this spirit or attitude is anti-metaphysical and directed toward engagement with the world and experience. — pomophobe

James is taking the empirical attitude — pomophobe

Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. Abandoning subjective idealism for subservience to the real can end up trading off one form of metaphysics for another.

It's aimed at active personalities who take life or experience as the primary authority. It expects revision. — pomophobe

Yes, but what kind of revision, and what is presupposed in what we assume about how our theories are revised? Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? What I am asking you is whether you adhere to a Popperian falsificationism, which is consonant with Kantianism, or a Kuhnian approach ,which abandons the idea of empirical knowledge as corresponding to an independent reality, and the vector of science as toward an assdymptotic approximation of reality. Kuhn takes his philosophical cues from Quine, Donaldson, Putnam and Rorty, who recognized that all empirical facts are value-laden, and that any fact makes sense only in relation to an overarching account. This value-laden basis of factuality is not someting that Bacon or Hume understood.

Heidegger radicalized this idea of primordial subject-object interpenetration by deconstructing the basis of logic undergirding the empirical sciences. His rant against technology is really a rant against forgetting the foundation of empricism and logic in a a more fundamental inrersubjective experiential structure. What we forget when we begin from objective thinking is that objectivity and logic are contrivances invented over a period of millennia, beginning with the Greeks and solidified with Galileo and Descartes. We create the presuppositions out of which calculative thought is possible(objects as persisting self-identities with assigned properties and attributes) but the generating process out of which such abstractions emerge is invisible to us.

As Evan Thompson argues :

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that
calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn’t
conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that
such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential.All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic
facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the
conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical
things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I
wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied
mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there’ independently of how we configure or constitute it as
an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as
experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete,
canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of
the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of
consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an
additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can
make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which
is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are
attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this
transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent
metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive
dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world."

Maybe you agree with this. If so, would you not also agree that this is far removed from Bacon and Hume?

Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. — Joshs

I basically agree with you, but I don't like the word 'metaphysics.'

Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs

Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. We mostly use 'truth' effectively. For me it's part of the empiricist attitude to not get lost in the spiderwebs of theory. Which kind of theory is worth our attention is one more thing we can put to the test.

On the other other question, Popper and Kuhn are both great. If we are wrong, we were right, because we tried something specific enough to recognize its failure. But none of this is possible in the first place without some paradigm that makes the situation intelligible. Paradigms come and go.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. — Joshs

On this issue I'd say look to politics. The distinction between fact and opinion isn't some random mistake. Nor is the distinction between mind and matter. These distinctions have their limits. Their utility can blind us to what they cover up. This is what I like in Heidegger. Being-in-the-world, the hammer being used versus the hammer just being stared at, etc. I think know-how is utterly prior to know-that. For me this insight adds to empiricism. Practice makes perfect. Knowledge is largely embodied which is to say not made of thought in the first place. Hinton makes some fascinating points on machine translation. He calls the vectors of floating point numbers 'thoughts.' The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. And these are our best machines for translation, inspired by what's in our own skulls.

this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world." — Joshs

I agree that if commonsense realism is vacuumed up into the ether so that it becomes metaphysics that it indeed breaks down. But isn't this spiders eating spiders? The bees are out there, perhaps in different departments and perhaps outside of academia altogether. And maybe someone like Hinton who gets his hands dirty with cutting edge science/invention is even preferable to yet another exegesis of Wittgenstein. If the distance from facts and concrete challenges is what empiricism criticizes, then perhaps the best empiricists are too busy practicing what they don't have time to preach.

While this is far too fuzzy initially to either hit or miss, my suspicion is that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. — pomophone

And that is why Heidegger is a chore to read. His work is best read in reverse. ;)

Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs


Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. — pomophobe

It sounds to me like you've already committed to a position, that being the recognition of the interprenetration of fact and value. Posting an independent 'out there' would seem to contradict the sort of pragmatism you want to defend.

