wonderment — Wayfarer

Will bafflement suffice?

...wonderment... — Wayfarer

...which I much prefer to bafflement... :confused:

Yeah probably a better word. All I’m trying to avoid is the taken-for-grantedness that seems to inhere in ‘that’s just how we do it.’

Crossed two versions of that post... I'm baffled as to how.

Not a source of wonder?

I wondered how it happened - but was baffled.

I must have had two windows opened, unawares.

A few things strike us as necessarily true, like basic logic and math, but that isn’t the same as claiming there must be some particular thing that exists. When people ask whether anything exists necessarily, a lot hangs on whether “there could have been nothing at all” and if that makes sense. I for one would say “absolute nothing” is not a real option, because even trying to describe it uses ideas like “is,” “not,” and “could,” which already assume a background where talk and truth have a foothold. You could reasonably conclude that reality can’t be completely empty. But even if that’s right, it doesn’t automatically mean there’s one special thing that exists no matter what. It could simply be that there’s always something there, while what that “something” is can vary: in every possible version of reality there is at least one occupant, yet for any particular occupant you pick, there could have been a version where it never existed at all. In that sense, existence might be unavoidable even if every individual thing is still contingent.

@Banno @Joshs @Philosophim

There has been a lot of drift in the discussion since the opening replies to the OP, so I'm going to try to recapitulate my stance by gathering the loose threads and tying them back to the original question asked by the OP. Sorry for the length, but there's a lot to consolidate.

In my exchange with @Joshs I've been trying to clarify a persistent misunderstanding. I’m not treating norms, intelligibility, or truth-conditions as items in the domain, nor confusing formation rules with what those rules are about. The issue isn’t ontological inflation. The point is that modal semantics already presupposes truth-apt judgment; the distinction between being right and merely being coherent within a framework. My original objection to Meillassoux’s “absolute contingency” was that it relies on that distinction while denying that anything non-optional obtains at the level of reality itself.

So @Banno, I was not asking modal logic to generate metaphysical necessity, nor claiming it forces a necessary being. I was questioning whether modal frameworks can underwrite the metaphysical thesis that nothing whatsoever must be the case (per Meillasoux), given what they presuppose in order to function. That’s a methodological disagreement about what modal structure tracks, not a confusion about grammar or model theory.

I think part of the difficulty here is that we’ve been talking a lot about norms and practices, but not enough about the act of judgment itself. In inquiry, there’s a real difference between continuing to ask questions and reaching a point where no further relevant questions remain without undermining the reasons already in play. To judge that something is the case is not merely to conform to a practice or stabilize commitments; it’s to take responsibility for the claim that the relevant conditions have been met. That’s why judgment is truth-apt in a way that rule-following alone isn’t.

While judgment doesn’t require a metaphysical guarantor in the sense of an external foundation, it also isn’t neutral with respect to necessity. When we judge that something is the case, we commit ourselves to the claim that, given the relevant conditions, it cannot be otherwise without error. That is a minimal but genuine sense of necessity; one that arises from inquiry itself rather than being imposed from outside it. Practices can explain how we arrive at judgments; judgment explains why certain denials are no longer optional once understanding has been achieved.

If we take judgment seriously in this way, it doesn’t just commit us to particular necessities (“given these conditions, this must be so”), but raises a further question about the totality of conditions themselves. Inquiry doesn’t only ask whether this or that claim is adequately grounded, but whether reality as such is intelligible or merely a brute fact. If everything were conditioned without remainder, then the responsible affirmation of any claim as finally true would be undermined in principle, since further conditions could always be demanded. Yet inquiry does make such affirmations, not dogmatically, but as answers to questions that have been adequately satisfied.

That commitment points beyond any particular conditioned object or causal explanation to something unconditioned; not as an entity within the universe, nor as an empirical cause among others. This “beyond” is not introduced as a further hypothesis or item in the domain, but as what inquiry already relies on when it affirms that its judgments are answerable to how things are, rather than to nothing at all. To deny this would not simply revise our ontology, but would undercut the very distinction between getting things right and merely going on coherently. In that sense, the unconditioned is not merely thinkable or regulative, but real; not by possessing existence as a further attribute, but by not being the sort of thing whose existence could be contingent on conditions. Its reality is inseparable from its role as the ultimate term of judgment, rather than an object among objects. My suggestion is that inquiry can bottom out here without incoherence, without a priori posits, and even without appeal to a cosmic mind/subject.

