What would Shakespeare have said? What would Peirce have said? From their points of view, what do you suspect would be the answer and why? — apokrisis

That'd be something like the Shakespearian approach to the question. I'd be articulating my models of two different personalities. For Shakespeare, the 'existential' plane is perhaps the worthiest focus, but he'd have to explore the other attitude to model Peirce -- have to end up undecided and undecidable. Cosmic irony.

We can use a word like “philosopher” widely or narrowly. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to not employ it confusingly and thus render our utterances vague. — apokrisis

A conception of philosophy looks to be an 'existential' (at base 'irrational') specification of the cognitive hero. A group forms around an implicit 'image' of this hero, the shadow or antipode of Hegel perhaps, and fits it in a robe of explicit principles -- a 'rationalization' of an identification that runs deeper than concept. But I can't experiment with such claims as if from a neutral vantage. This perspective is subject to its own corrosive analysis.

I paint and draw and I also write poetry; when asked why I do these things I say in regard to the first "to discover how I see, and how I feel and understand beauty and aliveness in terms of tone, colour, intensity and calm in terms of visual composition". — Janus

But I can say I play sport and climb mountains for that same reason. Not so much with a focus on visual composition but for the intensity of the experiencing.

Is that “art”. Well I don’t mind terms being stretched in useful ways as well as being narrowed in useful ways. I’m not here to die in the ditch for a definition. I will just point out that your talk of solitary art does acknowledge the social context which can justify your painting and drawing as that kind of thing rather than some weird scratching and smearing at a surface which might make you a rather suspect character in out tight little community.

If no one related to it it wouldn't matter to me because I know what it means to me. — Janus

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. But then no one likes seeing the sausage getting made. :razz:

Rationality is a collective enterprise, but it is a method not a set of conclusions; conclusions are matters for individuals. — Janus

So you assert. But I find Peirce’s theory of truth a more useful view. Conclusions are more about what we could all agree. Truth is the limit of a community of inquiry. So no beetles in boxes allowed.

Is human philosophy 'constrained' to serve the particular groups of humans who cocreate it on some group level or some genetic level ? Is there a necessary philosophy ?

Is your own theory 'only' a tool evolved by and for humans ? Do humans have a purpose ? What if anything needs to be added to a Dawkins-like vision of moist robots?

One of the complexities here is that the human nervous system models in some sense the human nervous system.

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. — apokrisis

I want to say there's a famous holograph of Balzac, page with the title of the new book at the top, and the rest of the page is full of calculations of how much money he'll make from it, which debts he'll pay off, and so on.

A conception of philosophy looks to be an 'existential' (at base 'irrational') specification of the cognitive hero. — plaque flag

I can’t tell if you mean this ironically. Our positions are poles apart if I am emphasising the socially constructed and communal nature of rational inquiry, and you are pushing the Romantic image of the individual genius.

One of the complexities here is that the human nervous system models in some sense the human nervous system. — plaque flag

No. Neuroscience does that. The view of the neural level of world-making from a verbal and mathematical level of world-making.

The form of the complexity is well specified. The semiosis is hierarchical. Each level of organismic order arises with a more abstracted code and a more abstracted world.

I will just point out that your talk of solitary art does acknowledge the social context which can justify your painting and drawing as that kind of thing rather than some weird scratching and smearing at a surface which might make you a rather suspect character in out tight little community. — apokrisis

Yes, of course I acknowledge the social dimension of art, the history of art; 'art' here denoting all the arts. Where art differs from mountain climbing is that it is an adventure which yields tangible results that others may or may not relate to and value.

When Jackson Pollock produced the first drip paintings many people claimed a monkey could have produced them. To me this is nonsense, no one since Pollock has produced drip paintings that remotely compare to his. But of course, not everyone sees this, and it is not something you can convincingly argue for. People either see it or they don't. And there is no way of definitively establishing that seeing such aesthetic qualities is illusory or not, other than the individual being the judge of their own experience, and that experience, no matter how profound or intense, is not something that can be evidence for others. In other words, art is simply not science or logic.

