So, if knowing is not a species of belief in this view, what is it? It is what Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- the actualization of intelligibility -- or, in more phenomenological terms, the awareness of present being. — Dfpolis

Or, in psychological terms, cognition (knowing condition).
Or cognisance (mental experience of knowing), part of being aware; the other part being perception (experience caused by sensation).

His awareness of this dynamic presence, of this intelligibility, was him knowing that he was in his chamber, and it was unaffected by his suspension of belief. — Dfpolis

I have not read Descartes. Was he suspending belief or modulating attention (concentrated direction of mind by means of information selection)?

Was he suspending belief or modulating attention (concentrated direction of mind by means of information selection)? — Galuchat

Descartes was on a quest for certitude. In this quest, he employed methodological doubt -- doubting everything he could reasonably doubt and ending at his famous Cogito, ergo sum -- which he believed beyond doubt. Currently, however, eliminative materialists, such as Dennett, have chosen to doubt mental experience. (Showing in my mind that you can will to suspend belief about anything.)

Currently, however, eliminative materialists, such as Dennett, have chosen to doubt mental experience. (Showing in my mind that you can will to suspend belief about anything.) — Dfpolis

In Dennett's case, no mental experience may be a fact.

He he

In Dennett's case, no mental experience may be a fact. — Galuchat

In Dennett's case, the mental is redefined to be something objective, such as the functional role it plays. He's never said we don't have minds or experiences, only that they're not what some people (including myself) think they are.

Dennett also considers himself to be a quasi-realist about certain mental content. You can adopt the intentional stance in regards to other people, whereas you adopt the physical stance for rocks, the design stance for chairs.

He's never said we don't have minds or experiences, only that they're not what some people (including myself) think they are. — Marchesk

What does he say, and what do you think, minds and experiences are?

Descartes's knowledge was unaffected because all during his meditation, his chamber continued to project its reality into him -- it never ceased to act on him in sensible ways: scattering light into his eyes, pressing up on his bottom, holding his manuscript in place as he wrote. His awareness of this dynamic presence, of this intelligibility, was him knowing that he was in his chamber, and it was unaffected by his suspension of belief. — Dfpolis

Don't you think that Descartes's awareness was supported not only by a simple physical presence of the things in his room but also, more broadly, by rootedness of the things in the world?

What does he say, and what do you think, minds and experiences are? — Galuchat

Dennett thinks that subjectivity in terms of the Cartesian Theater or the Hard Problem are an illusion. A trick of language or the brain. There's nothing going on inside other than physical and biological processes, and whatever functional or computational roles they carry out. We are the equivalent of philosophical zombies, and he said as much in one talk I watched on Youtube.

I think there's something to subjectivity that is very hard to account for with an objective explanation. That's why Dennett is an eliminativist about qualia instead of trying to provide some sort of reductionistic or emergent account. But I don't see how you can entirely eliminate qualia, or whatever you want to call it. There's something to subjectivity. Something possibly fundamental.

Don't you think that Descartes's awareness was supported not by a simple physical presence of the things in his room, but also, more broadly, by rootedness of the things in the world? — Number2018

While I would not deny this, I don't know what point you are making.

I agree with your thoughts on subjectivity.

With regard to Dennett's levels of psychological explanation, he assigns an ontological status only to his Physical Stance, not to his Functional Design or Intentional Stance.

So, I reject eliminative materialism as a radical form of reductionism which denies the existence of mental conditions and functions known from experience and through introspection.

My point is that Descartes's meditation and doubt reflected not just his intellectual way of being, but also the existential-being-in the world. He was not a philosopher of his chamber, of his ivory tower.

I agree, but I still do not see what this observation adds to our understanding of his enterprise.

I just want to add to your observation that during his suspension and doubt,
Descartes was actually also supported somehow by his belief in the existence of the world as a whole,
not just a few separate things in front of him.

OK That is fair

Could you explain your interest in Descartes?

Yes, I think he distorted the trajectory of Western philosophy.

At the beginning of natural science, we make what i call the fundamental abstraction of natural science. Even though all knowing involves both a knowing subject and a known object, natural science chooses to abstract the objective from the subject. As natural scientists we care about what Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Hubble saw, not their experience of being a knowing subject seeing it. As a result, the fundamental abstraction leaves behind data on subjectivity. Having projected such data out of its conceptual space, it can form no judgement linking what it knows of the objective world to concepts reflecting our subjective experience.

Dennett and his ilk seem blissfully unaware of the fundamental abstraction. So, finding no place for subjectivity in their conceptual space, they assume it does not exist. The correct response is to approach the problem in a way that does not leave data on the table.

In other words while he continued to know that he was in his chamber, he chose not to believe it. — Dfpolis

Surely it's the other way around. He believed he was in his chamber. And what he felt he knew - by rational doubt - was that was just in fact a belief and no more.

So simple empiricism - the evidence of the senses - has a problem when it comes to being "knowledge". It is quite plausible that any sensory evidence is some kind of dream or illusion. Psychology already reveals that. And logically, it is not impossible that an evil demon insures this is the general case.

He extended this to even his mathematical imaginings. It might be the case he believes a square to have four sides - as he can picture a square in his head and count them. But that might also be a continuation of a deception.

To follow this line of thought to its natural end, he had to further suppose the evil demon would never let up. The fact that life couldn't operate unless he allowed himself to fall back into old habits - like just accepting his chamber was actually there and getting on with daily life - was still just sensory evidence and so still doubtable for this reason.