So, by way of checking my understanding

• Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game.
• To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility.
• This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error?

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. That is, the judgement that such-and-such is true commits one to denying that it is false; but it doens;t commit one to saying that it is true in all possible circumstances. Yet this is what would be required in order to move from "such and such is true" to "such and such is necessarily true".

That is , this "unconditional" truth is a step further than is justified by the commitment to such-and-such being true.

That is “If everything were conditioned, final truth is undermined” - perhaps; I'm not sure what final truth might be. but not truth per se.

:up:

Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game. — Banno

Yes.

To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility. — Banno

Yes.

This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error? — Banno

Yes.

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. — Banno

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised.

Now consider what it means to assert that the denial of a claim is truly wrong. It means something like “even given all relevant considerations, ¬p fails to answer to how things really are”. That requires an implicit commitment to (1) their being such a thing as “all relevant considerations,” at least in principle and (2) that p is settled by how things really are, not just by where we happen to be currently situated within inquiry.

If we say that there is always a further relevant condition that could overturn p, then we must also accept that denial is never truly wrong, but only premature. But this implies that denial can never be truly incorrect in the robust sense that we all presuppose when we tell someone that their claim is really-and-truly wrong (much as we all are constantly doing to each other in this very forum).

To give a concrete example, suppose we judge that “Water is H₂O”, and suppose someone here on the forum denies this. Why do we treat the denial of this claim as wrong, not just awaiting further data? It’s because we take ourselves to have reached a point where all the relevant conditions have been satisfied and no further conditions would overturn the claim. By contrast if our operating notions of reality and truth were radically unconditioned, we could never say that the denial is wrong in the robust sense, because we would have to presuppose that every fact always depends on further, undisclosed conditions; indefinitely.

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised. — Esse Quam Videri

This is a valid concern. Forgive me if you're already replying to my last post. I figured this would be a good summary.

1. That we discretely experience is an actual truth. The act itself, not what we think about it. Factually, there is nothing more that can ever be discovered that would undermine it.
2. There is always a question about our application using discrete experience. Its unavoidable as we are applying one experience and truth we directly have, to something else that we do not have full control or potential comprehension over.
3. In theory, one could arrive at the truth of everything if one had full context. So if we could sense it all from a bird's eye view, and be able to perceive and sense everything that was possible to perceive and sense, what is deductive and what is reasonably inductive would be true, but it would still be within the context of a perceiver.

So, the only context of truth which we are privy to discover is that we discretely experience. Everything else is built on this, and the fact that our application of them can be contradicted. Thus full knowledge is a blend of a true foundation, and rational approaches to attempting to understand the world outside of that true foundation. This would not change given more information or findings, this is also a truth. One way to think of it is, "I can be me. But I can never be anything else. And to know something else in itself fully, I must actually be that thing fully."

I don't think there's any possible way to know what is true outside of ourselves, but it is true to know our own experiences in themselves. I hope that summarizes the point I was trying to make in my last post.

Another way to look at it is is, "What is the definition of necessary?" Necessary implies some law that if this does not exist, then something which relies on that thing cannot exist. But is is necessary that the necessary thing itself exist? No. — Philosophim

Not so sure about this. Necessity is presuppsitionlessness, something that cannot be denied, and since anything spoken at all can be undone by something else, other thinking that looks to the fragile contextuality the thing is constituted by, necessity can only be found outside of language, that is, outside of representational structure of language. Consider the affective dimension of our existence, or more broadly, the value dimension, and ask a question like, Can searing pain, say, be gainsaid? Note, you are not asking about the logic of the idea that brings the pain to propositional understanding, and anything that may be brought against it as a challenge to the pain's "truth" has no bearing at all.

Pure necessity? Yes, there is such a thing. It lies with what lies outside of the contingency of the saying of what a thing is.

Forgive me if you're already replying to my last post. I figured this would be a good summary. — Philosophim

Not at all! I'm glad that you jumped in with a response.

