If you have a genuine interest in this question, check my post here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1

This basically answers the question. Quick summary, we create language, then test it against reality. If reality does not contradict that language, then it is rational to hold it for as long as it does so.

How does each individual respond to their culture inheritance? — Joshs

I think your characterization is pretty good. It's obviously just false that people are locked into the culture, religion, morality, language, they are born into.

I don't know much of anything about what mechanisms psychologists hypothesize for cultural uptake. What I mean is, we can count on evolution leaving in place dispositions that generate a more or less predictable world model given a particular environment -- can't quite say niche with us because we are very adaptable and there appears to have been considerable selection pressure for adaptability and even evolvability. We generate the models we do because we're designed to generate them given the right sort of input, roughly. Evolution has some ideas about what sort of environment an organism needs to thrive in.

So how does something like that carry over to culture? Are the mechanisms of cultural uptake a repurposing of our basic model-building gear? I really have no idea.

Even evolution seems to leave us with only something like very strong tendencies. It makes it easy (both efficient and effective) to build the usual thing because here are the tools you need and the instructions. And obviously culture's hold on us is considerably weaker, and our interaction with it considerably richer, the way we reshape and extend our partial inheritance as we go.

...aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible — Joshs

Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture.

↪plaque flag Are the two vases the same, or different? What's "the" vase?

I've in mind something along the lines of the analysis of simples in Philosophical Investigations, §48 and thereabouts. You have some understanding of Wittgenstein. Hilary Lawson seems not to have moved past the Tractatus.

I do not wish to conclude that there is a vase, since that there is exactly one vase is taken as granted in Joshs' story. I am just pointing to the error in concluding either that there are only vase-phenomena or that there are no true sentences about the vase. — Banno

I tend to agree with Josh in spirit, but on this issue he may not give the world enough attention. We experience the [ same ] red flower differently (in a series of adumbrations perhaps). — plaque flag

Let me see if I can clarify what is at issue in the notion of ‘same vase’ or ‘same world’ for all. In my reading, the later Wittgenstein and post-Husserlian phenomenology complement each other in re-thinking the idea of a private experience. Witt’s focus on the emergence of meaning from discursive interaction locates linguistic sense in situated, contextual interpersonal responsive performances, while phenomenology turns perception into a discursive interaction between subjective and objective poles of an event of sense.

If one wants to argue, then, against the idea of sense as private, I am in agreement with Witt and phenomenology that discourse must by considered primary and grounding. That being the case, it seems to me that the idea of a same world for everyone is precisely the sort of thinking that the above philosophical perspectives put into question as relying on the assumption of a private sense. In order for such a notion to be coherent , we must be able to extract from particular vantages something not only common to them all but identically in common. That which is composed of identical parts is a kind of deistic entity, purely enclosed in itself as self-affecting. As Merleau-Ponty argues,

...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores.

Now let’s see how Philosophical Investigations discusses the relation between same, rule, agreement and identity.

We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a thing with itself. I feel like saying: "Here at any rate there can't be a variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing identity too." Then are two things the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shews me to the case of two things?
216. "A thing is identical with itself."—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted. We might also say: "Every thing fits into itself." Or again: "Every thing fits into its own shape." At the same time we look at a thing and imagine that there was a blank left for it, and that now it fits into it exactly.”

Witt reveals ‘same’ as the expression of a rule. The question then becomes what is involved in learning and obeying a rule that dictates something as ‘the same’.

224. The word "agreement" and the word "rule" are related to one another, they are cousins. If I teach anyone the use of the one word, he learns the use of the other with it.
225. The use of the word "rule" and the use of the word "same" are interwoven. (As are the use of "proposition" and the use of "true”)

According to Rouse’s reading of Witt, “No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”On could say, then, that the rule for the use of the word ‘same’ is instantiated in performances that are bound together by family resemblance, which means that they have no one thing in common.

...aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible
— Joshs

Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture — wonderer1

And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from?

one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture — Joshs

The cultural control we see is one which is within the person’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and persons manage it in a tremendous variety of ways. — Kelly

Didn't really respond to this. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure what "limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal" means. It sounds kinda like cultural determinism through the back door. Maybe it's just put a little too strongly here for my liking, but the focus on validation is itself interesting, since he's making the supposedly neutral pole of worldview construction (evidence, facts) the locus of something like cultural bias.