The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. — pomophobe

Francisco Varela elaborated something similar with his neurophenomenological model. It draws from the idea of a living system as self-organizing. In this view, the origin of cognition is the enactive nature of organismic functioning, the fact that a living system shapes the very environment that it is affected by. This approach doesn't require us to choose between subjectivism or empiricism. It makes the formal and empirical sides of things into poles of an interaction in which neither self nor environment, neither mind nor world , have any coherent sense or existence apart from their interaction. So no top-down theory, but also no bottom up empiricism. This is the meaning of embodiment.

And that is why Heidegger is a chore to read. His work is best read in reverse. — I like sushi

pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. I would agree that this later period of Heidegger's career consisted of mostly obscure and impressionistic poeticizing language. I don't view Being and Time and earlier works this way. There's no question Being and Time is an extremely dense and difficult work, but for me it is no more obscure that Kant.
As to the claim that

it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. — pomophone

, I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time.
It only appears to be saying something pretty simple to the extent that it is confused with older philosophical ideas that it superficially resembles.

Do you mean the reading the sentences backwards? Or?

pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. — Joshs

My first quote was from Being and Time (1927) and I praised it. I've mostly read 20s Heidegger and mostly not read post-20s Heidegger. I've also read some great secondary sources, including all of Kisiel's Genesis, Steiner, Polt, Sheehan, others. For a few months he was my favorite philosopher. At the moment I might pick History of the Concept of Time as my favorite. I like Kisiel's English. Another favorite is Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. van Buren also writes well.

While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. But I could never much get into Kierkegaard, except I did like Fear and Trembling. But then that's a dark book. Abraham is a monster for God, and that's the point. 'If you phonies we're actually religious,...' And maybe this connects to this letter from Heidegger to his brother.

18th of December, 1931

Dear Fritz, dear Liesl, dear boys,

We would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. It is probably snowing where you are, inspiring the hope that Christmas will once again reveal its true magic. I often think back to the days before Christmas back at home in our little town, and I wish for the artistic energy to truly capture the mood, the splendor, the excitement and anticipation of this time.

[…]

It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates.
— Heidegger

'It’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos.' I'm not even trying to shame or judge Heidegger here. But perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/

I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time. — Joshs

I have been slapped with a glove, sir.

I’m not suggesting it is like Led Zep’s Stairway to Heaven! Haha!

I do think it is better reading from last section to first (and often enough each section is better read by reading the final paragraph FIRST). There were a few instances in my reading that I felt time was wasted by pointless blocks of text that could easily have been omitted.

All said and done I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in phenomenology and/or consciousness in general. Some bits are more useful than others; enough so for me to occasionally dip back into it.

While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. — pomophobe

Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. Many in the American Heideggerian community of scholars embraced him becasue they assimilated his thinking to Kierkegaardian religious themes dear to their heart(Sheehan, Dreyfus, Caputo, Sallis). This interpretation of Heidegger misses everything that is profound and original about him, in my view. If Heidegger were offering nothing more radical than what authors like Sheehan and Dreyfus make him out to be saying , I would join you in proclaiming that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. At the very least, one could learn as much from Kierkegaard, Gadamer and Levinas. My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida.

perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements? — pomophobe

Doesn't any 'scientific' theory already imply a valuative stance implicating poltical ,spiritual, ethical considerations? That's the difference between the concept paradigm understood in Kuhnian vs Popperian (or Kantian vs Hegelian, modernist vs post-modernist) terms. The Popperian asks 'Must we commit to a position here?' whereas the Kuhnian says there is no value-neutral scientific paradigm.

I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science.

I have been slapped with a glove, sir. — pomophobe

Didnt mean to sound snarky, but it would be fun to go through it briefly and see what we come up with.

Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. — Joshs

I've read plenty of the man himself. I still don't think it's clear. Of course you can give me your interpretation, but you'd be one more secondary source.

I also thought there were many pointless blocks of text. I'd also still recommend it to others as worth looking at, but I'd be upfront about what I don't like about it.

My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida. — Joshs

Well at least Derrida is crystal clear. (Not really.) I've read some Derrida too. Some of it is great, but I found it overall less relevant than what I like in Heidegger. To put it bluntly, at worst we have the philosophical tradition crawling up its own ass, exaggerating its importance to those who aren't tuned in.

Its not that secondary sources are bad in themselves. It's just that someone who spends their career in slavish devotion to translating and interpreting the work of a philosophical great is unlikely to have equaled, much less exceeded, the rigor of their thought. For one thing, if they had, they would use their own voice. instead we get an almost comically sycophantic impersonation of the style of writers like Deleuze and Derrida by their translators(Massumi, Bennington).

As to whether Being and Time is clear or not, the challenge is to find a reading of it we find plausible that is itself clear, coherent and powerful. If we take up Sheehan's or Derrida's interpretation of Heidegger and, try as we might, we are not able to see the logical consistency and clarity that they claim to see in it, then i guess it s time to put Being and Time in the closet. I've had to do that with Lacan and some of Deleuze.

For me the radical core of Being and Time is not about authenticity or death, it's in the first half of the book where Heidegger introduces the equiprimoridal modalities of temporality, attunement and care. I studied experimental cognitive psychology and my central focus was affectivity. In the past decades, affect, feeling and emotion have been lifted out of the shadows to which they were consigned by the behaviorists and positivists for years.With the rise of embodied, embedded and enactive approaches in cognitive science , affectivty now takes center stage as an organizing principle of cognition, rather than the peripheral disorganizing distraction it was considered to be in earlier thinking. In this regard, Heidegger has been taken up by Matthew Ratcliffe and others in the cognitive community for the way that he views affective attunement as framing the meaningful of all experiencing. For me the key to understanding Heidegger is via his treatment of affect in relation to cognition.

I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science — Joshs

I don't think we have to drag in all the academic heroes to tackle the issue of how the fact-value distinction is useful. I've read some of those guys closey, others not all. Other thinkers not mentioned have also been important to me. But I don't see the value in parading these ghosts when we could just discuss the issue. Indeed, it may be that all the academic hustle and bustle actually obscures precisely the point I'd want to make.

The fact-value distinction is utterly familiar to us. Yes we can question it theoretically, but we shouldn't ignore its ordinary function. We know how to use it, and it exists differently in use than in the books of philosophers. Language itself is the hammer. That's where Heidegger and Wittgenstein meet. Philosophers tend to just stare at language and ignore what they 'know' in their everydayness. From my point of view, as I said before, Heidegger enriches something I've been calling empiricism. There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world.

I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. Sheehan also writes strong English. I respect what both writers were trying to do. Sheehan had the proper arrogance. Better to be wrong than unclear. I'm not saying he's wrong, if we can even talk of wrong or right in the interpretation of difficult texts. I agree that we want a strong reading, even if it's a misreading. Kojeve is great on Hegel, though it's really Kojeve presenting Kojeve through the voice of a hero, just as Plato often used Socrates. Bloom's translation is also first rate. To me that's one of the great books 20th century philosophy that isn't much talked about.

I've dabbled with Lacan and Deleuze and it didn't take. Zizek does some fascinating stuff with Lacan, and I think he's pretty readable. And then Zizek's live persona is great. Heidegger and Lacan in the few videos available come off pretty humorless and square. Derrida is likable on video. Some of his ideas are impressive. A less cutesy and more focused book than Bennington's could really sell Derrida to skeptics, I think. Pomophobia is largely a rejection of a certain tiresome cuteness or tendency toward mystification and exaggeration. The style is decadent, late, precious. The purple velvet jacket says it all.

There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world. — pomophobe

Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? In terms of topics of active debate in cognitive science these authors represent clear divisions within the field concerning understanding of the capacity of empathy, theories of affect, representationalism vs post-nonrepresentationalism, accounts of autism, the nature of consciousness, etc., and these differences parallel larger philosophical rifts. The journal phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences gives us a point of entry for I=integrating Heidegger with empirical work in affect and consciousness.

I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. — pomophobe

Bennington is one of the best interpreters of Derrida and is able to correct many of the grossest misreadings(like the common misinterpretation of 'nothing outside the text' as nothing outside the bounds of formal language). But Bennington never puts away the Derrida impersonation in any of his writing, right down to the idiosyncratic French inflections(Bennington is a Scot, for God's sake!).
This is not the mark of a writer confident in his originality.Not that I'm saying he has to be original. I imagine Bennington is reconciled to his role as Derrida's bulldog.

Yeah Bennington is still a little cute for my taste, but the prose is clear. His book is crammed with ideas. I like summaries, even if they are difficult to do well. There is so much out there to read that's it good to be able to tell quickly whether a thinker is worth the time.

Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? — Joshs

I have read some Dennett but not the others. I'd probably like them, if I can get around to them. My real job is in science, which I often neglect for philosophy. I should be working on a dissertation (early stages). Much of my attitude is influenced by training in mathematics. The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. Intuition is decisive. Proofs are largely important as communicators of this intuition and to some degree as hygiene. Also successful application is IMV the actual ground of mathematics. This is of course a dark foundation, a framework that is not essentially made of thoughts.

In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. I haven't studied QM closely, but I get the impression that that's the situation there, too. If I object to metaphysics, it perhaps because I think that systems often exist to cover over a darkness. We mostly push buttons that have tended to give us what we want. Our ignorance of final things looks fundamental to me, as if the mind wasn't built to address such questions with any kind of consistency or clarity. So there's a humility in empiricism (as I intend it). At the same time there's bravery and pride that is biased against whatever inspires fear and poverty. While indulgent language is sometimes justified, I also think a suspicion against anything foggy is also justified. When pomo gets a little too eager to through out the notion of objectivity, the pushback is sensible.

The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. — pomophobe

Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? Put differently, isnt it possible to to talk philosophically about the way that our moment to moment relation to the world and to our self transforms the nature of both the subjective and objective side of experience, without having to be accused of falling back into the same trap one is trying to critique? On this forum, such accusations take the form of 'Isn't pomo relativism asserting a truth in claiming that objective truth is impossible?' A post-realist argument isn't meant as a replacement theory but as a move toward practice itself. Its way of thinking sees itself as no longer theory at all in the old sensed but as activity and interaction. Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. That's why temporality is so essential to Heidegger(and Husserl).

Philsophers used to be in the forefront of introducing new mathematical concepts(Aristotle, Leibinitz, Descartes). Then they stopped, or at least the continental thinkers did, other than a few odd attempts like that of Badiou. Given that I view mathetical concepts as arising out of the cultural contingency of language generally, I see the the articulations of thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger as the direct continuation of the tradition of mathematical thought. Their formulations ARE a form of mathematics in the most sweeping sense. They are what mathematics had to become.

In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. — pomophobe

A thoroughgoing pragmatism applies not just to means but also to ends..
If our tools don't really make sense to us, then what it means for them to work for us also wont make much sense. That is to say, the way in which we will understand what it means for something to be useful will be contingent and arbitrary, intelligible in relation to local norms, which is in fact how Deleuze and other pomos already tend to understand our relation to the immanent world. The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned.

This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) .

I came across the work of Joseph Rouse recently, who writes in a field called 'science studies', which I find fascinating. It places empirical endeavors smack dab in the middle of a complex milieu of political and socio-cultural practices. It has connections to social constructionism but doesnt restrict itself to a focus on language. It give a window into what scientists are doing as they make their way around black boxes.

Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? — Joshs

Indeed, but I think it's easy to be so dazzled by insights that we actually forget to apply them to our own inquiry. It's one thing to grasp finitude abstractly, for instance, and another to feel and affirm it. You've mentioned lots of names, names, names. Many of them surely belong to thinkers I'd enjoy. And I could also mention names that you'll probably never get around to. As individual mortals we are condemned or privileged to make our way through our own brief lives with the torches we find along the way. Beyond that there's the recognition that know-how is prior to knowing-that. This is a profound insight, and it connects to Hegel's owl that always arrives to late.

Perhaps you've studied science yourself. For me it was of extreme value philosophically. The person working on post-quantum cryptography is up against some right-angled facts about algebraic structures and computational complexity. That's the sharp part of the work where Nietzsche would be useless. On the other hand, navigating the academic hierarchy via politics and the choice of what to research is something else. The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards.

On the cultural level, we are clearly on philosophical terrain, and then philosophy is something like high grade politics. Of course scientists can use philosophers for insight, just as Einstein used Mach (and then put him aside when he got in the way.) A society is something like an organism. Philosophers are an important kind of cell, but they never were the only brain cells. I don't deny that philosophy is important. I think it's less than obvious that it remains central. Figures who aren't philosophers proper (like Hinton) are going to think philosophically about their work. Look at Hinton's inspiration for using 'dropout' regularization. In short, I'm not against theory. I'm not just sold on its centrality. That theory has taught me its non-centrality. The true ground is successful application. Yes, we reflect on it. But sometimes we figure out how to do something before we figure out how we figured it out.

The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned. — Joshs

I don't find this plausible. To this attitude I reply: go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of.

This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) . — Joshs

As I read it, these 'realists' are just more philosophers. That indifferent-to-us nature has regularities which can be exploited is not so wild as all of that. IMV a good scientist knows that he mostly doesn't know. Look at the spiderweb of powerlines that keep our computers humming. Look into the codes that allow for the efficient, error free transmission of this very post. I don't pretend to profound truth about the thing-in-itself or 'the Real.' Am I authentic or worldless? That's a religious-spiritual-political question. I'm saying that non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is.

Most of us/them don't have some metaphysical theory of our linguistic know-how. 'But what do you really mean by real?' 'But what is being?' These questions have their charm and maybe even great spiritual value, but leaving them unanswered in not a practical problem (not at that level of generality, anyway.) Any foundation that arrives after the fact is too late. The framework was already up and running for that artificial construction to be delivered in the first place. This is not to say that we can't learn more about how we are intelligible to one another. I do suggest that we'll favor theories about this that can themselves be applied to further this intelligibility.

Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. — Joshs

I understand that frameworks 'invisibly' determine entities as entities. It's as if we are convolutional neural networks that come pre-trained with features. I can't remember when the world wasn't a system of objects and people I could talk to about those objects.

For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. I like Mach's philosophy. Much of science looks like the discovery of functional relationships between uncontroversial entities. We can find a relationship between the use of the word 'red' and the readings on a scientific instrument. I'm not a Mach scholar (I only have so much time), but I remember thinking that he cut through lots of noise and confusion with his approach.

For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. — pomophobe

Indeed, Kant showed us the dependence of science on formal conditions of possibility for such grounding concepts as logic, causality and objectivity. But Kant believed in a static universe, a single integrated gestalt that it was our challenge as puzzle solvers to penetrate and represent through incremental trial and error. His frames were set in stone as a priori categories. Hegel asked why we shouldn't think of these frames as themselves contingent and changeable. This led eventually to the idea that science at its most relevant and creative doesn't just rearrange the pieces on a chessboard, but upends the rules of the game. Newtonian physics already 'worked', but modern physics worked in a different way, by turning the Newtonian world on its head. You could say that the quantum explanation works better than the classical account, but its important to note that it works better by reinventing the game, redefining the terms. The same can be said of Darwinian biology with respect to the model it upended. Evolutionary theory didnt solve a puzzle within the bounds of the old framework. In fact, it can be argued that there was no puzzle at all to solve within the terms of the old model. Only within the bounds of the new framework offered by Darwinism did it make sense to talk about a problem of origin of species.

Steve Jobs said :“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

I think problem solving doesn't capture the genius of science. Rather , science first creates a new space of possibilities, upending the old framework and all its rules and definitions . Only when this is done can what didn't appear before as a problem emerge as an issue.
As Heidegger said "The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts."
The historical movement of science is one of revolutions in ways of knowing how.

know-how is prior to knowing-that — pomophobe

Yes, and this perceptual and cognitive know-how, being perceiver-dependent , consists in our assimilating the world into our already-structured processes of understanding. But at the same time, we must accommodate our patterns of organization to the novelties of our environment. This assures that any frame of understanding we use to interpret the empirical world is always in the process of transforming itself subtly. We normally dont notice this. Thus , you can claim that :

The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards. — pomophobe

Just because you don't notice substantial ambiguity concerning the goal or standards doesnt mean that you are not performing an interpretive function every time you sit down to work on a narrowly defined empirical puzzle safely within the bounds of a conventional framework. And the fact that interpretation is necessary in the act of engaging your know-how means that in subtle fashion you are re-envisioning the bounds of that framework in even the most conventional project,and with it your criteria of valuation , purpose and standards.

Recent work on enactivist cognitive science shows that we engage the world in a unified manner. Know-how is holistic. We don't consult an interior script or theory, we engage directly, bring our embodied understanding as a whole to bear on tasks. As we experience the world moment to moment, our frames of understanding shift as a whole, very subtly.

go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of. — pomophobe

Mundane life is non theoretical if theory is understood as a canned abstract database we consult. but It is theoretical in the sense of an embodied holistic pattern of meaningful engagement. Such patterns, as ways of sense making, manifest themselves on a cultural level as the evolving worldviews that define our potentialities and limits as ethical,political and scientifically inforrmed people. Affectivrty is a sensitive barometer of the extent to which our system of know-how is confronted with an event it cannot effectively assimilate. Observe your affective response next time you engage in a project, or even as you read my comment . To the extent that your ongoing sense making capabilities
are not being challenged inordinately, your emotive register will hover somewhere between boredom and mild interest. If , however, something in what I say appears incoherent or challenging in a way that you are not prepared to process adequately , irritation, anger, frustration or anxiety will alert you to a potential reorganization of your system of understanding. In such a situation, could we say that your philosophical scheme of understanding underwent a minor crisis of validation? Not if philosophy is understood as an inert and formal construction. But if we acknowledge that know-how implies that all of us walk around with a stable ongoing interpretive sense-making potentiality, and that this functions in a holistic way in our engagements with our world, then it seems to me that all of us function as naive philosophers(and scientists), regardless of what our skill set consists of.

non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is. — pomophobe

Yes, and that 'stuff' they can't ignore is deeply embedded within and dependent on the very framework of thought that it impinges on. There is always an alternative to solving a problem, and that is transcending the very terms of its formulation. Within certain fields of endeavor the conceptual terms are so broadly drawn as to make it appear that there really is such a thing as 'indifferent-to-us nature'.
To a growing number of philosophers, and empirically minded types as well, this is an incoherent notion.

My question to you is, how do you think Heidegger thinks we jump from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand thinking? — schopenhauer1

I think this was more systematically taken up, especially as it is relevant to cognition, by Merleau-Ponty in his reflective/pre-reflective distinction.

From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. Most of the time we're on auto-pilot. When we're on autopilot there doesn't seem to be much difference between myself and the tasks I'm doing in my environment, especially when you constrain it to practical labour.

For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other.

Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself.

I think Heidegger is right to construe present at hand framings of concepts an their topics as easily assumed because reflective pauses typically engender a separation from a flow state, and reflection itself can easily take this as a framing device. It makes a lot of sense to populate your ontology with separated subjects and objects and activities as connections between the poles of the subject object relation; this is part of his critique of Descartes. But he does not, at least not to my knowledge, provide a detailed phenomenology of cognitive labour, or make comments that allow us to infer what it would be, at all.

Merleau-Ponty is much more critical of the importance of reflection in philosophy, and tries to point out limitations in uncritically framing things from a merely reflective and contemplative stance; with reference to the previous discussion of the importance of framing questions for Heidegger, treating philosophical issues as intellectual puzzles which will reveal their essence given sufficiently precise articulations/solutions is itself a type of rationalist bias to approaching the issues. A corresponding empiricist bias would be to insist upon the necessity of distinct units of objective evidence which must ultimately be synthesised into an understanding of a philosophical issue; rather than heuristic conceptual relation. Both of these approaches pay insufficient attention to the theory-ladened-ness of experience and the experiential/expressive character of theories upon their topics. Reading a reflective given illegitimately back into the world allies its analysis with one sided framings of the origins of that reflective given.

So I'm quite tempted to Mearlu-Ponty-ise Heidegger's present-at-hand/ready to hand distinction here, while the distinction was noticed through creative synthesis of descriptions of transcendental structure (existentialia) out of the experiences suggestive of it (existentielle), construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! The present-at-hand gets downplayed because Heidegger needed it to for his account, in other phenomenological contexts it's incredibly important to attend to.

You might like Ray Brassier's 'Concepts and Objects' for an interesting corrective about how to think about conceptual, specifically philosophical, labour.

Edit: @StreetlightX in case they want to rip my limited understanding of Merleau-Ponty apart.

Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself. — fdrake

Yes, like troubleshooting a technical problem. You may know some of what to do, but it's not a flow state by any means, but grueling attempts to match known heuristics with the new problem or find a possible other cause and solution.

But he does not, at least not to my knowledge, provide a detailed phenomenology of cognitive labour, or make comments that allow us to infer what it would be, at all. — fdrake

Agreed.

So I'm quite tempted to Mearlu-Ponty-ise Heidegger's present-at-hand/ready to hand distinction here, while the distinction was noticed through creative synthesis of descriptions of transcendental structure (existentialia) out of the experiences suggestive of it (existentielle), construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! The present-at-hand gets downplayed because Heidegger needed it to for his account, in other phenomenological contexts it's incredibly important to attend to. — fdrake

Well that's just it. Why does the present-at-hand get downplayed at all? It seems a false and unnecessary dichotomy. Any troubleshooting with a problem of the world is reflective. Any easy-use of an intended tool is more of a flow state. Both are necessary and entailed to live in the world as human beings. In fact, if present-at-hand is equated with reflective capabilities, it is indeed the primary way we humans engage and survive in the world (contra Heidegger). One of my themes in another thread is the decoupling of instinctive programming with cultural learning. To troubleshoot is to take intuitive guesses based on past learning and applying it to new situations, running scenarios of similar use-cases or intuiting new approaches that might fit. These approaches are based on abduction/induction, intuition, inference, iterative thinking, and generally discursive, haltingly painstaking thought-processes. This to me, is all present-at-hand. A new tool gets created or an existing tool gets fixed through these aforementioned painstaking, non-flow-like mental states and attitudes. Sure, we are at ease in the use of a tool, but we also have the capability to be not at ease troubleshooting or creating new tools, deemed appropriate or necessary for human living.

You might like Ray Brassier's 'Concepts and Objects' for an interesting corrective about how to think about conceptual, specifically philosophical, labour. — fdrake

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into that.

From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. — fdrake

When something is missing or malfunctions and it disrupts our seamless ready-to-hand involvement with tools , we don't revert to a present to hand mode of understanding unless we explicitly thematize what was missing , which means to point to it and define it as an object , in isolation from what we need it for. Normally, when our seamless involvement is interrupted by a missing tool, the way in which what was missing played a role in terms of the totality of relevance of the context of our involvement is what becomes explicit, not as a thematized 'object'. It's a matter of whether we are understanding a thing in terms of its relevance to our purposes and activities or simply as a defined entity with properties and attributes, independent of the way it matters for us in a particular context.

"When something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references discovered in our circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for and at hand with. Again, the surrounding world makes itself known. What appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection." Being and Time

For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other. — fdrake

Calling the ready to hand 'autopilot' or flow implies suggests, even if you dont mean it that way, that objects 'in themselves' are there and we are simply not paying attention to them when we are focusing on a task. But this isn't how Heidegger understands the distinction between ready to hand and present to hand. The present to hand does not stand on equal ontological footing with the ready to hand. It's a derivative and impoverished mode of the ready to hand for Heidegger. . It s not that in pointing out an object we are attending to something extra, something we ignored during our labors. The opposite is the case. In moving from the ready to hand to the present to hand mode, we are ossifying, freezing , flattening and distorting the beings we are involved with.

Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself. — fdrake

These all seem to me good examples of continuing within the ready to hand mode without having to make recourse to objectification. Indicative sounds, using a voltmeter as a tool, thinking how to use language in ways that matter to the situation, are all relevant articulations that move a stuck situation forward by involvement with contextually meaningful tools rather than thinking of them explicitly as objects. If one were to stop ones activities and merely say or think 'this is a voltmeter, this is a sound, etc. that would be an example of reverting to the present to hand mode.

construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! — fdrake

Heidegger isn't just faulting those Cartesian types who believe that empirical or conceptual objects are essences. He is deconstructing the concept of a formal indicator by showing how it is derived from the ready to hand , that is, how the concept of a material or theoretical object as a self-identical predication emerges as an impoverished mode of understanding our relevant involvement in the world, Heidegger doesn't want to do away with logic or empiricism . He recognizes their value. But he also recognizes the danger inherent in not recognizing how the present hand is generated from the ready to hand.

Yes, like troubleshooting a technical problem. You may know some of what to do, but it's not a flow state by any means, but grueling attempts to match known heuristics with the new problem or find a possible other cause and solution. — schopenhauer1

Gruelling and non-flowing, yes. But this paragraph is also an excellent example of contextually relevant ready-to-hand thinking. The ready to hand is not a proxy for 'flow' or 'at ease' situations.It applies equally to the oppsite situation of interruption, crisis, puzzlement. Being stuck or interrupted doesnt mean that the larger context of significance suddenly vanishes for us. Even the flailing about for new solutions is informed by ,and takes its sense and significance from, that context. Its not present to hand objects that we have the need for in this circumstance.. We don't need to call out to ourselves or others the names of tools at this point unless we are asking for something for a particular purpose it may serve. Even if we are making use of mathematical or logical language, the way we are able to benefit from it is seeing the relevance in it for our immediate purposes.

if present-at-hand is equated with reflective capabilities, it is indeed the primary way we humans engage and survive in the world (contra Heidegger). — schopenhauer1

The present to hand is not equated with reflection by Heidegger, it is equated with subject-object predicative statements(the basis of formal concepts as well as objective determinations of physical things). There is nothing particularly problematic for Heidegger about reflective thinking unless it cuts itself off from relevant contexts of involvement by narrowing itself down to theoretical or logical analysis. He would not want us to simply reject such forms of discourse, but to understand its derivation. so that we can use such forms in a more knowing and ethically effective manner.


Heidegger: "For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances.But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning
and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being.
Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive."

The present to hand is not equated with reflection by Heidegger, it is equated with subject-object predicative statements(the basis of formal concepts as well as objective determinations of physical things). There is nothing particularly problematic for Heidegger about reflective thinking unless it cuts itself off from relevant contexts of involvement by narrowing itself down to theoretical or logical analysis. He would not want us to simply reject such forms of discourse, but to understand its derivation. so that we can use such forms in a more knowing and ethically effective manner. — Joshs

That's the thing, I never quite understand Heidegger. Ok, so present-at-hand is not reflective thought, it is "theoretical or logical analysis". Well, isn't that something often used in troubleshooting and heuristics for fixing technology and improving it? What is an example of this "not as good" way of thinking he labels "present-at-hand"? Is it literally just Descartes sitting in his room, ruminating about metaphysical matters a priori? Does it have to touch a "real world application" for it to be considered the "good" ready-at-hand?