I don't think there's any possible way to know what is true outside of ourselves, but it is true to know our own experiences in themselves. I hope that summarizes the point I was trying to make in my last post. — Philosophim

Yes, it does, thank you. I actually agree with you on this; we do not have access to a god's eye view that would enable us to exhaustively answer all possible questions. But the notion of a "fact-of-the-matter" that I’m working doesn't require this. It requires only that judgments be answerable to how things are, independently of whether we ever fully grasp them. When we say that a claim about the world is wrong (not merely incomplete or misapplied) we are presupposing that there is a determinate way things are that the claim fails to answer to.

So it’s not a question of whether the results of inquiry are always provisional or contextually-scoped in practice, but whether the act of inquiry (especially in acts of judgement) itself presupposes that reality is unconditionally determinate independent of our provisional conclusions about it, thereby preserving robust notions of truth and error.

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all. — Esse Quam Videri

So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled. — Esse Quam Videri

Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? Ok.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised. — Esse Quam Videri

So your trilemma is set up like this, using the language you are adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they are able to state the conditions under which they so judge; but then they must either again explain their judgement as to the truth of those conditions; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And the conclusion is that "...no fact of the matter... could ever settle a judgment as finally correct".

You then spend a few paragraphs explaining much the same thing for negation. If someone were to deny that water is H₂O, we would never be in a position to say in some absolute sense that they are wrong, because there would always remain some conditions that are not judged to be true... or something along those lines. We could never say their denial is wrong...

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have two notions of truth, ordinary and robust. Ordinary truth is "what's best so far" and robust truth is "how things really are". You worry is about losing the ability to tell which we have.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have along side the two notion of truth, two notions of explanation, one of which is "authentic" in that it commits one to saying how things are "unconditionally".



Now I think your have drawn yourself a nice picture here of how you think epistemology works, but that there are fundamental problems in the way that this picture has been set up that lead you to a sort of absolute conclusion that is erroneous.



Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are. Now on your account, since you so judge, there must be "conditions" for that judgement. And the condition for it being true that you are reading this post, here, and now is just that you are reading this post, here, and now. So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same.

I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. It is what we mean when we say something like "EQV is reading". To deny that you are reading this, here, now, would be to deny the whole practice that underpins the use of sentences like "EQV is reading here, now".

If we go back to the Trilemma, the leg we are on now is in effect that of circularity: we judge that you are reading because we judge that you are reading.

It might help at this stage to review the fact that a circular argument is perfectly valid, just potentially unsatisfactory. So it is not an objection to point out that the justification is circular.

And this is part of the appeal of practice. The justification here is that this is just how we use the words "EQV is reading" and their correlates. To deny that you are reading is just to step away from that practice. So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out.



And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do.

Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. We've sidestepped that, too, by since we do not here point to a fact about the world, but to our practice within that world. In these sort of circumstances, we say things like "it is true that EQV is reading this post".

And we've dropped any need for splitting truth into absolute and relative truths. Our sentences are just true when the practice is coherent.


I'll stop there. That's enough for now.

The pattern here should be familiar. There's the intuition that there must be something firm - absolute, necessary, unconditional - upon which we build whatever it is we are building. And then there's the inability to coherently set out what that foundation might be.

And what we have instead is small steps, ad hoc hypotheses, little critiques of piecemeal ideas.

Two ways to philosophise.



For @Esse Quam Videri there must be something that exists necessarily. But trouble is, it's very hard for such a view to survive critique. Every time the absolute is found, it turns out to be just another posit in the ongoing discussion. Every necessity on examination becomes contingent on it's context.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete - that is, whatever foundation we build will never give us every truth. The best we can hope for is to add a little bit more truth to that consistent system.

And if that's the case for simple formal systems, why should we then expect our natural languages to be any less complicated?

It requires only that judgments be answerable to how things are, independently of whether we ever fully grasp them. When we say that a claim about the world is wrong (not merely incomplete or misapplied) we are presupposing that there is a determinate way things are that the claim fails to answer to. — Esse Quam Videri

That would be what a contradiction is. A contradiction is the world telling us, "Our idea about reality is wrong." We cannot will a contradiction away. If I jump out of an airplane without a parachute, no matter how I perceive the world or will it, I will fall to my death. Contradictions are proof that there are things outside of ourself and our own willpower.

