He is a sensible cookie! His position does parallel that of Richard Feynman and his view of physics. A sense of humility and understanding, in our lack of understanding, would benefit many commentators in every field of interest. Too often it is more common to see people espousing their perspectives or field of research as the be all and end all of all.

To do this, a basic training in the fields of science and art is required. — MoK

I lived life is not something one can learn though. Not everyone gains much wisdom with age but I doubt no one gain any whatsoever.

A basic education can easily lead someone down a blind alley just as it can broaden horizons. Awareness of this is knowledge, whilst understanding it is ourselves who are certainly succumbing to blind alleys or overreaching beyond the horizon is where wisdom lies.

Ironically it seems tha failiure is the only way to make any kind of progress in life. Bravery is learning to keep on keeping on. I believe this is why Sisyphus was regarded as the wisest of all.

Philosophy is describing the workings of practices in which we already share interests (in the practice; thus their normativity) so it’s just a matter of agreeing on the explication of the criteria. — Antony Nickles

"Just" a matter of agreeing! Would that it were so simple. I'm not holding out for some radical relativism that would make sensible conversation about this impossible. I'm only pointing out that, within any practice that is deeper and more complicated than, for instance, "what constitutes a correct and sufficient apology or excuse," there is likely going to be debate about framework and criteria that is difficult to resolve. You go on to add "(or scientific study)" to the example about apologies and excuses, but do you really think this is in the same ballpark? Apologies may be seen to be largely conventional, and the prospects for agreement are bright, but is this true of scientific practice? I don't think so.

To say you can speak intelligibly and have reasons doesn’t mean you can say anything you want (intelligibly) in claiming, say, how an apology works (or how knowing does). Again, we might not end up agreeing, nor circumscribe every case or condition, but it’s not as if anything goes. — Antony Nickles

Right. But the things that do go, will keep the discussion about normativity alive.

people who throw cabers — Antony Nickles

Is that like stirring the possum? :smile:

[Specific criteria] hardly transcends the local interpretative predispositions of various cultural communities on earth, — Williams, 302-3

I don't think "[specific criteria]" will do as a substitute for my "[A philosophy which doesn't claim to speak from an Absolute Conception]". Williams is talking about an entire (non-absolute) philosophical framework, not criteria for a practice. His point is that you don't even get to practices without certain understandings about basic background stuff. These understandings, on this way of seeing it, are "local predispositions" because we've stipulated that the philosophical framework is non-absolute. And let's not forget that all this is being set up by Williams in order to question it -- to ask what is at stake by setting up the local/Absolute binary in this way.

If we insist on removing a topic from its context and specific criteria, then we lose the ability to judge a thing based on its own standards.
— Antony Nickles

Agreed, but why would speaking from an absolute conception have to involve this kind of removal? Wouldn't a genuine View from Nowhere provide, along with many other things, an account of those standards, and why they can serve as a basis for judgment? — J

I just did “account for those standards, and why they can serve as a basis for judgment.” — Antony Nickles

Yes. The point is that the Absolute Conception can do that too. It doesn't need to remove a topic from its context.

We can’t with one hand give that there are a multitude of criteria and with the other require that the judgment of each thing requires the same “basis”. It depends on the thing whether the judgment is “absolute” or not. — Antony Nickles

Here you're raising a good question about what "absolute conception" really means. What's the cash value? If we were to discover such a conception, would it mean that all those alleged possible criteria get reduced to some common denominator, conceptually? Is that the "basis" upon which the absolute conception itself rests? I don't know. For Williams' purposes -- and, he suggests, for Descartes' -- an absolute conception would allow us to make sense of, to explain in a unified way, "local" things like secondary qualities, social practices, and disagreements within philosophy. Here's another quote that may help:

[The absolute conception] should be able to overcome relativism in our view of reality through having a view of the world (or at least the coherent conception of such a view) which contains a theory of error: which can explain the existence of rival views, and of itself. — Williams, 301

Judging a good shoe and what is considered a planet are different in kind, not hierarchy, or scope. — Antony Nickles

Say more about this? What is the difference in kind that you see?

