves "see red," then "seeing red," has to turn out to be in someway illusory or indirectly related to "the way things fundementally are."

This isn't always the case. Sometimes smallism leads people to deny that anything "sees red," directly or indirectly.

For populism to take root, I would have to assume the majority of the political class to be corrupt, because if it weren't there would be counter-forces in the system that would make populism unnecessary.

I would disagree that populist movements are only ever responses to corruption. The backlash against the Democratic party in the South over the end of Jim Crow was a populist movement, but it wasn't, and did not consider itself, primarily a movement against corruption. It was a popular backlash against racial integration.

We could consider what would happen if some new party swept into power in the US and radically reduced corruption and perceived corruption. Now let's say our new party is all about "building the future" and turns around and says "we have to deal with global warming and the national debt. This will mean national sacrifice. We will be implementing carbon taxes, benefits cuts, and raising revenue to pay off the debt, and this will mean that everyone has to change their patterns of consumption, consume less."

I'd argue that this is 100% guaranteed to produce a major populist backlash in the current enviornment, regardless of how virtuous the new party is and how much it has reduced self-dealing and conflicts of interest.

The populist backlash against plans to do much of anything to combat climate change aren't grounded in charges of corruption, they are grounded in the fact that such plans require reductions in consumption to be effective.

I think @Banno and I share a suspicion of all metaphysics, though I welcome correction from him if I'm wrong.

I don't think science parses to Nature/Geist or most philosophies at all.

I think they are different, or if not, it's not easy to trace the connections.

I'm not sure I understand you. What is different, Nature versus Mind or science vs a Nature/Mind distinction?

IDK, science seems to make mention of the divide between subjective experience and nature all the time. It's partly what divides the social sciences, and it comes up in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, AI, etc. continuously.

I use "Geist" because Hegel's frame is the totality of minds, which would seem to be where truth and falsity is adjudicated, as opposed to "individual kind"/nature.




Well, thanks for the long reply. I guess we are coming from very different places. I'll reply where I find the biggest variance in my own thought:

In Kant's terms, the transcendental unity of apperception, a feature of the mind rather than a feature of things-in-themselves.

I've had an increasingly hard time seeing Kant's noumenal as anything but a sort of dogmatism, a bare posit. He certainly spends a lot of time trying to justify it, but I don't can't see how it cashes out. Anything acting solely in-itself cannot make any difference for anything else, and the entire presupposition of discrete things, as noted in the last post, appears to itself be an anthropomorphizing move (this is partly Hegel's criticism of Kant, but I think modern philosophy of physics gives it credence).

But of course the noumenal isn't actually said to to only act/exist in-itself, it's said to act on us, to cause. So we know it through its acts, but then this is said to not be true knowledge. How so? I don't see how it makes any sense to say "things are what they are, not what they do." Things only reveal their properties through what they do, a static isolated thing essentially sits alone, outside being. So the noumenal is what it does, and what it does is quite knowable, making "noumenal" a bad lable/concept.

I'm inclined to agree with the minority of Kantians who say that Kant's thought simply is, whether he personally liked it or not, subjective idealism ala Berkeley, with the noumenal playing the role of the mind of God for us, making it so that all minds are the same and communication is possible. I tend to disagree with them that this is what Kant actually intended, which seems like a stretch (to say the least).

From the same place that beauty, ghosts, bent sticks and unicorns come from, from the mind.

But this can't be the whole story. Because the Rocky Mountains and Mordor don't have the same ontological status. There has to be a way to distinguish between fantasy and fiction, between Narnia and Canada. So, to simply say that dragons and gorillas both come from mind is to miss something that differentiates them.

Moreover, wouldn't this imply that the apparent multiplicity of different minds itself only exists in mind? Do discrete minds have ontological status, or is the mind-dependent judgement that there are many minds in the world not true knowledge that other minds exist "in-themselves?"

If I am stung by a wasp, I could say "my pain is real". As an adjective, "my pain is real" means I am being truthful when I say that "I am pain". As a noun "my pain is real" is more metaphysical, in that in what sense does pain exist. It cannot have an ontological existence in a mind-independent world, but can only exist as part of a mind.

