The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. — Joshs

I agree.

In phenomenology, the ‘horizon’ is, in general terms, that larger context of meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a ‘fusion of horizons’, then so it always involves the formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation—moreover, inasmuch as our own history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process of understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#LinUnd

So, if we're to avoid the pitfall of talking past each other, we must come to an agreement as to what the words we use mean, — Agent Smith

To do so would require that we use words, yes? Hence the hopelessness of starting from scratch. And what works in math won't work in philosophy. 'Language is received like the law,' and meaning evolves historically.

As for me, I'm trying my level best to get an idea of what you're trying to say here. Do you mean, à la Wittgenstein, that language is inadequate for philosophy? If yes, why make all this effort to convey your thoughts? If no, why bring up Wittgenstein at all? — Agent Smith

One way to grok Wittgenstein is as language trying to climb out of its own stupidity or automatism, as a snake trying to shed its own skin. In the same way a developing mind is trying to slide out of its own confusion and prejudice, but it can't help but relying on the little it knows as it finds its way about. 'Thought' is trying to figure out its own laws, its own frailties, struggling toward clarity and mastery, illuminating its own darkness Socratically.

Why try ? Lots of motives. Among others, I get a deep pleasure from doing philosophy, almost like playing on a conceptual saxophone (I often have Coltrane playing beside me as I write.) Whether I'm good, bad, or average....I feel as if I was born to do philosophy, like this infinite quest is the point...at least for my personality type. On the road again, toward a slightly more comprehensive and stylish understanding of reality, toward that point at infinity, a limit never attained.

it seems the notion of private languages applies also to groups/societies/tribes if you will. — Agent Smith

Yeah, this is cultural relativism. You can think of each tribe as having a generic personality and the world as a room full of these 'people' who never exactly understand one another. Interpretation/translation is an infinite process.

Herder’s theories of interpretation and translation both rest on a certain epoch-making insight of his: Whereas such eminent Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire had normally still held that, as Hume put it, “mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange” (1748: section VIII, part I, 65), Herder discovered, or at least saw more clearly than anyone before him, that this was false, that peoples from different historical periods and cultures vary tremendously in their concepts, beliefs, values, (perceptual and affective) sensations, and so forth.
...
Given this principle, and the gulf that consequently often initially divides an interpreter’s own thought from that of the person whom he wants to interpret, interpretation is often an extremely difficult task, requiring extraordinary efforts on the part of the interpreter.
...
In particular, the interpreter often faces, and needs to resist, a temptation falsely to assimilate the thought that he is interpreting to someone else’s, especially his own.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean

If you want to talk about culture as 'really' just being the performance of bodies, I guess you can. If a room is dancing the Charleston, though, you might want to focus on the form of the dance, 'imperfectly' realized by each dancer. If you allow the dance to slowly mutate, then you have a metaphor for culture. — jas0n

I’m not sure what a ‘body’ is in general. I get that in this example ‘body’ is point of view. I like
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body of embodiment as a gestalt figure-ground ensemble.

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm. But if , as I am arguing , there are only ever individual interpretations of the norm or
standard, then there as many Charlestons as there dancers of it. Which isn’t to say that one cannot aim to improve one’s performance of the dance, only that the standard one is aiming for is still one’s own version of the ‘correct’ Charleston.

You have a dangerous metaphor for culture of
you assume that the mutation of the dance need not be understood from the point of view of each dancer. Otherwise you will fail to understand why there are so many micro-cultures within a larger culture , and why a the red states and the blue states are at war even though they are all supposedly part of the same larger 21st century western dance.

I like psychologist George Kelly’s view of shared culture.

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”

Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.

“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”

It is true that each party's participation in interaction changes the other's way of being, but the question is whether there is not an underlying thematic consistency that is maintained in each person throughout all their interactions , a self-consistency that resists being usurped by a larger self-other ‘system'. For Kelly a mutuality, fusion, jointness cannot be assumed simply because each party is in responsive communication with the other. One party can be affected by the interaction by succeeding in subsuming the other's perspective and as a result feeling an intimate and empathetic bond with the other. At the same time, in the same ‘joint' encounter, the other party may become more and more alienated from the first , having failed to subsume the first party's way of thinking and finding the first party to be angering, upsetting and threatening.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my ways of thinking; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

But if , as I am arguing , there are only ever individual interpretations of the norm or standard, then there as many Charlestons as there dancers of it. — Joshs

In a way, yes, but the point of a single name is to indicate an abstraction.

