But what eliminative materialism wants to eliminate or deny or describe as 'folk psychology' is in fact the fundamental nature of being itself. TO which the materialist reply is invariably: TOSH. There is no such 'fundamental nature'. If there were, you would be able to demonstrate it empirically'.
Do you see my point? — Wayfarer
The reason I'm saying that mind is not objective, is to undercut the presumption that it is a subject for the objective sciences at all. — Wayfarer
To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist? — Searle
But what about psychology? — jjAmEs
But isn't your description precisely the eye seeing itself? The hand grasping itself? The mind is the meaning-grasper, the meaning-hand. Or the mind is sense organ for the otherwise invisible conceptual realm. The mind is a special kind of hand or a special kind of eye. Both metaphors are great. — jjAmEs
In short, the folk metaphysics of dualism seems to be not absurd but only blissfully unaware of how the beetle in the box cannot ground the talk about the beetle. Perhaps denying the beetle is also saying too much? — jjAmEs
Metaphysically the hard problem is just a sub-problem of 'why is there is anything at all'? Certain philosophers gesture at the limitations of explanatory discourse. That there is a world in the first place cannot be explained as a matter of principle. — jjAmEs
But I see Chalmers as articulating a very real and profound philosophical problem, which is that no matter how much knowledge we accumulate about the objective domain - and after all, this is what science is in the business of - that the nature of the knowing subject will always elude this analysis. — Wayfarer
if the deterministic natural forces are expressed through a stochastic system then there's no reason at all to suppose a deterministic method will result. — Isaac
(if I ask every rational English-speaking body in NYC to point to his foot, they will all point to the same place) — Mww
Understood. One can’t reject mind-related terminology yet still talk about mind-like things. Still, because minds, in and of themselves, would seem to be irrefutably private, it seems odd...or self-contradictory....to reject radical privacy in the mental sense, which is what we’re discussing here. — Mww
Talk of the mind, one might say, is merely a convenient facon de parler, a way of speaking about certain human faculties and their exercise. Of course that does not mean that people do not have minds of their own, which would be true only if they were pathologically indecisive. Nor does it mean that people are mindless, which would be true only if they were stupid or thoughtless. For a creature to have a mind is for it to have a distinctive range of capacities of intellect and will, in particular the conceptual powers of a language-user that make self-awareness and self-reflection possible. [bold mine] — Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience - Bennett and Hacker
To say interest in cogitation, not credence: is self-defeating, for credence IS cogitation, as opposed to arriving at cogitation, by means of “pondering or trying to solve a problem”, which is, of course, what le penseur is actually doing when he thinks. — Mww
Now, one may perhaps interject that Ryles is not talking about cognition when he uses the term cogitation. If that is the case.....I give up. Anybody can say whatever they want if they also invent the terms to justify it. Just going to be mighty difficult to find common ground, though. — Mww
....all possible, yet all reducible to........go ahead, take a guess. — Mww
If there are some mental activities in which language has no play, yet mental activities are completely comprehensible, the whole intentionality thing is rather worthless, at least from a radical private perspective. — Mww
Anyway, thanks for the reference showing me the ground of your arguments so far. Rest assured I don’t necessarily disagree with them entirely, even if I find such grounding both insufficient for theoretical completeness, and misguided in theoretical derivation. — Mww
...Our Reductionist had begun by assailing Cartesian and Platonic extravagances on the basis of what can be, in an ordinary way, observed. But now he reduces, in its turn, observation itself to Nothing But some oddly stingy minimum. However, this stinginess of the empiricist must not soften us towards the lavishness of the transcendentalist. For though he properly acknowledges the differences between kicking and scoring, or between just presenting arms and obeying the order to present arms, yet he goes on to make these differences occult ones. For since they are not to be the earthly or muscular differences demanded in vain by the empiricist, they will have instead to be unearthly, nonmuscular differences that transcend the referee's and the sergeant's powers of perception... — Gilbert Ryle - Thinking and Saying
In the immortal words of Herr Pauli......That is not only not right, it is not even wrong! — Mww
One has no business qualifying the transcendental with the transcendent, and neither are necessarily occult in nature. Ryles may have been nodding toward Steiner, re: “The Outline of Occult Science”, 1909, but Steiner was no proper transcendentalist, but rather a mere mystic, or spiritualist, a la Swedenborg. — Mww
My model: as you put it, is pretty much the case, yes. — Mww
I balk at “her beliefs”, however, because if she knows the object as a tree, she has no need to merely believe in the properties that cause it to be a tree in the first place. This is a reflection on my thesis that we attribute properties to objects, as opposed to your thesis that objects are necessarily in possession of intrinsic properties belonging to them irrespective of the perception of them. — Mww
I shall take that as saying we still agree language always presupposes experience. — Mww
Besides, realization can be considered really nothing other than a change in subjective condition, and all change takes time, so...... — Mww
I know what you’re trying to say, and at first glimpse there is force to the argument. But the argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, because no explanation sufficient to facilitate it has as much power as an explanation that refutes it. The only reasonable recourse such argument has going for it, is to deny the theoretical reality of what Ryles calls “....any catalogue of simple qualities and simple relations, whether rude or refined...”. Which is tantamount to denying reason itself, because reason is exactly that catalogue. — Mww