Rather, it involved a willing suspension of belief, — Dfpolis

Explicitly the opposite. Descartes had to posit a relentless evil demon as the reason why it was logically possible he could be deceived, despite his wishes otherwise.

So, if knowing is not a species of belief in this view, what is it? It is what Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- the actualization of intelligibility -- or, in more phenomenological terms, the awareness of present being. — Dfpolis

Well "the awareness of present being" is a hopelessly ambiguous term here.

The correct answer in my view is the Pragmatic/Semiotic position taken by scientific reasoning. Descartes was essentially right. But that then means knowledge becomes founded on pragmatic belief. We have to take a chance, make a guess, form a hypothesis that is our belief. Then we see how operating in that light fares. We find out how false it is in practice. Truth becomes whatever stands the test of acting in the world as we feel we understand it to be.

This is good psychology. It is how brains function. Minds are pragmatic models of the world - a system of signs or an Unwelt, and not some kind of veridical direct representation as is usually naively presumed.

So Descartes problematised knowledge, highlighting that it couldn't in fact rise above belief.

Then eventually the modern scientific epistemology emerged. With semiosis, we can realise that knowing isn't even about having a true belief, but about having a pragmatic one. The whole question of whether we can "see things as they actually are" becomes the charade. What we are in fact interested in - as modellers - is to reduce "the world" to an easily understood system of signs.

The view we are constructing - biologically and socially - is not of the "world out there", but of "the world with us acting in it". And that is a big step on from the simplistic representationalism that Descartes helped problematise.

So knowledge becomes about certainty over our possible courses of action. We are judging our ability to act in "the world" in a way that conforms to our long-run expectations.

Surely it's the other way around. He believed he was in his chamber. And what he felt he knew - by rational doubt - was that was just in fact a belief and no more. — apokrisis

Let's begin with a semiotic reflection. "Knowing" names a human activity. "Believing" names another. In common usage, the meanings of these terms terms overlap: Knowing is sometimes called "believing" and "believing" is sometimes called "knowing." So, as philosophers, we need to define these terms more precisely. What we should not do is define these terms in such a way that they no longer name a human activity.

So, I have chosen to define "knowing" to refer to the process Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- a usage with a long tradition of philosophical usage. To wit, to know is to actualize present intelligibility. It is thus an activity of intellect -- of our capacity for awareness of information.

Coordinately, I have chosen to define "believing" as committing to the the truth of some judgement. Committing is an act of will, of our power to make choices, not an act of intellect. Thus, I have defined these terms in such a way as to ensure their orthogonality -- their meanings do not not overlap. This does not mean that knowing and believing are unrelated, only that they are independent acts.

Now I say he knew, the whole time. You say "he felt he knew." But, wasn't there an intelligibility present, the source of which we choose to call "Descates's Chamber"? And wasn't Descartes aware of this intelligibility? If this is so, then didn't Descartes actually know, and continue to know, that he was in his chamber?

So, what of his "rational" doubts? Of what he "he felt he knew"? (I personally think the notion of demons deceiving him is very irrational.) What he actually knew was that there was something adequate to present the system of intelligibility we call "Descartes's chamber."

What "he felt he knew" was that that something had a certain ontological structure, such that it was not the product of demonic activity. Of course, he never knew this at all. This was a construct, a hypothesis, inadequately supported by what he actually knew. Other hypotheses might be that the intelligibility he was aware of was the effect of an interacting set of atoms or that it was the result of a computer feeding inputs to his neural system.

Some of these hypotheses are falsifiable, others not. Some are supported by confirming data, others not. Still, all remain mere hypotheses -- constructs, not the awareness of present intelligibility.

I would suggest that underlying this crisis in faith about our knowledge is the cultural shift from a theological perspective to a humanistic worldview. The Scholastics were quite content to acknowledge that human beings are finite creatures, with limited intellects. They did not think that we should know anything exhaustively, as God knows it. Rather, we know only what sense reveals to us. Still, we know what sense reveals to us.

With the advent of Renaissance humanism came a great deal of optimism about human capabilities. Protagoras' view that "man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not," became widely current. So, the recognition that we have a limited knowledge of reality was replaced by the expectation the that we should have unlimited knowledge. Instead of "knowing" naming an actual human activity, Divine Omniscience became the paradigm of knowledge.

I call his view (that knowledge is only real when it is exhaustive) the Omniscience Fallacy. In its place, I see that all human knowledge is a projection (a dimensionally diminished map) of reality. Being reveals itself to us by acting on us in specific ways that inform us of some, but not all, of its possible acts. By combining multiple projections we can come to a fuller understanding of reality, but never an exhaustive knowledge.

So simple empiricism - the evidence of the senses - has a problem when it comes to being "knowledge". It is quite plausible that any sensory evidence is some kind of dream or illusion — apokrisis

No, it is not. For a theory to be "plausible" we need strong evidence supporting that theory. All we have is an unfalsifiable hypothesis lacking a shred of confirming data. In fact, it is not even clear what the theory proposes, for reality does not fit the phenomenology of dreams. I'm a lucid dreamer. When I don't like how a dream is going, I wake myself up. I can't do that with reality. Dreams have a finite duration against the persistence of reality. Dreams also lack the consistency, order and continuity characteristic of reality. I could make a similar analysis of "illusion." So, what does the hypothesis even mean by "some kind of dream"?