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm. — Joshs

You are trying to make a point using logic, yes? That feels like taking 'for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.'

You have a dangerous metaphor for culture of you assume that the mutation of the dance need not be understood from the point of view of each dancer. — Joshs

I think you are projecting or worrying too much about political ramifications. To put it playfully, I know that we are all irreducible non-fungible snowflakes. But rational inquiry (philosophy, science) seeks for some kind of truth about our shared situation. To deny this is to demonstrate it, for what can such a denial mean if it does not pretend toward the truth of our shared situation. Metaphysical attempts to specify this vague truthy stuff and this vague shared situation end up containing contradictions and possibly ineradicable ambiguities. One of my pet theories (inspired by Peirce and others) is that our signs have only as much 'precision' or 'resolution' as we have needed them to have for practical purposes. I think of how rich the 'concept' of 'the world' is in ordinary language. Or take 'truth' or 'real'. We are never done trying to figure out what we mean by these marks. What 'meaning' means is itself elusive.

But rational inquiry (philosophy, science) seeks for some kind of truth about our shared situation. To deny this is to demonstrate it, for what can such a denial mean if it does not pretend toward the truth of our shared situation. — jas0n

This is my model of the aim and capability of science. It is a relativistic pragmatist way to keep a certain notion of progress without assuming a ‘real’ world independent of our construals of the world.

In my view , the aim of truth is anticipative
consistency. As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. We could then say this is teleological, that over time our revised constructions of the world produce anticipations that allow us to anticipate events as more and more intricately, multidimensionally and assimlatively consistent with our precious knowledge. Note her that this is not a mere mirroring of intransigent external
world but a continually refashioning of the world in more an more self-consistent ways. The way the world appears is always exquisitely responsive to the ways we construe it. So the only assumption being made here about some a priori nature of reality is the at it is endlessly amenable to reconstruction in more and more intimate ways.

As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. — Joshs

I agree with this constant experimentation (usually against a background of repetition.) This 'construal' is not so badly approximated by 'nailing down unchangeable facts.' The point of finding enduring structure is to exploit it in the future.

We could then say this is teleological, that over time our revised constructions of the world produce anticipations that allow us to anticipate events as more and more intricately, multidimensionally and assimlatively consistent with our precious knowledge. — Joshs

A sophisticated view. The 'real world' lingers here perhaps as the possibility of a surprise. We might ask why we must anticipate, and look for the source of our care. We are mammals that evolved from simpler less-anticipative forms of life.

Note her that this is not a mere mirroring of intransigent external
world but a continually refashioning of the world in more an more self-consistent ways. — Joshs

I can related, but I note that a normed critical discourse that strives toward consensus seems to be implied.

So the only assumption being made here about some a priori nature of reality is the at it is endlessly amenable to reconstruction in more and more intimate ways. — Joshs

Reasonable. This downplays the everyday difference between 'facts' and 'interpretations.' I mean to say that the 'top layer' (philosophical blah blah ) is more amenable than daily practical talk (talk of hands and eyes and ears and trucks and puppies.)

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.
— Joshs

You are trying to make a point using logic, yes? That feels like taking 'for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.' — jas0n

This isnt formal logic. It is the logic of construing not conceptualization in the traditional sense of the term. The difference is that the presuppositions that are in play in the above paragraph aren’t assumed to be sitting there statically in some mental conceptual file, to be drawn on and placed within a propositional logical form. Instead, the presuppositions (imperfection implies a standard or norm) are formed afresh, and only mean what they mean within the specific context of the argument I am presenting to you. They work freshly within the current context of meaning. Do I believe these freshly working constructs are ‘correct’ or the ‘norm’? They are normative in that they are a way of organizing new events on the basis of likeness with respect to previous events. That is, they allow me to recognize patterns within events. But the constructs which organize events into such patterns only retain their ‘primacy’ to the extent that new events dont invalidate them. That is to say , as long as they retain their effectiveness in anticipating new events. So the world tells me when my constructs are valid or invalid. But this ‘world’ that fits or doesn’t fit my expectations is world that comes already pre-interpreted by me It is my version of the world that can reward or disappoint me. So there is a radical circularity here, what I believe Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle.