I am not sure if I understand you here. Is the claim that something only has "ontological existence" if it is "mind independent?" Wouldn't everything that exists have ontological existence?

I agree that notions like tree, cat, tornado, etc unfold throughout the history of English speakers, presumably all human, but not throughout the history of non-English speakers, nor other forms of life, such as cats and elephants.

So the concept cat only has to do with humans and nothing outside them? I just don't find this plausible. This would seem to lead to an all encompassing anti-realism.

As Wittgenstein pointed out, the possibility of a private language is remote, and that all language is a social thing requiring an individual speaker to be in contact with other users of the language.

Wittgenstein pointed out that if language is defined as something used to communicate between two or more people, then, by that definition, you can't have a language that is, in principle, impossible to communicate to other people. If X is Y and Z is not-Y, then Z is not X.

I don't think that demonstrated much, it's a tautology. It didn't stop Language of Thought theories from taking off again because those theories simply define language differently.

For me, part of my world is other people and the language they use.

Sure, but don't they exist only in mind? But if they exist only in mind, does this mean that other people also lack mind-independent ontological status? If they don't, what saves them from the status of cats and dogs?

For my part, it's clear that animals have something like concepts. Dogs and cats have no difficulty recognizing their owners and being scared of strangers, recognizing different types of animals, etc. Human language evolved on top of prior perceptual and behavioral systems, it isn't sui generis.

For me, the human mind doesn't create ex nihilo. Thus, concepts of cats can't spring into human thought uncaused. Nor can tornados and shrubs burst into our world (and thus the world) due to the creative power of speech acts. They are caused by the same sorts of causes that affect everything else, which causes the world to evolve in a determinant way. But if the world evolves in a determinant way, then mind can't emerge and have certain concepts due to causes that are unique to mind.

If mind's causes lie outside mind, they are knowable, because an effect is a sign of its cause.

See the "known"? That implies an attitude, and hence someone having the attitude. Yep, if something is known, then there is someone who knows.

Right, that was the first question, but you ignored the rest — "what would be a property that exists "in-itself," i.e., exists in a way that doesn't make any reference to how a thing interacts with other things or parts of itself?"

I do not see how such arelational properties can make any difference in the world, even if we were to accept their existence as axiomatic. They aren't just unknown, they are unknowable.

Hence, relational properties are not a special case. Direct knowledge of "things-in-themselves," as opposed to how things relate to other things, is not only unattainable, but completely worthless.

When people hold up knowledge of "things-in-themselves" as some sort of standard of truth and objectivity, what they really mean is "how things other than minds relate to one another." But once this is clarified, I believe it is easier to bring out why the preferencing of relations between mindless things is not based on good reasoning.

Most of those people are shitposting.

Everything is "shit posting" and covered in multiple levels of irony, but I've seen enough of these spaces to be quite confident that there are a decent core of people for whom Evola and Guenon are "serious business."

The stuff about Hyperboreans, Antarctic-Lemurians, Atlantis, and the Olympic race is taken as ironic, but also symbolic on a deeper level.

While a totally different set of people, the ties between Q Anon and New Age spirituality have a similar general feel. There though the link has been alternative medicine, neo-shamanism, psychics, and even yoga groups. I think this fits into the larger "politics as a substitute for religion," thesis quite well.

but generally in Europe we don't see much insanity

Well, in general I would say Neo-Reactionaries are a radical group, and thus necessarily on the fringes. Something like neocameralism is never going to be broadly popular, but it can still have its influences. You don't see them in the US unless the media goes out to find them either. Something like QAnon or the wider Evangelical "Trump is King Cyrus" theory are the types of things that can actually have broad appeal.

But the people on the fringes are more sophisticated and in some ways get closer to the levers of power.

Seems to me that all you have said here is that epistemic notions like knowing are relations between an individual and a proposition

I don't see how this is the case. What would be an example of a property that is known without interaction? Moreover, what would be a property that exists "in-itself," i.e., exists in a way that doesn't make any reference to how a thing interacts with other things or parts of itself?

