Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand. — apokrisis

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. For instance, the linguistic-conceptual idea of the self is part of our heritage. Children are trained into it, but they can also modify it, before they are replaced as 'carriers' or 'thin clients' or torchbearers in the relay race.

↪Joshs Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said — apokrisis

But then that might deflate your ego and we can’t have that. :grimace:

I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place. — apokrisis

I think the psychological and ethical insights of your approach are limited by conformity to assumptions about the ‘way things are’. I respect your world but I wouldn’t want to live in it. It’s too rooted in past certainties and not sensitive enough to future possibilities. A principle of constructive alternativism should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy.

You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit? — apokrisis

No. I never mentioned quantity. I'd say maybe reread some of what I wrote. I think you are casting me incorrectly as a subjectivist or Romantic. But my interest in the existential is better understood as part of a goal to leave nothing out. Someone like Karl-Otto Apel seems to get the massive sociality of language right, correcting the typical subjectivistic tendencies. But someone like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty includes the vital account of how the world is revealed through or by individual human bodies.

My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. But the world for us is always through (embedded) individual sense organs and individual brains.* As Apel emphasized, language is ferociously subjective -- no private language, but doves can't fly in a vacuum and a language is truly dead without bodies that trade in it. We may model the movement of bodies in the world, but this modelling must be done by actual bodies in the world or 'model' loses its sense.


*The world apart from all human cognition might be round square (nonsense, for a human), but the world is independent of the cognition of particular humans. The lifeworld is implicitly a human lifeworld, symbolically rich.

Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve. — apokrisis

:up:

I think we agree on the necessity of embodiment, at least in the abstract....

Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better. — apokrisis

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated (Bloom's The Invention of the Human.) The 'personality' layer of reality is one possibly focus of knowledge that aims at comprehensiveness.

If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. — apokrisis

I was trained to be one, but I'm mostly infected with the need to play at philosophy.

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. — plaque flag

I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book.

individual living brains are necessary for this social game. — plaque flag

But which comes first? A biologist could reasonably argue that “ultrasociality” first arose in ants and termites speaking the language of pheromones to act like a distributed brain.

The individual ant is more like an individual neuron than an individual brain in this story of chemical messages jumping synapses.

So if we are to generalise successfully to the wider biological frame, of course there must be the suitable parts. But it is the collective whole which defines what could be meant as suitable.

Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later.

That Og invented the wheel is a modern joke - the first entrepreneur. The history of isolated small human populations - like the Tasmanian aboriginal people - show how the quickly forget much that they once knew. Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that.

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated — plaque flag

Yep. The shift to real people rather than social tokens. Less moralising and more nuance. All part of the social construction of the modern citizen upon which the next chapter of social and economic development was based.

My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. — plaque flag

And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”.

Probably you want to leave that way framing things behind. I believe I have provided as many pointers as I can to what I view as the right path.

A principle of constructive alternativism — Joshs

Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice?

I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book. — apokrisis

If you want to PM me a link to your book, I'm curious. Or link it publicly, whatever you prefer.

Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later. — apokrisis

That may be, but it looks like our collective habit is the potential for intense individuality (differentiation, specialization, invention.)

Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that. — apokrisis

:up:

I agree, at least if we are thinking about history. But this doesn't cancel the (fleeting) reality of the music of that castaway composer. We don't have to think in terms of history. That to me is a tempting but still optional framework/criterion.

And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”. — apokrisis

In case it's helpful, I agree with the following:

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 argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding. Every empirical investigation of a domain of objects implies at the same time a relation to other subjects, to a community of interpreters.
...
The so-called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid criticism and argumentation.

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

Another view, similar.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and thatthinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
...
This loss Feuerbach finds reflected in three general tendencies of the modern age: 1) the tendency to regard human history solely as the history of the opinions and actions of individual human subjects, and not as the history of humanity conceived as a single collective agent, 2) the tendency to regard nature as a mere aggregate of “countless single stars, stones, plants, animals, elements and things” (GTU 195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely external and mechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal dynamics of which are animated by a single all-encompassing vital principle, and 3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent whose inscrutable will, through which the world came into being from nothing and is continually directed, is unconstrained by rational necessity.

Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of God and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as equally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to which motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the principle of its own development. It exercises “unlimited creative power” by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing its individual parts from one another. But the immeasurable multiplicity of systems within systems that results from this activity constitutes a single organic totality.