We understand this, because the very first instance of naming anything, is never conditioned by what the object is, but only as how we wish to know it. — Mww
The more complex you make the instruction, the more challenging the environment you make it in the more varied the results. — Isaac
all I want to know is how he understood me when I asked him to. — Mww
What Wittgenstein's thought experiment shows is that if there were such a beetle, then we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Now we can talk about pain, colors and meaning - they have a place in the language game. Whereas the beetle - a hypothetical entity that can't be referenced or talked about - drops out as irrelevant. — Andrew M
It seems to me that there should be explanations for these things. I'm not sure how not having satisfactory answers given our present state of knowledge should ever imply that there are no explanations to be had. — Andrew M
http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htmI was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "being." Or else I was thinking — how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing any thing in their nature.
...
The word Absurdity is emerging under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn't find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn't need it: I thought without words, on things, with things. Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the breath of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet, this serpent of wood. Serpent or claw or root or vulture's talon, what difference does it make? And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the clue to existence, the clue to my nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all I could grasp beyond that comes down to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless, paralyzed, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not [logical] necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being [i.e., God] can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float.... — Sartre
better understanding our disagreements — Andrew M
......to better understand our disagreements is an achievement, which we can then say only evolves by the faculty of understanding being tasked to achieve it.understanding denotes an achievement, not a task (nor a faculty or capability). — Andrew M
Still, because minds, in and of themselves, would seem to be irrefutably private....
— Mww
I would say irrefutably not private (per the PLA). Or, to take a broader perspective, we have different ways of conceptualizing mind: — Andrew M
On my view, to interpret a figurative expression as a Cartesian-style mind is a conceptual mistake. — Andrew M
In the immortal words of Herr Pauli......That is not only not right, it is not even wrong!
— Mww
On the contrary, Ryle gets it right! And it's such a clear distillation of Ryle's view that I had to requote it. — Andrew M
Ryle's broader argument is that by rectifying the logical geography here (i.e., rejecting both the ghost and the machine and reallocating the facts marshalled by the transcendentalist and reductionists), the natural world becomes intelligible. — Andrew M
Yeah what about it? I studied undergrad psych and it was abundantly obvious that the whole field was philosophically fractured. — Wayfarer
Husserl's epoche was not aimed exactly at objectivity, but at detachment. They're close, but not the same. Actually comparisons have been made between Husserl's epoche and the Buddhist sunyata, in that both philosophies are concerned with cultivating close awareness of the texture and nature of experience without a sense of attachment. (There’s an essay out there somewhere called Epoche and Śūnyatā). — Wayfarer
The greatness of the natural sciences consists in their refusal to be content with an observational empiricism, since for them all descriptions of nature are but methodical procedures for arriving at exact explanations, ultimately physico-chemical explanations. They are of the opinion that 'merely descriptive' sciences tie us to the finitudes of our earthly environing world.4 Mathematically exact natural science, however, embraces with its method the infinites contained in its actualities and real possibilities. It sees in the intuitively given a merely subjective appearance, and it teaches how to investigate intersubjective ('objective') nature itself with systematic approximation on the basis of elements and laws that are unconditionally universal. At the same time, such exact science teaches how to explain all intuitively pre-given concretions, whether men, or animals, or heavenly bodies, by an appeal to what is ultimate, i.e., how to induce from the appearances, which are the data in any factual case, future possibilities and probabilities, and to do this with a universality and exactitude that surpasses any empiricism limited to intuition. The consistent development of exact sciences in modern times has been a true revolution in the technical mastery of nature.
In the humanistic sciences the methodological situation (in the sense already quite intelligible to us) is unfortunately quite different, and this for internal reasons. Human spirituality is, it is true, based on the human physis, each individually human soul-life is founded on corporeality, and thus too each community on the bodies of the individual human beings who are its members. If, then, as is done in the sphere of nature, a really exact explanation and consequently a similarly extensive scientific practical application is to become possible for the phenomena belonging to the humanistic sciences, then must the practitioners of the humanistic sciences consider not only the spirit as spirit but must also go back to its bodily foundations, and by employing the exact sciences of physics and chemistry, carry through their explanations. The attempt to do this, however, has been unsuccessful (and in the foreseeable future there is no remedy to be had) due to the complexity of the exact psycho-physical research needed in the case of individual human beings, to say nothing of the great historical communities.