More fundamentally, the dream argument is an abuse of language. What we mean by "reality" is paradigmatically what we encounter in the lived world. The dream argument casts aside this fundamental meaning of "reality," conjuring in its place (ex nihillo) another, mythic, "reality" that we are (irrationally) to suppose is more "real" than reality. Thus, the conjecture seeks the self-contradictory goal of convincing us that reality is not real.

Psychology already reveals that. — apokrisis

Really? I missed that lesson.

Rather, it involved a willing suspension of belief, — Dfpolis

Explicitly the opposite. Descartes had to posit a relentless evil demon as the reason why it was logically possible he could be deceived, despite his wishes otherwise. — apokrisis

The belief that he suspended was that he was in his chamber. His meditation does not require anyone be committed to (believe in) the actual existence of demons -- only the admission that they are logically possible.

Finally, the possible deception doesn't involve what he knows (his awareness of intelligibility he calls "his chamber.") It involves a belief, inadequately supported by evidence, about the ontological structure of his chamber -- as I have discussed above. What is shown is not that Descartes does not know he is in his chamber, but that his knowledge of the ontology of his chamber is limited -- a point taken for granted by the Scholastics.

Well "the awareness of present being" is a hopelessly ambiguous term here. — apokrisis

Let me disambiguate it for you. I take "being" to mean anything that can act in any way. "Existence" means an indeterminate ability to act in reality, and "essence" is the specification of a beings possible acts. "Present" here means that a being has acted on a subject in such a way (say via our sensory system) as to be available to awareness. Finally, by "awareness" I mean our ability to actualize intelligibility -- making it actually known to the subject.

Since in acting on us to make itself present, is an actual act of a being, it is a possible act of that being. Thus, it informs us of both its existence (since it is acting) and, in part, of its essence (since it is acting in this specific way).

The correct answer in my view is the Pragmatic/Semiotic position taken by scientific reasoning. — apokrisis

That is an altogether reasonable approach to the justification of belief. It has little to do with knowledge as I have defined it and as it was understood before the era of modern phiilosophy. Of course, I realize that "knowing" can mean "(causally) justified true belief" in many cases. And, in these cases, the hypothetico-deductive method is a reasonable approach to justification. Still, what is justified is belief as commitment, not knowledge as awareness of present intelligibility.

This is good psychology. It is how brains function. Minds are pragmatic models of the world - a system of signs or an Unwelt, and not some kind of veridical direct representation as is usually naively presumed. — apokrisis

You seem to think that one projection of our our minds (not our brains) work, is all we need. Aristotle's analysis in De Anima iii gives us a different projection -- one justifying episteme, not doxa. No epistemology that ignores one in favor of the other can claim to be adequate to the reality of human cognition.

What we are in fact interested in - as modellers - is to reduce "the world" to an easily understood system of signs. — apokrisis

What we are interested in as humans is to know being as it reveals itself to us. To the extent that we can "model" it with a system of comprehensible signs, we make it easier to respond to. Still, to the extent that we confuse our models with reality, to the extent that we think our "reduced" world is the real world, we are guilty of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. The real world is not our model and it is always ready to hit us with a shocking surprise to prove it isn't.

So knowledge becomes about certainty over our possible courses of action — apokrisis

If that is how you conceive of knowledge, it does not exist. Our actual system of episteme and doxa is always limited -- always open to shocking surprise. Our ability to predict, while real, is limited and uncertain. Failing to see this is a very dangerous form of hubris.

So, I have chosen to define "knowing" to refer to the process Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- a usage with a long tradition of philosophical usage. To wit, to know is to actualize present intelligibility. It is thus an activity of intellect -- of our capacity for awareness of information. — Dfpolis

If that is how you conceive of knowledge, it does not exist. Our actual system of episteme and doxa is always limited -- always open to shocking surprise. Our ability to predict, while real, is limited and uncertain. Failing to see this is a very dangerous form of hubris. — Dfpolis

So is the real debate about the accuracy of Aristotle's epistemology or the unreasonableness of Descartes's?

I think Aristotle's approach - shorn of scholastic/divine interpretations - boils down quite nicely to a pragmatic and semiotic story. And I certainly don't support Descartes's mentalistic dualism. I just see that he has a place in history as a particular reaction to the simplistic empiricism that characterised the dawning Enlightenment.

It is not me that would drive a wedge between sense data and rational argument, suggesting that knowledge rests on either the one or the other. My view is that theories and acts of measurement go together as an active and productive habit - an established system of sign. So the kind of doubt about sense data, and even habits of conception, that Descartes was saying were ultimately doubtable, well, in practice, we have no good reason to doubt them. At least until they start to make enough bad predictions.

A Peircean epistemology stresses that the very nature of habits of conception is that they are "well developed" - the best we can do so far. So Descartes in his chamber could "conceivably" be a Boltzmann brain, making all his practical knowledge some random illusion. But then pragmaticism is about accepting that absolute knowledge is never going to be the case, then moving on. The focus of pragmatism is about what constitutes "well developed" habits of belief or intellect. How closely can we approach some ideal of "absolute knowledge", or "objective totality", or whatever general epistemic goal we have a reasonable freedom to set ourselves.

So Aristotle offered a fairly systematic and complex view of epistemology. So does Peirce. And Descartes pops up as one of those epistemology 101 guys, along with Hume, Berkeley, etc, who questioned the empiricist tide of their times in some nicely simplistic fashion. They dramatised the "other" that looked to be subsumed in the contemporary discussion. But that kind of antithesis has to find its resolution in a triadic synthesis, not simply left as a disjointed dualism.