As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. — Joshs

Is this the statement of an unchangeable fact?

So the world tells me when my constructs are valid or invalid. But this ‘world’ that fits or doesn’t fit my expectations is world that comes already pre-interpreted by me It is my version of the world that can reward or disappoint me. — Joshs

I basically agree, but do you see the indirect realism peeking out this? You say 'my version' of the world, which is your perspective on the one world we share. Yes, these 'perspectives' are hardly only geometrical. We all see the world in terms of projected futures constructed from our unique histories, but the philosopher seeks to transcend such bias and incarnate something like an ideal perspective. As Hegel might say, we are bearers of historically evolved software. I study the great thinkers to download the 'best' version of this softwhere and hope to add to it. The movement is toward some ideal community, toward wisdom-power-grace, toward 'God' if you like, which is maybe a projection of an ideal mind, an end of inquiry, point at infinity.

As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous.
— Joshs

Is this the statement of an unchangeable fact? — jas0n

It is a construct that must expose itself to potential invalidation by events at every moment that I make use of it. It only continues to be ‘true’ to this extent. If in some way the world as I interpret it suddenly no longer appears to me to change relative to the previous moment , then I would have to attempt to alter my axes of understanding. In the meantime I would have to suffer through the experience of confusion and disorientation in a world that has become less structured for me.

But the constructs which organize events into such patterns only retain their ‘primacy’ to the extent that new events dont invalidate them. — Joshs

Sure. I think Quine allowed even logical principles to be put in doubt by experience. Neurath's boat. The dance can mutate in lots of ways, but such mutation must be continuous or gradual for intelligibility to be maintained. This is one way to understand the necessity/existence of time in Hegel/Kojève. We can't jump to the in. We can't jump to the summarizing thesis. For all the words change their meaning within or upon that journey. The thesis only makes proper sense if one follows the evolution of those meanings within the dialogue. I can only critique current norms within the framework of those norms. Language is received like the law. If I want to rebel against a time-worn conceptuality, then that rebellion must take place within or as that same time-worn conceptuality. The system tries to climb out of itself. To be human is to try to be superhuman.

It is a construct that must expose itself to potential invalidation by events at every moment that I make use of it. — Joshs

That smells like a falsifiable hypothesis, which is not a bad thing !

If in some way the world as I interpret it suddenly no longer appears to me to change relative to the previous moment , then I would have to attempt to alter my axes of understanding. In the meantime I would have to suffer through the experience of confusion and disorientation in a world that has become less structured for me. — Joshs

:up:

Smooth functioning ceases and troubleshooting begins. (This is an oversimplification, but what aphorism isn't?)

I basically agree, but do you see the indirect realism peeking out this? You say 'my version' of the world, which is your perspective on the one world we share. Yes, these 'perspectives' are hardly only geometrical. We all see the world in terms of projected futures constructed from our unique histories, but the philosopher seeks to transcend such bias and incarnate something like an ideal perspective. As — jas0n

But isnt my version part of this world? And every time I elaborate or revise my version I am contributing another piece to the world. The question then is how is a world shared by participants who are each constantly contributing new elements , but new elements which mean different things to different persons who interact. The image is more one of a multitude
of worlds , and each of us can only describe things from within our own sphere. There can ever be anything ‘same’ between two or more people, just as there can never be anything same within one person’s perspective. So really my own experience is already that of expereincing slightly different worlds from moment to moment.

I would have to conclude that there doesnt seem to be anything pragmatically useful to gain by the notion of a shared world. I prefer to ‘sharing with others’ the idea of subsuming another’s perspective from my own vantage because that is all that I can ever experience.

Would it make sense to say that I share the world
with myself moment to moment? If not , how can I share it with others? And why can’t I share it with myself? Isn’t it because the effect of being in time is that of altering who I just was a moment ago?