So it’s not a question of whether the results of inquiry are always provisional or contextually-scoped in practice, but whether the act of inquiry (especially in acts of judgement) itself presupposes that reality is unconditionally determinate independent of our provisional conclusions about it, thereby preserving robust notions of truth and error. — Esse Quam Videri

Because at any time we could be contradicted, we are reminded of a potential unconditional independent of our conclusions about it. The truth is that you will be contradicted, and that contradiction to your idea of the world is an undeniable error in your judgement.

Does that cover it? I'm not sure what else you would be looking for at this point, but please continue if there is.

So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false. — Banno

I’ve already addressed this point several times. Briefly: judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. I don’t think restating this again in detail will move the discussion forward.

Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? — Banno

No. I’m not concerned with an infinite regress of reasons, but with an infinite regress of conditions—conditions of being right rather than reasons we happen to give.

So now you have two notions of truth... — Banno

I’m not introducing two notions of truth or explanation. What I’m saying is that if we deny that truth involves answerability to how things really are, or that explanation aims at getting things right about how things really are, then what remains is no longer recognizable as truth or explanation. Instead we are left with weaker surrogates (endorsement, acceptance, coherence) that cannot carry the same epistemological weight within inquiry.

Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are....So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same — Banno

I don’t think that follows. The condition is a state of affairs; the judgment is an act of affirming that state of affairs. They may coincide extensionally in this case, but they are not identical in kind.

I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. — Banno

Practice determines what would count as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself make a judgment right.

So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out. — Banno

That may be right for this particular case, but it doesn’t generalize. In many cases of disagreement—scientific, historical, or ordinary—we treat people as mistaken about how things are, not merely about how words are used. Reducing error to misuse doesn’t capture that distinction.

And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do. — Banno

Appealing to “what we do” avoids conditions all the way down only by treating truth as exhausted by acceptability within practice. But acceptability cannot do the same epistemological work as truth.

Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. — Banno

If no fact of the matter ever settles anything, then the distinction between misrepresentation and mere misuse disappears. That distinction is doing real work in inquiry and cannot simply be set aside.

The pattern here should be familiar. There's the intuition that there must be something firm - absolute, necessary, unconditional - upon which we build whatever it is we are building. — Banno

This mischaracterizes my position. There’s an important difference between (1) trying to build inquiry on an absolute foundation and (2) reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete... — Banno

I agree that we shouldn’t expect completeness, and I haven’t suggested otherwise. But invoking Gödel here actually cuts against a practice-exhaustive conception of truth rather than supporting it. Gödel’s result shows that (1) truth outruns formal derivability, (2) consistency does not collapse into completeness, and (3) there are truths that hold even though they cannot be proven within the system. Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence.

------------------

I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion.

I think you’re right about contradiction doing real work here, and I agree that it shows our judgments are not sovereign over reality. Where I’d want to press a little further is on what makes contradiction count as error in the first place.

My point isn’t just that we can be contradicted, but that when contradiction occurs, we take it to show that our judgment was wrong about how things are, not merely overridden by a new experience. That normative force doesn’t come from the contradiction itself, but from the fact that judgment already aims at a determinate way things are.

Put differently: contradiction doesn’t create objectivity; it reveals a failure relative to an objectivity that judgment already presupposes. Even in cases where no contradiction ever shows up, we still take our judgments to be answerable to how things really are, not merely to what has survived so far.

So I think we’re actually very close on this issue. I’d just want to say that the possibility of contradiction has its significance only because judgment is already oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs, not merely because we sometimes get corrected by experience.

Put differently: contradiction doesn’t create objectivity; it reveals a failure relative to an objectivity that judgment already presupposes. Even in cases where no contradiction ever shows up, we still take our judgments to be answerable to how things really are, not merely to what has survived so far. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't have a definite answer at this point, but its something to think on. Do we by default take our judgements as answerable to how things really are, or do you think most people simply assume their judgements are the way things are?

Put another way, I think there may be a personality difference here. There are some people who are constantly questioning whether their judgements are concurrent with reality, and those who are constantly surprised when its not. Some people get angry that their judgements are not being respected by reality, and others who are flexible and respectful of the outside forces that impinge on their judgements.

What I'm describing is the factual way I see people form knowledge. What I can't describe is the feeling a person has while doing it. I can describe that water is di-hydrogen monoxide. I can't describe what its like to feel it on your skin as you swim through it. A person could feel like they are pushing the water out of their way as they swim, or feel that the water is propelling them as they push against it. A person can feel hot, or 'not as cold'.

