I wouldn't say the Tao is above or better than human conceptualisation of it in a directly valuative sense, but prior ontologically... the human world is part of it. And insofar conceptualisation is only partial/perspectival, and presumably can lead us astray for that reason, maybe it is a reason to put a little less stock in it. — ChatteringMonkey

I’m tempted to get into a rational, nitpicky non-Taoist discussion of the intricacies of what Taoism means, e.g. The human world is not part of the Tao because the Tao doesn’t have parts. All
I can tell you is it doesn’t feel that way to me. There is the Taoist idea of return. The Tao continually manifests as the 10,000 things—the multiplicity of the human world—which then continually returns to the Tao. It’s all happening over and over again all the time.

I don’t think I’m really disagreeing with what you said though.

To make the point a bit more salient for this discussion maybe, that is the issue with the Socratic view on Life, and Christianity consequently, that it presumes that it can box in Chaos, conceptualise the whole of it and make life entirely predictable and planable on the basis of these fixed conceptions. — ChatteringMonkey

I don’t know enough about the Socratic or Christian view of life to make an intelligent comment on this.

They can certainly use it to give a sheen to their prejudices, but to what extent is it merely a post hoc rationalization of affective commitments? — Tom Storm

I think this is exactly right, and I think it shows what’s wrong with philosophy. If you can be doing this for thousands of years and not recognize where reason really stands, what its role really is, what’s the point?

reason is situated, embodied, enactive and emerges from our lived, affective engagement with the world. Reason is not a detached faculty that can apprehend universal truths on its own; it’s shaped by biology, culture, experience. Truth claims therefore are always embedded in context, practice, and perspective. — Tom Storm

It can be all that and still a tool

Yes, I would say connected. Everything arises from social practices and contingent factors; the possibilities of our experiencing anything, perception, our bodies, and the way we experience the world are all shaped by these conditions. But this is not my area of expertise I think @Joshs is a professional on these matters. My interest/knowledge is limited.

Thanks. Do you recall if there was a thread on intuition? I seem to have a memory of this.

You make a common enough criticism of Thompson's position (and I guess that of many pragmatists and post-modernists) and it is a good one. All I can say is I don’t see it as a contradiction, because I’m not claiming (nor would Thompson) to step outside all contexts while saying this. [...] So when I say truth claims are context-dependent, I’m also saying this one is too. That doesn’t make it collapse, it just admits that I’m part of the same situation I’m talking about. — Tom Storm

But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say.

My understanding is that Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. — Tom Storm

This looks to me like platitude-language, and it is very common. My point is that the relativist contradicts himself, and that is the argument that is relevant. I don't know what these supposed, "detached, universal viewpoints," are, nor do I know who is supposed to have promoted such things (apart from some moderns, who I also reject).

It is a form of strawman to say, "I reject a detached, universal viewpoint, therefore every truth claim is context dependent." For my part I don't see that I am permitted to contradict myself, regardless of what I wish to reject. I think we should be less willing to contradict ourselves than we are desirous to reject some particular doctrine. Of course if someone thinks they cannot affirm that language is partially relative to culture etc. without also claiming that every truth claim is context dependent (and thereby contradicting themselves), then they are surely in a pickle. But I would suggest they examine their conditional premise to see whether it is actually true.

We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. — Tom Storm

My point is that the person who says, "Truth claims are always context dependent," is engaged in a form of relativism, and that form of relativism is self-defeating.

Can you explain in simple terms why Thompson might be wrong? — Tom Storm

Hopefully I did this above.

Do you recall if there was a thread on intuition? — Tom Storm

I started a thread on introspection once and I’ve included discussions of intuition in a number of other threads. I don’t remember any discussions that were specifically on the subject of intuition by either myself or others.

Yes, I would say connected. Everything arises from social practices and contingent factors; the possibilities of our experiencing anything, perception, our bodies, and the way we experience the world are all shaped by these conditions — Tom Storm

Sure. It pains me to agree with Leontiskos, but he's right that this theory about human life suggests a fixed, transcendent vantage point. That's just how the mind works. If you call something transient, you're situating yourself at a point that being identified as stationary.

if he’s right, that’s great, I like different views to my own even if I can’t get on board.

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that. It actually denies that anyone can stand outside it.