I can think of none outside bare posits. For example, I don't get how you can explain the property of having mass with zero reference to how a thing's mass affects other things or how it effects parts of itself.

One cannot attain an alien culture’s reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible.

Right, and this would be the work of reason, transcending current beliefs and horizons. But we need not stop at Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." Since we "cannot forget ourselves," it seems to follow that we should remember ourselves in our understanding (essentially, Hegel's point re Spirit knowing itself in the shape of Spirit).

There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history.

Sure, but they're still the same core ideas being transmitted. If each formulation is sui generis and unconnected to the last, then philosophy is impossible. Perspectivism need not entail relativism.

Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.

I'd argue it's at least both. Clearly, Plato identified problems in his own work, as did Kant. In both cases, successors took up these seeming contradictions, carrying them forward in an attempt to resolve them. The directions they chose to go with them weren't fully contingent, they were shaped by contradictions inherit in the source material. When Fichte picks up on a tension in Kant, he is picking up on a problem Kant himself recognized as not fully resolved. When Calvin picks up Augustine, he is dealing with contradictions inherit in Augustine's ideas of divine sovereignty and the freedom of the will.

Would I go as far as Hegel and say the move is only a logical one? I think it depends on your frame of reference. Because Hegel certainly allows for what might be considered contingency, it's just that the essence of the evolution of notions is grounded in logic.

You're talking about constitutional/human rights, not the basic function of democracy.

Well, I assumed I was talking about the telos of governance in general, as defending/empowering freedom, ensuring justice, etc.

I don't think the function of democracy is readily apparent. Why is democracy good? Is it because it is good in virtue of what it produces, i.e., on average, better governance, or is it intrinsically good for people to select leaders or policies by voting?

Political scientists, with their aversion to pronouncing on norms, often focus on the former. Liberal representative democracy is good because of what it tends to provide in terms of better governance, economic growth, property rights, liberties, etc. Clearly, it doesn't always provide these benefits though, and it is possible for less democratic systems to sometimes outperform democratic ones on these metrics.

However, I can see an argument that democracy is a good in and of itself. It would seem to enhance citizen's freedom. Moreover, it can help foster a sense of ownership, getting citizens to identify with their state.

That said, it is clear that it doesn't always do this. Wealthy liberal democracies in particular tend to have citizens who say that are least willing to fight to defend their current system. Populist movements themselves seem to show that you can have elections without people feeling much ownership vis-a-vis the state. If demagogues are a real threat to democracies, and I would maintain they are, then it cannot be the case that the benefits of democracy lie simply in leaders doing what a majority of the people want.

In particular, crowds tend to be dumb. Large groups are not conducive to reasoned debate. Yet governance seems to call for such reasoned debate. The legitimacy of either elites of populist movements comes down to what their aims are. Being justifiably angry doesn't justify a groups policy ideas. The Cultural Revolution would be an example of a populist movement that was absolutely disastrous. The current US case is particularly dubious because you have a populist movement interested in securing minority rule, with an explicit focus on "we will get more support for the legitimate types of people," not "we will get more support from all citizens."

So, I would say populism can be bad for a state for the same reason a jury can obviously be less just than a judge in some instances.

The only way to remove a corrupt elite is therefore by overpowering them, sometimes through mass voting, discontent/protests, sometimes through revolution and violence. This is something markedly different from "authoritarianism", since in one instance it is a means and in the other a goal.

Yes, and historically this meant popular support that turned the French monarch into the "Sun King" of Louis XIV, whereas during the Hundred Years War the monarch couldn't even keep his nobles for raiding and annexing each others' land or implementing their own justice system in their lands.

Of course, yes, people eventually began to chaff under the new locus of power, and so you get the move towards constitutionalism and democracy. Authoritarianism isn't the ultimate goal, but sometimes it is seen as the proximate goal. But vis-a-vis the embrace of the "divine right of kings," it was also the ultimate goal in many cases.

The human can look at the world and see a tree. I would agree that the parts making of what we call a tree can exist independently of humans, but wouldn't agree that what we call a tree can exist as a whole independently of humans.

