But it is important to appreciate that it will never be the exact same sense, because the form of life or hinge making Moore’s assertion intelligible in the way that he means it is slowly morphing over time , but much more slowly than the empirical assertions and language games that it authorizes — Joshs

This is an interesting point, but I missed what follows from it. You go on to show how the duck-rabbit "game" is embedded in a host of other background conditions. And you draw attention to Witt's point that we don't apply a rule when we play this game. All fine, but what were you meaning to say about the slow changes that occur as a form of life "morphs along"? That the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable?

Certainly they made sense to them. But they don't make sense to us. Now, are we going to worry about whether they made sense simpiciter or in a non-relative sense of making sense. I hope not.

It's easy to dismiss their theories. But some of their questions survive to this day, in the form of logical paradoxes. (It's just that we don't draw the same conclusions from them.) They weren't idiots. — Ludwig V

They make sense to us insofar as we can see why they would have made sense to them, and that's about it, I'd say. The point was only that, absent empirical evidence or logical necessity, the plausibility of metaphysical speculations can only be assessed according to the degree to which they may or may not make intuitive sense, and of course that will vary somewhat from individual to individual.

Thus in saying that there can be no certainty regarding the truth of metaphysical speculations, I am not claiming that people cannot feel certain about them, but that whatever certainty they might feel is underdetermined.

All fine, but what were you meaning to say about the slow changes that occur as a form of life "morphs along"? That the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable? — J

I guess I’m trying to emphasize that concepts like truth, certainty and impossibility, whether applied to stable forms of life or more rapidly changing language games, may be used in such a way that they are assumed to be fastening themselves onto an unchanging ground or fact of the matter, when instead the ‘how’ that they establish only maintains itself through use, and use redefines the sense of what it has established ( the how is modified in its maintenance) . It’s not just that the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable, but that to play it is to use the meanings established by it, and to use the meanings is to reawaken and reinterpret its sense.

Got it, thanks.

I'm sorry I've not been here for so long.

I’m getting this concept of metaphysics from contemporary Continental authors, who apparently treat the term in a less technical and more encompassing way than the writers you are drawing from. — Joshs

H'm. Well, there's no stopping people using a term like metaphysics in a different way. But I can't set aside the difference between a theoretical stance, which seems baked into the concept and essentially different from a form of life which is the engagement of a living being with needs and desires (and hence values) in the world. Certainly, for Wittgenstein (though he doesn't put it this way) and for Heidegger, insistence on the latter is a fundamental part of their philosophies - IMO.

Does D have to say that he should not have doubted the "eternal truths"? Or that he should not have been inattentive to them? Does this amount to the same thing, if they're irresistible? — J

The difficulty is that "irresistible" seems to mean that he could not have doubted eternal truths. Well, only in the way that he can utter the sentence "I doubt the Law of Non-Contradiction". My complaint is that he can't follow through with the consequences of that doubt. It's the follow-up that makes it real. (I'm sure that you are thinking, "Oh, but one can doubt the LNC". In a sense, yes. But think about what one would do and say that puts flesh on the bones. Descartes doesn't give us that, on the excuse that his doubt is (merely methodical). I say that it's not a real doubt.)

Do you mean that we should acknowledge that someone, somewhere, could be taught to see a lion in the duck-rabbit?" If that's the idea, I agree; it is not strictly impossible. — J

We can utter the words. But we can't put any flesh on the bones. (If we could, we could see the lion in the picture.)

I think Ludwig, and maybe Moore, mean the first; my hand, when seen, has the property of self-evidence. — J

I'm doubtful about the concept of self-evidence. I think the point here is that a claim like "This is my hand" explains what it is to have a hand. If you insist on doubting that, I shall ask why. You don't have any reason beyond repeating "That hand might be an illusion", I shall not be impressed. I'll think you just don't understand what it is to have a hand or to see a hand. Contrast the situation when I explain that I have a prosthetic hand, not a real one.

I suppose I could see my hand but not be sure that "this is a hand," because I don't know the concept. — J

If I have a hand, it is part of my life. You might think differently and not have the same concept, but the hand will show up in your thinking in one way or another. Your supposition that it might not is empty - just a form of words.