It's like when you tramp in the mountains; some may see and feel the sublime beauty there and others not. Individual experiences cannot be compared, so in that sense they "drop out of the conversation" as @Banno likes to say.

But the fact that we have these incomparable experiences does not drop out of the conversation, because many people do enjoy them, and it is arguable that they can recognize the marks of such experiences in art works and in the reports of others.

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. But then no one likes seeing the sausage getting made. :razz: — apokrisis

That the visual arts, particularly painting, is also a business or trade, and for some an extremely lucrative one cannot be denied. I know a successful artist who sells his paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But everyone wants his paintings which are of a particular subject he arrived at early on, so he cannot explore his creative ideas to his satisfaction but must keep producing the product others want, and he says this is frustrating although necessary since he has to make a million dollars a year just to service the mortgages on his houses in Australia, France and London. So for creative outlet he plays in a jazz band.

By contrast, no one makes any money out of being a poet.

So you assert. But I find Peirce’s theory of truth a more useful view. Conclusions are more about what we could all agree. Truth is the limit of a community of inquiry. So no beetles in boxes allowed. — apokrisis

And yet there is so little general agreement today. I'm currently reading a book by John Hands, in which he talks about all the objections to the standard model of the Big Bang in cosmology and how proponents of alternative models find difficulty in getting their work published on account of the almost religious dogmatism with which the BB model is considered to be just simply fact.

So, it has little to do with "beetles in boxes". If you read my posts you will see that I am often disagreeing with @Wayfarer that traditional metaphysics is a discursively viable subject of discussion if the aim is arriving at the truth; I say it isn't because there is no clearly decidable way of establishing the truth of such metaphysical propositions as God, transcendence, eternal life, free will and so on, or whether materialism or idealism are closer to the truth about the absolute nature of things, or even whether such ideas are coherent or whether we know what we are talking about when we try to address such issues.

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. That said, it's not always easy to establish just what the truest current findings in the sciences even are, or to have confidence that anything we think today will hold up for another hundred years. Hopefully the cream rises to the top over time, but we have no way of being sure of that outcome.

Is human philosophy 'constrained' to serve the particular groups of humans who cocreate it on some group level or some genetic level ? Is there a necessary philosophy ? — plaque flag

As a person with math background you might ask this question of that discipline as well. Every day about 80 articles are submitted to ArXiv.org . There are probably tens of thousands of articles published that are read by less than five people and have not garnered enough support to move the needle of mathematical desire.

To this extent most mathematics and philosophy have little to no effect on the twists and turns of civilization. But there is a kind of satisfaction to the individual producing their product.

I am often disagreeing with Wayfarer that traditional metaphysics is a discursively viable subject of discussion if the aim is arriving at the truth; I say it isn't because there is no clearly decidable way of establishing the truth of such metaphysical propositions as God, transcendence, eternal life, free will and so on, or whether materialism or idealism are closer to the truth about the absolute nature of things, or even whether such ideas are coherent or whether we know what we are talking about when we try to address such issues. — Janus

What about non-traditional metaphysics , or metaphysics period? If analysis of the origin and nature of the paradigmatic structures and worldviews that make empirical facts and truths intelligible do not produce clearly decidable ways of establishing their truths or coherence, what do you think it is that makes empirical facts and truth decidable and coherent? Perhaps your answer is in the next quote:

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. That said, it's not always easy to establish just what the truest current findings in the sciences even are, or to have confidence that anything we think today will hold up for another hundred years — Janus

So the findings of the sciences are what makes a metaphysics plausible? I would say you have that exactly backwards. How can the results of a methodology whose central concept, observed evidence, is only intelligible within an overarching paradigmatic framework be used to validate that overarching framework?