So I don’t share myself with myself moment to moment, I divide and transform myself. It seems to me that my experience of ‘others’ must be understood in this way also. World isn’t a space that can be shared , it is a ‘worlding’.

But isnt my version part of this world? And every time I elaborate or revise my version I am contributing another piece to the world. — Joshs

Yes. I can't remember who it was, but some thinker said that each movement of every fly is part of history. What if Joyce had expanded Ulysses to 50000 pages? I think Andy Warhol messed with just letting his tape recorder scoop up all the babble of him and his friends.

We hunt for density. We like models with more bang per buck, perhaps as we like nutrient-dense food. 'Most' art and 'most' philosophy is bad, repetitive, devoid of invention. Too much 'realism' (no filtering, no selection ) is a bore.

I would have to conclude that there doesnt seem to be anything pragmatically useful to gain by the notion of a shared world. I prefer to ‘sharing with others’ the idea of subsuming another’s perspective from my own vantage because that is all that I can ever experience. — Joshs

Well, that's as you like, but I find this retreat back to the 'I' somewhat questionable. The symbolic ego is part of the OS, as I see it. It's just grammatical habit. The solipsist wouldn't turn around because everything was always in front of him anyway.

Come down from the theoretical clouds for a moment. Consider a murder trial. I think it's a crisp enough empirical matter to ask whether Jones shot Smith. In the real world, the shared world, not just in your dream or my dream. Or one can ask whether Jones is the biological father of Smith. I don't think what I gesture toward with the formal indication of 'shared world' can be finally and happily specified. It's not just 'atoms and void' or 'medium sized dry goods.'

Thought you might like to glance at Derrida on Peirce in Of Grammatology. — jas0n

Also, in case you've never sampled it, Kojeve's Hegel. — jas0n

Yuck. Now you are truly testing my resolve not to be so routinely dismissive of PoMo. But this is dreadful stuff. Abstract word salad. :sad:

I'll look into the difference, but if you feel like trying to summarize, I'll be glad to read it. Dyadic plays into the rest of Western philosophy, which is not necessarily good but of course familiar. — jas0n

I can't recommend a single good source on Peirce. There are the collections of his scattered works, but they leave out much of the good stuff.

But for example - given your maths background - I loved this Kauffman paper.

And Peirce was sharp on real numbers - an example of the secondary literature on that.

But on the Saussure vs Peirce difference, I should have added that Peirce was offering a completely general model of semiosis, not just a model of human language. So he went well beyond language games to a theory of modelling relations that applied to any kind of biological modelling system, and then jumped the epistemic cut to apply this systems analysis to a pansemiotically self-organising Cosmos itself.

So the difference in metaphysical ambition is simply vast.

Then on the dyadic-triadic distinction, the point of Peircean semiosis is that his triad of Thirdness incorporates both the dyadic (as Secondness) and the monistic (as Firstness).

So yes, all metaphysics finds itself grounded in the dichotomy, the dialectic, the unity of opposites. The concrete secondness of a relation that is a reaction. But the Peircean triad includes that business of symmetry breaking and follows it all the way to its stable conclusion as a realm of stably broken asymmetry, or hierarchically organised Thirdness. The Cosmos as it becomes once regulated by the fixity of its developed habits.

Again, Peirce was arguing a triadic view of causality at the cosmological level. Saussure was only talking about linguistics, and splitting the world into a simple twosome of the modeller and the modelled. So - in the over-simplified retelling - Saussurean semiotics was easy to collapse back into the dualism of Cartesian cognitive representationalism. The great historical mistake in metaphysics that Peirce was doing everything to overcome with his semiotics and pragmatism.

As I said, Saussure was not in fact such a dummy. See Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology, Dustin S. Stoltz (2019).

Cultural analysts in sociology typically cite the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to motivate a narrow theory of meaning. In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary; (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs; (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary; and finally (4) the idea that he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was a follower of Durkheim). Saussure’s project, rather, was specific to linguistics, and mainly one of theoretical and methodological clarification regarding phonology. Saussure never intended his analytical model of phonology to apply to the real operation of meaning in general, as done by contemporary interpreters and, furthermore, never argued that meaning is arbitrary.

