Idealism assumes a kind of theater, that instead of observing a material world we are observing our own minds. All experience of the world is indirect for idealism. But we can watch others directly interact with things, and so need not assume that this is untrue of ourselves.

We directly interact with the world. There is no veil or space between a man and the rest of the world, and therefor no place to project and observe the contents of our minds. So rather then shedding doubt on a material world, experience confirms it. We can directly witness the coming and going of people and confirm that the world is largely unaffected by it, and therefor is independent.

We can directly witness the coming and going of people and confirm that the world is largely unaffected by it, and therefor is independent. — NOS4A2

This is a good point, but it seems compatible with indirect realism. We understand that a blind man lacks an aspect of reality of the non-blind. We can then imagine (vaguely!) an extraterrestrial with more sense organs, experiencing an aspect of reality closed to humans. Or our scientists can make a case for objects too tiny or fast for us see. So it's hard to shake the vision of some imperfect mediator between us and 'stuff in itself' (though this dualism is not without problems.)

what is discursive practice? Is it rational ? Is it a group activity? It's hard to see how one monkey body can make a nonviolently binding claim on other monkey body without discursive norms that hold each monkey accountable for assertions as to the way things are. If there are proper ways to use concepts, we have norms, which are hard to make sense of without individuals subject to them before witnesses. Once we are doing philosophy, it's 'too late' to question the framework, for such questioning is part of the game. "Let me prove to you that the responsible and autonomous self is ontologically secondary." — igjugarjuk

Im reminded of two opposing reading of the later Wittgenstein. The first has been put forth by Pete Hacker, along with Gordon Baker , who later jumped ship and embraced the second reading. Also in this first camp are many of the Oxford school Wittgensteinians(, Malcolm, Ryle, Strawson and Mounce).

Among adherents of the second reading are Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben.

The first reading is I think broadly consistent with your indirect realism, in that it wants to protect the idea of a material or formal substrate that to some extent can protect itself from contextual change such as to be able to exert a specific influence on the present context from a position in memory, history or the world at least partially independent of the immediate context of the now.

As Phil Hutchinson argues against Hacker:

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non occasion-sensitive) reference points?”

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

I'm sympathetic to those points, and I'm not even terribly attached to indirect realism. But I don't currently see how the vague notion of a substrate is not more plausible, with all its problems, than some of its competitors.

Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns.

Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns. — igjugarjuk

As I’m sure you will agree, there are central ethical implications to how we understand the relation between identity and difference. Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique.

Descartes did not doubt his existence because he was certain that God would not deceive him. He, in effect, said nothing.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique. — Joshs

Please explain what that intimate relationship is and why traditional philosophies do not have that.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique. — Joshs

I really don't get this point - where does it arise from? Could you maybe clarify a bit? A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity.

Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. — Joshs

I agree. But it's 'tautologically' rational to fear a descent into irrationality. Of course Peterson, for instance, becomes the thing he fears.

What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world. — Joshs

It's a reasonable claim. And I understand that to be related to the non-intellectual version of Derrida (watered down to the limitations or cruelty of binary thinking, etc.) I'm not denying that this simple ethical point has force. But your point only has force if it's true. Or accepted as true. Taken to extremes, your point would object to anything at all actually being the case. A determinate reality would itself, in that determinateness, be perceived as violent. And perhaps there is 'violence' in all institution, but it's a necessary violence (ameliorated, we hope, with Progress (John Gray barfs)). A community without norms does not make sense. Someone, in retrospect, after norms have changed, will be portrayable as the victim of those former less developed and less correct norms. And we will have Van Gogh and Nietzsche and other posthumous superstars.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique. — Joshs

One example of this is the critique of the privileging of phonetic script as ethnocentric, maybe a bit racist. The white man is closer to the breath of God, his own breath, and not lost in a maze of hieroglyphs, cut off from the (invisible) real thing.

A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity. — hwyl

The more solid, substantial and permanent you make your irreducible contents, the more polarizing and violent becomes the relations between these contents. This is fine for people who believe in good and evil or a correspondence theory of truth. Their moral thinking is this violent and polarizing sort, moral and empirical truth as the forcing of conformity to an arbitrary content.

But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation.

Please explain what that intimate relationship is and why traditional philosophies do not have that. — Jackson

Think about Hume’s model of associative synthesis. Correct me if I’m wrong , but like the behavioral
models in psychology that borrowed from it, it determines the conditions under which two events become associated with each in our mind in terms of temporal and spatial contiguity , etc. These are external criteria of association. Husserl offered instead an intentional model
of associative synthesis, which is internalistic.

