So how does Quine come to such a position. (From the Pursuit of Truth): "From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input." And thus we have the start of Quine's naturalized epistemology. In a nut shell, our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors. In contrast, I presume, phenomenology starts with appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, from a first person point of view, then attempt to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest or achieve some sot of knowledge of consciousness. — Richard B

Yes, and I agree with the forward looking pragmatist's thinking on truth, knowledge and thought. But he knew where this kind of physicalist talk takes one. From Ontological Relativity:

When . . . I begin to think about my own verbal behavior in theoretical or semantical terms, I am
forced to admit that, here too, indeterminacy reigns. Philosophical reflection upon my own
verbal behavior, concerned with hunting out semantical rules and ontological commitments,
requires me to make use of translational notions. I then recognize that the intentional content of
my own psychological states is subject to indeterminacy: semantical and intentional phenomena
cannot be incorporated within the science of nature as I would wish.2

He knew, as Heidegger did, that foundationally all roads lead to indeterminacy. I am inclined to believe that when we encounters this, it is generally handled by the basic inclinations of analytic philosophy in a resort to naturalism, and is evidenced in his confession above. And naturalism simply cannot proceed at all. What is happiness, misery, and all the "semantical and intentional phenomena"?

Of course, this kind of talk leads to none other than a phenomenological turn.

our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors. In contrast, I presume, phenomenology starts with appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, from a first person point of view, then attempt to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest or achieve some sot of knowledge of consciousness. — Richard B

You likely know how this goes. As Rorty put it, and Quine well knew, causal relations are not epistemic relations, or, as Rorty put it, " I no more know the world (the "out there" things science and everydayness talks about) than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail." Quine knew full well that not just knowledge issues, but everything that constitutes being a person simply goes unaddressed because this cannot be fit into a naturalistic schematism.

All we ever really see, encounter, understand, deal with intellectually, pragmatically, and so on, is phenomena.
Hence, the turn to phenomenology.

It is simply not the case that there is a binary choice between science and phenomenology. Which is just as well, since phenomenology remains vexed. — Banno

All I have ever asked of analytic philosophy is to simply tell me how foundational matters are worked out. Because materialism, even Strawson's Real materialism (or naturalism, or naturalistic materialism, or physical naturalism, or any other useless distinctions) falls flat is it capacity for discovery.

Or perhaps you can disabuse me on this.

@Janus, @Constance and @Joshs apparently see a place for discussion of phenomena, via a somewhat esoteric method, that somehow permits the effing of the ineffable. Perhaps @Moliere is tempted to sympathy with that idea, but the problem here is that such a method becomes a beetle in a box. — Banno

More than tempted :). I full on like phenomenology. Sometimes it speaks to me, and sometimes it doesn't. Even so I think it a good philosophical method, even with the esoteric connotations. (or, with respect to understanding religion, the esoteric connotations are better -- how else could one understand religion, rather than write it off ala Russell?)

I think I've said it before, and it relates to my belief that the mystics are not lying -- what are people doing when they talk about God?

And, if we are direct realists, and believe that people aren't lying when they talk about their mystical experiences, how do we parse reports from people of totally different experiences from us?

I pointed out to @Constance how I approach philosophy anarchically. I want to say the same here. I believe the so-called rebels of analytic philosophy are closer to the concerns of continental philosophy than they want to believe, mostly for institutional reasons. I mentioned earlier how these aesthetic concerns are necessary for teaching and propagating an institution, but can you imagine being a professor of philosophy -- with tenure -- and being asked to not know one, but TWO traditions at once?! Maybe the department, as a whole, can cover that -- we'll hire our token continental philosopher to pass on the knowledge, just in case...

:D

Obviously I'm on the outside of all that, it's just what it looks like from the perspective of a person who identifies as a worker, in his soul, and simultaneously was really just educated by continentals, while having the scientific-analytic bent in his mind.

Since I have anarchic feelings towards philosophy, though, I'd say there's nothing bad in trying different ways. Wittgenstein was right, yet so are other people. Especially the people we meet in day-to-day life who don't have that education, but do have the experience -- there are different ways to express things, but usually they speak the truth in the situation, even if persons with a philosophical bent will nit-pick the words used.

This to go some way to tempt you to read the deep, dark, unfathomable phenomenologists :D. Husserl, at least, is very direct. I need to read him more than I have, and I am put off by his style, but he still makes very clear points and distinctions. He's earnest. And he takes on the subject unlike philosophers who write that off -- which I think is important. Even if Descartes is a hangover, he's a hangover with a lot of influence. Dropping it is good for institutions who want to progress philosophy in a certain way, but engaging with Descartes is good for us who just like this stuff and probably read too much ;) -- at least as a way to connect.

