For example, "science" cannot tell us whether or not we should be scientific realists, or what a property is, or what constitutes knowledge. — darthbarracuda

So science has no epistemology? Gee, that's news to me.

So science has no epistemology? Gee, that's news to me. — apokrisis

If it is indeed the case that science has an epistemology, then this just further shows how philosophy is a separate and prior domain.

I suggest not only that there is not one but also that there cannot be a "why the world is intelligible." This "why" (be it God or more nakedly synthetic concept) would always be part of the world-as-totality it supposed to "explain." The mind seems good at arranging entities in a push-pull system. If you want this, do that. If you see this, expect that. If you had done this, then event X "would" have happened (expectation projected backwards).

I think "explain" is a word to be sniffed. So-called explanations have weight to the degree that they help us manipulate/predict physical and social reality and/or make our emotional/intellectual peace with it, or so it seems to me. As I see it, reason is intrinsically instrumental. Veblen comes to mind when I think of the piety directed toward non-instrumental Reason. Roughly speaking, it takes on a status-boosting function in its distance from work. I do experience the "lyrical why," but this is almost like a glitch in human cognition. We can arrange entities within the totality into a system of causes and effects, so why not the totality? Because it cannot be related to anything.

If it is indeed the case that science has an epistemology, then this just further shows how philosophy is a separate and prior domain. — darthbarracuda

Why the snobbery? Historically, science has clearly been philosophy's best and sharpest expression of itself. It's pragmatism deals with idealism/realism in systematic self-grounding fashion.

You seem to miss the whole point of intelligibility. It is about constraining possibility so that it leaves you with a crisp framework of yes/no binary questions about existence. And once you have a theory expressed in counterfactuals, then you can actually make matchingly crisp measurements in the name of the theory. You can answer the questions with experienced facts.

So intelligibility is pragmatism. It doesn't mean "being able to be understood". It means being understood in that particular way.

If you want to understand reality some other way, say a prayer or hold a seance. Or learn to write obscure PoMo texts that are the opposite of intelligible models of existence.

"When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story? "
From Popper and Kojeve I got the idea that these are all one and the same. Some stories address the physical/social more the emotional/personal. Some stories address the relationships that hold between stories. In my view, creativity is central. We come up with a new story or fusion of stories and we are seduced by it. Then it gets banged against other stories. We always already believe lots of stories. We abandon them when we are seduced by a better incompatible story or when a story keeps getting us into trouble, physical or social. I suppose philosophy has been for me largely a collection of stories about stories. One starts to see (doesn't one?) certain structures that sum to a story about human nature (its story-telling aspect).

"So intelligibility is pragmatism."
I strongly agree with what I think you're getting at here. I "understand" insofar as I can make use of. Utility is vast, of course, or so I intend it. In short, understanding is a handle on things. Apart from motive and action, the handle doesn't exist in a way worth talking about. Note the mention of worth/value, which is a sort of ineffable ground.

Note the mention of worth/value, which is a sort of ineffable ground. — who

Yes, it is important to a proper understanding of pragmatism - the original Peircean version rather than the popularised Jamesian one - that is isn't simply a presumption of some utilitarian ground of value. What it means to "work" - to serve a purpose - is also up for discussion as part of the epistemology. So it is really a claim about the value of a general reasoning method.

When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story? — darthbarracuda

In my view, we are ALWAYS telling each other a story, and there's no 'just' about that. Story-telling is the pinnacle!

On the question of intelligibility, I'm always a little mystified at questions like that, or the similar 'why is mathematics so effective'. It's like asking why the person that won the lottery won the lottery (what are the odds!!?!). If the world were not at least fairly intelligible, we would be unable to survive. So its partial intelligibility is a logical consequence of our survival. Similarly, if mathematics we were not so effective we would not use it. It is so effective because we chose it as the most effective thing we could get hold of. And again, if there were nothing nearly so effective, we would not have survived.

In my view the universe is predominantly, and ultimately, unintelligible. The fact that some minor aspects of it are intelligible to us should not come as a surprise. It could not be otherwise.

Does the world contain empirical aspects and non-empirical aspects? — darthbarracuda

One non-empirical aspect is the "what-it's-likeness" of an individual organism. It is only empirical in that the individual person is the only who can access their own experience. At what point is experience not a part of the world? Can experience itself (the basis for empirical observation, imitation, connection-making, inference-making, synthesizing, analyzing, and memory-storage, etc.) have ever been non-existent in total or was it always there in some way as a product of how particles/forces/molecules work? When does experience pop in the picture? Amoeba? Multi-cellular life? Clusters of neurons? If it is one of these bags-of-chemicals- what makes those bags of chemicals different from previous ones where a "what-it's-like" experiential phenomena is entailed with its very nature. If it did come about at a point-in-time and not there all along, what is this big explosion of experience like to come on the scene from non-experience? Can the idea of having no-experience what-so-ever then having one instance of experience exist even be truly comprehensible?

The world is clearly intelligible in some respects. — DarthBarracuda

The qualifier ruins it. In the traditional understanding, something is either intelligible or it isn't.

'The world' is intelligible enough for me. I must say, Picasso and Graham Greene made it so for me, initially, rather than scientists. They remain a good guide to what matters to me, as compared, say, to neuroscience.

From an idealist perspective, "the world" is something created within our minds, and so it is necessarily intelligible. We exist as independent minds with separation between us. "The world" is a concept, created in an attempt to understand this separation. It is necessary to assume that this medium between us, the separation, is itself intelligible, or else our attempts to understand it are self-defeating.

However the alternatives (such as philosophy as being First Inquiry) must be justified in itself. There needs to be an explanation as to why science cannot tell us these things, a meta-philosophical question. Why is science limited in its scope, and how do we know science will never answer questions we typically assign to philosophy or even theology/mysticism? — darthbarracuda

The scientific method proceeds from speculation. Speculation itself cannot be said to be scientific or non-scientific, as science is a particular means by which speculation is tested. The direction in which individual human beings speculate is influenced by interests which cannot be said to be scientific either.

When individuals such as yourself, speculate that perhaps the world (the medium) is unintelligible, you approach that self-defeating assumption. If you understand the necessity in concluding that the medium is indeed intelligible, (a conclusion produced by logic rather than the scientific method), you will adopt this idealist premise. If you do not understand the logic behind this premise, you may assume as a premise, that the world is unintelligible. Therefore the world (the medium) will be unintelligible, to you.

The reason 'science cannot tell us these things' is because it is not omniscience.

Here's the thing - 'intelligibility' basically means that something makes sense. And, since about, oh, I don't know, sometime in the 19th Century, the world has, on the whole, and as a whole, stopped making sense. Now, the idea that it ought to 'make sense' is viewed as a quaint anthropomorphism. We are kind of proud of the fact that the 'world that science reveals' is basically incomprehensible, as if that represents an opportunity for discovery. I don't know if anyone else agrees that this is weird.

There's a book I know about (as distinct from know) which is called 'The Eclipse of Reason', by Horkheimer. He's Frankfurt school, and despite the fact that I hate communism, this book has some important things to say. One of them is that up until, oh, I don't know, sometime in the 19th Century, it was simply assumed that 'the world made sense', that it was animated by reason, that things existed for a reason, and that reason could be used to discover what that reason was. But one of the things that 'Darwinism' did, was cast doubt on the idea of reason in that classical sense, because, accoding to the Tangled Bank Theory, 'what grasps reason' is essentially the same thing that causes earthworms to mate, writ large - 'evolved', it is said. To say anything else is - you guessed it! - a quaint anthropomorphism, the nostalgia for the times when we (falsely) believed we were anything but animals.

So I have been musing on the depressing thought that the denizens of hell probably don't know 'this is hell'. I bet they think where they live is actually pretty good. They've become accustomed to it, and they can't imagine it could be some other way. And that's the main reason they're in it! Whereas, for us earthlings, we have this dim recollection that things could actually be other than, and better than, what they are, and a sim sense we ought to try and remember or discover why that is.

Hence, questions about inteligibility.

But one of the things that 'Darwinism' did, was cast doubt on the idea of reason in that classical sense, — Wayfarer

I find that a very odd point of view. What Darwinism has actually done is provide an explanation where there was none. The reason for biodiversity has been discovered!

It's like asking why the person that won the lottery won the lottery (what are the odds!!?!). If the world were not at least fairly intelligible, we would be unable to survive — andrewk

Say I load a gun with a blank and fire it at you. You don't know that there's a blank in the gun, and believe that it is loaded with a real bullet. After it fires, you are unharmed. You would not be surprised that you're not making the observation, "I am dead." You would, however, be surprised that you are making the observation, "I am alive."

'The world' is intelligible enough for me. — mcdoodle

For all of us, really, unless we've committed ourselves (perversely) to inhuman standards of intelligibility. Many of us have unreasonable expectations regarding the world, sad to say.

Don't forget Dewey, dammit.

Your namesake was a philosopher and yet his evaluations of the human condition were more empirical than anything else. It is an empirical issue whether or not organisms experience boredom, or suffer, or how they experience desire.

Schopenhauer was not alone in this kind of empirical-philosophical reasoning. Existential questions seem to be empirical - a point that IIRC Brassier pointedly advocates. It's just that empiricism is now dominated by science. And so these kinds of questions and answers must be undertaken by science. But I think the part that makes it philosophy is knowing where to look, i.e. identifying problems and having the gall to do so.



What strikes me as odd is that in modern philosophy you get philosophers who have carved their own little intellectual realm in which they get to study while everyone else waits outside, as if reality itself is actually structured this way as well. Lots of reactionary metaphysicians today are apt to call certain questions "ontologically metaphysical", or outside of the realm of empiricism and science, and only a priori intuitions can even attempt to solve these issues. Now I'm skeptical of science alone being able to answer these questions, as if it can operate without a rudimentary metaphysical structure, but what remains to be shown is why this is the case - that is to say, why some questions are empirical and other apparently not.

What would seem to be the case, then, is that many of these philosophical insights are produced through reasoning "shortcuts" rather than a specific methodology that you see in the special sciences.

But one can have an a-utility understanding. For example: you understand that Gandalf loves his Hobbits. This is true understanding, but it is also useless understanding.

I would argue that direct information exchange is the pinnacle. Telling a story suggests other connotations, the weaving together of something which may or may not be true, but tells us something through an artistic method. What then of copy-and-paste? Strong arguments are made that we will send and receive thoughts and information via the Internet in the near future. And math itself is hardly a story but more integral to the description of any given thing.

Where do we draw the line in what we call a story? Because if the sequence of if-then statements a computer uses to understand a given problem is a story, "story" becomes a rather swollen and meaningless term, no?

Now I'm skeptical of science alone being able to answer these questions, as if it can operate without a rudimentary metaphysical structure, but what remains to be shown is why this is the case - that is to say, why some questions are empirical and other apparently not. — darthbarracuda

It is a faulty binary to go about saying science is empirical, philosophy is rational, therefore the two are mutually exclusive. Sure, you can advance that theory of the world in a way that makes it intelligible for you. But measurement should demonstrate the faultiness of such reasoning.

You yourself just said Schopenhauer was a rather empirical chap. And science is a deeply metaphysical exerercise, explicit in making ontic commitments to get its games going.

So you are applying the method by which we attempt to achieve intelligibility - trying to force through some LEM based account of the world. But you are failing to support it with evidence.

But one can have an a-utility understanding. For example: you understand that Gandalf loves his Hobbits. This is true understanding, but it is also useless understanding — IVoyager

Of course you would have to have useless understandings. That is what justifies talking about the contrary of a useful understanding. Again, this is how we render the world intelligible - A exists because not-A exists to make the existence of A crisply a fact.

What Darwinism has actually done is provide an explanation where there was none.

A biological explanation - but at the cost of the devaluing of reason.

In the Eclipse of Reason, (1947), Max Horkheimer argues that individuals in contemporary industrial culture experience a universal feeling of fear and disillusionment, which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as a reality which underwrote the order of the cosmos. Now, reason is seen as a subjective faculty of the mind. This attitude undermines metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself. Reason no longer determines the guiding principles of our own lives, but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized.

The effects of this shift are devaluing. Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them. He forgets the unrepeatable and unique nature of every human life and instead sees all living things as fields of means. His inner life is rationalized and planned. "On the one hand, nature has been stripped of all intrinsic value or meaning. On the other, man has been stripped of all aims except self-preservation....

The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics – that the world is in some sense a product of the mind –is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy...

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature – even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man – frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature.

... the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy."

A biological explanation - but at the cost of the devaluing of reason. — Wayfarer

Actually No! The modern theory of evolution is not biological. Replicators subject to variation and selection can is not a biology-specific theory.

Reason no longer determines the guiding principles of our own lives, but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized. — Wayfarer

Reason does not determine anything. Reason consists of how ideas are treated, not how they are determined or justified.

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. — Wayfarer

And you are complaining about the status of reason??!!

Where do we draw the line in what we call a story? Because if the sequence of if-then statements a computer uses to understand a given problem is a story, "story" becomes a rather swollen and meaningless term, no? — IVoyager

I would say that a necessary condition for something being a story is that it have a conscious narrator (story-teller) and at least one consciousness listener. They may be the same entity - as we sometimes tell ourselves stories - but usually they are different.

But unless a computer is conscious, a computer executing a series of statements, or even printing out a story written by somebody else, is not telling a story. And I don't think the primitive computers we have now could possibly be conscious.

A consequence of this, to which some may object, is that a computer typing out random symbols endlessly, that by a sheer fluke prints out a sequence at some stage that reads just like Thumbelina, has not told a story. The same applies to a tree branch tapping against a cliff that by fluke produces a Morse Code version of Thumbelina.

Trying to produce necessary and sufficient conditions for what a story is would be challenging, and I don't have an answer for that right now. It would have difficulties similar to those in trying to define a 'game'. But the above necessary conditions are enough to rule out computer story-telling.

The qualifier ruins it. In the traditional understanding, something is either intelligible or it isn't. — Wayfarer

Do you think so?

I think 'intelligible' traditionally relates to ordinary speech, not to philosophical discourse, and means that we can make out what the person is trying to communicate.

In most spoken sentences we hear, we do not catch every word, but we can still understand the sentence because there is redundancy in the language and we can interpolate. Sometimes we miss so many words that we are unable to interpret the sentence, but then, usually a few sentences later, we are able to make up for the loss of that sentence by the redundancy between that and the other sentences. This effect is amplified when listening to a language in which one is not fluent. That's why, when one is speaking to another adult in front of one's young children about something one doesn't want them to understand, one talks fast and in big words, to prevent the child from using redundancy to understand.

So we are usually able to understand one another, even though we miss much of what we each say. We could say that the message of a speech is still fully intelligible, because the redundancy enables us to capture the full meaning despite the missed words and sentences.

But in anything other than a short passage of speech, there are likely to be multiple themes. We may capture some of them but not all. For instance a prosecuting barrister may argue the defendant is guilty because of reasons A, B and C. A juror may not capture C, but be convinced by A and B, and vote to convict. I suggest that in that case the barrister's speech is only partially intelligible to the juror.

I am trying to learn German, and am reading short stories in it to improve my comprehension. I don't understand many of the words but I can get the meaning of most sentences via redundancy. There are some sentences or paragraphs that escape me entirely. I generally get the overall drift, but I never found out whether Eskol the Viking was angry or just sad when he was telling the others that their ship was broken and they'd have to stay in America. I would say the story is partly intelligible to me. Maybe even mostly intelligible, but that may be flattering myself.

I suppose I'm not really arguing here. It's just that your interesting comment set up a chain of thought in my head about intelligibility that I found curious.

@andrewk - your definition of 'intelligibility' is a perfectly normal one in day to day terms.

But that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the traditionalist, (neo)Platonist idea of 'intelligibility', which is considerably harder to understand and to convey (not that I'm an expert in it). But the traditionalist account of intelligibility was such that it conveyed the sense of a complete, (if you like illuminated) understanding, in the sense of there no longer being any shortcoming or gap between the understanding and the thing understood. The pinnacle of this understanding was 'the vision of the One' - a vision of the 'order of the cosmos', which you will find in the more mystical Platonic dialogues and also in Plotinus' Enneads. The ideas in those texts are that the intelligible domain of mathematical and geometric laws, and of the forms of things, is real in a way that the domain of perception can never be. Now, of course, our modern sensibility is so thoroughly embedded in what the Platonists would dismiss as 'the sensory domain', that we no longer understand what they're talking about at all.

Consider it an historical footnote.

I think 'intelligible' traditionally relates to ordinary speech, not to philosophical discourse, and means that we can make out what the person is trying to communicate. — andrewk

Given this is a philosophy board and the OP was clearly meaning to apply the philosophical usage, talking instead about issues of ordinary language comprehension is an unhelpful sidetrack.

I'll post the Wiki definition if it helps....

In philosophy, intelligibility is what can be comprehended by the human mind in contrast to sense perception. The intelligible method is thought thinking itself, or the human mind reflecting on itself.

Plato referred to the intelligible realm of mathematics, forms, first principles, logical deduction, and the dialectical method. The intelligible realm of thought thinking about thought does not necessarily require any visual images, sensual impressions, and material causes for the contents of mind.

Descartes referred to this method of thought thinking about itself, without the possible illusions of the senses. Kant made similar claims about a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is claimed to be independent of the content of experience.

So the metaphysical surprise is that reality is logically structured. It appears to conform to the laws of thought. The world seem to operate with order and reason - regulated by formal/final cause or abstract rational principles.

Traditionally, this seemed such a surprise that it was mystical. A transcendent cause of order seemed necessary because nature itself is naturally messy, with an ever-present tendency towards disorder.

But now - through science and maths - we have discovered how structure in fact arises quite naturally in nature through fundamental principles of thermodynamic self-organisation. Disorder itself must fall into regular patterns for basic geometric reasons to do with symmetries and symmetry-breakings.

So the intelligibility of the Cosmos is far less of an issue these days. We have things like selection principles and least action principles that explain the emergence of order even from randomness.

@Wayfarer Do you think it would follow from that definition of intelligibility that nothing can ever be intelligible (in that specific Platonic sense) because, to whatever explanation is provided, one can always ask 'Why?'.

Whether it be 'things fall towards the Earth because of Newton's inverse square law of gravity' or 'the world exists because Yahweh manufactured it / Brahman dreamed it', one can still ask why.

If so, doesn't the concept of intellligibility become useless, since it does not distinguish?