I got nothing else to do, so……



Is the illegality found in the categorical error of at once denying and affirming the same thing?

Or is the illegality a logical fallacy exhibited in some propter hoc iteration?

Or is methodological solipsism merely the occassion of denying while affirming common sense realism?

Assuming at least one of those is a sufficiently reasonable interpretation, how do you figure Kant does any of those three things?

And even if none of those are sufficient interpretations, what is it about taking for granted, which reduces to presuppositions, that makes such taking illegal, which reduces to logical law?
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It seems as though you’re just saying Kant contradicts himself, regarding the notion of causal common sense realism, or perhaps just in his employment of the conception itself.

What is the usual way that common sense realism grasps the causal relation between objects and sensory apparatus? If Kant takes the way the relation is grasped by common sense realism for granted, but takes it for granted illegally, then it must be the case he is not in fact grasping the causal relation in the way of common sense realism at all, but has instead inflicted onto it that which doesn’t belong to it.

If he takes for granted common sense realism’s grasp of the relation between objects and sensory apparatus is the case, which is its affirmation, how can he at the same time deny it?
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All objection disappears with the exclusion of “simultaneously”, insofar as he does grant the object/sensory apparatus causal relation common sense realism professes to endorse, but does not grant that relation as a “legally” sufficient condition for what subsequently occurs because of it.
———-

He did inherit from others the so-called methodological solipsism…..how could he not, being immersed in academia….but he moreso expanded it, by inventing a new one, to which, of course, it is doubtful he would have given that doctrinal or theoretic name or acceded to its implication.

He did inherit from others the so-called methodological solipsism…..how could he not, being immersed in academia — Mww

Indeed, and I myself think there's something profound in MS, but it must be applied to the species as a whole. Part of it is true 'locally,' in that the world is only given perspectively. But the time-binding sociality of reason must be acknowledged. Even given perspectively the world is given to a cultural being that sees a shofar or a tobacco pipe, not some random shape.

I am me because there are others who are not me. I am 'inside' because there's stuff on the outside I'm not responsible for or in control of in the same way. My internal monologue is 'one' (mono) because 'one is one around here.' I am held responsible as a single body for keeping my story straight. Two or three souls per body would make reward and punishment difficult.

More to the point you mention, our common sense understanding of sense organs and brains and worldly objects is what inspires the thesis of mediation. An image between us and Reality is postulated --an iron curtain. So now the eyes and ears and brain are mere representations of who knows what. Yet they inspired the very hypothesis that negates their evidentiary value. Note that all else that makes a subject meaningful as such is also mere representation of who knows what.


***
I don't think it makes sense to doubt as a philosopher and not a madman the conditions of possibility for rational conversation. So we gotta be in the same world, gotta be talking about the same objects and not private representations of them. We gotta mostly have concepts in the same way. Things can be blurry and imperfect. Direct realism doesn't mean no mistakes. Your eyes are better than mind. Joey is deaf. Timmy didn't grasp the drama of the situation. Indeed we never exhaustively see even familiar objects. So I think we see eyes and not representations of eyes, though I don't doubt the complexity of the seeing process. But the 'I' that sees is a discursive social self, best understood perhaps in terms of responsibility for the claims it makes --instead of via the red herring of biological details, as if I'm in my own skull, waiting for electric signals to get to me. Though electric signals are just representational illusion, so what am I talking about ? I might not have a brain, etc. [ I'm not saying this is your belief. I'm reacting to common hyperskeptical indirect realisms that appear on the forum -- also arguing for direct realism by arguing against the rival.]

I am me because there are others who are not me. — plaque flag

I am me because it is impossible I am not, regardless of others.

Mww, your statement "I am me because it is impossible I am not, regardless of others" is a nice variation on Descartes' performative "Cogito Sum" insight.

In other words, while I am thinking in the first person present tense mode, it is existentially inconsistent and existentially self-defeating (impossible) for me to claim, simultaneously, that I do not exist. And the occurrence of this indubitably certain intuition does not at all depend upon my being aware that there are others who are not me.

The problem is semantic. What is this 'I' ? The unity of a monologue ? How is such an assumption justified ? Why do we not just have a stream of words ? Or why isn't it 17 people arguing who gets to control the hand ? And what meaning can justification have in the absence of a community ? Or in the absence of the world that is other than me that I can be wrong about ?

The whole framework of autonomous rationality is smuggled in without apology, as if personhood wasn't essentially and fundamentally normative, discursive, and social.