As are feelings, and for much the same reasons. — Mww

I add two to the traditional five senses for feelings: bodily feelings and mental feelings. Feelings are akin to senses but point inward.

what is it about objects that can elicit descriptive terms from sensation — Mww

Objects interact with the world in ways we are attuned to: they emit and reflect light, cause variations in air pressure, sublimate chemicals. Our sense organs and then our brain translate these into sensations. We are trained to bind together the relevant features of objects and their corresponding sensations with symbols, words, and so we have descriptive terms. (this is why sensory terms are a little peculiar, they always have two meanings: the sensation and the feature of the world that produces it).

There is no possibility of inventing a language to describe sensations. We can have words for sensations because we can point to things that invoke the sensation. But we cannot point to the sensations themselves, as they are internal. Therefore we can never assign words to features that would describe them. And so they will forever remain both immediate and indescribable. — hypericin

This is where I disagree, I think.

We can't know that sensations will forever remain both immediate and indescribable.

I think Merleau-Ponty goes some way to undermine this thought, with his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Perception

Maybe I can't imagine a language which makes every little thing I experience describable, but that's more about what I'm able to do than what really is the case. There's some people who can make that language, I think -- at least potentially? To todo the biggest reach of philosophy.

It just doesn't seem like something which will never be known to me. To rely on phenomenology a bit. I can't tell you yet, but I'm not so confident that we'll never be able to tell each other these things.

Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.

“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive” — Joshs

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8) — Joshs

It is unclear how this ‘the most radical aspect of Deleuze’ that you embrace is compatible with your
perspective on phenomenology and the ineffable. As you wrote before:

“Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically. This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others in the sense that it doesn’t hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it”

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup. Therefore, what is rejected here is not just the anthropomorphism of any discourse that thinks a time in general for man in general, but also the prevalence of the internal, that is valid in all times and all places. Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach. By contrast, a multiplicity, an assemblage, implies that “Untangling the lines of apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a survey of unexplored lands…One has to be positioned on the lines themselves…We belong to these apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus for those preceding it is what we call currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become.” (Deleuze, 2007, ‘What is a Dispositif’?) Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. Together with other lines, that of knowledge (epistemological) and power (ethical), we are not, but we become. What holds an assemblage, an apparatus, together? What makes it a multilinear, opened whole? The ineffable is the relation of what we experience to our assemblage. We need to grasp the dimensions of its processual creativity. Likely, the most radical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy are notions of the machine, the abstract machine, and the machinic unconscious as ways of explaining the operational unity of assemblages.

Ok, thanks. While I agree sensation is ineffable, I cannot isolate ineffability from sensation with your description here. If one of the meanings of sensory terms derives from sensation, hasn’t some language been used on it? And if I read you correctly, it begs the question as to how conceptions, by which all objects are described, arrive at purely physical structures such as sensory devices.

I think it more the case sensation merely informs our representational faculty, sometimes called intuition, as to which physiology has been affected by some real object, but provides nothing descriptive per se with respect to it. This is given from the fact we are often affected by some object’s sensation, but have no immediate idea what it is. Knowing we are affected says nothing descriptive of that affect.

But this is grounded in a dualistic philosophical paradigm, so…..maybe you’re right in some other way.

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup — Number2018

Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach — Number2018

There are many interpreters of Deleuze these days, so each of us have to choose our preferred interpreter. It might be helpful to my understanding of your interest in Deleuze if you could mention which current writers you think get him right. With regard to the relation between singualeites and ordinary points, between the quantitative and the qualitative , difference in degree and difference in kind, there is divergence between two prominent readers of Deleuze, James Williams and Dan Smith. Are you familiar with their disagreement? I agree with Williams over Smith.

Williams writes:

“Dan Smith gives no prominence to Deleuze's work on time for the determination of the new in Deleuze. This presents two difficulties through the critical question of whether Deleuze's work on calculus should be taken as a starting point for his work on time, as opposed to my focus on synthetic processes, and through the related question of whether the role of singularities in the philosophy of time should be understood through a mathematical understanding of the term:

‘The singularities of complex curves are far more complex. They constitute those points in the neighborhood of which the differential relation changes sign, and the curve bifurcates, and either increases or decreases' (Smith, 2007: 12).

My reservation about the mathematical model is its dependence on an opposition between ordinary and singular points. In terms of Deleuze's philosophy of time, there are no ordinary points in ordinary time, since the processes of time are all dependent on multiple singularities and their relations (in the living present, in the pure past, in eternal return and in the caesura that come with the new). In that sense, then, at least for the philosophy of time, my view is that the new is better defined in a more formal metaphysical manner. So I would rephrase the following sentence from Smith's work, avoiding the terms ‘ordinary', ‘constant' and ‘perpetual': ‘Every determinate thing is a combination of the singular and the ordinary, a multiplicity that is constantly changing, in perpetual flux' .The version closer to Deleuze's account of time would be: Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of time and led by the work of dark precursors and the eternal return of difference, the eternal return of the new.”(Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time)

Another noted reader of Deleuze is John Protevi. Are you familiar with his work? He says that in contrast to certain forms of phenomenology, “Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

This sounds like your claim that

Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. — Number2018

But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze.