So sure. Take a pop at Descartes. Could he actually doubt "everything" in a reasonable fashion? Or was he simply illustrating the Peircean point. Knowledge develops by beginning from some "leap of faith" - a willingness to take one hypothesis as a plausible truth and then judge that based on its "real world" consequences. The metaphysical starting point then becomes believing there really is a world out there that impinges on us in such a way that we can be its pragmatic modellers.

I would suggest that underlying this crisis in faith about our knowledge is the cultural shift from a theological perspective to a humanistic worldview. The Scholastics were quite content to acknowledge that human beings are finite creatures, with limited intellects. They did not think that we should know anything exhaustively, as God knows it. Rather, we know only what sense reveals to us. Still, we know what sense reveals to us. — Dfpolis

I don't buy that at all. Pragmatism doesn't just acknowledge our finitude, it goes further in saying we - as "aware selves" - are constructed via that very process. What gets constructed are habits of belief that are models of selves in worlds. So there is no soul that pre-exists the modelling relation. That kind of personalised psychological point of view is what emerges in forming notions of "a world out there".

So we switch to not even expecting the phenomenal to have access to the noumenal. The phenomenal is the system of sign, the Umwelt, which is producing the "self" along with its "world".

In this light, knowledge is all about the development of those kinds of regulatory habits. It is not about subjective, nor objective, truth. It is about the production of a subjectivity in contrast to an objectivity - a modelling relation which embodies a separation of "self" and "world". And that separation is what a system of sign mediates. The outside physical world becomes symbolised in terms of internal goals and desires.

So, contra simplistic empiricism, all sense data is simply acts of measurement. A self-interested transformation of material energy into self-interestedly meaningful data has already happened as soon as sensations have "entered experience".

So what sense reveals to us isn't finite because it is somehow partial, or lacking in omniscience. It is finite in the sense of already reflecting some useful structure of selfhood. It is the world as it could make sense to the habits of interpretance that have developed to produce some focal "us".

Your scheme seems basically Cartesian in its dualism of mind and world. You accept that there is this stuff called "mind". And God has the all-sensing version. We have a limited embodied point of view. Animals lack something essential - the intellect or reasoning soul - and so have a very dull and extremely embodied perceptual experience.

But my position is quite different from that. I would take the naturalistic view that we are talking of different grades of semiosis - principally the evolutionary advances of genes, neurons, words and numbers.

So the Aristotelian intellect is the product of evolution reaching the level of semiotic modelling which we would recognise as discursive and rational. That is, it is semiosis mediated by words, then numbers.

And this socially constructed understanding of human evolution does map comfortably to Aristotle's notion of the rationalising intellect as something extra even to the sensing soul. It is just that rather than a cut-down Godhood, it is about the kind of "self" that a new level of "world making" will produce.

Humans - as discursive selves - are the product of sociocultural systems. It all started with symbolic language that could encode social ways of thinking. There could be an institutional memory, and hence the rise of social institutions and their socialised participants. There emerged a higher state of being or mind - the cultural-linguistic one. But it was a purely natural development, not any kind of divine shift.

And then - the Greek flowering - we had the further development of a logical discursive self. Mathematical-strength discourse paved the way for mathematical-strength social institutions and mathematical-strength selfhood.

In some sense, this was a depersonalisation or objectification of viewpoint. As animals selves, we are highly embodied in our own immediate biological concerns. As cultural selves, we start to become disembodied in our point of view to the degree that we take on some higher level institutional view of how we ought to behave, what we ought to think.

And then now we have the possibility of a logical or rational "self" in a logical or rational "world". Again, no mystery. Just the kicking of semiosis up another level of abstraction or objectivity. But - as philosophy makes clear enough - trying to live as a self of that world is a little dicey.

In human history, the turn to institutional rationalism was a powerful next step. We could both mechanise society and bring nature much more under our technological control. But the new "self" that this new "world" eventually creates stands in question.

Anyway, getting back to Aristotle's intellect, the naturalist view is that this isn't talking about another step towards omniscient godhood and true knowledge. It is instead the direct continuation of a natural trend - the evolution of semiosis. And the reason Aristotle would have seen the discursive intellect as somehow coming from somewhere beyond the embodied and sensing animal soul is that its form indeed does come from the "beyond" that is human cultural development, with the "self" and the "world" that emerges there.

What we are interested in as humans is to know being as it reveals itself to us. To the extent that we can "model" it with a system of comprehensible signs, we make it easier to respond to. Still, to the extent that we confuse our models with reality, to the extent that we think our "reduced" world is the real world, we are guilty of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. The real world is not our model and it is always ready to hit us with a shocking surprise to prove it isn't. — Dfpolis

Yeah. But what I'm saying goes beyond that. I am stressing that the system of signs is Janus-like in that it encodes both "the real world" and "the real us". So experience is a reduction to a model that results in the twin emergence of some crystalised sense of "out there" vs "in here". And the fallacy of misplaced concreteness would be to think that this constructed selfhood is any more real than this constructed world.

Now this seems to return us to an argument that only the noumenal is the real, the phenomenal is some kind of generalised illusion. There is the hard reality that is being modelled, and then this afterthought, the modeller, whose very actions of modelling are constructing "himself".

And this could be the reductionist understanding indeed. There is something true about it, as naturalism would lead you to argue.

But here is where I would personally embrace the more speculative metaphysical turn that is pan-semiosis. This is where we go beyond the naturalistic explanation of life and mind as modelling systems and begin to understand all physical reality as a self-organising evolution of an intelligible sign system.