Nature is ground and principle of itself, or—what is the same thing, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of God, in which he is one with nature. (GTU 291/86)

God, on this view, is not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world, but a prolific artist who lives in and through it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

I interpret this in terms of inherited logical-semantic norms ( bound time) being applied in individual nervous systems. My thinking is largely not mine except that I host some of the timebinding self-referential conversation. I work on my little piece of the blockchain.

One of the points I was making earlier is that there's too much bound time or 'knowledge' for a single nervous system to contain. Yes we can and do compress, but there are mortal limits, and I'm not sure that we can be sure that we are in the 'best' part of the blockchain. It might be in the interest of the tribe that we all have the feeling that we are, so that we broadcast our results effectively.

...should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy. — Joshs

In the same spirit of making ontic commitments explicit so they can be debated rather than derided, I would point out that I follow the biosemiotic hierarchy on the material cause half of the hylomorphic systems science dichotomy.

So the material half of the equation would run from the most general to the least specified subsumptive order of....

"quantum indeterminacy" > dissipative structure > thermodynamics > mechanics > matter

That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order.

You can then restrict this larger view to that of regular "gone to equilibrium" thermodynamics – where the flows can encounter their final heat death. And then restrict the ontology even further to extract the regular classical view of dead matter following Platonic trajectories. And still further to arrive at simple matter imagined as a substance we could rub between our fingers or fling across the room.

So you can appreciate that to say physics really starts with the openness and self-organisation of dissipative structure theory is still a bold metaphysical move even today. But particle physics is there with topological order, QFT, condensed matter physics, etc.

And biosemiosis also now argues this is the "right kind" of material cause to use in its models as it is matter at its most dynamic and lifelike already. That leaves the semiosis so much less to have to do to then play its own causal part in whipping up organisms that exhibit the structure we call life and mind.

This covers with how the material half of the Aristotelean equation is dealt with. But what about the form in hylomorphic form, I hear you ask? :wink:

Well dissipative structure is a triadic ontology. It is the hierarchical story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom. What exists is then the dynamical balance that results. So it already includes global form and purpose to quite a large degree.

Again that is the feature not the bug. It leaves feeble life and mind less to have to organise as dissipative structure is "order out of chaos". It provides so much order just for free. But it is confusing as every move towards a suitably complex view of reality always winds up in trichotomies. It can seem – as Peirce was accused – that one just suffers from some trichotomania.

Anyway, form. From the biosemiotic point of view, there is a hierarchy of increasingly more general sign or code that runs... genes < neurons < words < numbers

Now there is clearly something different here. Genes are pretty arbitrary seeming. The whole of biology seems rather accidental more than metaphysically fundamental.

Well in fact there are new arguments for how the Comos couldn't have used anything else but carbon backbones, proton pumps or redox reactions. The space of possibility was far more restricted than might be thought. Yet also, the Cosmos wasn't too fussed seeming about their being any biology. And genes look to have a large dose of contingency about them until we get a proper autopsy on those aliens they found.

Neurons are likewise a perhaps contingent bit of semiotic kit. Words - as puffs of air – again could have been something else. But puffs of air are very low cost, and a vocal tract forces the symbols into serial order. There is the general thing of being cheap to produce and also dimensionally constrained in ways that build in the necessity of articulate choice. Word order is inevitable and so grammar is also inevitable.

Then we get to number. Would any kind of alien have to count? Arguably yes if they get around in flying saucers and generally do engineering. And as the Ancient Greeks felt they discovered, maths speaks with Platonic necessity. You can't just pick and choose the structures that follow rules. Form at that level is more discovered than invented. So we seem to arrive at some kind of matching metaphysical limit, even if it remains a highly debated one.

As you can see, I defend a fairly elaborate but systematic metaphysics. Laugh if you like. Or engage.

A principle of constructive alternativism
— Joshs

Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice? — apokrisis

, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order — apokrisis

I’ve been fascinated by my recent engagement with the agential realist approach of physicist-philosopher Karen Barad. I think their reworking of causality exemplifies the spirit of constructive alternativism , the mutual responsiveness not only of human subject and material nature, but between the non-human and itself. The differences with your summary are instructive.

“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differen­tial becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds
for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phe­nomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.