Peotevi and Massumi are the only Deleuzian writers I know of who engage with phenomenologically informed enactivist approaches to cognition, motivation, intersubjectivity and affect. In their hands, Deleuze is less useful than the models offered by Varela, Thompson, Gallagher and others. How, specifically, does your Deleuzian reading improve on an enactivist psychology?

I think Merleau-Ponty goes some way to undermine this thought — Moliere

To my (very limited) understanding phenomenology aspires to what the title suggests, an account of the "phenomenon of perception", of what it is like to perceive, in the abstract. Perhaps you can illustrate your point with a quote? I can't see how an abstract accounting like this can bridge the gap I described.

If a language capable of describing perception were achieved, conversations like this would be possible:

"Hi Bob, I was thinking, my subjective experience of my perceptions are like this (...). What about you?"
"Wow Sam, that's crazy! Mine are exactly like yours, except when you smell cinnamon I smell your cardamom, and when you hear the violin I hear your piano!"

Humans have been playing at language for a long time, and afaik such a conversation has never happened. Forgive my skepticism at phenomenology ever achieving some kind of linguistic breakthrough that would allow it. The reason, I believe, is fundamental: internal states cannot be pointed to, so no language can ever develop.

the critical question of whether Deleuze's work on calculus should be taken as a starting point for his work on time — Joshs

Reference? Thx.

If one of the meanings of sensory terms derives from sensation, hasn’t some language been used on it? — Mww

This seems to be a common confusion. Words are labels which are attached to sensation. But this doesn't make sensation any less ineffable. Imagine as a child you were trained to associate buzzes with animal pictures, so that one buzz is associated with a dog, two for a cat, and three for a horse. Do the buzzes then describe the animals? No, they merely symbolize them. But the buzzes are to the animals as sensory terms are to sensations.

And if I read you correctly, it begs the question as to how conceptions, by which all objects are described, arrive at purely physical structures such as sensory devices. — Mww

Please restate, I don't get the question.

:up: That seems close!

Perhaps you can illustrate your point with a quote? I can't see how an abstract accounting like this can bridge the gap I described. — hypericin

The only way I can see it bridging the gap is when, due to our generally similar ways of experience, an account may speak to our own experience, and thus gain our assent.This cannot be empirically demonstrated, of course.

For me the arts are like this and being linguistic in form, poetry in particular.. If you take 'effable' to denote 'capable of being expressed in propositional form' then only that which can be expressed in empirically and logically grounded forms would be counted as effable.

On a looser definition, perhaps there is little that is completely ineffable; which would mean effability/ ineffability is on a continuum, and not strictly a "black and white" matter.

I'll eff off now...

All I have ever asked of analytic philosophy is to simply tell me how foundational matters are worked out. — Constance

So move past the Tractatus and on to On Certainty. Instead of looking for what it makes sense to believe, look to what it makes sense to doubt. This post, here, now?

I agree sensations are entirely ineffable. — Mww

And yet we do talk about them.

How can that be?

He knew, as Heidegger did, that foundationally all roads lead to indeterminacy. — Constance

And yet science continues to make successful predictions and enhance understanding.

All we ever really see, encounter, understand, deal with intellectually, pragmatically, and so on, is phenomena. — Constance

Maybe to phenomenologist, and for Quine sensory surfaces, but most scientists they continues doing what they are doing without worrying about phenomenologist's subjective content, or Quine's cultural posits, pragmatically speaking.

And yet we do talk about them. — Banno

Because "about" means concerning or referencing, but doesn't mean conveying, which would mean transferring actual content.

Because "about" means concerning or referencing, but doesn't mean conveying, which would mean transferring actual content. — Hanover

:up:

I agree sensations are entirely ineffable. — Mww

And yet we do talk about them. — Banno

Do we talk about them? Or do they drop out of the conversation as irrelevant?

Because "about" means concerning or referencing, but doesn't mean conveying, which would mean transferring actual content. — Hanover

Ok, so how does this differ from, say, talking about a tree? Can you convey a tree by talk?

When I read this it feels like it'd go the same with objects... we cannot say objects, and so they are ineffable. But the reason we can't say objects is that they aren't words, not because we can't talk about them. — Moliere

How is talk of leaf and branch different to talk of smell and touch? See how the tree has a similar leaf to the Oak? See how the desert has a similar smell to coffee? Or see how the desert brings about a similar sensation to the coffee? Why aren't I here talking about the sensation? That's not conveying actual content? Or, if it is conveying actual content, then it's not about the sensation? Or what?