And in some sense that has to be right if you define a culture as what nobody contests, what everyone takes for granted -- that means, in effect, what counts as fact for that culture whether they conceptualize it that way or not. Interesting.

The Greek term logos gives us a better sense of the problem then 'language'. What is at issue is the logic of saying, a logos of logos. The ability to give a comprehensive account. — Fooloso4

There can be no comprehensive account of being without a comprehensive account of non-being. But what is other is without limit and cannot be comprehended. On the one hand this means that there can never be a comprehensive account of the whole, but on the other, it encourages an openness to what might be; beyond our limits of comprehension. — Fooloso4

I got you. Thanks.

According to Rouse’s reading of Witt, “No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. — Joshs

Witt or Quine? Quine is famous for demonstrating that the ability to apply a rule in new circumstances has to be innate. You can't learn it.

it seems to me that the idea of a same world for everyone is precisely the sort of thinking that the above philosophical perspectives put into question as relying on the assumption of a private sense. — Joshs

What you are perhaps ignoring here is that the putting of a perspective into question already assumes a situation that one can be more or less right about. Discussion toward truth is discussion toward a shared reality. Equiprimordiality of self, others, world, language. Language is geared around worldly objects, the red flower.

As I started to argue here here, the minimal version of the world, for philosophers anyway, is that which we can be right or wrong about.

The philosopher Apel seems to have focused on the hyper-social nature of language. I found his ideas in Zahavi's work on Husserl.

According to Apel, in light of these innovative traditions, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived. In particular, the conditions for intersubjectively valid knowledge cannot be explicated in terms of the structure of consciousness or the cognitive capacities of the individual knowing subject but only through a systematic investigation of language as the medium of symbolically mediated knowledge. The pragmatic turn, initiated by Peirce and Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) and continued in the early twenty-first century in speech act theory, further implies that an adequate explanation of how meaningful communication is possible cannot be achieved by a semantic theory alone. Rather, it must be supplemented by a pragmatic study of the relation between linguistic signs and the conditions of their use by speakers. Apel's strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification (1980).

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

Well, there’s certainly SOMETHING that constrains our constructions, but aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible? — Joshs

Yes. So the something is slippery. We might talk of a vast blanket of interdependent concepts and practices. It seems to me that we largely 'are' this blanket. We have no choice but take most of this world-navigating conceptuality for granted as world itself. We can put this or that piece of the mesh into question, but only by taking most of the mesh for granted.

It's true, of course, that each individual organism needs to construct their own, in some sense 'private', model of the world (and themselves in it), because that's what brain development just is, but it's not true that each organism constructs the framework they will use to construct the world from scratch. There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Yes, this is basically my view. The hardware is inherited from Darwinian evolution (one kind of history). The software is inherited mostly from cultural (another kind of history.) Saussure thought in terms of language being somehow imprinted on individual brains (never exactly in the same way, but close enough.)

Ontogeny gets to recapitulate phylogeny rapidly because what used to be endlessly branching little pathways are now high-speed rails. As Hume put it, there are questions Nature has deemed too important to leave to our own fallible and imperfect reason. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I think Hegel saw cultural education the same way. What took the first explores a long time can be streamlined and summarized. So later individuals are like vampires, the true ancients -- fortunate heirs of thousands of years of timebinding (millions if you count the hardware.)

”On could say, then, that the rule for the use of the word ‘same’ is instantiated in performances that are bound together by family resemblance, which means that they have no one thing in common. — Joshs

Note that this statement is aimed at the public concept of the rule for the use of the word 'same.'
The family resemblance point is well made, so maybe what they have in common is reference norm. The same word is used in many ways -- and will be used in ways that cannot be predicted.

FWIW, I grant some kind of radical open-endedness, a sort of frontier. For all our inheritance, there is always danger and novelty.

It seems we agree, apart from perhaps this:

I understand why one would say this, but I'd counter that impressions and sounds and so on only make sense within a tacitly accepted framework on an animal in an environment. — plaque flag

Yes, but I'd argue that such frameworks are inferentially synthesized by animals, including humans, from out of an initial "buzzing, blooming confusion", in their infancy. The framework just is the Unwelt or empirical world in the case of humans.

I take this synthetic apriori as the generation of hypotheses from experience. But I'd say such knowledge is fallible. We may act on it without checking (and surely we do), but it could turn out to be wrong. Math might be an exception, but that gets us into the weeds of the philosophy of mathematics. — plaque flag

Do you think that Kant's synthetic a priori derivation of the "pure forms of intuition" and categories of judgement could be mistaken (bearing in mind that they are only presented as being relevant to the context of human experience and judgement)?

