Which knowledge claims? What objects in which world?
If the supposition that there is one way in which we can tell if a proposition is true, then the answer I gave, the T-sentence, is the only candidate. — Banno
My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
(it) pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. — Banno
"The cup has one handle" is true IFF the cup has one handle. — Banno
↪Constance, in your first post on this thread you gave us:
The reduction I have in mind is Husserl's. The idea is to consciously dismiss presuppositions that implicitly give us the familiarity of the familiar world in a perceptual event.
— Constance
My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
(it) pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus.
— Banno
Your response was
You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
— Constance
To which I asked
What?
— Banno
eliciting in turn your enigmatic response. If you think that T-sentences do not answer your question, then have a go at explaining what it is you are asking. "(H)ow epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world" is an ambiguous question.
It's not enough just to read a bunch of philosophers and pick the bits you like. We are not doing philosophy until we engage with and critique those views. I think you agree with this.
That is what this thread involves. It sets out various ways of understanding the notion of ineffability, and seeks comment on them. It gives folk enough rope, a place to set out a part of their thinking or the thinking of their betrothed, with the aim of identifying problems and inconsistencies therein.
The problem is that you have still to set out what it is you are asking. — Banno
I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.
…how do epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world? — Constance
yet you provide no argument or evidence to refute my claim that he denies only the privacy of language, not the privacy of the feeling of sensations. — Luke
248. The sentence “Sensations are private” is comparable to “One plays patience by oneself”.
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
Here's the issue that plagues any attempt to claim ineffability:
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
Can you escape this paradox? — Banno
You were dismissive of the references in the Tractatus to the mysticism and transcendence — Constance
I don't recall this discussion, although doubtless it occurred. My response was probably Davidsonian.you ignored Quine's admission that he could not reconcile his naturalism with experiential phenomena; — Constance
On that we agree. It appears incoherent, for reasons given.you don't seem to grasp the essentials of phenomenology — Constance
I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.And you cannot handle basic questions. — Constance
whatever is ineffable in human experience, propositonally considered, "drops out of the conversation", but may be the subject of poetry and the other arts. The ineffable, as such, may drop out of the philosophical conversation, but the fact that there is the ineffable need not: it may, on the contrary, be considered to be of the greatest philosophical significance (but obviously not on a conception of philosophy as narrow as AP or OLP). — Janus
Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world. — Joshs
Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates. — Constance
I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics. — Constance
What do you think of the idea that the ineffable used to be thought of in terms of a hidden substance , a thing -in-itself, the noumenon that stands on the other side of a divide between our representations and the essences buried within external nature as well as in the interiority of our own subjectivity? And more recently the ineffable , rather than pointing to a hidden substance, is associated with the unconscious of thought , the fact that the origins of our values are not transparent to us, and neither is language transparent to itself. In other words, the ineffable is irreducible difference , displacement and becoming rather than interiority, essence, ipseity, pure self-reflexivity. — Joshs
What Witti points out is that, that you cannot have my sensation is a direct result of it's being my sensation. If you had it, too, it would by that very fact no longer be just my sensation...
248. The sentence “Sensations are private” is comparable to “One plays patience by oneself”. — Banno
Here's the issue that plagues any attempt to claim ineffability:
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
Can you escape this paradox? — Banno
But this implies that we could never use the word "ineffable" (to mean that nothing can be said about something). That's absurd. — Luke
...nothing else can be said about something except that it's ineffable... Crisis averted. — Luke
So folk ought restrict themselves to not saying anything more about the ineffable than that it is ineffable.
— Banno
But that's saying something about it, according to you.
— Luke
Now you're getting it. — Banno
I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.
Are we done? — Banno
If I have it right, you have a barrier beyond which language cannot go, but beyond which a phenomenological method of introspection supposedly can see. Hence you find the term "ineffable" appropriate. — Banno
Ineffability is what is there on the horizon of the openness of language possibilities as inquiry stands in the midst of a world. — Constance
I see a continuity from what we say to what we do and what is not said but shown. It's the place where stating the rule is replaced by enacting it, and where saying what the picture is of is replaced by showing it. That continuity means that we can always say more, but enough is said when the task is done. Hence the term "ineffable" is inappropriate. — Banno
Do you have a definition of ineffable - or do you think you can steel man one? — Tom Storm
Are you comfortable with - 'too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.' — Tom Storm
I can say nothing about string theory. — Tom Storm
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