What about non-traditional metaphysics , or metaphysics period? If analysis of the origin and nature of the paradigmatic structures and worldviews that make empirical facts and truths intelligible do not produce clearly decidable ways of establishing their truths or coherence, what do you think it is that makes empirical facts and truth decidable and coherent? Perhaps your answer is in the next quote: — Joshs

Such an analysis is a matter for phenomenology or epistemology. Those structures and worldviews do not make intelligibility possible; on the contrary they would be impossible without intelligibility. Our understanding of our own epistemic structures and worldviews is a reflective understanding of ourselves, our culture and our language, and that is not metaphysics.

One thing that is often forgotten by those who hold that the empirical environment we experience and understand is constructed * as opposed to, in the human case, merely mediated) by language and culture is that the environment is also intelligible for animals, which is evidenced by the ways in which they can successfully navigate around and survive in the natural environment (and generally better in fact than we can, if we leave behind all our civilized accoutrements).

Science deals with the empirical world considered as it appears to us, without trying to take account of factors extraneous to the phenomena themselves, since to try to incorporate the subject into the picture would only create confusion. How would you incorporate the experiencing subject into the understanding of plate Techtonics, for example?

So the findings of the sciences are what makes a metaphysics plausible? I would say you have that exactly backwards. How can the results of a methodology whose central concept, observed evidence, is only intelligible within an overarching paradigmatic framework be used to validate that overarching framework? — Joshs

A metaphysics which is in accordance with how the world is, as we experience and understand it scientifically, is at least more plausible than a metaphysics produced by speculating about reified concepts which are based on linguistic and cultural associations, that is all I meant to say. I didn't mean to say that any metaphysics can ever be proven (or disproven).

. Our understanding of our own epistemic structures and worldviews is an understanding of ourselves, our culture and our language, and that is not metaphysics. — Janus

Of course that’s metaphysics. Metaphysics pertains to the fact that language, culture and how the world appears to us empirically are inextricably bound together as a unified web.

A metaphysics which is in accordance with how the world is, as we experience and understand it scientifically, is at least more plausible than a metaphysics produced by speculating about reified concepts which are based on linguistic and cultural associations, that is all I meant to say. — Janus

What does it mean for a paradigm to be ‘in accord with’ how the world is? What happens to how the world appears to us when we turn a worldview on its head? That world doesn’t become more or less true, but we observe it differently. What used to count as evidence no longer does, and what was previously not considered as evidence, or not even visible to us, now becomes fact. This openness of the world to potentially endless alternative constructions is the result of the entanglement of culture, language and perception.

Of course that’s metaphysics. Metaphysics pertains to the fact that language, culture and how the world appears to us empirically are inextricably bound together as a unified web. — Joshs

That's just a fancy way of saying that language and culture influence to some degree the way we see things. I have never disputed that. Dispassionate scientific observation is the closest we can come to seeing things without bias. We do that by leaving ourselves out of the picture.

It is a methodological Epoché which is kind of like the mirror image of the phenomenological Epoché that brackets the question of the existence of an external world. I notice you haven't attempted to address the issue for your comprehensively constructivist view that the obvious intelligibility for animals of their environments poses.

What does it mean for a paradigm to be ‘in accord with’ how the world is? What happens to how the world appears to us when we turn a worldview on its head? — Joshs

Worldviews do not much affect how people experience and basically understand the everyday world of natural and human events. As to paradigm shifts regarding how phenomena are understood, can you think of a major one which wasn't scientific, or else a transition from a previous worldview we would not count as being scientific, to one that we would count as scientific?

The change from a classical physical worldview to a quantum physical worldview has not made cars, animals, trees, chairs, houses, roads, mountains, rivers, oceans, planets, stars and galaxies seem any less real or material, or appear any different visually.

where art differs from mountain climbing is that it is an adventure which yields tangible results that others may or may not relate to and value. — Janus

So art produces artefacts which are indeed the concrete signs of ideas. I agree. Mountain climbing is definitely the more personal pursuit and less social pursuit. Art is literally a way of speaking to others about ideas and feelings of a certain kind. It is intrinsically the communal thing - the social organism thing - of forming a generalised and shared worldview.