This is an interesting line, and I think it gets something crucial correct. However, I find that mereological nihilism (i.e. the denial that wholes like trees and cats really exist) tends to have two problems.

The first has to do with the insistence on discrete particles as the basis of reality. So, to your point:

In a world independent of humans are elementary particles, elementary forces in space-time. When we look at such a world, we directly see the world as it is.

are there just "elementary particles" or are there just "elementary forces?" There is plenty of work in the philosophy of physics and physics proper that claims to demonstrate that "particles" are just another of those things that don't really exist "independently of humans." They are a contrivance to help us think of things in the terms we are used to. I've seen particles likened to the "shadows on the walls of Plato's cave," whereas fields or informational process are said to be "the real deal," or at the very least, demonstrably closer to it.

Likewise, mathematized conceptions of the universe, ontic structural realism, tends to propose that the universe as a whole is a single sort of mathematical object, not that the universe is made up of such objects, although I will grant that authors like Tegmark tend to get a little sloppy here in their descriptions. This is the difference between "the world works the way it does because of what things are," and "the world works the way it does because of what it is."

If any part of the old medieval Doctrine of Transcendentals holds up to modern scrutiny, it would be the idea that "unity" appears to be a universal property of being. Everything seems to interact with everything else, and so we don't end up with any divisions independent of minds.

What I find interesting is that this turns out to be the same problem of "the Many and the One" that shows up way back with Parmenides and Shankara. How do we resolve the apparent multiplicity of being with its equally apparent unity? Must one side of the equation be reduced to illusion (e.g., Parmenides, Shankara, modern eliminitivism, etc.)?

The second problem shows up in trying to explain how we end experiencing trees, cats, storms, etc.

When you say:

I would agree that the parts making of what we call a tree can exist independently of humans, but wouldn't agree that what we call a tree can exist as a whole independently of humans.

Where exactly do you see the trees, cats, and thunderstorms as coming from?

For me, they have to come from the same unity from which experience arises. But this presents a puzzle for me. If the experience of trees is caused by this unity, then it would seem like the tree has to, in some way, prexist the experience. Where does it prexist the experience? I would suppose it is in the whole history of the existence of the tree and in the evolution of my sensory system, and its particular development, including my past experiences.

I've found no good solutions here. The most promising might be Hegel's Science of Logic, but it's a very slippery work. But my takeaways from it would be:

1. It doesn't really make sense to declare that "human independent" being is more or less real. The reality/appearance distinction makes sense within consciousness, not applied to being qua being.

2. Notions like tree, cat, tornado, etc. would seem to unfold throughout the history of being and life, having an etiology that transcends to mind/world boundary (a boundary that doesn't exist "human-independently" itself). Our notion of tree has a history on either side of the mind/world distinction, and it's a very long history that involves human social projects, such as science, our evolutionary history, and our personal past.

3. Self-conscious reflection on notions, knowing how a notion is known, and how it has developed, would be the full elucidation of that notion, rather than a view where the notion is somehow located solely in a "mind-independent" realm, which as you note, has serious plausibility problems. A sort of "eye that sees itself and its own vision, and its own seeing of that vision" view, if you will.

Presumably, if some group rejects the terms of their labor contract, or a peace treaty, they have reasons for doing so. E.g., China doesn't maintain that it has claims on Russian-controlled land in the Far-East because they have their own incommensurate "Chinese way of declaring national boundaries." They claim they are the legitimate owners of those lands for various reasons: because they were ceded under duress, because the native inhabitants of those lands are culturally closer to China than Russia, and because they have a historical-traditional role as governors of that land, etc.

Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused."

All this seems fathomable. Different cultural views do not spring forth into the world uncaused and undetermined.

Nor is it impossible for a Marxist worker to become a conservative libertarian or vice versa, or for chauvinists to embrace third wave feminist eventually. But if this is the case, it is not impossible for reason to transcend these boundaries. Someone raised as a Lutheran is not locked inside a box, forever unable to fathom Catholicism, let alone Zen Buddhism. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work.