Check out current physics - with its information theoretic turn in particular - and pan-semiosis seems the case. The "reality" of information has become a standard "material fact". So as speculative metaphysics, it ain't so whacky. Science has already gone there now.

But regardless, my main point here is that what Aristotle meant by the "intellect" maps very nicely to what we would understand about the social evolution of the human mind. And it has nothing to do with any approach towards a transcendent and absolute state of knowledge. It arises directly as a continuation of pragmatic semiosis. There was a jump to a new level of self-making and world-making with the invention of words and then numbers. Codes create memories and memories create institutions. Organismic behaviour could rise up another level of self-organisation - the ones we call social culture and then science and philosophy.

So is the real debate about the accuracy of Aristotle's epistemology or the unreasonableness of Descartes's? — apokrisis

The debate is about what Descartes called into question. The background for that is the philosophical understanding of knowledge at the time he wrote. The sources for that are Aristotle's De Anima iii and Plato's distinction between episteme and doxa in The Republic v.

I think Aristotle's approach ... boils down quite nicely to a pragmatic and semiotic story. — apokrisis

I take it from this that you have not read De Anima iii.

I just see that he has a place in history as a particular reaction to the simplistic empiricism that characterised the dawning Enlightenment. — apokrisis

Then you need to read history. Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 and died in 1650. He was part of the background out of which the Enlightenment developed. He was certainly not reacting to a movement that did not begin until the late 17th c.

Knowledge develops by beginning from some "leap of faith" - a willingness to take one hypothesis as a plausible truth and then judge that based on its "real world" consequences. — apokrisis

And I take it from this that you have not read what i wrote in my last post.

pragmaticism is about accepting that absolute knowledge is never going to be the case, then moving on. — apokrisis

We have many examples of metaphysically certain knowledge, but they are not of interest to those whose sole concern is praxis -- only to those interested in theoria -- those who want to know for the joy of knowing.

Pragmatism doesn't just acknowledge our finitude ... — apokrisis

We are not discussing pragmatism (which did not begin until c. 1870), but Descartes's methodological doubt and its implications for our prior understanding of knowledge and belief.

In this light, knowledge is all about the development of those kinds of regulatory habits. — apokrisis

As I said, there are many ways of defining knowledge. However, when you use a different definition, you reference a different aspect of reality. In this case, the aspect of reality you are referencing has little to do with either knowledge defined as awareness of present intelligibility or with knowledge defined as (causally) justified true belief. So, while what you say may be important to you, it is not relevant to the topic we are discussing.

all sense data is simply acts of measurement. — apokrisis

Measurement is a process whereby we ascertain numbers descriptive of physical states. Very little sense data is numerical.

Your scheme seems basically Cartesian in its dualism of mind and world — apokrisis

Really? When have i said that our minds are apart from the world? When have I asserted that we are a compound of thinking stuff and extended stuff? Haven't I said the opposite? That we humans are unified beings. That a major problem is the fundamental abstraction separating the objective and subjective.

And the reason Aristotle would have seen the discursive intellect as somehow coming from somewhere beyond the embodied and sensing animal soul is that its form indeed does come from the "beyond" that is human cultural development, with the "self" and the "world" that emerges there. — apokrisis

I have no idea what text you have in mind here. Do you?

I am stressing that the system of signs is Janus-like in that it encodes both "the real world" and "the real us". — apokrisis

You have not said what "signs" you are talking about. Thought? Natural language? A formal system?

You do realize that thoughts are not the same kind of signs as natural and artificial languages?

my main point here is that what Aristotle meant by the "intellect" maps very nicely to what we would understand about the social evolution of the human mind. — apokrisis

Having read De Anima a number of times, i fail to see any evidence of this. Would you care to back this up with specific texts that support your point?

I take it from this that you have not read De Anima iii. — Dfpolis

As if there were one reading of it. :grin:

You know that there are many contrasting readings on what was meant by the intellect and how it was embodied.

Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 and died in 1650. He was part of the background out of which the Enlightenment developed. — Dfpolis

Oh please. As if Galileo or Francis Bacon did not yet exist.

And I take it from this that you have not read what i wrote in my last post. — Dfpolis

Is this going to be your standard response? Anyone who dares to disagree with you must be merely failed scholars.

You do realize that thoughts are not the same kind of signs as natural and artificial languages? — Dfpolis

But are thoughts things or processes? Are they the syntactical symbols, the mere marks, or the semantic acts of interpretation?

So yes, semiotics is about recognising there is a difference between the signs - as marks - and their interpretance. If you want to call the semantic part of the story "thoughts", that would be reasonable.

Or maybe you also want to say that thoughts can take mental images as their signs. And that would also be reasonable to me in the light of my position being that all sense data are signs in a syntactic sense. At some level, we find neurons firing in a fashion that physically marks out the state of a logically organised circuit. Some yes/no question is being answered about the "state of the world".

Having read De Anima a number of times, i fail to see any evidence of this. Would you care to back this up with specific texts that support your point? — Dfpolis

I made my argument. There is a quite adequate naturalistic explanation of "human intellect". And it is no surprise that Aristotle is remembered as the empirical antidote to Plato's rationalism - a proto-pragmatist - even if that is of course a rough caricature of the story. You can choose to ignore it if you can't muster any telling counterargument.

I take it from this that you have not read De Anima iii. — Dfpolis

As if there were one reading of it. — apokrisis

One reading is far superior to total ignorance.