This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: dif­ferent cuts enact different materialized becomings….

Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed. Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do.”

Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do

All fine up until the conclusion. Why won’t our theoretical frames do if they can do work in terms of our enactive interests?

Barad to me is saying nothing further than we indeed form Umwelts as “models of our world with our selves also to found in them”. This self-world modelling might just be Bayesian technology. But it’s what we’ve got and so the question is how do we proceed from there having realised there is this technology … and it can always be improved.

Is that what you mean by constructive alternativism? The difference of course may be that I would see that as a Darwinian competition for best model - according to some optimising metric that would be the debatable bit - and alternativism is philosophical cover for anything goes pluralism?

So, how Does Language Map onto the World?

Was anything decided?

We decided the limits of the world are the limits of language. :smile:

In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differen­tial becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phe­nomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.

Barand's theory is interesting to me, as is the idea of merging epistemology and ontology. I had a similar idea re: a relational ontology, although it seems Carlo Rovelli beat both of us on applying it to quantum mechanics by 10+ years, and as he points out in his book, John Wheeler led him to the idea, and Lu-Trub Nāgārjuna beat us all to this sort of relational conception by 1,800+ years ("there is nothing new under the sun," after all.)

But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines?

I take it that agents ≠ individuals (at least not exclusively) given her comments on how the subjective/objective distinction goes wrong by placing us outside the world. Could agents be higher level emergent social structures as well, e.g. states, corporations, etc.?

This is key for me because in many situations it seems that we are more akin to the individual ants in the any hive or lymphocytes in the immune system, while our institutions play the role of the larger, active system. That is, in some respects we are not agents, but parts of a greater agent that supervenes on us.

Could her theory accommodate this? Do agents necessarily have first person perspective?

I couldn't figure this out. I read several reviews and criticisms and didn't see an answer. Then I downloaded the book and went to the main chapter on Agential Realism and that didn't help either (although I didn't give it a particularly close read).

So my main problem was: how are we to make this epistontology of inter-action performative vis-á-vis our interactions with technoscience and naturalcultural phenomena if we can't figure out what the theory is because it's buried behind an avalanche of continental-speak?

This isn't so much a dig at Barand, she's writing for her audience, and got me genuinely interested. It is more a dig at some areas of continental philosophy for making itself so opaque as to have become transparent for the average person (transparent because no one sees it...)

But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting.

That's fine, but then presumably, sometimes, they later interact with something again. Now if relations can spring out of existence like this, what causes them to be one type of relation instead of another? This is the old John Edwards "Cosmological Argument," which I don't think non-eternal cosmologies have ever adequately addressed, except now it pops up everywhere.





This isn't the first time I've read one of your posts and been very intrigued. You wouldn't happen to have a helpful reading list around, would you?

I was mostly interested by:

That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order

I.e., the idea of the universe as self-organizing. I found Jantsch's "Self-Organizing Universe," online, and it generally had good reviews, but it's also 43 years old and my fear was that it might be a bit dated. (Plus the opening was pretty polemical, which I generally don't like).

Then I was reading Basarab Nicolescu's book on Jacob Boheme's cosmology of self-organization, but this was too esoteric and mystical for what I was looking for, although I might return to it.

Biosemiotics interests me too, but I've found it pretty hit or miss. I have really enjoyed some of Terrance Deacon's papers.

So, how Does Language Map onto the World?

Was anything decided? — Banno

I don't think so. We seem to employ language to communicate fairly well on many matters - that's as deep as I'm going.

But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is some of what Barad says about agency:

There are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change…it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies.
…the primary ontological units are not “things" but phenomena -dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/ (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not “words" but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.”

So what does all this verbiage mean? If I were to take a stab at a one-sentence definition, I would say agency is the power to affect and reconfigure. This is more like an intention than a cause, but does not originate in a constituted subject. Agency doesnt make sense outside of Barad’s concept of apparatus. Unlike for Bohr, one of her heroes, an apparatus is not a set-up that pre-exists and remains unchanged by the activities it organizes. Rather, an apparatus is a material configuration of entangled agential elements that produces a normative organization. For instance, interacting bits of space dust or dirty socks i. our washing machine are already interacting with us such that a certain apparatus of organization configured what is going on in a certain way. Our recognition of the washing machine and the socks, as well as the context of cleaning clothes are organizing apparatuses for our determination of what is going on. Entangled with this is the patterns created by the interacting socks ( of course there would be no patterns for us to see if we didn’t already recognize the socks as objects).