Authoritarianism has always been seen as the cure for the failure of the democratic institutions. And especially when you have widespread corruption, the idea of evil elites isn't so far fetched. It is very easy to show the real failures of the system, and somehow the idea "I will correct this!" makes people to believe that the populist has the magic wand to solve the problems. What they end up actually doing usually doesn't work. Perhaps today the drastic measures of totalitarianism have historically been shown as disastrous as they are, so the new authoritarianism-light is the present day populism.

I think such a trend goes back further than the advent of liberal democracy. If you look at how monarchs became a centralized locus of power, with a monopolies on force and the administration of the justice system in Western Europe, it was through the emerging urban middle classes and the peasantry supporting the monarchs against the feudal elite. There is a long history of "the people" supporting the centralization of power as a means of keeping recalcitrant elites in check.

However, in general, I think we tend to focus too much on the threats of totalitarianism. We look back to the last crisis, to Hitler and Stalin. Our dystopias generally focus on the role of a domineering state. Our classic literature is fixated on this problem.

Yet if anything, states seem to be decaying, and economic elites gaining more power and leverage. The 60 year stagnation of median wages, the steady drive towards most income in advanced economies coming from capital ownership, not labor, the growing share of all workers who work for large corporations, dramatically increasing market concentration across a variety of industries, etc. all point in the opposite direction. AI and automation stand to blow open this trend, already 50+ years in the making.

Particularly, mass mobilization of the "people" seems less and less relevant to winning wars. Gone are the days of massive corps-sized formations carrying out operations in warfare. Modern militaries are shrinking — both China and Russia embarked on a dramatic downscaling in order to strengthen their militaries. New technologies like autonomous drones, autonomous artillery systems, which are already being produced, will only compound this trend. This is crucial in that many historians point to the need to "mobilize the people," as a determinant factor in "the people" getting widespread political rights.

What happens when "the people" are largely irrelevant to winning wars? When small groups of professionals can outclass mass mobilized armies? IDK, it isn't something we've seen since the advent of the stirrup.

But I would point to an assessment made by Michelle Alexander in her "The New Jim Crow." There she says the problem for African Americans isn't that elites want to oppress them to extract their labor. It's that their labor is increasingly becoming irrelevant to elites. As she notes, African American communities with high rates of poverty are more the "canary in the coal mine," here than anything else. It does seem that most of "the people's" labor will become increasingly irrelevant, as will their ability to provide military service.

IMO, this points more in the direction we saw with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of feudalism (although obviously it will take a quite different path), then the situation that gave rise to Hitler and Stalin.

This political elite forgets that it is there not to impose its opinions on its citizens, but to carry out the will of the people. Because this political elite does not want to carry out the will of the people, it attempts to persecute those who do as "populists".

Is it? But then the "people's" will often is to do some pretty nasty things. Massacre the Jews, again and again, disenfranchise and segregate African Americans, etc.? Is it necessarily the case that Eisenhower was acting illegitimately when he federalized the Arkansas national guard to allow black students to attend school unmolested by rioters? Certainly, he was acting against the will of the people. Or was St. Bernard of Clairvaux abusing his considerable political clout in admonishing the Germans to stop carrying out pogroms on the Jews?

Consider that if authority is founded solely on the aggregate "general will" then there could be no challenge to a dystopia like "A Brave New World," since it is a society its citizens overwhelmingly support.

And there is to consider cases where the general will is too inchoate and divided to lead much of anything. Being angry about problems is not equivalent with knowing how to solve them.

Oh, right, Trump, the anti-realist philosopher. Meanwhile in reality

My favorite Gilliani soundbite:

"But truth is truth right?"
"No, truth isn't truth."

I also found the title for: "Post-Truth and the Controversy over Postmodernism. Or, was Trump Reading Foucault?" quite amusing.