You know that there are many contrasting readings on what was meant by the intellect and how it was embodied. — apokrisis

Yes, but in all, the knower knowing the known is identically the known being known by the knower. Not one credible reading denies that knowledge is the actualization of present intelligibility. The main point of contention is whether the agent intellect is an aspect of the knowing subject, or a power of God, or perhaps the Neoplatonic Logos. Are you, then, claiming that the agent intellect is God or the Logos, rather than the subject's awareness?

Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 and died in 1650. He was part of the background out of which the Enlightenment developed. — Dfpolis

Oh please. As if Galileo or Francis Bacon did not yet exist. — apokrisis

I suggest you review the names of the cultural movements of early modern Europe. The Late Middle Age ended c. 1500. It was overlapped by the Renaissance which ran from about the 14th to the 17th centuries. Then, as I said, the Enlightenment, began in the late 17th c. (after the death of Descartes). Galileo (1564 -1642) was not an Enlightenment, but a Renaissance, figure -- his work the culmination of late medieval developments in mathematical physics. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) died even earlier.

And I take it from this that you have not read what i wrote in my last post. — Dfpolis

Is this going to be your standard response? Anyone who dares to disagree with you must be merely failed scholars. — apokrisis

Not at all. You can disagree all you like. But, if you're responding to me (as your post indicated), then you should say why you disagree with me. If you don't want to do that, then please don't pretend you're responding to me. Just make an independent post.

You do realize that thoughts are not the same kind of signs as natural and artificial languages? — Dfpolis

But are thoughts things or processes? Are they the syntactical symbols, the mere marks, or the semantic acts of interpretation? — apokrisis

Thoughts are acts. They are not substantial things, nor need they be processes, though they can result from processes.

Thoughts are not syntactical symbols like words. They are essential signs. They are not any kind of "mark." Marks can be instrumental signs, Thoughts can be, but need not be, acts of "interpretation."

maybe you also want to say that thoughts can take mental images as their signs — apokrisis

No, I don't.

my position being that all sense data are signs in a syntactic sense. — apokrisis

I think you have not thought this through. What is the nature of sense data? Is it not neurally encoded information? If it is, then to interpret the supposed "sign" we would have to know our neural state, and then work out its meaning in the same way we first see marks on paper or a computer screen, and then interpret what they mean. Yet, clearly, we do no such thing. We have no idea which of our neurons is firing, nor their firing rate (which is how neural information is encoded). So, our neurally encoded information is not a sign like marks on a page that we "interpret."

Instead, we are aware of the information (or intelligibility) encoded in our neural state directly -- with no process of interpretation. Thus, your semiotic model simply breaks down under scrutiny.

Some yes/no question is being answered about the "state of the world". — apokrisis

We have no reason to think that the brain employs any sort of binary code and much reason to think it does not.

Would you care to back this up with specific texts that support your point? — Dfpolis

I made my argument. — apokrisis

Your "argument" proposes an interpretation of De Anima, but cites no text. That is a prima facie reason to reject your proposal.

Aristotle is remembered as the empirical antidote to Plato's rationalism - a proto-pragmatist — apokrisis

This shows, once again, that you do have no fear of making pronouncements on subjects you don't understanding. I suggest you read about praxis, theoria and the contemplative life in Aristotle.

Yes, I think he distorted the trajectory of Western philosophy. — Dfpolis

Could you expand on this a bit? (I'll leave it at that rather than risk entanglement in a metaphor.)

As natural scientists we care about what Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Hubble saw, not their experience of being a knowing subject seeing it. As a result, the fundamental abstraction leaves behind data on subjectivity. Having projected such data out of its conceptual space, it can form no judgement linking what it knows of the objective world to concepts reflecting our subjective experience.

Dennett and his ilk seem blissfully unaware of the fundamental abstraction. So, finding no place for subjectivity in their conceptual space, they assume it does not exist. The correct response is to approach the problem in a way that does not leave data on the table. — Dfpolis

What is it you'd like to recover from the "lost" subjective experience? I don't question its value; I rather don't know what the value is you have in mind.

And a question I can't at the moment think through. Is the knowledge of so-called "divine" knowledge the same knowledge I have when I know that it's raining? It seems to me it must be different - but where does that leave "knowledge"?

Could you expand on this a bit? — tim wood

Before Descartes philosophers were focused on reality. On being as such in metaphysics, on changeable being in physics and the philosophy of nature, and on thought about being in logic and philosophical psychology. After Descartes, philosophers turn their vision more and more from being, to the question of what, if anything, we know.

Aristotle was an empiricist. He based his understanding of reality on what we could learn from sense experience and scolded his students for not wanting to get their hands dirty. He understood that in the single act of awareness actualized two distinct potencies: The knower, with a prior capacity to be informed, is actually informed by the same act that makes the object's intelligibility actually known. Thus, a single act bridges gap between knower and known. Said in a different way, there is a partial identity between knower and known: The object being known by the subject is identically the subject knowing the object.

Locke, Berkeley and Hume we not empiricists in the same way. Following Descartes, they begin by assuming a gap between knower and known -- falling to recognize the unity of subject and object in the act of knowing. Locke, for example, claimed all we could knew was our own ideas. This assumed separation of knower and known became total in Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Phenomenology gives up on being to focus on appearance, analytic philosophy to focus on language.