So, is there a difference between "not being able to see the lion" and "not being able to not-see my hand"? Does either one equal "simply true"? I'll keep mum. — J

Well, I'm not sure what to say, either. But those cases are clearly not the same as the duck-rabbit, because there is no coherent alternative interpretation. So I'm driven to say, on the one hand that there's no reason to withhold "true" from either and that our seeing involves a process just like interpretation.

But it is important to appreciate that it will never be the exact same sense, because the form of life or hinge making Moore’s assertion intelligible in the way that he means it is slowly morphing over time , but much more slowly than the empirical assertions and language games that it authorizes. — Joshs

That's just like Heraclitus' river or Theseus' ship. I don't exactly disagree. But I also insist that I am the exact same person as I was 20 years ago. It's normal for things to change over time without losing their identity. However, one could say that we now see hands differently from Moore's day, because physics has revealed that solid objects are not what we thought they were.

They are agreeing that it is a drawing, that their task is to identify what it resembles, that the figure within it can be interpreted in different ways, they see enough detail in the image to recognize a duck or a rabbit. — Joshs

Yes. But I don't think that any of that is metaphysics. But those practices are embedded in our form of life.

or enough to produce the ‘odd fact’ of actually seeing something as something. — Joshs

H'm. I'm reluctant to say that seeing something as something is an odd fact. It seems normal to me. I would say that the odd fact is the puzzle picture.

Well, there's no stopping people using a term like metaphysics in a different way. But I can't set aside the difference between a theoretical stance, which seems baked into the concept and essentially different from a form of life which is the engagement of a living being with needs and desires (and hence values) in the world. Certainly, for Wittgenstein (though he doesn't put it this way) and for Heidegger, insistence on the latter is a fundamental part of their philosophies - IMO. — Ludwig V

You’re right that Wittgenstein equates philosophy with metaphysics and metaphysics with theory, but the situation is different with Heidegger:

Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of man.” It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself. (What is Metaphysics)

but the situation is different with Heidegger:

Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of man.” It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself. (What is Metaphysics)

Seems to be straying into the mystical there. Requiring understanding and knowing not just through the lens of the mind. But from other parts of the being.

You’re right that Wittgenstein equates philosophy with metaphysics and metaphysics with theory, but the situation is different with Heidegger: — Joshs

I must have misunderstood something. Heidegger understands our cognitive, theoretical, stance as "present-at-hand" and our real-life experience as "ready-to-hand". He analyses Descartes approach through presence-at-hand (which I'm equating to a theoretical stance and therefore methodical doubt) as implying a model seeing us as subjects, the world as object and knowledge as what links the two. These are what Heidegger calls ontological presuppositions and he therefore points out that this mode returns metaphysics to First Phiilosophy. Now, here's my confusion. Doesn't he also criticize this model because it does not begin to explain our everyday lives as active and engaged in the world - ready-to-hand? So, isn't the return of metaphysics part of his working through of a model which he does not deny, but which he wants to limit the role of to specialized occasions, positing "ready-to-hand" - as the model for our "real" lives.

Seems to be straying into the mystical there. Requiring understanding and knowing not just through the lens of the mind. But from other parts of the being. — Punshhh

Yes. I understand the parts of Heidegger that I understand. But there's much I don't understand and that I skirt round, hoping to avoid sinking into any marshes that are concealed there.

It’s not just that the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable, but that to play it is to use the meanings established by it, and to use the meanings is to reawaken and reinterpret its sense. — Joshs

Well, it will certainly be playable for as long as we (and the people we teach to play) are around, because we are the players. I agree that we cannot know what may happen afterwards. Nobody plays push-pin any more. No-one can rule out the possibility that the concepts necessary for duck-rabbit will disappear or change in such a way the game will no longer be played. But, by the same token, no-one can rule out the possibility that ii may last as long as human beings, or life on earth or till the heat death of the universe.