But how philosophy is done, and what even counts as philosophy, is always an internal struggle of the discipline — Antony Nickles

Well, yes, that's how I see it, but can you reconcile such a view with what you're saying about "agreeing on the explication of criteria"? When philosophy takes itself as its subject, I believe it enters a unique discourse. Philosophy may talk about science by looking at scientific criteria; the assumption is that philosophy's criteria for how to do this are not on the table. But when the inquiry turns inward, we don't have the luxury of bumping any questions of judgment or method to some off-the-table level.

This is the benefit of looking at the tradition as a set of texts, and not necessarily a set of problems. — Antony Nickles

Interesting. Can you elaborate?

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. — TLP 6.41–6.522

Your entire quote from the Tractatus is very apropos to the question of an Absolute Conception. We could make this substitution:

"In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no Absolute Conception—and if there were, it could not be absolutely true."

What I'm getting at is that the View from Nowhere puts some very peculiar demands on us as denizens of "the world." If "all happening and being-so is accidental," nothing we say in philosophy can escape this. It's all "local," in Williams' terms. "What makes it non-accidental [that is, what makes the Absolute Conception absolute, or unconditioned] cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental." So, how could we meet this demand?

And yet philosophy (in its reflective capacity) can’t help but trace the contours of what it cannot fully name — whether it’s called the unconditioned, the transcendental, the One, or the Ground. Not a thing, but not nothing. — Wayfarer

Yes, something like this. Do you think "trace the contours of what it cannot fully name" is the situation Williams is describing when he points out that "to ask not just that we should know, but that we should know that we know" is asking too much?

his 'that of which we cannot speak' is not the 'taboo on metaphysics' that the Vienna Circle took it to be - as Wittgenstein himself said:

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.
— 6522 — Wayfarer

Yes.

Philosophy may talk about science by looking at scientific criteria; the assumption is that philosophy's criteria for how to do this are not on the table. But when the inquiry turns inward, we don't have the luxury of bumping any questions of judgment or method to some off-the-table level. — J

This is not at all true of the whole lineage of philosophy arising from Nietzsche’s work (Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida). The self-reflexivity you are suggesting is missing from philosophy is at the very heart of their method.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was saying the opposite: Self-reflexivity is virtually definitive of philosophy. I was contrasting this with what I took @Antony Nickles to be saying -- that there is no difference between the problem situation of reflecting philosophically about, for instance, science, and reflecting philosophically about philosophy.

Not a thing, but not nothing. — Wayfarer

That is the world I’m interested in. I don’t think the experts in speaking about this half-world are only priests and mystics and poets. I think there is rigorous philosophic work that can be done on whatever that is that you just referenced.

To give it some type of grounding, I call it, the personal. Persons don’t seem to equate to things, but can’t be denied as if nothing either.

Good stuff, Wayfarer. I’d love to be able to get rigorous about the unconditioned. I’d love to discuss “love” for instance, as a substance, like a thing, but not a thing, but not nothing. Seems eons away from where philosophy is today…

↪Joshs Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was saying the opposite: Self-reflexivity is virtually definitive of philosophy. I was contrasting this with what I took Antony Nickles to be saying -- that there is no difference between the problem situation of reflecting philosophically about, for instance, science, and reflecting philosophically about philosophy. — J

What I meant was that for the philosophers I mentioned, the act of philosophical self-reflection is not an inner process of solipsistic self-confirmation. Instead the self comes back to itself (constitutes itself) from the world. To reflect is to self-transform, to be thrown elsewhere. The objection to scientific thinking is its tendency toward platonism (subject-object dualism) in the presuppositions guiding it. Anthony will be able to show how for Wittgenstein traditional philosophy gives into this platonism alongside the self-conception of the sciences. Williams’ approach devices the li geri f attachment to the platonism inherent in the distinction between the real
world and the apparent world.

- :up:

-

The problem is that while "we all" can indeed make intelligible and rational claims in support of a given framework, another group of "us all" can dispute them, with equal rationality. — J

Why is that a problem?

Or rather, how do you determine that every claim is made "with equal rationality"?

What you always end up saying is, "Oh, well not every claim is made with equal rationality. But every claim from the set of [serious/professional/rational people] is made with equal rationality, and I have no way to tell you how to identify that set." These threads of yours always involve this same petitio principii, which amounts to a sort of question-begging assertion in favor of relativistic pluralism.