To me the Cartesian move (if executed at the level of the single human and not the species) tacitly assumes the absurdity of a private logic, a private semantics, the intelligibility of truth or justification in the absence of an transcending other (encompassing community, encompassing world.)

The problem is not semantical.

The "Cartesian move" as you call it can, in fact, be performed by any person who makes up the human family who wishes to perform it. And the truth of the Cogito Sum can be verified by any person who wishes to verify it in the first person present tense mode.

The welfare and progress of the human community is dependent upon the "I" of the creative genius, not the other way around. Thank goodness for autonomous personal creativity. May it always prosper.

All ideas that are truly original have never been created through community deliberations.

Also, history shows that out-of-control communities can be quite dangerous as totalitarian systems, since they seek to define who the persons must be.

The problem is semantic. What is this 'I' ? — plaque flag

It's well known that Augustine articulated a similar argument to Descartes':

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14

I agree that the argument is apodictic, that it can't be plausibly denied. But when you ask 'what is this "I"?, if you're seeking an objective response to that question, there won't be one, as the self is never an object of cognition (save for in a metaphorical sense of being an 'object of enquiry'. I take that as the meaning of the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl.)

It may be of interest that Husserl criticises Descartes on similar grounds, by rendering the ego in naturalistic terms as something existent, 'a little tag-end of the world' : "naturalising consciousness as just another region of the world, as indeed contemporary programmes in the philosophy of mind deliberately seek to do. True phenomenology will grasp the original givenness of consciousness precisely as modes of self-givenness rather than as entities in any naturalistic sense" (Routledge intro. to phenomenology p139)

I agree that the argument is apodictic, that it can't be plausibly denied. But when you ask 'what is this "I"?, if you're seeking an objective response to that question, there won't be one, as the self is never an object of cognition (save for in a metaphorical sense of being an 'object of enquiry'. I take that as the meaning of the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl.) — Quixodian

Why say the 'I' is never an object of cognition ? You are making claims about it. Much of philosophy is an attempt to clarify the discursive self. Still more is about whether the world is given directly or indirectly the subject --- the kind of being awareness has. In this context, I claim that the subject is a the world from a perspective, and that we know only of a world which is given through perspectives in this way.

My point is that this 'pure' subject is a circle without a perimeter --- semantically broken, however tempting. It's a sci-fi trope that's entertaining but doesn't make sense.

As living embodied discursive subjects, you and I indeed find it absurd to deny ourselves. Karl-Otto Apel fixes the old move: we critically examine our situation, therefore we are (we exist) in an encompassing world together with a working language. Descartes assumed too little.

According to Apel,... the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived...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

I claim that the concept of philosophy itself has intense ontological implications. Human normative conceptuality is not outside looking in but the conceptual structure or aspect of reality. The alternative is irrationalism, if not obviously so.

The "Cartesian move" as you call it can, in fact, be performed by any person who makes up the human family who wishes to perform it. And the truth of the Cogito Sum can be verified by any person who wishes to verify it in the first person present tense mode. — charles ferraro

I don't think you understand me. Of course we currently living ( embodied ) subjects can make that move. The issue is whether some isolated worldly tribeless bodiless ghosts makes sense. I claim that it's just science fiction with a serious plot hole. We can imagine ourselves with no brains in our skull --but only when and because there is a brain in our skull. We can imagine a radically isolated bodiless subject, but only because we are genuine subjects. We can say 'round square' and 'circle without a perimeter,' but we can't take these phrases to the bank. We end up unwittingly babbling like mystics, sure that we are the opposite of credulous, accidentally pushing our skepticism into reckless fantasy -- not seeing that our fear of error is the error itself.

Why say the 'I' is never an object of cognition ? — plaque flag

Because it's not. Even the source you quote, David Hume, says that he never discerns a self, but only a stream of thoughts. Every object I can now perceive - let's see: computer monitor, speakers, pile of books, keyboard, desk upon which computer sits....all of those are objects of perception to me. But the self who is writing this post is not amongst them, he is that to whom they are objects.

Incidentally, précis of Kant's 'transcendental apperception' which might be relevant to the 'Apel' quotation.

• All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (pace David Hume).
• To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity in order to comprise a meaningful whole
• Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
• The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is.
• Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
• These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.

(I am dubious of the fourth premise, of the unity of self as being an 'object of experience'. I would categorise it as amongst the 'conditions of experience'.)