I must have misunderstood something. Heidegger understands our cognitive, theoretical, stance as "present-at-hand" and our real-life experience as "ready-to-hand". He analyses Descartes approach through presence-at-hand (which I'm equating to a theoretical stance and therefore methodical doubt) as implying a model seeing us as subjects, the world as object and knowledge as what links the two. These are what Heidegger calls ontological presuppositions and he therefore points out that this mode returns metaphysics to First Phiilosophy. Now, here's my confusion. Doesn't he also criticize this model because it does not begin to explain our everyday lives as active and engaged in the world - ready-to-hand? So, isn't the return of metaphysics part of his working through of a model which he does not deny, but which he wants to limit the role of to specialized occasions, positing "ready-to-hand" - as the model for our "real" lives. — Ludwig V

The ready to hand forms a totality of relevance, which is what Heidegger calls world. We use the hammer in order to hammer the nail, in order to build the house, in order to have shelter or pay our bills. This chain of in order to’s encompasses everything in my world relevant to my functioning in it. But the ready to hand doesn’t constitute the most primordial understanding of Being. If I understand a science in terms of a totality of relevant pragmatic relations between me and the world, this constitutes for Heidegger only a regional ontology. What makes it theoretical isn’t that it ignores relations of relevant use, but that it fixes this totality of pragmatically relevant relations. As a theory, a science acts as a paradigm, map, model of pragmatic relations. It explains the ‘how’ of the organization of the particulars of the science.

We can understand a microscope as a present to hand thing or a ready to hand tool, but for Heidegger, we are not understanding Being primordially until we see the totality of equipmental relevance that the tool belongs in its changeabilty. Heidegger’s ‘world as whole’ , including all of its relations of pragmatic relevance, is constantly transforming its sense. It changes along with our mood ( attunement). We can think of a metaphysics as a totality of relevance which is mistakenly reifed. We can’t avoid the metaphysical gesture, since we are always thrown into a world ( equipmental totality) . We always have a pre-understanding of the world ( what you are calling ontological presuppositions), which means that it is already familiar to us at some level. Heidegger isn’t critiquing the very existence of metaphysics and its ontological presuppositions. Without these presuppositions there is no world. He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms.

Seems to be straying into the mystical there. Requiring understanding and knowing not just through the lens of the mind. But from other parts of the being. — Punshhh

If the mystical implies contact with a faculty separate from the mental, then this is quite different from Heidegger’s intent. His project critiques the modern notion of subjectivity going back to Descartes. The subject, consciousness, the object and objectivity are all put into question by his approach.

Because the Dasein is constituted by being-in-the-world, it is a being which in its being is out beyond itself. The epekeina belongs to the Dasein's own most peculiar structure of being. This transcending does not only and not primarily mean a self-relating of a subject to an object; rather, transcendence means to understand oneself from a world. The Dasein is as such out beyond itself. Only a being to whose ontological constitution transcendence belongs has the possibility of being anything like a self. Transcendence is even the presupposition for the Dasein's having the character of a self. The selfhood of the Dasein is founded on its transcendence, and the Dasein is not first an ego-self which then oversteps something or other. The “toward-itself” and the “out-from-itself” are implicit in the concept of selfhood. What exists as a self can do so only as a transcendent being. This selfhood, founded on transcendence, the possible toward-itself and out-from-itself, is the presupposition for the way the Dasein factically has various possibilities of being its own and of losing itself. But it is also the presupposition for the Dasein's being-with others in the sense of the I-self with the thou-self. The Dasein does not exist at first in some mysterious way so as then to accomplish the step beyond itself to others or to extant things. Existence, instead, always already means to step beyond or, better, having stepped beyond."(Basic Problems of Phenomenology).

Thanks very much for that. I think I can follow most of it.

We can think of a metaphysics as a totality of relevance which is mistakenly reifed. — Joshs

OK. Mischievous questions. Does the totality of relevance include what Derrida calls bricolage (which I understand to mean, roughly, non-standard uses. Using a screwdriver to fish out a small object that has got into a space I cannot get my hand into. Does it include accidents, as when I trip over a screwdriver or drop one on the cat?