Unfortunately, while Newman has some very good analysis in there, he is too concerned with defending his own philosophical "school," and seemingly biased against the "Trump crowd," and so misses some important nuances. He paints supporters of the former President with a broad brush, and misses the small, but influential radical set who have swam in the waters of continental philosophy and identity movements, and adapted them to the Trumpian mileue.


https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/acbe140d-c732-4842-940d-754b6d063ef6

It's an interesting area:

Moreover, tactics of information warfare initiated by so-called “postmodern” terrorists of the 1990s would, by the 2010s, take an epistemological turn, sewing global anxiety about the instability of knowledge and truth itself. Throughout the 1990s the Neue Rechte increasingly aimed its rhetorical ammunition at the stability of historical truth and the German culture of remembrance by engaging in historical revisionism. Epistemic chaos was further deepened by a trend of left-wing apostasy to the Neue Rechte, culminating in recent years in a lateral politics that uses the instability of truth to its advantage. In an intellectual turn referred to in this dissertation as “right-wing postmodernism,” the Neue Rechte of the 1990s and beyond has successfully weaponized anxiety concerning the knowability of facts, from its attack on the liberal media to its online disinformation campaigns in recent years. While other nations such as the US and Britain have experienced their own “post-truth” climates in which concepts such as “alternative facts” and “fake news” abound to discordian effect, in Germany, historical memory is the specific target of the Neue Rechte’s campaign

Someone with more time than me would do well to look at the cross over between esotericism and these trends, because they seem to be a pathway towards a full blown anti-realism. Or to let 4chan (discussing Julius Evola and Aliester Crowley) speak for itself:



Actually, the whole evolution of "post-religion" esotericism is very interesting. It's an area where tradition reigns supreme as a source of authority, and yet one cannot delve into pre-19th century Western esoterica without seeing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of God and divine love/unity everywhere, at the very core. So, the shift to a largely areligious, even anti-religious frame is interesting and I've never seen it explained. The old frames are very much absolute, but the replacement of Absolute Spirit with the Absolute Individual in magical idealism totally shifts the focus, while the anti-rationalism and view of discursive knowledge as chains, barriers to freedom, radically alters the ground.

On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.

The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.

Related, I found the opening here quite funny. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/tom-cotton-new-york-times/677546/

:rofl:

I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason.

So to, eliminitivist and reductive paths to some varieties of relativism don't deny the purview of reason. Rather, they claim that reason reveals that some phenomena fall fully on the appearance side of the reality/appearance distinction, and are explained/have their reasons in something else. This variety of relativism isn't even a true relativism IMO.

I don't think Rorty generally falls into this trap, although he might come close in the ways he sometimes describes Wittgenstein's PI as seemingly absolutely decisive re questions of how "language can hitch to the world." In sections of Philosophy as Cultural Politics, he sometimes seems to get dangerously close to absolutizing clefts in being, fully excising parts from the whole, in a way I don't think is helpful or warranted, even by his own standards. But from this one cleft, a lot seems to follow, like the arguments for eliminitivism and against "objective reality." I think Brandom has a decent critique of these, but it misses the main point IMO, which is the rush to dispense with fairly essential elements of human experience because some prior, absolutized cleft in being appears to make them impossible to account for.

Solubility is not a property of salt but a relation between salt and water.

Right, I would think the relationship to the topic would be that "smelling lemony" appears to be a relation between lemons and people.

I don't think changes in logic affect the larger issue, which is that, upon close inspection, relations don't end up being some sort of special case of properties, or somehow more ephemeral, they end up being the only type of property.

Epistemicly, there is no way to discover a non-relational property. Properties refer to how things interact with other things or how parts of one thing interact with each other. There is no possible means of discovering the properties any substance has when it interacts "with nothing." "In-itself" properties are a mirage, bare posits. The most common sort of these truly arelational properties proposed in modern metaphysics is that of the bare substratum, the sheer haecciety that universals or tropes are said to "attach to" so that substances aren't "just the sum of their properties."

But no one seems particularly happy with bare substratum. They are an embarrassment required to deal with the Identity of Indiscernibles. And in any event, if we believe they exist, we believe they are required to properly explain interactions and are revealed through them. Even bare substratum don't "exist in themselves" alone, they explain why discrete objects exist and can relate to one another.

Likewise, the Problem of the Many introduces a similar set of problems re substances, motivating mereological nihilism or various weird sorts of work arounds like the claim that when Tibbles the cat lies on a mat, there are actually billions of cats there (or no cat and just "particles arranged cat-wise").