What is it you'd like to recover from the "lost" subjective experience? I don't question its value; I rather don't know what the value is you have in mind. — tim wood

In epistemology, we have to realize that knowledge is not abstractly "objective." Rather it is a subject-object relationship that is inescapably both objective and subjective. Reality is projected into one or more conceptual spaces and doing so reduces the information we actually consider. We can compensate for this by seeking out diverse projections and finding points seen in one but missing in others.

In the philosophy of mind, we need to understand (vs. Ryle's critique in The Concept of Mind) that every act of knowing contains information not only on the primary object (what we are "looking at"), but also ourselves as subjects knowing the primary object. We not only know x (the objective object). we know that we know x -- so that we are the subjective object of each cognitive act.

In the philosophy of nature, we have to see that intentionality (as revealed by our knowledge of subjectivity) is as much a part of the natural world as physicality. Our intentional life, often called our "spiritual life," is not something "supernatural" (taken as a term of disparagement), is as natural as our physicality.

This goes on, analogically, to such topics as interpreting quantum theory in which we need to include the physics of our detectors (analogous to the subjective object) in any explanation of the measurement process.

Is the knowledge of so-called "divine" knowledge the same knowledge I have when I know that it's raining? It seems to me it must be different - but where does that leave "knowledge"? — tim wood

There are two ways we can know God. Ratiocinatively or by mystical awareness. In reasoning we come to God as the actualizing source of the world of experience. In doing so, we do not experience God per se, but find indicators pointing to God as their Source. We do not have a positive concept, but a negative specification: not contingent, not limited in His ability to act, not limited in knowledge, etc.

In mystical experience, we have something akin to Rubin's vase (the picture that is bi-stable between appearing to be a vase or two faces looking at each other), When we think of our self, or the world, we normally see our self or the world. Yet, metaphysically, there is more to be grasped. The world, being maintained in existence by God is identically God holding the world in existence. And, of course, the same is true of our self.

So, if we are able to shift our intellectual focus (as we do with Rubin's vase), then, instead of being aware of the world (or self) that is held in existence by God, we become aware of God, Who is holding the world (or self) in existence. This is direct, not ratiocinative knowledge.

Whether we are aware of physical objects or of God, we are aware of present intelligibility.

After Descartes, philosophers turn their vision more and more from being, to the question of what, if anything, we know. — Dfpolis

Is this the "distortion of the trajectory?"

to know is to actualize present intelligibility. It is thus an activity of intellect -- of our capacity for awareness of information. — Dfpolis

It's exhausting to parse these things too closely, but sometimes we have to. I'm walking downtown and turn a corner and there's a horse! The recognition (and surprise) comes pretty quickly. But what has actually happened? My eyes gathered some peculiar light, my brain quickly connecting the gathered impressions with some pre-loaded ideas. The horse itself is only tangentially involved in the process. Knowledge so far seems just as you describe, an "actualization of a present intelligibility." But maybe it's not a horse. Maybe it's a picture or a man in a horse suit or just a mistake in perception. Now we're stuck on just what knowledge is. I buy your definition - I appreciate that you trouble to define your terms - but it apparently only holds in terms of the object so far as I can say, "I thought it was a horse." Hmmm. Knowledge as intracranial activity, or as a relation in and to the world?

Of course there's a process of verification, but does that at some point become certainty? Is knowledge of = certainty of? Or does knowledge become certainty? As a practical matter it "certainly" does. It comports with the working of the world. Maybe knowledge becomes certain when it - the horse - within the appropriate margin for error and using appropriate criteria, cannot be anything other than a horse: a judgment. It would seem you have attached a word to a process - no complaints; that's the best start. But we still don't know what knowledge is except in terms of a functional definition. (Here I'm channeling the idea found in the quote that the "essence of truth is the truth of essence," together with its qualification that a criteriological standard for a thing is not what a thing is.)

.....

I have a take on Descartes, fwiw. I don't think he was about Socratic detachment, although he attempted to place himself in a setting that might facilitate something like. I suspect he was driven to reflection by the tumult of his world. These tumults were about conceptions of god, and therefore it follows, about knowledge. In short, he set himself adrift in a sea of doubting (your qualifications on this doubting and what, and how, it was doubted here appreciated), but did not expressly navigate his way to safe harbor, but rather found it in a reconciliation of sorts of scholastic materialism with nominalism - with the ideas of a perfect god with an omnipotent one. That (reconciled) god is omnipotent with respect to knowledge, but perfect in respect of acts. With the corollary that people are "perfect" in respect of knowledge and omnipotent in terms of acts. And from this it follows that within this, he - Descartes - cannot be deceived. Unless he is.

I largely agree with this, but it's not true that "most philosophers" today think what you say they think.

Most philosophers today understand that the course of investigation presented in the Meditations wasn't Descartes central focus, but rather just a preliminary investigation into the conditions of certainty wrt scientific knowledge. Descartes wasn't a sceptic, he was trying to strip away what he thought could be doubted, to get at foundational principles that couldn't be doubted, so that he could then rectify the scientific process and put it on a sound footing.

It's actually later philosophers and near-contemporaries who took the knowledge-questioning bit and turned it into a sort of standalone conundrum - which then resulted in the bifurcation between Empiricism and Rationalism.

What I would say (that partly echoes what you're saying) is that Descartes mistakenly took the positing of mere alternative logical possibilities for reasons to doubt. It's not surprising he did this, because it's what sceptics (in the philosophical sense) do generally, and Descartes was trying to see what could be discovered by following the sceptical line of reasoning to its limits.