Moving the body has neurobiological meaning. It has its signs - like sweat and endorphins. But art is part of the human social construction game. It is about the representation of conceptions at the level of our collective social consciousness.

And I would agree that art has moved from dealing in representational artefacts to conceptual artefacts. So rather than just capturing perceptual likenesses of socially meaningful people and occasions, it claims to challenge our ideas about social identity itself. You could say that is stepping into philosophical territory by presenting society with art works in a gallery and demanding we show our seriousness in terms of putting a hard number in terms of dollars on the dose of useful philosophising thus delivered.

What? You want personal enlightenment for free? Go climb a mountain! :grin:

When Jackson Pollock produced the first drip paintings many people claimed a monkey could have produced them. To me this is nonsense, no one since Pollock has produced drip paintings that remotely compare to his. — Janus

Experts certainly like to think they would immediately recognise his unmistakable signature and couldn’t be fooled when some “lost work” suddenly appears on the art market.

Not for them the lab tests to check out the canvas and pigments for their authenticity. No need but to stand back and see the mark of genius imprinted on the flecks and splatter.

Individual experiences cannot be compared, so in that sense they "drop out of the conversation" — Janus

A convenient inconvenience for Romanticism? Or what a system metaphysics predicts when it talks of the duality of constraints shaping degrees of freedom?

The more there is a shaping social order, the more individualistic we must become. Paradoxical or instead how complexity evolves?

But the fact that we have these incomparable experiences does not drop out of the conversation, because many people do enjoy them, and it is arguable that they can recognize the marks of such experiences in art works and in the reports of others. — Janus

Yes. The social function of romanticism was to point to the sublime. It was the other half of this dichotomistic move towards greater system’s complexity. We should all learn this trick of being not just individual, but incomparably individual.

Hey kids! it’s 1974! Everyone must wear flares! Put away the Kerouac, get hip to Castaneda. Been there, laughed at that.

The Enlightenment was pushing the same metaphysics. Adam Smith’s rational economics was about mass consumption via individualised labour specialisation.

It all comes back to the same recipe for complexity. Differentiate so as to integrate. The greater the variety, the more general must be the laws that bind it.

That is the social value of art as self expression. It is another way of getting humans to think and act like individuals so that what they collectively produce is an ever-enlarging space of cultural meme.

Prove that you can stand out as a social influencer because of your incomparable individuality? Ker-Ching! Social media will rain you with dollars.

But everyone wants his paintings which are of a particular subject he arrived at early on, so he cannot explore his creative ideas to his satisfaction but must keep producing the product others want — Janus

I know the dynamic well. That is how a system works. It needs to impose stability on what it finds useful. It is another reason that individuality - as something apart from its social context - is a dangerous and angst-generating fiction.

Audience building is what pays the bills. Every influencer know that.

By contrast, no one makes any money out of being a poet. — Janus

But a lyricist? Even I would pay more for a song with good lyrics.

Why do poets get a bum deal then? A Tennyson could make a fortune in Victorian book publishing days. Pam Ayers managed to sell in more recent times.

And yet there is so little general agreement today. I'm currently reading a book by John Hands, in which he talks about all the objections to the standard model of the Big Bang in cosmology and how proponents of alternative models find difficulty in getting their work published on account of the almost religious dogmatism with which the BB model is considered to be just simply fact. — Janus

Always the splitters complaining about the lumpers, and the lumpers complaining about the splitters. I wouldn’t take too much notice. The worry would be if all the voices fell silent. Instead there is a vigorous debate going on and big things keep getting discovered.

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. — Janus

Metaphysics makes the guesses. Science checks them out. So yep.

The only thing that could derail this natural philosophy enterprise is Descartes’ demon. And so far, so good, pragmatically speaking. If we are someone’s computer simulation, we haven’t stumbled upon any glitches in the matrix that I can think of.