Yes, all that. And as you seem to note, what is experienced is the world. We should avoid Stove's gem - the false argument that we only ever taste oysters with our mouths, hence we never tase oysters as they are in themselves...

Nothing so far supports the idea that we cannot say true things about the world.

We don't actually experience a world; it is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience. — Janus

As if we never actually taste the oyster; instead what we taste is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience.

No. That "synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience" is the taste of oysters.

The problem is set up by an excessive emphasis on "internal" and "external", and appears to be inherent in the phenomenological approach itself, from it's emphasis on direct experience.

As if we never actually taste the oyster; instead what we taste is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience.

No. That "synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience" is the taste of oysters.

The problem is set up by an excessive emphasis on "internal" and "external", and appears to be inherent in the phenomenological approach itself, from it's emphasis on direct experience. — Banno

You are attacking a strawman: I said we don't actually experience a world; I didn't say we don't actually experience oysters.

I said we don't actually experience a world; I didn't say we don't actually experience oysters. — Janus

We do experience the world, one oyster at a time.

Perhaps you are one of those who thinks the world is his oyster. We experience parts of what we think of as the world and parts of what we think of as oysters, but there is a vast difference of scale there.

I am in agreement with Witt and phenomenology that discourse must by considered primary and grounding. — Joshs

I understand that, on the contrary, Wittgenstein took use, not just discourse, as "primary and grounding". Not what we say, but what we do, is what makes the difference between following and running counter to a rule.

See the lines immediately after what you have quoted:

217. “How am I able to follow a rule?” If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule.
Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

Indeed, that whole discussion follows on from §201, which I have been at pains to point to:

there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”.

The difference is fundamental. There is more to this stuff than just narrative - there is the form of life, the fact of being embedded in the world, and so to our being both acted upon and acting upon it. Not just talking about it.

Hence use, not discourse.

Gather 10 people in a room, and include persons from all corners of that world and all eras of human history. Ask them to paint the ‘same ‘ vase of flowers as accurately as possible. Compare the results and try and find any aspect of their paintings which exactly match each other. The wide variety of differences shows us how we actually interact with each other on the basis of supposedly shared experience. — Joshs

Which takes us back to your use of "same".

What does not follow here is the never stated but only hinted reductio, that therefore, there was never a vase in the first place. But this reductio is what is needed if the story is to support some unspecified form of antirealism.

It remains that there may be one vase, which different folk see and report differently.

Hence the argument does not support your rejection of 's point, a repetition of Davidson's observation that we overwhelmingly agree as to what is the case.

And this in turn fits with Wittgenstein's analysis of doubt, in On Certainty. To doubt, we must hold some things as indubitable. A view not too far from Quine.

Hence use, not discourse. — Banno

This is something we agree about. Discourse, or narrative, rules only in the arcane world of philosophy. Use, or doing, is the source of all narrative and discourse; much of the latter being post hoc.

Well, in this thread our similarities should outweigh our disagreements. I think it pretty clear that @Joshs is viewing Wittgenstein through a PoMo looking glass. The emphasis on narrative and first-person phenomena skews one towards an unneeded antirealism.

:up:

Anyway, back to Hilary Lawson. I listened to another podcast last night in which he tried to explain his use of "open" and "closed". It sounded very much like Searle's use of direction of fit in relation to intentionality. Roughly, stuff is "open" until such time as we choose to render it "closed" by tying it down with language... or something like that. That it is we who make the vase count as a vase seems to be common to both Searle and Lawson.

So again, to the point Searle makes, that it does not follow that we cannot say anything true about the vase. We do not need antirealism.

but I'd argue that such frameworks are inferentially synthesized by animals, including humans, from out of an initial "buzzing, blooming confusion", — Janus

We ought take care to avoid the problem identified by @Isaac and I, in which the model constructed by a neural network is confused with the world around us. Our neural nets do construct what is called a "model" of the world, consisting in various weightings of neural pathways or some such. But this is not what we experience.

So there is a view, more often implied that expressed, that what we perceive are such neural models. But that is mistaken; indeed, it is an iteration of the homunculus, this time with the little man looking at it's own neural pathways. Rather, those neural models constitute our perceiving.

That is, the folk looking at the vase see the vase, not each their own neural net.