Doesn’t this objection get contingency wrong? Calling something “contingent” doesn’t mean you’re looking at it from some perfect, fixed viewpoint. You’re just using the language and ideas that come from within the same messy, changeable world you’re talking about. You don’t need a god-like perspective to say things are contingent.

We now arrive at the question, is antifoundationalism itself a foundation?

Thanks. Nicely articulated. I’m not done yet, but I have a meeting.

- :up:

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that. — Tom Storm

It would be a bit like the fish saying, "Everything is water." If the fish knew that everything was water then he would not be bound by water. The metaphor about fish and water has to do with the idea that what is literally ubiquitous is unknowable.

Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. On the contrary, some ways of thinking are better than others, and we can test, refine, and improve our ideas through experience, dialogue, and careful reflection. Thompson would probably acknowledge that reasoning is grounded in context but this doesn’t weaken it, it makes it more honest, responsible, and connected to how we actually understand and navigate the world. — Tom Storm

Spot on. I had the idea of writing an OP on disembodied cognition. Why? To bring out what was important about embodied cognition in the first place - what it was critiquing. I think that was largely focussed on intellectual abstraction, functionalism, physicalism, and many of the other popular 'isms' of the academic philosophy. So, I agree with you, I don't think Thompson's project is relativist, but it's also //not// hanging off philosophical absolutes. It's threading the needle between those kinds of dilemmas which gave rise to the whole project. Which is why it is not co-incidental that the whole of The Embodied Mind is pervaded with references to the Buddhist 'middle way'.

Yes, I would say connected. Everything arises from social practices and contingent factors; the possibilities of our experiencing anything, perception, our bodies, and the way we experience the world are all shaped by these conditions. But this is not my area of expertise I think Joshs is a professional on these matters. My interest/knowledge is limited. — Tom Storm

I'd say everything about human life is socially mediated, simply because language is a social phenomenon, and so I must agree with you that truths are always relative to contexts. This can be shown by asking anyone who disagrees to state a context-independent truth. Within our common life there are a myriad of contexts, and they are all nested within the human context itself, which in turn is nested within the context of biology―the context of life that we share with other animals, and even plants, fungi and microbes.

Social and cultural evolution are preceded and underpinned by biological evolution. At the most basic level we perceive the world in the way our evolved 'embrained' bodies determine. As the study of animals shows language is not necessary for perception, and it seems absurd (to me) to say that if we had not been enculturated we would not perceive the same world that we do as enculturated beings, just on account of our human physiology.

From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities.

I’m tempted to get into a rational, nitpicky non-Taoist discussion of the intricacies of what Taoism means, e.g. The human world is not part of the Tao because the Tao doesn’t have parts. All
I can tell you is it doesn’t feel that way to me. There is the Taoist idea of return. The Tao continually manifests as the 10,000 things—the multiplicity of the human world—which then continually returns to the Tao. It’s all happening over and over again all the time.

I don’t think I’m really disagreeing with what you said though. — T Clark

I don't think we disagree either, it's just difficult to speak about. Language fails to some extend, hence that what can be named is not etc...

About the human world being a part, I was looking for the right words, but I'm not necessarily committed to it being an actual quote unquote 'part' of it. What I think I would commit to is that the Tao is ontologically prior to our conceptions of it.

The idea of returning to "the source" is important IMO, that is to some extend what is missing it seems to me in Western tradition where we get hung up on fixed conceptions without returning.

I don’t know enough about the Socratic or Christian view of life to make an intelligent comment on this. — T Clark

That's fine, it's basically Nietzsches idea of how nihilism was already inherent in the Greek and Christian root of the Western tradition and the reason why we eventually ended up with the "dead of God". It do think he's onto something, though it's probably only part of the story.

From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities. — Janus

Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him.

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that.
— Tom Storm

It would be a bit like the fish saying, "Everything is water." If the fish knew that everything was water then he would not be bound by water. The metaphor about fish and water has to do with the idea that what is literally ubiquitous is unknowable. — Leontiskos

This is getting very meta. :wink:

Doesn't your fish and water objection assume that being immersed in something makes it unknowable? Doesn't Thompson’s view suggest the opposite? That our immersion is what makes understanding possible. We are always situated within social practices and contingent factors, but this situatedness doesn’t block insight, it creates or enables it. (I assume this is basic to phenomenology?) Recognizing that “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” is a reflective awareness that arises through our engagement with world, not from standing outside it. Being “bound by water” does not make the water invisible; it is the medium through which we come to know it. Or something like that?