Art is literally a way of speaking to others about ideas and feelings of a certain kind. It is intrinsically the communal thing - the social organism thing - of forming a generalised and shared worldview. — apokrisis

Art is a way of speaking about feelings and experiences which cannot be rendered in generalized explanatory terms. My experience is that you may start with a kind of vision or intimation which is worked towards, and at some point abandoned rather than finished, when you feel satisfied that it has culminated in being a apt expression of that vision or those intimations, I can't be any clearer than that.

I don't think art is about forming a generalized and shared worldview (well, I mean it could be in some cases) as it is about finding expression for one's own experiences and feelings. If others relate
then great, if not, then too bad.

Not for them the lab tests to check out the canvas and pigments for their authenticity. No need but to stand back and see the mark of genius imprinted on the flecks and splatter. — apokrisis

On the face of it, drip paintings should be the easiest to forge. I'm not aware of any attempts to forge a Pollock except for something that happened here in Sydney when I was at art school in the early seventies. I heard that there was an exhibition of previously undiscovered works by Pollock in one of the rooms in the campus. When I looked at them, I could see straight away that they we amateurish with none of the nuance, understanding of tonal or colour relationships or strength of composition of a Pollock. It was immediately obvious to me, and by his reports, the friend I was with, that it was a hoax.

That said I don't deny that a very talented forger could produce a work that might fool the experts simply because such a work would have the same colour, tone and composition strengths, and the same kind of allusiveness and power of vision as a genuine Pollock.

Instead there is a vigorous debate going on and big things keep getting discovered. — apokrisis

A debate which would be all the more vigorous if humans did not have such a tendency to dogmatize knowledge, and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy.

If we are someone’s computer simulation, we haven’t stumbled upon any glitches in the matrix that I can think of. — apokrisis

Even if we were, there would still have to be a real world in which our simulation was being run. Not an idea to be taken seriously.

I can't be any clearer than that. — Janus

Art schools make it their business to these days. They teach the process of making works. They sell their courses to worried parents by pointing out the creative process is exactly the same as for producing any culturally-relevant artefact.

Just like philosophy PhDs are sold as a route to Wall Street – critical thinkers able to break out of the box! – so fine arts is sold because so many employers must want the socially savvy graduate who can tickle the zeitgeist for a few dollars more.

. I'm not aware of any attempts to forge a Pollock except for something that happened here in Sydney when I was at art school in the early seventies. — Janus

I had to wait a nanosecond, but Google coughed up....

Forgery Experts Analyze a Fake Jackson Pollock Painting

This is Thiago Piwowarczyk and Jeff Taylor of New York Art Forensics. And this is a Jackson Pollock or at least it looks like one. But it's actually a fake. Here's how they figured it out.

There is a lot of claims of Jackson Pollock drip paintings and our laboratory was able to identify over 100 fakes. So we can say that we found more fakes than there authentic Jackson Pollocks out there.

The first step when we receive a painting, we try to establish something called the provenance. The provenance is a chain of ownership and custody of an artwork from the contemporary ownership all the way back to its manufacturing.

[In this case, the documentation itself was forged!]

The next step is a close-up visual analysis. So we're looking close to the painting to try to find anachronistic materials and techniques, something that would be uncharacteristic for a given author or a given time.

It's a very, very thin layer. [Jeff] Yeah, look at how many colors I count that aren't in the drip layers. Look at these underlying colors. We got a yellow, a green. And neither of them appear in the drip patterns. That's done with a brush. Yeah, it's rather strange 'cause when Pollock starts doing the poured paintings, he really doesn't brush much anymore.

Then you see here, Thiago, I got two holes right here. Just that distance. And they're repetitive. You have a series of smaller holes and that indicates that this canvas was, at certain point, stapled. And a stapled canvas will not be a thing in 1956.

https://www.wired.com/video/watch/anatomy-of-a-fake

And so on until spectroscopy identifies the acrylic binders not available until the 1960s and other giveaway details about the artefact itself, nothing about how no one would misjudge this as an actual Pollock just because his genius is unmistakable.