The reality is that doubt is a game that can only be played in the context of some accepted truths - IOW, to actually doubt, you need a reason to doubt, which is based on something accepted as veridical (e.g. the subsequent sensory evidence - like looking closer - that tells you that what you previously thought you saw was just a hallucination or an illusion).

The sheer fact that one could be mistaken, and that (for all one knows) reality might be different in any of a million "logically possible" ways from what one thinks it is, is not itself a reason to doubt.

After Descartes, philosophers turn their vision more and more from being, to the question of what, if anything, we know. — Dfpolis

Is this the "distortion of the trajectory?" — tim wood

Yes, because after Descartes, philosophers confuse distinction (which means independent concepts) with separation (which means ontological independence). As a result, there is a strong tendency to reify concepts. Examples are:

Descartes' res cogitans vs res extensa. Where Aristotle and the Scholastics saw a unified human person capable of physical and intentional operations, Descartes saw two separate things.

Lockean ideas. Where ideas had been the actualization of prior intelligibility, Locke made them separate things -- so that what we knew (in his view) was only our ideas. At most, our ideas are the means of knowing their objects. Minimally, they are just us thinking about their objects.

Kant's separation of unknowable noumena from known phenomena. Instead of seeing phenomena as the inseparable acts of beings revealing themselves, they become separate "things" standing between us and true reality.

Russell and Wittgenstein's logical atomism which proposes a correspondence between true statements and systems of objects.

But maybe it's not a horse. Maybe it's a picture or a man in a horse suit or just a mistake in perception. Now we're stuck on just what knowledge is. I buy your definition - I appreciate that you trouble to define your terms - but it apparently only holds in terms of the object so far as I can say, "I thought it was a horse." Hmmm. Knowledge as intracranial activity, or as a relation in and to the world? — tim wood

I know what you mean. One day, walking home from high school, I was scared by a huge dog that suddenly pocked its head over a fence behind me. When I turn to face it, I saw a chestnut horse. What is happening in cases like this?

First, what we are aware of is a "this" -- a largely unspecified something making itself present to us. Of course our brain does not care what it is, but it has evolved to activate neural net complexes associated with (representing) various categories of experience -- in your case the "horse" complex, in mine, the "dog" complex. So, what is present to awareness is twofold: a largely unspecified "this" and an activated or associated representation ("horse" or "dog" as the case may be.) We are aware of both. One is part of our self (someone more used to seeing horses would probably not activated "dog" as I did, but "horse"). The other has an immediate external source.

Awareness is not judgement. Being aware of both "this" and "horse" is not judging <this is a horse>, but we do so judge, because we confuse the joint awareness of the two different contents with that of a single object that is both this and a horse. For <this is a horse> means that the identical thing that evokes <this> is evoking <horse>.

So, there is no lack of awareness of present intelligibility, but we are confusing association with identity.

does knowledge become certainty? As a practical matter it "certainly" does. — tim wood

I think we agree, knowledge becomes "practically certain," but that does not preclude all chance of error. Of course, there are degrees of certitude (e.g. metaphysical, physical and moral), each appropriate to a realm of discourse.

we still don't know what knowledge is except in terms of a functional definition — tim wood

Well, there is no a priori concept of knowledge handed down from on high. We look at various aspects of reality, forming concepts and expressing them with names. As long as we are careful in applying the concepts and do not think that our concepts exhaust reality, we can avoid errors while being open to further insight.

Here I'm channeling the idea found in the quote that the "essence of truth is the truth of essence," together with its qualification that a criteriological standard for a thing is not what a thing is. — tim wood

I am not sure what to make of this. We can think of "essence" as Aristotle does, as the foundation in reality for our universal ideas, or we can think of essence as the specification of an individual's possible acts. These ideas overlap, but they are not the same. While responding in a feminine manner may not be part of the Aristotelian essence of humanity, it may be very much of the essence of a transsexual male.

Stepping back, saying "essence of truth is the truth of essence," seems rather monadistic. I mean that a great part of truth is not about the essence of any one thing, but more ecological -- about how things relate and interact -- and we can never discover that except by observing actual relations and interactions.

I suspect he was driven to reflection by the tumult of his world. — tim wood

I agree.

Also, it's very dangerous to put oneself in the mind of God. It doesn't fit us.

I appreciate you rounding out and balancing what I said.

Most philosophers today understand that the course of investigation presented in the Meditations wasn't Descartes central focus, but rather just a preliminary investigation into the conditions of certainty wrt scientific knowledge. — gurugeorge

I think this may be seeing more in Descartes than is there. I sympathize with his goal -- silencing radical skepticism. Still, the four rules in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences pale in comparison with the elaborate account of the hypothetico-deductive method and the need for controlled experiments laid out in the scientific works Robert Grosseteste.

Still, the four rules in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences pale in comparison with the elaborate account of the hypothetico-deductive method and the need for controlled experiments laid out in the scientific works Robert Grosseteste. — Dfpolis

Descartes tried writing systematic treatises many times, but never finished them. Bear in mind that he was actually a scientist and mathematician (in both of which fields he was a genius of the highest order, just as in philosophy), his main interest was science, and the main purpose of his philosophical investigations was in fact to find a secure foundation for science, and answering the sceptics was part of it. The philosophy really didn't occupy that much of his attention, and he felt he'd pretty much done with it quite early in his career. But as I say, the philosophical aspect of what he said became very popular and skewed the public image of him.

To get that more rounded picture of Descartes, cf. Tom Sorrell's introduction to him.