I'm now getting dizzy with the curlicues of argument.

The broader question to me seems to be, is anti-foundationalism a foundation? Is it a performative contradiction? I suspect it isn’t on the basis that anti-foundationalism is more a lens or a stance toward foundations than a foundation itself. It discourages the search for an ultimate grounding, but offers no ultimate principle to stand on.

I'd be interested to hear your take on this particularly.

Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him. — Tom Storm

I think there are commonalities of understanding. A dingo will see a wallaby as potential food source, just as we might (if they were not protected). We observe birds dipping into water, perhaps to cool off, or wash themselves, just as we do. Birds and bees get nectar from flowers, and we also can do that with a certain limited range of flowers. Birds nest in trees and up here in Nimbin, there are actually some treehouses. I like the idea of "affordances" and it seems clear that many things in the environment offer similar kinds of affordances to animals as they might to us.

I'm now getting dizzy with the curlicues of argument. — Tom Storm

Let's not lose sight of the central argument which is this:

But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say. — Leontiskos

-

Being “bound by water” does not make the water invisible; — Tom Storm

Do you think water is visible to a fish?

The broader question to me seems to be, is anti-foundationalism a foundation? Is it a performative contradiction? I suspect it isn’t on the basis that anti-foundationalism is more a lens or a stance toward foundations than a foundation itself. It discourages the search for an ultimate grounding, but offers no ultimate principle to stand on. — Tom Storm

Well, what do you mean by "anti-foundationalism"? Is it just something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent"? If so, then we're right back to the original argument.

Well, what do you mean by "anti-foundationalism"? Is it just something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent"? If so, then we're right back to the original argument. — Leontiskos

That there is no final or ultimate ground for our knowledge, meaning, or justification. I think that's how philosophers like Rorty, Lawson, or Brandom might have it. And I appreciate that anti-foundationalism is disparaged by many.

Let's not lose sight of the central argument which is this:

But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

As I understand it, this objection misunderstands the claim. Saying "truth claims are always context-dependent" is a way of describing how claims function within particular social, historical, and conceptual contexts. This description is itself situated and arises from those contexts. I'm, nto sure there's a contradiction in making this statement because it does not claim to exist outside or above context. The objection only seems persuasive if one assumes that all claims must be judged from a perspective beyond any context, but anti-foundationalism does not make that assumption.

What I think I would commit to is that the Tao is ontologically prior to our conceptions of it. — ChatteringMonkey

My problem with that, and I’m not joking, is that ontology is one of the 10,000 things. On the other hand, when I’m in my human form, I call Taoist principles metaphysics too. That’s one of the things I like most about Taoism—you often have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time.

The idea of returning to "the source" is important IMO, that is to some extend what is missing it seems to me in Western tradition where we get hung up on fixed conceptions without returning. — ChatteringMonkey

It took me a long time to get a feel for what return is about in this context.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." — Leontiskos

I agree with you that if the relativist-postmodernist is treating their assertion that “truth claims are always context dependent” as itself a truth claim, then they are attempting to achieve a view from nowhere. You might then ask how else one could mean such a statement except as a general claim. The answer writers like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida give is that what they are doing is not asserting or claiming but enacting. What’s the difference? A truth claim purports to encompass within its purview a transcontextual temporal span. What I claim to be the case at this moment must be assumed to hold beyond my immediately present experience. Enactment, by contrast, is the experience of the present moment itself as ‘fat’ or specious.

In noticing what takes place right now, I simultanously notice the passing of the previous moment and anticipation of a future moment. If I then draw from this experience of the fat present a notion of primordial ‘contingency’ I can only rely on the present as it repeats itself to confirm and reconfirm this notion of contingency. How do I know the next moment and those that follow it will not lend themselves to truth claims which validate themselves? I only know this by attempting to think such a conception and then notice whether it unfolds itself as self-identical or as self-transforming. Enaction is speculative and experimental, not assertoric.

My submission of your utterance of a truth claim to enaction does not result in a contradiction or refutation of your assertion. It allows me to understand the meaning of your assertion and at the same time to experience it as being buoyed by a current which allows it to remain the same always differently. When I then express this to you, I am reporting gmy experience as it renews itself moment to moment and extending an invitation to you to experience something similar. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t this does not make your belief in truth claims false. It simply means you will not likely be inclined to participate in the community ofnrelativists who together, each in different ways, are exploring the implications of their experience of the specious present.