I would think the mereological nihilists has a strong point if they didn't tend to rely heavily on the idea of truly fundemental "particles."

Primary qualities as single predications - the mass of the leaf; secondary properties as relations between the leaf and the observer.

If we take the indirect realists' concerns about anthropomorphizing seriously, I think we have to throw out the primary/secondary quality distinction. It is, after all, a distinction born out of the human nervous system. If a property shows up in one sense, e.g., color, it is deemed less real. If a property shows up in sight, hearing, touch, and the vestibular sense, e.g. extension, it becomes "primary." And in any case, primary properties require references to interactions to define.

How does one explain how an object is spherical without reference to either other things or how parts of that thing relate to the whole? Use of the terms "center," "surface," etc. have already begun speaking of how parts of the object relate the other parts. "A round plane figure whose boundary (the circumference) consists of points equidistant from a fixed point (the center)," speaks of relations. Where is the in itself that exists without reference to interaction?

Mass likewise is at the very least only known through interaction. I am not saying you can't have a well developed metaphysics where primary properties play a role, but they will be known through and defined by relations. And physics would tend to suggest that we could always claim that such knowledge ends of "mediated" in some ways. So the ideal of direct / "in-itself" doesn't seem like a good standard in the first place.

But we don't want a strange world of nothing but particles arranged x-wise or one undifferentiated process either. We'd like to say cats exist on mats (and just one at one time and place), that lemons are yellow, that rocks have mass and shape, etc. I am just unconvinced that these can be properly be dealt with fully on the nature side of the Nature/Geist distinction.

Salt is water-soluble. This is a commonly-held property of salt.

But salt only dissolves in water if it is placed in water. When salt isn't in water, salt doesn't dissolve in water. So is salt water soluble in-itself or does water construct the solubility of salt?

Is water-solublity a property of salt or is salt-dissolving a property of water? Or are these properties of neither because they only show up when the two interact? Salt doesn't dissolve in water if the water is cold enough, so it would appear that the enviornment might be constructing the solubility as well.

Would these interactions be direct then?

Two quotes from recent readings that I think get to the core of the whole 'things known "in-themselves"' issue.

To be a substance (thing-unit) is to function as a thing-unit in various situations. And to have a property is to exhibit this property in various contexts. ('The only fully independent substances are those which-like people-self-consciously take themselves to be units.)

As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes. With Kant, the process philosopher wants to identify what a thing is with what it does (or, at any rate, can do). After all, even on the basis of an ontology of substance and property, processes are epistemologically fundamental. Without them, a thing is inert, undetectable, disconnected from the world's causal commerce, and inherently unknowable. Our only epistemic access to the absolute properties of things is through inferential triangulation from their modus operandi-from the processes through which these manifest themselves. In sum, processes without substantial entities are perfectly feasible in the conceptual order of things, but substances without processes are effectively inconceivable.

Things as traditionally conceived can no more dispense with dispositions than they can dispense with properties. Accordingly, a substance ontologist cannot get by without processes. If his things are totally inert - if they do nothing - they are pointless. Without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositional properties, substance lie outside our cognitive reach. One can only observe what things do, via their discernible effects; what they are, over and above this, is something that always involves the element of conjectural imputation. And here process ontology takes a straight-forward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.

The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from it in interaction with others. And so a substance metaphysics of the traditional sort paints itself into the embarrassing comer of having to treat substances ·as bare (propertyless) particulars [substratum] because there is no nonspeculative way to say what concrete properties a substance ever has in and of itself. But a process metaphysics is spared this embarrassment because processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process-unlike a substance -can simply be what it does. And the idea of process enters into our experience directly and as such.

Nicholas Rescher - "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy"

It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or “unveil” their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience thus reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. Meditating on this leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. In a word, existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not
static.

...by metaphysical reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose (a metaphysical thought experiment) that there were a real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it (unless it had created it), since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. And if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference even to itself....To be real is to make a difference.

---

One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all.

The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the “self revelation of being,” that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.

W. Norris Clarke - "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics"