Perhaps it was the necessary qualities of human epistemology that lead to and are connected with understanding the necessary qualities of ontology that shaped it. — schopenhauer1
Also, fdrake I know you have mentioned speculative realism. Can you elucidate on this view, and how it matches up with Witty's critique, or vice versa? — schopenhauer1
Why do scientific facts obtain so well? You can say that it is similar to how a carpenter creates a masterpiece furniture, but is that the same? A man-made object created by someone, or a social convention, can be arbitrarily changed, and is contingent, varied. Any decision on it would be the freedom of the carpenter, or the architect. — schopenhauer1
We can look back and see that worldviews change over time. For instance, people once thought the sky was a hard dome. The transformation of the concept of sky isn't something we decided upon. It was part of a large-scale alteration in worldview. Don't think of concepts as toys we play with and change by fiat. Declarations come downstream of seismic changes in outlook — frank
Not without you doing more work, no I can't. — fdrake
What does that look like for you? Also realize, unfortunately, I have a lot of other stuff I have to do to not go homeless, so though I'd love to delve many hours into the minutia mongering of every math problem that ever existed, every proof, every speculative realist argument, every Wittgenstein quote, I have to do this cursory, more playful approach. I know.. shitty of me. — schopenhauer1
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays”
― Friedrich von Schiller
A lecture or article or book might be cited in support of what you say but if we are going to discuss it then you need to state things in your own words. — Fooloso4
‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ — After Finitude/Meillassoux
...Although Meillassoux does not himself specify this, correlationism presumably comes in a variety of different forms, and is therefore not restricted to theories focused on the relation between mind and being. Thus the relation between transcendental ego or lived body and the world in phenomenology would be one variant of correlationism, while the relation between language and being in Wittgenstein, Derrida and Lacan, or between power and knowledge in Foucault, would be other variants. In each case we encounter the claim that being cannot be thought apart from a subject, language or power.
...Kant claimed that in traditional forms of epistemology the mind was conceived as a mirror that reflects being as it is in-itself, independent of us. He argues that mind does not merely reflect reality, but rather actively structures reality. Consequently, on the other hand, he argues that we can never know reality as it is in itself apart from us, but only as it appears to us. If the mind takes an active role in structuring reality (for us) we are unable to know what it is in-itself because we cannot determine what, in appearances, is a product of our own minds and what is a feature of things as they are in themselves. This is because we cannot adopt a third-person perspective that would allow us to compare things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves. Consequently, knowledge is restricted to appearances and we must remain agnostic as to what being might be like in itself.
The claim that modern philosophy is inspired by Kantian correlationism is not the claim that most modern philosophers embrace the specific details of Kant’s philosophy. Clearly Wittgenstein, for example, does not adopt Kant’s account of transcendental categories, pure a priori intuitions, or the transcendental ego when he speaks of language games. Rather, the correlationist gesture consists solely in the claim that we can only think the relation between being and thinking and that therefore our knowledge is restricted to appearances.
One of Meillassoux’s central projects lies in finding a way to break out of the correlationist circle. He seeks to determine whether it is possible to think the absolute or being as it is in-itself apart from mind, and what characteristics the absolute might possess. Meillassoux’s discussion of ancestrality or statements about time prior to the existence of human beings is not an argument against correlationism per se, but is designed to present readily familiar and widely accepted claims about cosmic time prior to the existence of life and humans that ought not be permissible within a correlationist framework. If correlationism is true, what entitles us to make claims about the nature of the universe billions of years prior to the emergence of life or mind? Meillassoux presents his account of how we might break out of the correlationist circle in his discussion of the principle of factiality in After Finitude.
He rejects the claim that epistemology and ontology have necessary qualities. That things are as they are does not mean they must necessarily be as they are or will be. — Fooloso4
One thing that Wittgenstein wants to show with his examples of imagined tribes is that what we know is part of our form of life. Different circumstances, different practices, and different concerns yield different concepts, different ways of seeing things. This is not, however, a causal relationship. There can be other ways of looking at something and different ways of seeing things. — Fooloso4
However, my take on it is that there is something that humans can glean (hence speculation) that is going on behind the scenes. — schopenhauer1
Yes we will always provide the humanistic ways of seeing the world (unless one is to concede to naive realism, which most aren't), but the speculation is hinting at what kind of things we may speculate is happening outside the anthropomorphic. — schopenhauer1
So Harman (the guy in the video) has ideas of objects other than humans interacting with each other. — schopenhauer1
He thinks objects have been deflated into the subjective experience of objects, and thus aren't given the attention they deserve as interacting entities that they are. — schopenhauer1
In each case we encounter the claim that being cannot be thought apart from a subject, language or power.
He seeks to determine whether it is possible to think the absolute or being as it is in-itself apart from mind, and what characteristics the absolute might possess.
Clearly Wittgenstein, for example, does not adopt Kant’s account of transcendental categories, pure a priori intuitions, or the transcendental ego when he speaks of language games. Rather, the correlationist gesture consists solely in the claim that we can only think the relation between being and thinking and that therefore our knowledge is restricted to appearances.
Meillasoux for example, has the view that everything is in fact radically contingent, because the way something is, can always be something else. — schopenhauer1
Can the objective world outside of the social/mental sphere be understood outside of the criss-crossing web of a humans in their form of life? — schopenhauer1
Again, why do things seem to "work out" when math is applied to empirical investigations. — schopenhauer1
why do things seem to "work out" when math is applied to empirical investigations? — schopenhauer1
whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. 'To understand' is to free form completely from matter.
Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge [insofar] as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.
It is just this tendency to posit a hidden world behind the world that Wittgenstein rejects. How does one peak behind the curtain? By imagining that there must be something going on and speculating that it must be this or that? — Fooloso4
The most significant parallel between Whitehead and the speculative realists, on Shaviro's account, follows directly from Whitehead's critique of the bifurcation of nature. When it comes to the bifurcation between the phenomenal appearances of "the red glow of the sunset" and the physical reality of "'the molecules and electric waves' of sunlight refracting into the earth's atmosphere", Whitehead is quite clear in arguing that one is not more real than the other. To the contrary, for Whitehead "we may not pick and choose". The red glow of the sunset and the electric waves of sunlight each have for Whitehead, as Shaviro points out, "the same ontological status" (2). Stated differently, nature is not divided between material things that are inaccessible to us except insofar as they are taken up by the mind in the form of impressions and ideas; rather, things are always already present in other things. Whitehead is clear on this point: "an actual entity is present in other actual entities" (Process and Reality, 50; cited 8).
How does speculation avoid being something other than some way we see the world? It seems to be self-deluding - picturing some hidden way things must be and ignoring the fact that the picture one conjures or deduces is a human artifact. — Fooloso4
Shaviro, by contrast, will accept the idea that there is more to reality than what is actually given or present to us -- "Things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us" (49). This surplus or excess, however, is not a hidden reserve withdrawn from relations but is instead an excess of relations that cannot be captured and constrained within a predetermining set of normative categories and objective types. The goal for philosophy, Shaviro claims, is therefore "not to deduce and impose cognitive norms, or concepts of understanding, but rather to make us more fully aware of how reality escapes and upsets these norms" (67). This is again why when we do philosophy "we are compelled to speculate," for when we are "confronted with the real" this reality escapes our "cognitive norms, or concepts" and puts us into a situation where "we must think outside our own thought" (67). We are forced into doing philosophy as speculative realism, and speculative realism, if done right, "must maintain," as Shaviro sees it, "both a positive ontological thesis and a positive epistemological one" (68). The ontological thesis asserts that "the real not only exists without us and apart from our conceptualizations of it but is actually organized or articulated in some manner, in its own right, without any help from us" (68); and the epistemological thesis claims that "it is in some way possible for us to point to, and speak about, this organized world-without-us without thereby reducing it yet again to our own conceptual schemes" (68).
This is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein. Once again: In On Certainty Wittgenstein quotes Goethe: “In the Beginning was the Deed”(402). The relation of other animals to the world is not via thinking and at its most fundamental level it is not for us either. — Fooloso4
Shaviro's strategy in providing both a positive ontological and epistemological thesis is to push the anti-correlationist arguments one finds among speculative realist philosophers to their logical conclusion. Underlying these arguments is perhaps the central claim of his book: that "all entities have insides as well as outsides, or first-person experiences as well as observable, third-person properties" (104). For Shaviro, "the problem with Harman is that he seems to underestimate this latter aspect," the public, third-person aspect of entities. By accepting the two-sided nature of entities, Shaviro adopts a form of panpsychism, and one of the motivations for this move is that it responds to an alternative approach one finds among speculative realists whereby they overcome the problem of correlationism by purging thought from being (see 73). Both Meillassoux and Brassier, for instance, offer a version of this argument. Meillassoux calls for a version of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in order to show how an object can be "formulated in mathematical terms . . . (and hence) can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself" (citing Meillassoux, 74). Brassier goes even further and argues that our thought, including mathematical thought, "is epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without efficacy" (74). Whether a meaningful grasp of objects as they are in themselves is possible or not, both Meillassoux and Brassier are agreed on one thing, according to Shaviro, and that is "that they both assume that matter in itself -- as it exists outside of the correlation -- must simply be passive and inert, utterly devoid of meaning or value" (77). Thought and matter are thus put into polar opposition with one another -- or Meillassoux and Brassier continue to assume the validity of the bifurcation of nature (77) -- whereas Shaviro, following Whitehead, calls for a contrast of thought and matter, a contrast wherein everything entails both a subjective aspect and an objective aspect, an inside and an outside. — COS
That is the distinct characteristic of the modern mathematical sciences commencing with Galileo. — Wayfarer
Natural languages are not as simple as ideal languages, nor are they governed by such fixed and precise rules.
...
Rather, the notion of rule-governed use is merely one of several related notions of the use of language that Wittgenstein employs"
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The gain here is that it manages to clarify language without having to postulate abstract entities (e.g. ideal languages) to which our natural language must conform to get it right. Wittgenstein turns the classical account on its head. The classical account just ignored the way language is actually used and sought to find the ideal which would dictate proper usage. Wittgenstein takes into account the way we talk in order to show the logic behind it, its grammar, by comparing language with calculi or games according to fixed and exact rules.
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Rather, clarification by means of ideal languages constitutes a particular method for resolving philosophical problems" — 2019
Kantian readings of him* can't explain this fact, even if they avoid the problem of armchair empiricism of which Wittgenstein was accused of but he himself denied that he was undertaking. — 2019
That is, there is no possibility of another’s agreeing or disagreeing with us; for we really indicate only a method. It is as if Boltzmann’s model were simply placed beside the phenomenon of electricity and someone said: ‘Just look at that!’." — 2019
PI 497. The rules of grammar may be called “arbitrary”, if that is to mean that the purpose of grammar is nothing but that of language.
Language has no single purpose, but it could not serve many of its purposes if it did not have a logical structure, that is, if what is said does not make sense. There is something arbitrary about language and something non-arbitrary about the grammar or logic of language. This does not mean that there is a fixed logical structure underlying language, but that all language-games have a structure. This is not an empirical claim but a logical one. — Fooloso4
498. When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar!” and “Bring me milk!” have a sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar”, this does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it an order to stare at me and gape, even if that was precisely the effect that I wanted to produce.
499. To say “This combination of words has no sense” excludes it from the sphere of language, and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary, it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players are supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may show where the property of one person ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary-line, that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.
500. When a sentence is called senseless, it is not, as it were, its sense that is senseless. Rather, a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.
As I understand it, Wittgenstein is not claiming that there is a universal grammar, but that any grammar must make sense. — Fooloso4
One might imagine a language game in which "Milk me sugar" makes sense, but the grammar of the invented game would have to make clear what this means, how the phrase is being used in that game, what one is supposed to do with it. — Fooloso4
... giving another theory. I don't like only viewing these problems with one strategum. — schopenhauer1
Witty doesn't have to be contrary to any other theories, but they can accord but apply to different areas or levels of investigation of the large phenomenon of language. — schopenhauer1
Language has no single purpose, but it could not serve many of its purposes if it did not have a logical structure, that is, if what is said does not make sense. There is something arbitrary about language and something non-arbitrary about the grammar or logic of language. This does not mean that there is a fixed logical structure underlying language, but that all language-games have a structure. This is not an empirical claim but a logical one. — Fooloso4
Clearly, logic is derived from, or comes from language. Therefore there is no such thing as logic prior to language, nor was there logic when the first language-games started to exist.. Furthermore, the structure or order which underlies natural language games, just like the structure and order which underlies the entire universe, cannot be attributed the property of "logical", because there was no such thing as logic when these things came into existence.. — Metaphysician Undercover
Clearly, logic is derived from, or comes from language. — Metaphysician Undercover
... nor was there logic when the first language-games started to exist — Metaphysician Undercover
Furthermore, the structure or order which underlies natural language games, just like the structure and order which underlies the entire universe, cannot be attributed the property of "logical", — Metaphysician Undercover
Evolution also plays by certain rules, dictated by the necessity of survival for biological organisms. — schopenhauer1
Presumably, he is not talking about logic in the formal sense, but a structuring that takes place in the development of language. — schopenhauer1
Grammar is a logical order. It is not derived from language, it is integral to it. There can be no language that is not a logical language. — Fooloso4
How can there be a language-game that is not logical? How would anyone know what anything means? All language-games are logical. It is not a question of which came first. Even the builder's language is logical. — Fooloso4
The structure or order is logical. What would an illogical order be if not disorder? — Fooloso4
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