Yuck. Now you are truly testing my resolve not to be so routinely dismissive of PoMo. But this is dreadful stuff. Abstract word salad. — apokrisis

Well thanks for checking it out and giving an honest reaction.

I'll check those links out soon and get back to you. Exercise time.

Consider a murder trial. I think it's a crisp enough empirical matter to ask whether Jones shot Smith. In the real world, the shared world, not just in your dream or my dream. Or one can ask whether Jones is the biological father of Smith. I don't think what I gesture toward with the formal indication of 'shared world' can be finally and happily specified. It's not just 'atoms and void' or 'medium sized dry goods.' — jas0n

Here I can’t help thinking how Wittgenstein would respond. What would be of interest to him is not simply the fact of the matter ( whether Jones shot Smith), as if that has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria, but how the context determines the particular way that a ‘fact of the matter’ has its sense.

Can’t get around the laws of thermodynamics and entropy and all of our personal hopes and dreams and feelings are beholden to these. Sounds a bit totalizing to me. — Joshs

But doesn't it in fact predict that humans will cook themselves to death rather than voluntarily giving up on accelerating the fossil fuel burning?

It is rather a mystery that humans could be so stupid. The writing was on the wall concerning climate change even in the 1970s. But if entropification is its own cosmic imperative, then it becomes easier to see why humanity acts as if entrained to the will of fossil carbon.

It wants its release. It doesn't care about us except as vehicles expressing that burning ambition. :grin:

So if you want personification or subjectivity, we can grant that to the dead bulk of prehistoric trees and planckton. This is there unfinished business we humans are doing here. We are completing the biomass recycling that has been frustrated by accidents of geology for so many hundreds of millions of years.

We owe it to this past, even if it greatly shortens our own future.

I dunno. I prefer to think history is reinvented every moment. But then I’ve never been very good at obeying laws, even the laws of thermodynamics. — Joshs

Sure, you want to bend your metaphysics to suit a socio-political agenda. Pluralism wins, or whatever.

But you miss the critical point in talking about obeying laws - as if Nature has that kind of Newtonian/Cartesian structure.

The point is that the laws of thermodynamics encode the most general cosmic constraints ... and so, reciprocally, also its most generic local degrees of freedom.

What isn't constrained is free to be the case. It is a possibility that can be concretely expressed.

So the cosmos isn't ruled by laws that determine every "free" action. It is ruled by constraints that - due to their limited reach - underwrite actual creative freedom.

Of course, how you exploit the absolute freedoms granted to you by the fundamental laws of the universe are up to you. That will just be judged in the long-run in terms of your ability to maintain some chosen identity as an autopoietic dynamical balance.

As an individual, the Laws of Thermodynamics don't restrict your heroin intake or love of jumping off 10 storey buildings. As a society, they don't restrict us to remain entrained to the more mindlless entropic desires of fossil carbon.

But in the long-run, the statistical outcomes rule. How an organism spends its freedoms gets judged by history. How long did it last? How far did it spread? What was the spatiotemporal span of its particular state of coherence and persistence?

So you make the usual socially-expected statement about "being a free thinking and feeling individual, not a mindless entropy dissipating machine". You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints.

Yet the bigger picture is still the fact that constraints and freedoms are reciprocally yoked together as the two poles of being which make for a cosmos in the first place. Without general limitation, there is no possibility of there being any particular reaction against those limits.

How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. How can you imagine living in a world of maximum social pluralism unless you have also the backdrop of a maximal social conformity to kick against?

Even if facism didn't exist, the anti-facist would have to absolutely invent it to make sense of their socially-constructed community. The threat of facism would have to be made real, to make the anti-fascism more than some kind of solipsistic and meaningless PoMo gesture.

The Proud Boys must make Antifa real, and Antifa must make the Proud Boys real. We saw this social dynamic playing out in realtime over in Trump's amerika.

Meanwhile - behind the smokescreen of civil outrage - business continued as usual for global heating. Trump's handlers pushed through all the regulatory changes needed to maintain the prevailing rate of fossil fuel burning.

as if that has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria — Joshs

But consider:

...as if 'has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria' has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria...

Consider also that such 'criteria' are tacit and received like the law, so that 'convention' (a word I use) is somewhat misleading. The sign system has its 'meaning' in the world of revolvers and juries and bodies called 'Smith' and bodies called 'Jones.'