A nice supplement to Barad’s work is that of Joseph Rouse, whose main foils are post-analytic writers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Brandom, Putnam and Rorty. Rouse has heaped praise on Barad , and their ideas have much in common as an antidote to models that separate the human-cultural-linguistic from the material-natural-empirical.

But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this really anything new? It’s not that patterns, norms , regularities cease to exist as the nature of configurations shift. It is only the specific identity of elements which ‘cease to exist’ in their previous role.

So the initial OP stated the following problem:

While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible.

Yes, it was Hilary Lawson writing this, but Lawson is incidental, it's the point I'm curious about.

I was initially wondering if all our conversations about idealism, etc, can cease if we accept this point. It seemed like a cute idea worth investigating.

What is clear is that there is a diversity of opinion on the nature of language and reality. As someone with no expertise in this area, I can't comment other than to say language appears to be a useful tool that affords us extraordinary power.

A realist might argue that there is a clear and fixed correspondence between language and the objects, events, and concepts in the real world. I am not so sure what 'real world' means. It seems to me there are a series of real worlds, subject to experience and context. Julian Assange, for instance, surely cannot doubt that he has had his freedom taken away.

Can we meaningfully talk about idealism without a theory of language that explains how realist claims are possible?

I accept that the social constructivists are right when they argue that language is socially constructed and that meaning arises from shared agreements and conventions within a particular community. The meaning of words and expressions can vary depending on cultural and social contexts.

I also accept that cognitive linguists are right when they argue that language is closely connected to human cognition and conceptual systems. Meaning is seen as being shaped by cognitive processes, metaphors, and mental structures.

Language and its ability to generate meaning seems a kind of conjuring trick of metaphor, or a type of game where contingent rules or customs rather that 'reality' determine meaning.

You're steeped in philosophical tradition - ordinary language philosophy - what is your take home message?

I'd say language, being our primary medium of communication, is not capable of getting "behind itself" in order to derive "a realist theory of language". Language makes communication of ideas about the world possible, as evidenced by ordinary life; to ask for a realist theory that could explain that would be to already presuppose that language is capable of communicating ideas about the world and be asking for some more fundamental guarantor of realism than our merely taking it to be so, and the obvious successful practical communicative applications of language we routinely experience.

I'd say language, being our primary medium of communication, is not capable of getting "behind itself" in order to derive "a realist theory of language". — Janus

I think this is right.

Language makes communication of ideas about the world possible, as evidenced by ordinary life — Janus

Yes

to ask for a realist theory that could explain that would be to already presuppose that language is capable of communicating ideas about the world and be asking for some more fundamental guarantor of realism than our merely taking it to be so, and the obvious successful practical communicative applications of language we routinely experience. — Janus

So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?

I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world.

The relevant observation concerning Assange might be how much the various parties are in agreement.

They agree that there is someone who did certain things on the internet and that as a result folk found out a lot of stuff which other folk thought they should not have. They agree on the overwhelming picture of a world with people, cities, computers, networks, nations and all the other paraphernalia within which this drama can take place. And I suppose most folk would agree that Assange's ability to move from place to place has been somewhat curtailed over the last few years.

Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements.

So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions, and that these descriptions can be translated or interpreted, one into the other.

Now realism sometimes holds that the reason for this agreement is simply that there is a world in which we are embedded and to which our talk "corresponds". So the reason that we agree the cat is on the mat is simply that the cat is indeed on the mat. On the other hand idealism sometimes points out that sentences such as "the cat is on the mat" are social constructs, that we might have used other sentences, or not even have posited cats and mats at all. That there are cats and mats is a result of shared agreement, or some such.

What might be worth considering is if these two views are actually incompatible. After all, not just any sentence will do. If the cat is on the mat, yet someone insists that the cat is not on the mat, then there are a few possibilities. They may be using "cat" or "mat " in some alternate way; or they may just be wrong. What we can say about the world is in some way restricted by the world - that is, there is a difference between true statements and false ones.

If there were only language, independent of what we do with it in our everyday dealings, one might countenance some form of idealism. But there is a difference between those statements that are true and those that are not. Hence, one way or anther, there is a shared world that underpins that difference.