“The old concepts of association and of laws of associ­ation, though they too have usually been related to the coheren­cies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.

It is phenome­nologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche".”(Husserl)

Think about Hume’s model of associative synthesis. Correct me if I’m wrong , but like the behavioral
models in psychology that borrowed from it, it determines the conditions under which two events become associated with each in our mind in terms of temporal and spatial contiguity , etc. These are external criteria of association. — Joshs

For Hume, there is no necessity to association. Objects and events do not have continuity.

But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation. — Joshs

I don't know. I guess I will have to remain unconvinced - and I very early rebelled against the modern concept of identity, some weird, arbitrary cage for being. But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power.

For Hume, there is no necessity to association. Objects and events do not have continuity. — Jackson

The question is , how do things become associated ? What is the ‘glue’ that binds them?

The question is , how do things become associated ? What is the ‘glue’ that binds them? — Joshs

No glue. What gave Kant hysterics.

. But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power. — hwyl

FWIW, most of the political rants you hear about accusing some entity or other of wielding their power and privilege is not postmodern but Marxist or neo-Marxist. Postmodernists like Foucault dont see groups as having or holding onto power. That is a modernist notion, and the insufferable finger-pointing moralisms go along with this kind of thinking. The postmodern philosophers are not moralists. For them power is not a thing , not anything we can posses. It is more like the differential elements of a value system that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange.

No glue. What gave Kant hysterics. — Jackson

How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.

How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this. — Joshs

Convention.

How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.
— Joshs

Convention. — Jackson

Can you give some examples?

It is more like a value system
that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange. — Joshs

That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne.

I see a ball rolling down the hill. This is actually a sequence of discrete, digital, images. Some see it as continuous movement, thus a "fiction of a continued existence" (T I.4.2.36).

That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne — hwyl

I’m a firm believer in two things:
1) Constructive alternativism:

There are an infinite number of ways we can organize our understanding of our world. We discover that some work better than others , but not because they conform to some independent way thing ‘really are’ out there.

2) Over time , by repeatedly trying on differently frameworks of understanding, we will be able to construct systems that allow the social and other events of the world to appear to us in more and more intricately interconnected and harmonious ways. This is not our conforming to the way things ‘really, really’ are in the sense of having to adapt ourselves to some undeniable set of facts.
If ‘reason, logic and empiricism’ mean such conformity of reason to an arbitrary content , then that is a dangerous way of thinking that ends up blaming others for our failure to recognize the prison that ‘reason’ can create when it doesn’t recognize its dependence on a subjective worldview. Calling scientific worldviews ‘subjective’ doesn’t mean we can’t attain that ultimate harmonious understanding of each other. On the contrary, recognizing the intricate interplay between subjective interpretation and the world is the only effective avenue to that goal.

In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views?

Ext implies int. Is there an internal being? If yes, then there is an external world, even if it is a matter of mind.

It is not situated in it's maker organic; it's non-physical but a physical sensation is present.

The universe has no weight, weight is a feeling.

What's physical is more rhythmic than matter, matter is a logical illusion.

We make our experiences; like a child, we push out of the mother, into the world.

What's external is linked to us directly, not separate, like a continued womb.

Child birth is a process of inauguration into int and ext system, and not a bipartisan int into ext system.

I see a ball rolling down the hill. This is actually a sequence of discrete, digital, images. Some see it as continuous movement, thus a "fiction of a continued existence" (T I.4.2.36). — Jackson

What ties together this sequence of discrete images in my mind such that , for the sake of convenience, I can idealize it as a continuous movement? After all, I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other. Also, it is true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?

What ties together this sequence of discrete images in my mind such that , for the sake of convenience, I can idealize it as a continuous movement. — Joshs

Right, an act of the imagination as a "fiction."

Right, an act of the imagination as a "fiction." — Jackson

I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other.So what about this particular series of images allows me this fiction? Also, is it true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?


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Also, it is true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees? — Joshs

Seems to me standard physics.

Seems to me standard physics. — Jackson

yes, it is standard physics , but it ignores the fact that these images that forms sequence are. or neural bits of data, they appear to us and qualitatively differing unfoldings. Hume is consistent with a standard physical account of the measurement of motion. Phenomenological and postmodern accounts are not, because they see not just quantitative shifts from
image to image but qualitative. Bergson was among the first to recognize this with his concept of lived duration.

Bergson was among the first to recognize this with his concept of lived duration. — Joshs

I don't see this as an objection to Hume.