Far as Wittgenstein goes, I think On Certainty points at the same abyss/ground as Popper's swamp does. 'Doubt' occurs 'within' or against a background of non-doubt or automatism. I manifest trust in the intelligibility in the most radical questioning I can manage by asking the question, just as stepping out of bed manifests an expectation that the floor will catch my feet.

you want to bend your metaphysics to suit a socio-political agenda. Pluralism wins, or whatever. — apokrisis

I wouldnt say agenda. I’d say the eternal transformation of agendas. Is that still an agenda?

The point is that the laws of thermodynamics encode the most general cosmic constraints ... and so, reciprocally, also its most generic local degrees of freedom.

What isn't constrained is free to be the case. It is a possibility that can be concretely expressed.

So the cosmos isn't ruled by laws that determine every "free" action. It is ruled by constraints that - due to their limited reach - underwrite actual creative freedom — apokrisis

So freedom is play within an overarching frame? Free variations on a theme?

In the long-run, the statistical outcomes rule. How an organism spends its freedoms gets judged by history. — apokrisis

So ‘underwriting freedom’ are the objective constraints that allow for a statistical calculation of historical probabilities. History as pre-assigned boundary conditions of behavior, within which there is freedom to excel or screw up.

So you make the usual socially-expected statement about "being a free thinking and feeling individual, not a mindless entropy dissipating machine". You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints.

How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. How can you imagine living in a world of maximum social pluralism unless you have also the backdrop of a maximal social conformity to kick against? — apokrisis

A Romantic free-thinking and feeling individual implies more oppressively severe fundamental constraints than an entropy dissipating system. Such a Cartesian subjectivity is only free to think what it already knows at some level. A Nietzschean free-thinker is also free to think within a value system that constrains him, and is free to eventually destroy and replace that value system, but it is no longer the same ‘him’ that replaces the prior values , for he is changed along with the system. So the I that espouses my freedom is not the same I that overthrows my current values. The ‘I’ is thus finite, and along with it history in general and anything else that can be considered ‘general’ , ‘generic’ ,‘universal’ or even ‘pluralistic’ or ‘conformist’. The world of maximum social pluralism and the world of maximum social conformity (authoritarianism) are two poles of a binary, a general economy of relations thought from the vantage of a particular system of values(multiculturalism, liberal tolerance). But that makes the pluralism-conformity binary a finite, historically contingent formation. So there are the laws one breaks within a system of values , while remaining within that system:

The Proud Boys must make Antifa real, and Antifa must make the Proud Boys real. — apokrisis

And then there is the overthrow of the system of values:

Yet the bigger picture is still the fact that constraints and freedoms are reciprocally yoked together as the two poles of being which make for a cosmos in the first place. Without general limitation, there is no possibility of there being any particular reaction against those limits. — apokrisis

An even bigger picture begins with the overthrow of a value system which depicts a cosmos structured by specific objective laws, and a history that can be probabilistically calculated. It proceeds from this overthrow to what Nietzsche called a revaluation of all values, not a tolerant pluralism or celebration of subjective freedom but a yoking of current self and value system to a non-calculable other history and other self-to-be, an eternal return of the same , always different self, history and values.

I think On Certainty points at the same abyss/ground as Popper's swamp does. 'Doubt' occurs 'within' or against a background of non-doubt or automatism. I manifest trust in the intelligibility in the most radical questioning I can manage, just as stepping out of bed manifests an expectation that the floor will catch my feet. — jas0n

These ‘hinge propositions’ are not meant as irreducible grounds for all my deliberations. They are the preconditions for language games, but that does not mean that they are situated outside of the the context of the game as general types or categories. There is no element of language that is situated outside of the immediate context of the use of words for Wittgenstein. So these ‘ automatisms’ , types, categories are themselves freshly determined by immediate context of use.
Popper, on the other hand, believed that such ‘non-doubt’ automatisms stand apart from the contingency of the context of use.

Your reading of Witt here reminds me of Hacker’s, which is critiqued here:

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-object relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.” (Hutchinson and Read)

But for example - given your maths background - I loved this Kauffman paper. — apokrisis

Actually saw some of this in Spencer-Brown. I like the circle notation (negation and conjunction simultaneous, clever...).