So rounding back, Assange is not in a different world.

Add this to what I have already said; that the difference between idealism and realism is a choice of ways of speaking, and that mapping the world is something we can do with language, when we talk truthfully.

:up:

Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements. — Banno

Yep. Something many of us lose site of.

So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions — Banno

Sure - I was using it metaphorically for this kind of distinction.

What might be worth considering is if these two views are actually incompatible. After all, not just any sentence will do. If the cat is on the mat, yet someone insists that the cat is not on the mat, then there are a few possibilities. They may be using "cat" or "mat " in some alternate way; or they may just be wrong. What we can say about the world is in some way restricted by the world - that is, there is a difference between true statements and false ones. — Banno

Nice - yes this seems critical.

But there is a difference between those statements that are true and those that are not. Hence, one way or anther, there is a shared world that underpins that difference. — Banno

Don't disagree but the phrase 'one way or another' here might be said to hide a multitude of sins, from Kant to phenomenology. But I hear you.

Thanks.

yeah, and happy to talk about those sins. However in the end the analysis comes down to choosing between bivalent and other logics. That’s a bit esoteric. An example might help.

Suppose we agree that the sentence “The cup has a handle” is true. Put the cup in a cupboard. Does it still have a handle? A realist might say that it either does or it doesn’t, and perhaps add that since we have no reason to suppose otherwise, the unobserved cup on the cupboard still has a handle and the sentence is true. An idealists might in contrast say that the cup only has a handle in relation to some language construct, and that somehow as a result we cannot or at least ought not commit to the sentence being either true or false; instead it has some alter value, perhaps “unknown” or “neutral” or whatever.

The take home here is not which is the better description so much as to note that the difference is pretty inconsequential, an issue of the better way to talk about the cup.

For my money saying that the cup has a handle even when hidden in the cupboard looks the better approach. But if someone wants to instead insist that on opening the cupboard the cup would appear handle-ish, or some other obtuse locution, I don’t tuning the cup cares.

And in other circumstances a non bivalent logic might be preferable.

So speaking broadly, the idealist/realist dichotomy is not so big an issue.

Suppose we agree that the sentence “The cup has a handle” is true. Put the cup in a cupboard. Does it still have a handle? A realist might say that it either does or it doesn’t, and perhaps add that since we have no reason to suppose otherwise, the unobserved cup on the cupboard still has a handle and the sentence is true. An idealists might in contrast say that the cup only has a handle in relation to some language construct, and that somehow as a result we cannot or at least ought not commit to the sentence being either true or false; instead it has some alter value, perhaps “unknown” or “neutral” or whatever. — Banno

Yes, this example makes sense. And we can get marooned by talk about which things exit when no one is there to see or hear. To some extent where you land on this seems to depend on the frame you want to use or how you interpret language. I can already hear the phenomenological talk about a cup only existing as such if we share an intersubjective community of agreement involving some anticipatory relationship with the object we can understand contextually as a cup, subject to a specific purpose - or something like this...

Some of this might be rich territory, but as a minimalist, with only so many years left to live, I don't think I can use this type of understanding.

Food for thought.

So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?

I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world. — Tom Storm

I think you're right—language is, in effect, like our phenomenal world, since our perceptions of the phenomenal world, and how much more so our judgements about it, are linguistically mediated.

What is not linguistically mediated is the primary pre-cognitive effects of the body/brain/world interaction processes, which we cannot become conscious of, and hence can have very little to say about. So, if we think of that precognitive body/brain/world interaction as "the world" then our language does not map onto the world at all, or at least we have no way of saying whether or how it does or doesn't.

The world our language does map onto is the cognitively, linguistically modeled intersubjectively shared world we refer to as "the everyday world" which includes everything we know, including science.

If we understand metaphysics to be confined by phenomenology, as Heidegger does, then there is no problem, but if we think of metaphysics as dealing with the precognitive "world", then I think it is a fact that we have no ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics.

So, we know what we mean when we say that the world we share is a physical world, because we all experience the tangibility and measurability of that world, the tangibility and measurability which just are the characteristics that our notion of physicality consists, and is grounded, in. It seems to me that we do not know what we mean if we claim that the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience.

Any talk or claim about the precognitive "world" is literally senseless.