I suspect what's at bottom is the same old TPF schtick of, "You have the burden of proof." "I don't know why any one claim could be said to be more rational than any other claim, and you have the burden of proof in showing such a thing." I don't see that sound methodology is being used in trying to support such theses in these sorts of threads. This is one place where Wittgenstein's "therapeutic" diagnosis seems especially apt.

OK. A little off-topic. I don't think anyone's talking about "an inner process of solipsistic self-confirmation." What confirmation may be available is being discussed in terms of shared practices and interpretations.

I lived life is not something one can learn though. — I like sushi

Life is a great teacher! Your knowledge is developed through your interaction with mental events. Uncertainty in life allows us to learn from our mistakes, so we face new things every day, including new challenges, which keep our minds engaged and entertained.

Not everyone gains much wisdom with age but I doubt no one gain any whatsoever. — I like sushi

Very correct!

A basic education can easily lead someone down a blind alley just as it can broaden horizons. Awareness of this is knowledge, whilst understanding it is ourselves who are certainly succumbing to blind alleys or overreaching beyond the horizon is where wisdom lies. — I like sushi

Philosophy of art, for example, is a branch of philosophy. Without an art training, you cannot philosophize about art.

Ironically it seems tha failiure is the only way to make any kind of progress in life. Bravery is learning to keep on keeping on. I believe this is why Sisyphus was regarded as the wisest of all. — I like sushi

Could you please provide a few short quotes from him?

Williams’ approach evinces a lingering attachment to the platonism inherent in the distinction between the real world and the apparent world. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s 6 stages from Twilight of the Idols:

1)The wise and pious man dwells in the real world, which he attains through his wisdom (skills in perception warrant a more accurate view of the real world).

2)The wise and pious man doesn't dwell in the real world, but rather it is promised to him, a goal to live for. (ex: to the sinner who repents)

3)The real world is unattainable and cannot be promised, yet remains a consolation when confronted with the perceived injustices of the apparent world.

4)If the real world is not attained, then it is unknown. Therefore, there is no duty to the real world, and no consolation derived from it.

5)The idea of a real world has become useless—it provides no consolation or motive. It is therefore cast aside as a useless abstraction.

6)What world is left? The concept of the real world has been abolished, and with it, the idea of an apparent world follows.

Williams seems to be on stage 2 or 3

On the relation between Williams, Nietzsche and Platonism, you might enjoy Rorty’s To the Sunlit Uplands

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n21/richard-rorty/to-the-sunlit-uplands

The problem is that while "we all" can indeed make intelligible and rational claims in support of a given framework, another group of "us all" can dispute them, with equal rationality.
— J

How to you determine that every claim is made "with equal rationality"? — Leontiskos

Yes. No work can be done or progress made if one believes “equal rationality” applies to both sides of any dispute.

Rationality may exist on both sides, but how “equal”? The inequality of the rationality is what constitutes any dispute, whether one side (or both) are making invalid arguments and/or using unfounded facts.

This is @J's underlying approach in the vast majority of his posts. It is a "search" for the stone of infallibility:

1. Either the stone of infallibility exists, or else it doesn't
2. If it exists, then there is an end to relativistic pluralism
3. If it does not exist, then there is no end to relativistic pluralism
4. The stone of infallibility does not exist
5. Therefore, there is no end to relativistic pluralism

For my money @J wants (5), and this is post hoc rationalization, even though he styles it as a "search." But even if that is wrong, the whole framing around the horizon of infallibility is entirely confused. That is the fundamental error of both Williams and @J: this obsession with infallibility, which has become the gravitational center of their thought whether they like it or not. The correct response to this bizarrely redundant argument is, "Why do you care so much about infallibility?"

Yes. No work can be done or progress made if one believes “equal rationality” applies to both sides of any dispute.

Rationality may exist on both sides, but how “equal”? The inequality of the rationality is what constitutes any dispute, whether one side (or both) are making invalid arguments and/or using unfounded facts. — Fire Ologist

That's right, and this is precisely why one of @J's heroes contradict themselves:

The moral of the story is that if someone takes up Chakravartty's stance voluntarism, then they must give up their ability to "encourage others... to see things our way." By definition, the stance voluntarist has no reasons for why someone should "see things his way." — Leontiskos

Relativistic "stances" undermine dialogue and knowledge altogether. If no one view is more rational than any other, then there is no reason to search for what is better.