This stood out too.

In mathematics the grin without the cat is often obtained through a process of distillation. The structure is traversed again and again and each time the inessential is thrown away. At last only a small and potent pattern remains. This is the grin of the cat. That grin is a pattern that fits into many contexts, a key to many doors. It is this multiplicity of uses for a single symbolic form that makes mathematics useful. It is the search for such distillation of pattern that is the essence of mathematical thought.

And Peirce was sharp on real numbers - an example of the secondary literature on that. — apokrisis

I like the battle over the continuum. Recently I looked into nonstandard analysis, and I might get around to smooth infinitesimal analysis (which is maybe more what Peirce had in mind.) I also like Bishop's constructivism (which makes the real numbers countable, since each is basically a specified program.) Brouwer's choice sequences are psychedelic. In any case, the tension between intuitions of the discrete and the continuous has fascinated me for quite a while.

then jumped the epistemic cut to apply this systems analysis to a pansemiotically self-organising Cosmos itself. — apokrisis

This is the part that's hard to grok. I can understand viewing an organism from the outside and contemplating the way it materially encodes a model that expects and shifts attention, etc. I can't understand where the 'camera' is positioned when the Cosmos looks at itself, since the inside/outside framing seems to no longer apply, unless it is some kind of Hegelian thing where the stuff on the other side of the concept is itself just more concept and the mental/physical distinction breaks down. What's the relation of this idea to indirect realism?

I don't know exactly what you are getting at, and I'm not sure I agree with those interpretations. Perhaps you can elaborate or make more of a case.

I'm interested in describing reality (no small ambition!), and part of that may be clarifying what Wittgenstein or whoever 'really' meant, but sometimes I get the feeling that you are leaning on them as authorities, or at least trying to use them as crowbars against my own supposed reverence. That's within your purview, but that's water off a duck's back on this side. And (I say this playfully!) an 'epistemological anarchist' as far on the left as you are can't give me too much grief for it, since I can hardly get you to confess that we live in the same world.

The third point concerning this “author-function” is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a “realistic” dimension as we speak of an individual’s “profundity” or “creative” power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en/

I take what I can use from the famous windbags. My authority is a 'rationality' which is never done figuring out what it's supposed to be.

Your reading of Witt here reminds me of Hacker’s, which is critiqued here: — Joshs

I have the first volume and never finished it, found it a bit tame and dry. I think my interpretation of Wittgenstein is pretty radical, or I know how to lean in that direction when called for. I really don't think our views are all that different. From my POV, you want to emphasize subjectivity-under-erasure, be more radical and open and free, push to the limit of intelligibly. I want to keep at least one foot on the mud. I find you pretty readable and respect your prose, but I detect in you less ambivalence than I feel in myself toward 'pomo' recklessness/indulgence. Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze.

You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints. — apokrisis

Nice!

How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. — apokrisis

The knight and the dragon...an enduring structure.

I detect in you less ambivalence than I feel in myself toward 'pomo' recklessness/indulgence. Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze. — jas0n

There are ways to mitigate against that haze. When in doubt, consult the empiricists, or those who at least have one foot in naturalism. My list of favorite pomo types who fit the bill include Shaun Gallagher , Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs, Matthee Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Michel Bitbol and Joseph Rouse. I find Rouse particularly valuable for his ability to connect philosophy of science, Heidegger , phenomenology and postmodernism.
Are you familiar with any of these?

One can say that language does not refer at all. I understand the case for that. 'Jones shot Smith' is not a 'picture' of reality-in-itself in any simple way. Other metaphors have their virtues. I don't pretend to have some sharp metaphysical description of what it means for a fact to be a fact. I don't have some final theory of truth or the real. All such theories tend to have holes in them, bite their own tail, run around against other 'necessary' assumptions. Specification reveals tensions in the network of blabber. It may be impossible to weave a totalizing coherent discourse, but is that itself an incoherent thesis?

Yet I'm fairly confident that our fancy theories are 'parasites' on a practical reality and its hazy ordinary language where Jones shot Smith or he didn't (admitting edge cases.)