But you can't say, because it is ineffable.

And around and around...

The problem with claiming that something is ineffable is, of course, the liar-paradox-like consequence that one has thereby said something about it. — Banno

Do we talk about them? Or do they drop out of the conversation as irrelevant? — Luke

Exactly. Somehow sensations are supposed to occupy some middle (@Moliere) ground, private, ineffable, yet somehow despite that, the foundation of our understanding (@Constance).

You clever folk all agree, but can't explain it. I call bullshit.

This is a fascinating and seemingly endless debate. If you had to summarise where the others are going wrong in their conception of ineffable what is it?

I am very tempted with the notion that words are metaphors and I know you have already stated this leads to solipsism. Are we all in the thrall of Kantian metaphysics?

Do we talk about them? Or do they drop out of the conversation as irrelevant? — Luke

Exactly. Somehow sensations are supposed to occupy some middle (@Moliere) ground, private, ineffable, yet the foundation of our understanding (@Constance).

You clever folk all agree, but can't explain it. I call bullshit. — Banno

You said that we do talk about sensations. However, Wittgenstein says of his beetle that "The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all". If the beetle in the box represents sensations (as @Richard B suggests here), then it seems like you are advocating both positions?

I'll just await @Mww's response. It will be a bit more nuanced.

am very tempted with the notion that words are metaphors and I know you have already stated this leads to solipsism. — Tom Storm

Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By" makes this point, a book I've both seen and read.

Prose differs from poetry in form, not substance.

It seems this way to me intuitively.

a book I've both seen and read. — Hanover

Did it have a good cover?

What do you make of the criticism that if words are metaphors we risk slipping into solipsism?

How is talk of leaf and branch different to talk of smell and touch? See how the tree has a similar leaf to the Oak? See how the desert has a similar smell to coffee? Or see how the desert brings about a similar sensation to the coffee? Why aren't I here talking about the sensation? That's not conveying actual content? Or, if it is conveying actual content, then it's not about the sensation? Or what? — Banno

When it comes to objects of the senses we can refer to attributes which are visible, audible, tangibly available and so on, to all, but this referring consists in generalizations; it is only in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touching what is referred to that the particular comes into play.

The particular is not conveyed by language, but merely referred to. Regarding sensations like pain or pleasure, no such mutual apprehension of particularity is possible, and even in the case of sensory objects mutual apprehension is really an illusion.

What do you make of the criticism that if words are metaphors we risk slipping into solipsism? — Tom Storm

Why would we have to "slip into solipsism" on account of that? Just because I cannot fully share other's experience, does that logically entail that I should doubt their existence? Seems like a bogeyman to me.

Ok, so how does this differ from, say, talking about a tree? Can you convey a tree by talk? — Banno

To convey indicates the transporting of my thought to your thought, a metaphorical movement through space, akin to a mail delivery, and of course that cannot be done actually. That is why it's ineffable, and that is why we talk "about" things. Aboutness (a part of intentionally) would be the mental state and the word ithe speaker's representation of the mental state. What is conveyed is my word representation to be compared to your word representation, which offers you an opportunity to see what my experience is like, but not what it is.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

Did it have a good cover — Tom Storm

Meh.

What do you make of the criticism that if words are metaphors we risk slipping into solipsism? — Tom Storm

That I can't know the specific contents of other minds doesn't mean I only know of my own mind.

I would agree with the observation that ultimately, with enough questioning of fundamental beliefs and given assumptions, that soliipsism, meaninglessness, and moral relativism eventually follow. Poetically speaking, all roads out of Athens lead to solipsism. All roads out of Jerusalem, to meaning.

I would agree with the observation that ultimately, with enough questioning of fundamental beliefs and given assumptions, that soliipsism, meaninglessness, and moral relativism eventually follow. — Hanover

AKA - atheism leads to nihilism?

Poetically speaking, all roads out of Athens lead to solipsism. All roads out of Jerusalem, to meaning. — Hanover

Them's fighting words. :wink:

AKA - atheism leads to nihilism? — Tom Storm

Just that at some basic level, theistic or not, you're not going to get any where starting with Cartesian doubt. So posit what you need to and build from there, but don't get bogged down with criticisms of eventual solipsism. Just proclaim you take as a given that you're not the only mind in the universe deceived into thinking there are other ones.

Call it faith, pragmatism, foundationalism or whatever, but at a basic level you've got to just accept certain things as givens.

Call it faith, pragmatism, foundationalism or whatever, but at a basic level you've got to just accept certain things as givens. — Hanover

I hear you. Brute facts.