Williams’ approach . . . — Joshs

Out of curiosity, what do you take Williams' position to be on the question of the Absolute Conception? Could you set it out in Williams' terms, rather than indicate how other philosophers might derogate it?

the View from Nowhere puts some very peculiar demands on us as denizens of "the world." If "all happening and being-so is accidental," nothing we say in philosophy can escape this. It's all "local," in Williams' terms. "What makes it non-accidental [that is, what makes the Absolute Conception absolute, or unconditioned] cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental." So, how could we meet this demand? — J

It’s important to recall that The View from Nowhere is itself a critique of the limits of scientific objectivity. Nagel’s argument is that while the drive toward objectivity is crucial, it also distorts — especially when we try to abstract away the subject entirely: the world can't be reduced to “what can be said from no point of view.” At some level, the subjective standpoint is indispensable. He’s says he's not advocating idealism, but insisting that the nature of being has an ineliminably subjective ground or aspect (although that is what I think both idealism and phenomenology actually mean.)

In this, Nagel approaches something like a dialectic: not a fusion of subjective and objective, but a dialogical relationship between them. There’s a similarity with a schema given by Zen teacher Gudo Nishijima Roshi in his commentary on Dōgen (the founder of the Sōtō Zen sect). In To Meet the Real Dragon Nishijima describes a fourfold structure of philosophical reflection, which he calls 'Three Philosophies and One Reality'. He says that everything in life can be seen through these perspectives:

• Theoretical — the abstract or subjective standpoint
• Objective — the empirical or material standpoint
• Realistic — the synthesis of the two, lived and integrated
• Ineffable — opening toward the ungraspable real

Nishijima emphasizes that these modes are not to be collapsed into each other. Each is partial, and reality overflows even their synthesis. Reality, in this view, is not reducible to any standpoint — not even to a dialectic — but it must be met, not captured. (Hence the uncompromising emphasis on practice in Zen schools.)

What this offers, perhaps, is a different way of engaging the demand for the unconditioned. Not by striving for a “view from nowhere” in the sense of Archimedean objectivity, but by learning to move fluidly among perspectives without assuming any one of them is exclusive. If there is an Absolute, it does not speak to us in the voice of a single register. It’s approached only through this layered reflection — and perhaps not known as much as embodied.

I think this is the reason why the Western philosophical tradition struggles with these questions — shaped, as it has been, by all-or-nothing theological categories, especially since the Reformation: belief or unbelief, salvation or damnation, truth or heresy. Nondualism allows for a more nuanced philosophical stance — one that doesn’t demand total certainty, but also doesn’t surrender to relativism:

Whether one tries to find an ultimate ground inside or outside the mind, the basic motivation and pattern of thinking is the same, namely, the tendency to grasp. In Madhyamika (Middle Way Buddhist philosophy) this habitual tendency is considered to be the root of the two extremes of "absolutism" and "nihilism." At first, the grasping mind leads one to search for an absolute ground — for anything, whether inner or outer, that might by virtue of its "own-being" be the support and foundation for everything else. Then, faced with its inability to find any such ultimate ground, the grasping mind recoils and clings to the absence of a ground by treating everything else as illusion. — The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, Rosch, First Edition, p143

Also see: Three Philosophies and One Reality, Gudo Nishijima Roshi.

@Leontiskos @Fire Ologist

The "view from nowhere" expresses a misunderstanding of the approach adopted by scientists.

They are not attempting to create an account that 'abstracts away from the subjective entity"... or some such.

They are creating an account that will work with the broadest generality, that is pretty much an application of the Principle of Relativity.

It's preference for accounts that work in multiple situations.

It's the view from anywhere.

It's the view from anywhere. — Banno

The “view from nowhere” isn’t a critique of what scientists do, but of what scientific objectivity aspires to — a standpoint purified of subjectivity. Nagel’s argument is that this abstraction leaves out the very thing it can’t explain: the subject itself. And if you've ever studied philosophy of science (Polyani, Kuhn, et el), you would know that this criticism is perfectly well-grounded.

The “view from nowhere” isn’t a critique of what scientists do, but of what scientific objectivity aspires to — a standpoint purified of subjectivity. — Wayfarer

So it claims. And my reply is that it is not what scientists aspire to.