He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms. — Joshs

I don't quite see what it is that is being reified. In fact, if it is a mistake to reify it, there is nothing to reify and "it" has no place in that sentence. I can't even ask my question. Do you mean thinking of the screwdriver as an object?

But the ready to hand doesn’t constitute the most primordial understanding of Being. — Joshs

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding.

OK. Mischievous questions. Does the totality of relevance include what Derrida calls bricolage (which I understand to mean, roughly, non-standard uses. Using a screwdriver to fish out a small object that has got into a space I cannot get my hand into. Does it include accidents, as when I trip over a screwdriver or drop one on the cat? — Ludwig V

This is where Heidegger’s idealism (and Derrida’s) becomes conspicuously notable, in spite of the fact that his work moves beyond a traditional idealism-realism binary. There simply is no aspect of experience that excludes itself from the encompassing web of intelligibility by which we are understandingly attuned to the world as a whole. For instance, Heidegger talks about breakdowns in the use of tools as events which bring to the fore and light up the chains of ready to hand interrelations which are normally not paid attention to when the work is going smoothly. In other words, breakdown only makes sense in the context of a ready to hand involvement with tools. The same thing is true of accidents. A. accident only has meaning as an accident in the context of that activity which it subverts and surprises. If we use a screwdriver for a purpose other than the usual one, there must be some context of sense that bridges the gap between this new use and the normal one.

He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms.
— Joshs
I don't quite see what it is that is being reified. In fact, if it is a mistake to reify it, there is nothing to reify and "it" has no place in that sentence. I can't even ask my question. Do you mean thinking of the screwdriver as an object? — Ludwig V

What you’re talking about is the issue of how our comportment toward beings is modified such that the fundamental hermeneutic relation towards the world becomes disclosed in terms of reified present to hand objects. Heidegger explains:

The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.

Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like. Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth)

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding. — Ludwig V

Present to hand objects are not primary. They are derivative of the structure of active purposeful involvement with the world.

“Equipment is “in order to.” This proposition has an ontological and not merely an ontical meaning; a being is not what and how it is, for example, a hammer, and then in addition something “with which to hammer.” Rather, what and how it is as this entity, its whatness and howness, is constituted by this in-order-to as such, by its functionality. A being of the nature of equipment is thus encountered as the being that it is in itself if and when we understand beforehand the following: functionality, functionality relations, functionality totality. In dealing with equipment we can use it as equipment only if we have already beforehand projected this entity upon functionality relation.”(Basic Problems of phenomenology 1927) “…all equipment is as equipment within an equipmental contexture. This contexture is not a supplementary product of some extant equipment; rather, an individual piece of equipment, as individual, is handy and extant only within an equipmental contexture. The understanding of equipmental contexture as contexture precedes every individual use of equipment.”

“The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood beforehand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves. " “(Being and Time)

There may be a translation issue here, I come to this from a mystical tradition where the mind is a faculty of being, not foundational of being. So to me what is being described in that passage is how a conscious being is constituted. Mind is present only in so much as it is the operation of a structure in the nervous system, or brain and performs (like hardware in a computer) the role of projecting consciousness and presence and facilitates the activity of awareness, presence as flowing through time, (nowness) and the thinking, or intellectual faculty.

The distinction I’m making is that mind in terms of thought, knowing, understanding etc is secondary to what the brain is doing in these processes. So mind is present only in so much as it is a constituent part of the processes of the biological organism and any role it plays in hosting soul, or spirit. The higher faculties of mind, self conscious awareness, knowledge, understanding thinking etc are just one of these roles that the brain performs and is secondary to the others.

So I see mind in terms of a progression from the brain, facilitating the mind, which facilitates the higher brain functions. Brain-mind-higher mind function.

So ‘toward-itself’ and ‘out-from-itself’, transcendence are projections of being facilitated by the mind, forming the sense of self. That self then does the thinking, knowing, understanding.

I’m just thinking out loud here.

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding. — Ludwig V

Sometimes my typing is an embarrassment. I should have said "That's why I thought the ready-to-hand was the primordial understanding." So Descartes' methodical doubt could not be the foundation of our knowledge and understanding of the world.