They are almost nonsense to the person in question because they don't have access to their first person relationship with reality, not because they cannot imagine being in that situation and having that motive.No, in the bit about the Emperor, you're saying that his motivations "are almost nonsense to people who aren't the person in question". But you just said that we can know the motivations of others. That's the inconsistency I was pointing out. — Noble Dust
It was clear from my second reply to you. A motive is grounded in something - in the relationship of the person with reality - hence why I said that I know their motive but not how they arrive to it. Without having access to the ground - not through knowledge, which is impossible, but through first person awareness, how can I make sense of their motives? They are almost nonsense to me = I know the motive but not how it is arrived at.None of that was clear until you elaborated your idea further, but fair enough. — Noble Dust
It was clear from my second reply to you. — Agustino
You're saying that proper pragmatism is an ontic inquiry; you can always ask "why," but once you do this past the point of universal invariance, you hit a wall because there's no answer in terms of a more general kind of invariance. — Pneumenon
Basically, a qualified Principle of Sufficient Reason with a restriction on the kinds of explanations allowed, viz. they must be in terms of more general invariance. — Pneumenon
Now I want to talk about something else here: why that particular restriction? I would assume that this is motivated by the success of natural science, but that's a guess because you have not yet said so. Does this methodology bootstrap itself out of scientific pragmatism, from "Let's do this because it works" to a more general method, a sort of conceptual ascent? Or is it some other reason? — Pneumenon
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