They are not seeking to remove perspective, but to give an account that works from as many perspectives as possible.

The view from anywhere.

The view from anywhere. — Banno

It means precisely the same thing. No, they're not seeking to remove perspective, they're seeking an observation, outcome, or finding which will be the same for anyone conducting the same experiment or making the same observation in the same circumstances. It's called 'reproducibility' (the same thing that's allegedly in crisis in the social sciences.)

It means precisely the same thing. — Wayfarer

Well, no.

A view from nowhere has no location. A view from anywhere has any location. These are not the same.

The intent of a given principle is that it be applicable in as many cases as possible. It's much the same as that the principles on which we base our physics be the same in all reference frames, including accelerated and non-inertial ones.

That is not to claim that the principles on which we base our physics be the same in no reference frame whatsoever.

'Reference frame' is from relativity theory. It is true that relativity theory and quantum theory undermine the idea of absolute objectivity. That's one of the sources of the very anxiety that this thread is about.

It is true that relativity theory and quantum theory undermine the idea of absolute objectivity. — Wayfarer

You have claimed this, but I do not believe that you have succeeded in defending such a view.

And that is becasue the juxtaposition of objective and subjective here cannot be made coherent.

What we might call “objective” is defined with respect to all observers. But this still presupposes observers and their frames—so it’s not objective in the naïve sense of “from nowhere.”

Alternately, what is called “subjective” is often grounded in shared practice as Wittgenstein might say and so not purely private or solipsistic.

Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer.

Hence it is not denying the observer.

'Reference frame' is from relativity theory. It is true that relativity theory and quantum theory undermine the idea of absolute objectivity. That's one of the sources of the very anxiety that this thread is about. — Wayfarer

"Reference frame" came from math prior to Einstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation

Lorentz (1892–1904) and Larmor (1897–1900), who believed the luminiferous aether hypothesis, also looked for the transformation under which Maxwell's equations are invariant when transformed from the aether to a moving frame. They extended the FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis and found out that the time coordinate has to be modified as well ("local time"). Henri Poincaré gave a physical interpretation to local time (to first order in v/c, the relative velocity of the two reference frames normalized to the speed of light) as the consequence of clock synchronization, under the assumption that the speed of light is constant in moving frames.[8] Larmor is credited to have been the first to understand the crucial time dilation property inherent in his equations.[9]

In 1905, Poincaré was the first to recognize that the transformation has the properties of a mathematical group, and he named it after Lorentz.[10] Later in the same year Albert Einstein published what is now called special relativity, by deriving the Lorentz transformation under the assumptions of the principle of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light in any inertial reference frame, and by abandoning the mechanistic aether as unnecessary.[11]

Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer. — Banno

Right — but that idealised observer is precisely not a concrete subject. It's a perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or any first-person particularity. In other words, it's not any actual observer, but a methodological abstraction — which is exactly what Nagel critiques in The View from Nowhere. The idealised observer is, furthermore, of the same general type as the frictionless planes and dimensionless points that constitute the lexicon of science generally - an abstraction.

Fair enough, but the reference frame entered the public discourse through Einstein, and as that excerpt says, Einstein drew on those discoveries in devising his theories.

...that idealised observer... — Wayfarer

There is no idealised observer.

There's you and me and them.

Science seeks to give an account that works for any of us.

That "perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or any first-person particularity" is a philosopher's invention.

That "perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or any first-person particularity" is a philosopher's invention. — Banno

Nothing of the kind, it's an accurate description of basic scientific methodology. When you publish a scientific paper you may or may not get pubic recognition of what you've discovered or said, but who you are is by definition quite irrelevant to the content. But I'm done squabbling over it.

But that description of publishing fits equally well with presenting one's work so that it apples for anyone.

Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer — Banno

I would think it important to add to this ‘for any observer participating in the particular community of scientists who share a domain of study.’ Many scientist are quite humble this days about the reach of their theories. They appreciate that no overarching account of the natureof reality is possible, no reduction of all disciplines to some fundamental science (such as physics). Approaches, methods , theories , vocabularies concerning a given phenomenon differ depending on what aspect of that phenomenon is being examined, and for what purposes. In sum, ‘the view for everyone’ is a regional goal of science, not a universal one.

Fine by me.