All of this is very hard, perhaps impossible, to talk about consistently and coherently. Our senses are affected, and we perceive things which we refer to as plants or animals, for example. (I think the vase is not the best example in one way in that it is made by humans for a certain use, so I am using natural examples). Animals move around and plants don't move around, although they may be moved by wind, while remaining in the same places.

So, these things, animals and plants stand out for us. They stand out for us by being different than their surroundings (and because they are pragmatically important to us in other ways). Their appearances and characteristics are as they are and cannot be altered by us. Animals have to deal with this inability to alter what is perceived just as we do. We, and the other animals can alter things to varying degrees by acting upon them.

Although we can access the existences of things only via the senses, we naturally infer that they exist independently of our senses in that they, in the case of plants, are always found where we last left them, or in the case of animals, their movements are consistent with what we observe of them. For example, they may leave tracks or other signs of their movements. So, the whole is a coherent realist story. Science is just an amplification of this kind of everyday experience and observation, and it has become a vast and mostly consistent story.

What we experience, though, are our representations that have resulted from the process, of which we cannot be conscious, of being sensorially affected. This does not contradict the idea that we experience animals and plants, because the animals and plants are, in one sense, the representations of which we are conscious, and in another sense are part of the process of what affected us sensorially to produce those representations, a process of which we cannot become conscious pre-representationally.

So, in one sense we can rightly say that we experience plants and animals, and in another sense, we can rightly say that we experience representations of plants and animals. These are just two different ways of parsing what we experience. It's too easy for us to become confused by language because of the inherent ambiguity of terms.

So this

So there is a view, more often implied that expressed, that what we perceive are such neural models. But that is mistaken; indeed, it is an iteration of the homunculus, this time with the little man looking at it's own neural pathways. Rather, those neural models constitute our perceiving. — Banno

I would say is right, or consistent, with one perspective, but wrong, or inconsistent with another. We can say that we see our representations, or we can say that our representations are our seeing. There is an ambiguity of language use in this connection that allows for the apparent contradiction. I don't think homunculi (they are tiny strawmen or red herrings) have anything to do with this basic problem of gaining a clear conceptual grasp of our experience.

That is, the folk looking at the vase see the vase, not each their own neural net. — Banno

I see this as obviously true, but I would not say that our neural nets are our representations, since we can be conscious of the latter, but not of the former.

So, in one sense we can rightly say that we experience plants and animals, and in another sense, we can rightly say that we experience representations of plants and animals. — Janus

Oooo almost. Following Austin, I have to say not that "we experience representations of plants and animals", but that our experiencing is a representing of... plants and animals. It's still the plants and animals that are being experienced, not their representations.

The cat is sitting on the arm of my chair. I'm experiencing the cat, not my representations of the cat.

Like the oysters.

And this should be understood not as a piece of neuroscience, but a clarification of how to use words like "experience" and "representation".

Oooo almost. Following Austin, I have to say not that "we experience representations of plants and animals", but that our experiencing is a representing of... plants and animals. It's still the plants and animals that are being experienced, not their representations.

And this should be understood not as a piece of neuroscience, but a clarification of how to use words like "experience" and "representation". — Banno

I would say that both ways of framing it are consistent with common usages. How do we establish which is correct? Whatever way we choose, I think it remains unarguable that we know plants and animals only as they are represented. The primordial process of presentation (which includes, but is not limited to, neural nets) cannot be made conscious.

We might leave this as moot, since we've discussed it at length previously. I do not choose to say we experience our representations - I think it a misuse. You disagree.

Do you think that Kant's synthetic a priori derivation of the "pure forms of intuition" and categories of judgement could be mistaken (bearing in mind that they are only presented as being relevant to the context of human experience and judgement)? — Janus

I suppose that's connected to the philosophy of math issue. I'm open to the mathematical-logical synthetic apriori. It seems defensible anyway, and it goes with intuitionism perhaps. Apriori physics is of course hard to accept.

Perhaps we say, in retrospect, that Kant was doing phenomenology ? I lean toward saying that such things are checked and negotiated in conversation. In math, the semantics are likewise a bit mysterious. What is accepted as proof is public, but what it all means is a bit more elusive.

:up: It's fine to disagree, but I should note that I don't favour either way of framing it. I think it is an inherent aporia and I am comfortable with that. That said, I think we both agree that what appears to us as the vase exists independently of us; we do not construct its existence from scratch, or even merely from our rationality, language or culture.