If the world were constructed of two, so to speak, equal spheres of reality - nature and spirit - neither with a preferential position methodologically and factually, the situation would be different. But only nature can be handled as a self-contained world; only natural science can with complete consistency abstract from all that is spirit and consider nature purely as nature. On the other side such a consistent abstraction from nature does not, for the practitioner of humanistic science who is interested purely in the spiritual, lead to a self-contained 'world', a world whose interrelationships are purely spiritual, that could be the theme of a pure and universal humanistic science, parallel to pure natural science. Animal spirituality, that of the human and animal 'souls', to which all other spirituality is referred, is in each individual instance causally based on corporeality. It is thus understandable that the practitioner of humanistic science, interested solely in the spiritual as such, gets no further than the descriptive, than a historical record of spirit, and thus remains tied to intuitive finitudes. Every example manifests this. A historian, for example, cannot, after all, treat the history of ancient Greece without taking into consideration the physical geography of ancient Greece; he cannot treat its architecture without considering the materiality of its buildings, etc., etc. That seems clear enough. — Husserl
This rough sketch will gain in completeness and intelligibility as we examine more closely the historical origin of philosophical and scientific man and thereby clarify the sense of Europe and, consequently, the new type of historicity that through this sort of development distinguishes itself from history in general.23
First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc. All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves. In a word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal. — Husserl
In the focus on the environing world, a constantly objective attitude, everything spiritual appeared to be based on physical corporeality. Thus an application of the mode of thought proper to natural science was obvious. For this reason we already find in the early stages Democritean materialism and determinism.47 However, the greatest minds recoiled from this and also from any newer style of psychophysics (Psychophysik). Since Socrates, man is made thematic precisely as human, man with his spiritual life in society. Man retains an orientation to the objective world, but with the advent of Plato and Aristotle this world becomes the great theme of investigations. At this point a remarkable cleavage makes itself felt: the human belongs to the universe of objective facts, but as persons, as egos, men have goals, aims. They have norms for tradition, truth norms - eternal norms. Though the development proceeded haltingly in ancient times, still it was not lost. Let us make the leap to so-called 'modern' times. With glowing enthusiasm the infinite task of a mathematical knowledge of nature and in general of a world knowledge is undertaken. The extraordinary successes of natural knowledge are now to be extended to knowledge of the spirit. Reason had proved its power in nature. 'As the sun is one all-illuminating and warming sun, so too is reason one' (Descartes). The method of natural science must also embrace the mysteries of spirit. The spirit is real and objectively in the world, founded as such in corporeality. With this the interpretation of the world immediately takes on a predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical, form. The same causality -only split in two- embraces the one world; the sense of rational explanation is everywhere the same, but in such a way that all explanation of spirit, in the only way in which it can be universal, involves the physical. There can be no pure, self-contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inneroriented psychology or theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical self-experience and extending to the other psyche. The way that must be traveled is the external one, the path of physics and chemistry. All the fond talk of common spirit, of the common will of a people, of nations' ideal political goals, and the like, are romanticism and mythology, derived from an analogous application of concepts that have a proper sense only in the individual personal sphere. Spiritual being is fragmentary. To the question regarding the source of all these difficulties the following answer is to be given: this objectivism or this psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such. To speak of the spirit as reality (Realitat), presumably a real (realen) annex to bodies and having its supposedly spatiotemporal being within nature, is an absurdity. — Husserl
You asked me what an explanation is, in philosophy. One answer would be: an explanation of why we’re tied in knots. That’s close to Wittgenstein’s attitude, isn’t it? The ladder and the discarding of it. But first we have to climb it, and it’s more than just a verbal matter. — Wayfarer
The experimental practice presupposes a certain pre-scientific practice of description, which establishes the norm for experimental measurement apparatus, and consequently what counts as scientific experience. — Bohr
The investigator of nature, however, does not make it clear to himself that the constant foundation of his admittedly subjective thinking activity is the environing world of life. This latter is constantly presupposed as the basic working area, in which alone his questions and his methodology make sense.
...
In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.
...
It is true, of course, that since Kant we have a special theory of knowledge, and on the other hand there is psychology, which with its claims to scientific exactitude wants to be the universal fundamental science of the spirit. Still, our hope for real rationality, i.e., for real insight, is disappointed here as elsewhere. — Husserl
There is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever.
This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying features and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up (as in Figure 2.4, page 38). — Dennett
So let's take a brief tour of the phenomenological garden, just to satisfy ourselves that we know what we are talking about (even if we don't yet know the ultimate nature of these things). It will be a deliberately superficial introductory tour, a matter of pointing and saying a few informative words, and raising a few questions, before we get down to serious theorizing in the rest of the book. Since I will soon be mounting radical challenges to everyday thinking, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was simply ignorant of all the wonderful things that inhabit other people's minds. Our phenom is divided into three parts: (1) experiences of the "external" world, such as sights, sounds, smells, slippery and scratchy feelings, feelings of heat and cold, and of the positions of our limbs; (2) experiences of the purely "internal' world, such as fantasy images, the inner sights and sounds of daydreaming and talking to yourself, recollections, bright ideas, and sudden hunches; and (3) experiences of emotion or "affect" (to use the awkward term favored by psychologists), ranging from bodily pains, tickles, and "sensations" of hunger and thirst, through intermediate emotional storms of anger, joy, hatred, embarrassment, lust, astonishment, to the least corporeal visitations of pride, anxiety, regret, ironic detachment, rue, awe, icy calm. — Dennett
The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. According to the materialists, we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth. It is one of the main burdens of this book to explain consciousness without ever giving in to the siren song of dualism. — Dennett
I balk at “her beliefs”, however, because if she knows the object as a tree, she has no need to merely believe in the properties that cause it to be a tree in the first place.
— Mww
OK. But isn't that open to the problem of Crusoe attributing bentness to the (straight) stick? Does he "know" it is bent at the time? — Andrew M
Also note that I deny that an object has intrinsic properties. I instead say that the object has form in relation to Alice.
Anyway, my guess is that we're saying the same thing here in our respective terminologies. — Andrew M
I shall take that as saying we still agree language always presupposes experience.
— Mww
No, I don't agree with that! — Andrew M
I regard realization there as a logical condition, not a process in time. — Andrew M
He's denying a stamp-collecting approach to thinking and saying, either as a catalog of bodily movements or as a catalog of mental activities. Ryle brings in reason in the completion of that sentence where he includes the logical conditions under which thinking and saying occur, "... but some nexus of statable because statement-shaped conditions." — Andrew M
But I also think there is a give-and-take - some conceptual schemes are natural and well-motivated, others not so much. If I call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? — Andrew M
This is a monistic materialism, it seems to me. I find it just as metaphysical as dualism. The 'physical' is just as slippery and caught up in a system of signs as the 'mental.' The physical/mental distinction and an everyday loose dualism are both quite useful. They prove their value as instruments. But I agree with Dennett that science and philosophy should generally seek knowledge and pierce that which seems mysterious and sacred. — jjAmEs
The problem with Cartesianism is that it posits 'res cogitans;' as a literal substance in an objective sense - something which objectively exists. And that leads to the intractable problem of how this 'ghost in the machine' can pull levers or do anything (which is Ryle's criticism).
— Wayfarer
Perhaps you can expand on your distance from this Cartesianism. — jjAmEs
Dennett is constantly mischaracterized by Wayfarer; he doesn't deny the reality of consciousness, he just says that it is not what we think it is. — Janus
To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist? — John Searle
Because, as Husserl explains in Crisis of European Sciences, Descartes' depiction of 'res cogitans' leads to it being characterised as a literal substance, something that objectively exists (or doesn't exist). Whereas I say that because you can never get outside consciousness, then it is never amongst the things that exist. It doesn't exist anywhere at all, certainly not 'in' brains or 'in' minds. — Wayfarer
Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation. — Sartre
https://ia801901.us.archive.org/4/items/jstor-2011942/2011942.pdf
In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which only I understand) mean the limits of my world.
The world and life are one.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book “The world as I found it”, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.
The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.
…
This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is also a priori. Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori.
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.
— Wittgenstein TLP 5.62 on
This requires a radical re-orientation in order to grasp it, something like a gestalt shift (and I'm sure the inventors of gestalt had just this kind of perspective in mind. — Wayfarer
“As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is not self-splintering of it into consciousness and what the consciousness if ‘of.’ Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is ‘taken.’ i.e., talked of twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively but anew retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content.”