There are people who feel that the loch ness monster is real because of a few pictures. "See? That's all the proof we need." Their lives are in the affirmative of their judgements as being real, and reality is there to affirm them. Others will say, "Is that really enough evidence to claim that its real?" Those 'Debbie Downers" to the believers seem to lack wonder or 'openness' to the wonder and imagination of the world.

I’d just want to say that the possibility of contradiction has its significance only because judgment is already oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs, not merely because we sometimes get corrected by experience. — Esse Quam Videri

I think this is a personality difference. I think many of us have a will towards our own judgments first, then learn about an independent world because life contradicts us. Perhaps studying babies and kids would help us see this more. Kids aren't born with the notion of object permanence. Its only around 4-7 months of living that kids finally start to realize that things can exist outside of their immediate perception.

A large point about judgement is to recognize the world for action. When you go up to a door, do you carefully examine its hinges and structure to make sure its a door, or do you make a snap judgement to open it and move about your day? What if the door actually contained spy equipment that monitored your every action, but you would need to take it to a special lab to find out? We cannot go about our day constantly fearful that the next step we take will send us through to a hidden dimension where we will never return. So while when we're carefully thinking about something logically we might look for contradictions, in general this is a halting and inactive viewpoint as a person tries to reason through everything they can possibly think of.

Is the glass half-full, half-empty, or 'in the middle'? This is a feeling about the fact that the glasses' volume is divided equally between compact air and water. As I mentioned earlier, a person can view the universe as having no God with despair, or retain their curiosity and wonder about it. I feel the same about the knowledge theory here. I can only conclude at this point that we affirm the reality of our own experiences, and logically are only aware of there being something outside of them by contradictions. Some might be more inclined to feel we're lead more by affirmatives about the world instead of contradictions. But does that change the underlying logic of how inquiry and rationality works? I don't think so.

But what do you think? Is it more than a feeling?

I agree with most of what you said here, especially at the level of psychology and development. People clearly differ in temperament, in how much they question their judgments, and in how they experience the relation between themselves and the world. And it’s also true that much of our engagement with the world is unreflective and action-oriented rather than constantly critical.

The distinction I am trying to draw is a little different. It’s not about the different ways that people can come to recognize the independence of reality, or the temperamental and development differences that lead them to engage with reality in different ways. It’s about what commitments are implicitly presupposed in the act of inquiry itself.

Consider the act of asking a question. It might seem at first that there’s not much to such an act, but I would argue that there is a lot that is implicit within it. For example, asking a question presupposes that there is something to ask about. It presupposes that we already know something about it, but also that we don’t yet know everything about it—otherwise there would be no point in asking.

In other words, there is a logic and a set of commitments that are implicitly presupposed in the act of asking a question. To say that these things are “presupposed” is to say that the act of asking a question would be incoherent without them; they are constitutive of what it means to ask a question. To say that they are “implicit” is to acknowledge the fact they generally remain out of conscious awareness while performing the act. It is only through philosophical reflection upon what it is we are doing when we ask a question that these presuppositions are made explicit.

So what I am arguing is that robust notions of truth, error and reality are implicitly presupposed within inquiry as norms governing correctness, and that these are not reducible to weaker notions such as endorsement, misuse or coherence without loss. When we engage in inquiry we are intrinsically oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs. If we weren’t, notions like truth, error and reality would lose their meaning and inquiry would become unrecognizable in comparison to what we actually do and say in practice.

If this is still unclear, no worries. I have really enjoyed our conversation. It has given me plenty to think about, and I hope it has for you as well.

I’ve already addressed this point several times. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, you did. I marked "what judgment itself presupposes" specifically because of the central place you give it.

I'm concerned to make sure I am using your somewhat difficult language, so as to be sure we are not talking past each other. So let me adopt your language yet again, and go over what seems to me to be a central difficulty with your account:

...judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. — Esse Quam Videri

and your concern with:

an infinite regress of conditions— — Esse Quam Videri

So let's set the trilemma up again, using the changed language you are here adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, in order to so judge; but then they must either again explain that presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And your answer is that there must be something that exists necessarily in order to ground judgement.