A debate which would be all the more vigorous if humans did not have such a tendency to dogmatize knowledge, and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy. — Janus

I don't recognise this caricature from what I have seen inside the said institutions of learning. This is wishful thinking.

nothing about how no one would misjudge this as an actual Pollock just because his genius is unmistakable — apokrisis

A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery. I hadn't realized there have been so many Pollock fakes, but then I didn't search it, and was merely speaking from what I have encountered.

I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain; aesthetic quality in general is inexplicable, or at least all explanations are under-determined. I have found that people generally either get it or they don't; perhaps it cannot be taught at all.

I don't recognise this caricature from what I have seen inside the said institutions of learning. This is wishful thinking. — apokrisis

If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on.

Metaphysics makes the guesses. Science checks them out — apokrisis

If it can. So far the Measurement Problem and String theory are left dangling in a scientific void. My take is that metaphysics in this regard is more scientific speculation.

Just like philosophy PhDs are sold as a route to Wall Street – critical thinkers able to break out of the box! — apokrisis

bingChat could not find evidence to support the notion that Wall street in fact hires philosophy PhDs. Maybe they do.

What? You want personal enlightenment for free? Go climb a mountain! — apokrisis

Not at $36,000 for being hauled up Mt Everest. The less expensive climbs take their tolls in different ways. My back and shoulders testify to that.

. . . and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy — Janus

I spent many years in such institutions and did not observe this institutional trait. But I was not in the humanities where the lines between fictional and real may be blurred.

So far the Measurement Problem and String theory are left dangling in a scientific void. — jgill

Where is measuring a practical problem? Decoherence tacks statistical mechanics onto quantum mechanics and recovers a world that is close enough classical at most physical scales of practical interest.

You can do engineering fine without worrying about the quantum if your world is human scale in terms of time, distance and energy.

String theory is measurable if we could instead engineer a collider powerful enough to recreate a quantum scale of time, distance and energy. So there is a neat inverse connection here. We are stuck in our classical realm for all intents and purposes. Which is lucky for both us and our engineering projects.

And computational science can say a lot about limit-state physics by simulation. If it is good enough for mathematical proof, why not for maths' less rigorous kid brother?

There are other ways to skin the cat.

bingChat could not find evidence to support the notion that Wall street in fact hires philosophy PhDs. Maybe they do. — jgill

Google's first hit brings up the annedotes....

We hired a Philosophy graduate on our risk program a year back, while working in London. His knowledge about the financial industry was perhaps less than that of his peers at LSE or Oxbridge who studied financial and economics related degrees but he really wanted this job because he was curious.

During the 2 year graduate program he progressed much quicker than his peers. He learned coding at the job as well as all the fundamental financial principles.

He understood everything at a first go, while his peers, who knew the definitions from university, but struggled to match it with what they saw happened in real world situations.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-big-wall-street-banks-sometimes-hire-philosophy-majors

The second hit was.....

The measure of a man, according to Plato, is what he does with his power. Wall Street’s Bill Miller has taken the adage to heart, donating $75 million to philosophy—a branch of study that has been critical, he says, to decisions he has made in his career.

Miller (officially William H. Miller III), an investor famous for beating the Standard and Poor’s 500 index for 15 years in a row, was a graduate student for three years in Johns Hopkins University’s PhD program. His gift to the school, announced yesterday (Jan. 16), will nearly double the size of its philosophy department—bumping the full-time faculty from 13 to 22 professors, and creating new courses and scholarships for graduate students. It’s the largest gift to any college’s philosophy department ever recorded.

https://qz.com/1181741/wall-streets-bill-miller-gave-johns-hopkins-philosophy-department-75-million

So seems legit.

Not at $36,000 for being hauled up Mt Everest. The less expensive climbs take their tolls in different ways. My back and shoulders testify to that. — jgill

Mt Everest is evidence of all that could be wrong about the Romanticism that gets turned into Commercialisation.

My "birth" mountain behind the ex-family sheep station has become internet famous. For decades, I could climb it alone. Last time, I had to scoot past about 400 people. There was no room even to stand near the top. And this was me starting early in the off season to beat the crowds.

No. Neuroscience does that. The view of the neural level of world-making from a verbal and mathematical level of world-making. — apokrisis

Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware. Timebinding symbolic technique depends still on mortal brains, for now.

A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery. — Janus

Finding refuge in the Gettier problem? Sly dog.

I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain; — Janus

I agree. I couldn't see the fuss about Picasso when I was just looking at the pix in the book. But then there was the big exhibition in Aussie and in real life the paintings really worked. So there is something that lifts an artist above the crowd.

But you can also analyse what it is – like the way it works when seen from both near and afar. It's not a little flat image but something that seems to lift off the canvas because the details are not overworked. From a distance, it seems precise. From close up, it becomes the opposite.

My daughter is an artist (as was my mother) so we are looking both at the paintings and why they succeed.

If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on. — Janus

But you were talking about the "dogmatic" institutions – you know, the places that can house so many contradictory dogmas.

Have you spent any time in science departments or at science conferences? Or even had to work at the coalface of ideas?

If you are talking sociology, there is this curious - but explicable - dynamic where the greatest hatred is reserved for those just beyond your circle. Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies.

The real world is more like Turing's reaction~diffusion systems if you want to get technical.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif#/media/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif

Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware. — plaque flag

Computional analogies are certainly the rough cut. But even so, why does that make a difference – except in being a lossy compression of what I said?

But even so, why does that make a difference – except in being a lossy compression of what I said? — apokrisis

I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside. What we are doing now is something like conversational research, which is maybe also a negotiation/invention of a common language (of semantic and logical norms.)

I think you defended philosophy above, so we are maybe on the same page here to some degree. 'Shakespeare' is a symbol for the symbolic sociality involved, which engulfs us as finite individuals, or perhaps ought to (we ought to seek out that danger/opportunity).

I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside. — plaque flag

Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language.

Biology speaks of metabolism. I would show how political and economic structure is simply metabolism scaled up. There is a literal identity and not just a metaphorical one. As structure, they are the same.

So maybe you could have the goal of exploring all the ways individuals could be different. I am accounting for the fact that all natural structures must be essentially the same.

The bonus is that structuralism also explains why difference grows unboundedly as the constraints of “sameness” become increasingly general or abstracted.

So structural holism contains thesis and antithesis. A world that is just constructed of the atomic individual fails even to account for the local degrees of freedom that compose it.

.

Metaphysics makes the guesses. Science checks them out — apokrisis

If it can. So far the Measurement Problem and String theory are left dangling in a scientific void. My take is that metaphysics in this regard is more scientific speculation. — jgill

Where is measuring a practical problem? — apokrisis

Where is metaphysics making the guesses here? Was it metaphysics that presented string theory? Or perhaps simply a result of scientific speculation? Metaphysics seems to have entered the arena of speculative thought with various interpretations of quantum theory. Oh wait, those were actual physicists. Science hasn't done a very good job of checking them out IMO.

Our positions are poles apart if I am emphasising the socially constructed and communal nature of rational inquiry, and you are pushing the Romantic image of the individual genius. — apokrisis

Just to be clear, I am not emphasizing the Romantic image of the genius. I don't think you are quite seeing where I'm coming from. I've been trying to find different aspects of it to bridge the gap.

Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language. — apokrisis

Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? Of course Shakespeare is just an example. Pick your favorite 20 novelists.

I suggest that some kind of valuable knowledge is communicated in fiction, however indirectly or even ambiguously.

Granted that a person primarily wants to understand reality, what case can be made for the superiority of one path over another ?

Can either path really encompass the other, given human finitude ? Or is there a kind of blindness in each position to the richness of the other ?

Even this isn't a defense of the novelist, but an attempt to show that the existential aspect of reality 'ought' to be covered simply because it's there and plays a key role (not for sentimental reasons.)

Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? — plaque flag

You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. He may well have crystallised views of history and customs from an English perspective that informed the notion of what it was to be a member of that society. He was an influencer pushing the zeitgeist to its sharper focus. And that sense of identity was important as Europe was changing from feudalism to nation states. Larger identities were needed to bind the local fiefdoms into mobilised kingdoms.

So at the level of words, he was helping the reorganisation of a nation as it made a major upgrade to its metabolic basis by becoming centralised in its politics and moving towards the trade that which would alllow it to grow its population with imported food by beginning to export manufactured goods.

Did Shakespeare understand this or did he just pocket the proceeds from being nifty with a quill and rhyme? Was he brilliant at capturing the currents of his time, but didn’t actually claim to be standing right outside of the system to see it as indeed a system?

We can tell Anaximander and Aristotle were doing that. Metaphysics is different. It isn’t holding up a mirror to a time and place in the way that is of everyday human interest. It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated.

Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies. — apokrisis

:up: .

... metaphysical frameworks, such as idealism and panpsychism, which were derided as baseless nonsense by the positivists of the past, are back in new forms.

This is sort of funny in the context of language, given that Russell's theory requires propositions to exist as relevant explanatory entities that exist outside space and time, and yet which we somehow "grasp."



This question seems to be phrased in a leading way though. Most popular forms of idealism do not deny the existence of an external world or express skepticism towards its existence. Even if I bought into something like Absolute Idealism, or Kastrup's idealism, I think I'd still have to pick the top choice.

That said, I agree that idealism seems more popular here than in philosophy at large.



Excellent point. And the reason this works with spoken/written language so well is because we recognize that, when someone speaks to us or writes to us, they are trying to communicate. So, we don't have the problem of some sort of latent infinity of possible meanings existing within finite beings. Rather, we have the recipients' recognition of "the source of this incoming stimuli is an attempt to communicate, what could they want to specify?" and language allows us to rapidly narrow down the possibilities.

Thus, possibilities are "out there." This can be true even as respects our own thoughts, internal monologue, etc. because the mind works by communicating to itself, neurons are constantly communicating as much as computing.

Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too. Just going of cognitive science research into the topic, it seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language. When asked to visualize something, the same system used for processing sight gets used; when asked to imagine hearing something, we use a different system. These systems work in parallel and what makes it to conscious awareness is regulated by both unconscious processes, which seek to prioritize certain signals, and executive function - i.e. what we are paying attention to.

It's quite possible to listen to someone just enough to get by in terms of "playing a language game," to respond in ways that don't give any offense, while barely gleaning any meaning from what you hear. On the flip side you have guided visualization, where we are intentionally meditating on another's words. The levels of meaning that seemingly unfold can vary. We can read the same passage twice and get different levels of understanding from it, both because we are paying closer attention to it, or because we have new relevant knowledge/experiences that help us interpret the message. So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table."

IMO, philosophy of language has been badly hampered by foundationalism. Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of things. Sometimes it is referring to real objects in the world, sometimes it is used in a social game, sometimes it is expressing propositions (whatever the nature of propositions). Obviously names have causal histories, obviously language is established by social norms, etc. I don't understand why attempts work so hard to try to reduce it to just one of these things.

It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated. — apokrisis

I pretty much agree with this, but Shakespeare is celebrated largely because of his insight into human nature. Being (some would claim) always exist for and through a particular human personality. Many personalities are motivated to present their own conceptual map as superior to other, in terms of criteria like completeness, consistency, and relevance.

You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. — apokrisis

Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby.

The psychoanalyst shrinks the head of the commie who does a reductive class analysis of that reductive headshrinker. Indra's net. Clashing personalities/ideologies tend to model, place, and reduce their rivals. My 'ism' is always the 'highest' according, naturally, to the very criterion it offers in the first place.