— W James
[James believes that philosophers] misunderstood their own conceptual distinctions. They have mistaken distinctions, which are useful and important for particular purposes, for the concrete reality of experience itself. They have been guilty of what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and James calls “vicious intellectualism.” It is a fallacy that occurs when we mistake some abstraction or conceptual distinction (which is important for specific intellectual purposes) for the concrete reality of experience itself. It is a fallacy that according to Whitehead, James, and Bergson has had disastrous consequences for a philosophic understanding of the world. Abstractions are important; we cannot think without them. But abstractions are abstractions from a concrete reality. — Bernstein
OK, but if you are not going to support any claim that there are two radically different substances or realms or dimensions, or whatever term you want to use, to reality, then you are pretty much left with some kind of monism, no? — Janus
https://slavicgf.sitehost.iu.edu/assignments/Chandler_ch1_pt1.pdfSaussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system. His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things (the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things). Saussure did not define signs in terms of some essential or intrinsic nature. For Saussure, signs refer primarily to each other. Within the language system, ‘everything depends on relations’ (Saussure 1983, 121). No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. Both signifier and signified are purely relational entities (ibid., 118). This notion can be hard to understand since we may feel that an individual word such as ‘tree’ does have some meaning for us, but Saussure’s argument is that its meaning depends on its relation to other words within the system (such as ‘bush’).
...
Saussure emphasized in particular negative, oppositional differences between signs. He argued that ‘concepts . . . are defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not’ (Saussure 1983, 115; my emphasis). — link
The notion of value . . . shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements. — Saussure
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/saussure.htmlFor Saussure, there are no objects (words/texts/others) that carry inherent, autonomous, "positive" meaning: there are only points of view whose meanings depend on their interrelatedness: Saussure states that "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (LT 88). Signifiers (sound images) and signifieds (concepts/meanings) are not fixed and universal and do not simply reflect or represent prior categories (the world/ideas/forms): language articulates or makes such categories and concepts possible. Because there is no necessary or inherent relation between words and objects, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (e.g., similar meanings correspond in practice rather than in some natural or essential way to different words across languages or across time as words change). Yet because the sign's structure is arbitrary, it is subject both to history and to a synchronic study of its relational function within a signifying system (la langue) that is not arbitrary but conventional and socially constructed. To explain a signifying action (individual utterance, speech act, parole) is therefore to relate it to the underlying system of norms (conventions/practices) that makes it possible: hence, a structural rather than a strictly causal explanation (synchronic rather than diachronic/historical). — Flores
And if what science can deal with is, by definition, only the physical, and there is no other substance, realm or dimension, then a monistic materialism would seem to logically follow. — Janus
https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/files/wittgenstein-on-certainty.pdf35. But can’t it be imagined that there should be no physical objects? I don’t know. And yet “there are physical objects” is nonsense. Is it supposed to be an empirical proposition?—And is this an empirical proposition: “There seem to be physical objects”?
36. “A is a physical object” is a piece of instruction which we give only to someone who doesn’t yet understand either what “A” means, or what “physical object” means. Thus it is instruction about the use of words, and “physical object” is a logical concept. (Like colour, quantity, …) And that is why no such proposition as: “There are physical objects” can be formulated. Yet we encounter such unsuccessful shots at every turn.
...
476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books,
sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.
Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a
unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding
question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence
of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?
477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition
exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the
opposite?
For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?
478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a
mouse exists?
479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late? — Wittgenstein On Certainty
Of course we can do the Kantian move and say that we don't, and can't, know what that which appears to us as the physical "really is in itself"; but since that can never be known it is irrelevant to our inquiries, unless we want to illegitimately use it to reify our spiritualist fantasias (in other words practice traditional metaphysics and theology which are the very things Kant is working against).
(I am aware that Kant offers what he sees as practical reasons for believing in God, Freedom and Immortality, but that is a separate entirely ethical issue and has nothing to do with what we are justified in thinking regarding either ontology or metaphysics).
I also acknowledge that there can be a profound aesthetic dimension to "spiritualist fantasias", but again that fact says nothing about what we ought to believe regarding metaphysics or ontology. — Janus
If one insists on identifying what science deals with as the physical, then perhaps. I still find that too metaphysical, though I guess the 'physical' is a codeword for an anti-metaphysical attitude that I can relate to. — jjAmEs
If you want to call the whole thing 'rational' thinking without distinguishing any finer category, be my guest, but I'm not sure I see the advantage. — Isaac
walk up to a guy, show him a Rorschach, ask him.....what’s going on in your brain right now?
Or, I walk up to a guy, show him a Rorschach, ask him.....what does this look like to you.
Which question will he answer? — Mww
the advantage to calling the whole thing rational thought, is the absolute impossibility of individual comprehensions in particular and thereby meaningful communication in general given from it, in any other terms. — Mww
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