Now my rejection of this framing is based on an example of a judgement that does not fit that framing. First, I assume that you will judge with me that you are reading this post, here, now, and that this can act as a point of agreement. The question, then, by your account, is what that judgement presupposes, by way of answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, and how it avoids an infinite regression.

Now I don't see how we can make sense of being wrong about your reading this post, here and now. There is no possibility of error here, apart from our being mistaken as to the use of words like "EQV, reading, here, now".

So were you say

Practice determines what would count as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself make a judgment right. — Esse Quam Videri

I would instead point out that the example shows that the practice counts as making the judgement. Your reading this thread counts as "EQV is reading this tread" being true.

If you like, the extensional equivalence overrides any difference in intensionality. But that's not a very clear specification.

You take yourself as

...reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry. — Esse Quam Videri

Perhaps we agree that there are things that are taken as granted in order to enact an inquiry. But were you say these things exist of necessity, I point out that they are instead aspects of our practice.

Gödel, of course, is used metaphoricaly. But

Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence — Esse Quam Videri

is not quite right, since the underivable truths are true within the system. Truth is a part of the things we do with language.

I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion. — Esse Quam Videri

Cheers. You are of course under no obligation to respond to my posts.

You and I both hold that there are things independent of our own context.

It’s not about the different ways that people can come to recognize the independence of reality, or the temperamental and development differences that lead them to engage with reality in different ways. It’s about what commitments are implicitly presupposed in the act of inquiry itself. — Esse Quam Videri

Let me ask you this in response. If there was nothing to inquire, would inquiry exist? At a more tangible level, if an intelligence didn't invent cell phones, would they exist? No. Meaning that inquiry must necessarily involve some thing doing the inquiry. That is why it varies from person to person. There is nothing necessary in an inquirer. Some people ask a question rhetorically. Some inquire and seek personal validation in their predetermined conclusion.

The only thing I can give is that there is a way that we can inquire which logically leads to the truth rationally if what we are looking at is true. The other method of inquiry, induction, can also be categorized cogently. Meaning if someone decided to inquire using plausibility, "There's a magic unicorn in the forest," I can return with, "Magic isn't possible, its never been shown to exist" and dismiss their induction as less cogent than mine. I can create a system of inquiry that rationally, leads to the correct outcome based on rational justification instead of belief or guess work.

In other words, there is a logic and a set of commitments that are implicitly presupposed in the act of asking a question. To say that these things are “presupposed” is to say that the act of asking a question would be incoherent without them; they are constitutive of what it means to ask a question. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think we can find a universal implicitness that impacts all inquirers. I think we can establish a means of inquiry that is most rational, identify means of inquiry that are less rational, but I don't think there is a universal implicit expectation from every inquirer when they ask a question.

So what I am arguing is that robust notions of truth, error and reality are implicitly presupposed within inquiry as norms governing correctness, and that these are not reducible to weaker notions such as endorsement, misuse or coherence without loss. — Esse Quam Videri

Perhaps if we added an adjective like 'rational inquiry', this could be narrowed down a bit more? At that point we can use the theory to demonstrate what a rational inquiry is, and this would be rational for all discrete experiencers who can comprehend contradictions. Beyond this, I'm not sure what else to add.

When we engage in inquiry we are intrinsically oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs. If we weren’t, notions like truth, error and reality would lose their meaning and inquiry would become unrecognizable in comparison to what we actually do and say in practice. — Esse Quam Videri

If we say "Rational inquiry", I think I can agree. Inquiry in general has no such requirements.

If this is still unclear, no worries. I have really enjoyed our conversation. It has given me plenty to think about, and I hope it has for you as well. — Esse Quam Videri

Same! I too have enjoyed your writing, your questions, and your genuine points. Whether we agree or not at this point, you are a credit to these boards, and I hope to have more discussions with you on other topics in the future. Thank you for lending your view point to this.

I think your reply helps move the discussion forward, so thank you for spelling it out.

I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. What the example shows is that there are cases where answerability is immediate - leaving no room for representational error - not that answerability is absent altogether. I take these as a limit-case, not a counter-example.

As soon as we move beyond such limit cases to claims about past events, theoretical entities, or explanations of why things are as they are, the distinction between misusing words and misrepresenting reality explicitly reasserts itself. In those cases, practice can fix criteria for correct application, but it does not itself make the judgment correct.