I agree with you that if the relativist-postmodernist is treating their assertion that “truth claims are always context dependent” as itself a truth claim, then they are attempting to achieve a view from nowhere. — Joshs

No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement.

No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement. — Janus

Philosophy is divided into camps - some of which believe humans have access to facts or truths outside of human experience (eg, Platonism) and those who think we don't. How do we ground our knowledge? I don't think we can except though communities of intersubjective agreement.

Thanks. Jesus, it's bloody complicated.

Is Platonism not a context? Is language itself not a context?

Yes but the point is that Platonists appeal to a mind-independent order/realm to ground values like goodness, while antifoundationalists hold that we have no access to anything outside our historically situated human practices.

One conundrum I have been puzzling over, is the distinction between mind-independent objects, and mind-independent principles.

Let me explain. The principle of objectivity revolves around the idea that things exist in a particular way irrespective of whatever you or I might do or not do. The objective sciences endeavour to discern 'the way things are' outside of or apart from any subjective biases or pre-suppositions that we bring to the study of them. This also extends into subjects other than science, insofar as disciplines like history and jurisprudence strive for objectivity.

But it's interesting to reflect that in earlier philosophy, it was not things or objects that were considered to be independently existing in this way. The Platonic ideals of goodness and beauty were by no means objects in the sense of being 'objects of scientific analysis'. in the classical philosophical tradition, what was regarded as independent of the individual mind were not objects but principles: the good, the beautiful, the just, the true. They were intelligible measures, realities that could be participated in but not possessed. Access to them was understood to require a transformation of the knower — metanoia, the philosophical “ascent,” the cultivation of detachment (the original meaning of 'apatheia').

This is the part that, I think, becomes almost invisible within the post-Enlightenment frame. Once the Enlightenment redefines mind-independence in exclusively objective terms, normative principles lose their perceived standing. They are no longer something we discover through moral-intellectual formation but something we construct, negotiate, or inherit. And so the communities of practice that once embodied those principles inevitably begin to weaken.

When principles cease to be experienced as realities that make a claim on us, they can no longer act as shared horizons. What remains is a plurality of individual perspectives, each valid “for me” or “for us,” but without a binding force that earlier cultures assumed. This is not moral collapse — it’s simply the logical outcome of shifting the locus of reality from intelligible principles to empiricism.

Seen this way, the Enlightenment tended to undermine the forms of life and communities of practice in which normative principles were embedded. It gave extraordinary intellectual freedoms, but it also left us without the structures of meaning that were grounded in a very different understanding of what “mind-independence” really means.

(This is very much the ballpark of Alisdair McIntyre ('After Virtue'), Charles Taylor ('A Secular Age'). And also Pierre Hadot ('Philosophy as a Way of Life'))

It seems paradoxical to me that Platonism, which is an extremely abstract conception, should claim mind-independence. I think that if anything qualifies as being mind-independent it would be nature itself, not as it is modeled by us, but just as whatever it is apart from our ideas.

I am not one who thinks there are no foundations―on the contrary I think there are many foundations, namely all the different presuppositions our diverse domains of enquiry and worldviews are based upon.

Is there one overarching foundation for nature itself? I'm not sure the question makes any sense. The only "foundation" I think it makes sense for nature to have is chaos―the incomprehensible no-thingness that everything takes form out of―a foundationless foundation.

Much of philosophy seems to be a desperate scramble for foundational justifications that will 'beat' the other guy’s argument. The best one, of course, being God. If we can say a position we hold is part of God’s nature or the natural order of a designed universe, then we ‘win’ the argument (assuming winning means anything).

Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter.

Is there one overarching foundation for nature itself? — Janus

That would have been what the ancients designate 'logos'.

Nicely put, I’m not sure what this means for me, however. How do you see this sitting with phenomenology and Thompson’s descriptions of us enacting reality?

Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter. — Tom Storm

Yes, people have different views and some do believe in eternal, absolute foundations. The problem, as always, with different opinions, is the impossibility of independent arbitration between them to determine which is true and which false.

That would have been what the ancients designate 'logos'. — Wayfarer

If order is posited as basic, it suggests a universal intelligence or God. My personal belief is that order evolves―nature takes habits, as Peirce contended. Order emerges out of chaos.