You could argue that all discourse can be inferentially grounded in limit-case claims, but since inference preserves only entailment rather than fulfillment of conditions, this wouldn't address worries about the regress of conditions.

My point is that inferential articulation does not exhaust the normativity of judgment. Inferential articulation explains how judgments are connected; it does not explain what it is for an inferentially licensed judgment to be wrong about the world.

That is why I resist the claim that practice can exhaust the notion of truth. The “reading” example merely shows what judgment looks like when answerability is transparently fulfilled, not that answerability can be replaced by practice. Inquiry in general presupposes that there is a way things are that judgments answer to or fail to answer to, and it is such failure that we mean by "error".

If we say "Rational inquiry", I think I can agree. — Philosophim

I think that’s a helpful way of putting it. If we restrict the discussion to rational inquiry - inquiry aimed at truth rather than persuasion, expression, or validation or anything else - then I agree that we’re talking about something governed by norms of rational correctness. That’s the sense of inquiry I’ve been trying to isolate.

Fantastic then! I'm glad we both got somewhere. You made me look at my own theory critically as well, and that is very much appreciated.

I think your reply helps move the discussion forward, so thank you for spelling it out. — Esse Quam Videri

You are welcome, as Americans say, but I didn't do any more in that last post than repeat myself.

I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. — Esse Quam Videri

I'll try one more time. You are reading this now. We ask, "what is presupposed by the judgement that I am reading?" And the answer is, exactly and only, that I am reading. What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same. No explanation has been provided that was not already at hand. Also, you said previously that "judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error.". I'll italicise the latter. Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility.

If the answer is the same as the question, no "presupposed answerability" has been provided.

It will not do to try to maintain all judgment presupposes answerability to how things are by saying "limit cases" are simply trivial instances; that's indulging in special pleading. That you are reading this now is not obviously a limiting case in any special sense.

And indeed such are not limiting cases so much as constitutive cases. What you are now doing counts as reading, now. If what you are now doing is not reading this, then what could we mean by "reading, now"?

You are assuming that fulfilment of your conditions requires something outside the judgment itself but this is precisely what is being questioned by the reading example.

Truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice. But it seems that practice alone can provide the criteria that constitute correctness. This is a fairly direct consequence of Wittgenstein's considerations of rule-following.

You say: "What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same."
I say: "The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable in kind."

You say: "Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility."
I say: "Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared."

You say: "Calling it a limit case is special pleading."
I say: "Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is."

As explained in my previous reply, it is a limit case precisely because the answerability relation is immediately fulfilled - not eliminated. I explained how the representational gap widens again as you move away from the limit case. This is precisely how we would expect a limit case to function.

You say: "If you were right, truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice."
I say: "Norms of truth are constituted in practice as norms of answerability to reality."

Norms are made by practice, but are about getting things right - which is why practice can fail.

Practice and reality are not competitors here. They play different roles.

The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable in kind. — Esse Quam Videri

Special pleading. The judgement and the fact are the very same.

Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared. — Esse Quam Videri

An answer that repeats the question is not an answer.

Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is. — Esse Quam Videri

Such judgements appear to be a limiting cases because they are constitutive of the background that makes judgement possible.

Norms of truth are constituted in practice as norms of answerability to reality. — Esse Quam Videri

Norms are constitutive of what is the case as much as what is the case delineates norms, as is shown by "what is right" being itself a judgement.

Practice and reality are mutually dependent and inseparable.

I think your last reply makes the disagreement as clear as it’s going to get. On your view, certain judgments are constitutive of what is the case, norms and reality are mutually dependent, and truth is exhausted by what survives within practice. On that picture, error is ultimately a matter of deviance from shared criteria, not failure to answer to how things are independently of those criteria.

My resistance isn’t to circularity, constitutive cases, or practice-based explanation — I accept all of those. It’s to the consequence that misrepresentation reduces to misuse and that inquiry no longer answers to anything beyond its own norms. That’s a coherent position perhaps, but it’s one that reshapes the notions of truth and error in a way I ultimately can’t accept.

At that point, the disagreement isn’t about regress, limit cases, or examples like “EQV is reading.” It’s about whether truth is exhausted by practice or essentially involves answerability to how things are. I don’t really see a neutral way to adjudicate that any further.