Even the source you quote, David Hume, says that he never discerns a self, but only a stream of thoughts. — Quixodian

You quote David Hume to argue that David Hume does not exist.

I get it. I understand what's potent in Hume's attempted reduction of us to a stream of thoughts, but that seems to help my point more than yours. Why should a stream of thoughts be taken as (understand itself as ) a unified self-referential self ? This is where Brandon's take on Kant is so useful. The discursive self (you and me and David Hume doing philosophy) is temporally organized by a responsibility to keep its story straight. Ethics is [ part of ] first philosophy.

Since Brandom’s Kant also holds that an entity is responsible for its judgments and its acts just in case it is capable of taking responsibility for those acts and judgments, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that having a mind is a matter of the minded entity taking responsibility for what it believes and does. Put in slightly more Kantian terms, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that the unity of apperception is achieved through a process in which an agent unifies her judgments by coming to believe what she ought to believe (has reason to believe) given her other judgments and the content of the concepts ingredient in those judgments.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/

Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.
...
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/From_German_Idealism_to_American_Pragmat.pdf

Incidentally, précis of 'transcendental apperception' which might be relevant to the 'Apel' quotation. — Quixodian

Nice. And let me say that I count myself as a transcendental philosopher. Like you, I'll quote to clarify my meaning.

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

My latest thread is an attempt to let Y be the claim that 'I am a philosopher (an ontologist.)' Then X is everything that must come along with that, for Y to make sense. The enabling conditions of the ontologist are the necessary beginnings of his ontology.

More locally, I'm arguing that 'I am a subject' does not makes sense outside of all context. The notion of an interior depends on an exterior. That sort of thing.

Right. Agree with every word. But none of that makes the self (or the mind or the subject), an object of cognition, in any sense other than the metaphorical, i.e. 'the object of the debate'. The self is the 'unknown knower, the unseen seer.' Granted, that is from Vedanta, rather than from Kant, but it is in this precise respect that Kant and Vedanta are said to converge.

The mistake I'm arguing against is precisely the 'naturalisation of reason' i.e. regarding the rational subject (you and I) as the object of natural science.

.'...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.'

The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin

The self is the 'unknown knower, the unseen seer.' Granted, that is from Vedanta, rather than from Kant, but it is in this precise respect that Kant and Vedanta are said to converge. — Quixodian

To me the same kind of thing is maybe be said by being is not a being (the famous ontological difference.) Both Husserl and Heidegger had their own version of this. I prefer to say that subjectivity is the world (being) from/through a perspective. But I suspect you, like me, are aiming at the 'ineffable' (tautological) thereness of the there.

Being is not a thing. The exact thing that materialism denies.

The mistake I'm arguing against is precisely the 'naturalisation of reason' i.e. regarding the rational subject (you and I) as the object of natural science. — Quixodian

I can at least agree that approaching the discursive self as a mere piece of clockwork (a cog in the amoral machine or causal nexus of Nature) is a performative contradiction in its absurd cancellation of the normative dimension of reality that makes science science to begin with. Psychologism is tempting and common and ... self-undermining.

To be sure, there are contexts where we are practically motivated to think of others as machines, but a serious ontology must be holist ( honest ! not leave out something crucial ) and avoid this self-subverting ignorance of its own normative intention.

Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that the unity of apperception is achieved through a process in which an agent unifies her judgments…..

“…. The first pure cognition of understanding, then, upon which is founded all its other exercise, and which is at the same time perfectly independent of all conditions of mere sensuous intuition, is the principle of the original synthetical unity of apperception….”

In the first it is said the unity of apperception is an achievement by means of a process, in the second it is said the unity of apperception is that by which processes are achieved. While each of these are or may be the case in their respective philosophies, they are not compatible with each other.

“…. if I investigate more closely the relation of given cognitions in every judgement (…) I find that judgement is nothing but the mode of bringing given cognitions under the objective unity of apperception.….”

This just shows distinctions in the domains of such unity. In the objective the cognitions are presupposed insofar as there is consciousness that their representations are already united, in the synthetic the unity is only the consciousness that those representations can be united.

Brandom’s Kant may well infuse responsibility and whatnot into a purely transcendental systemic methodology, but Kant himself does not. There is a natural sense of responsibility and commitment in the general human condition, but they do not reside in principles contained a priori in understanding. It is absurd to suppose one is responsible or committed to that which is necessarily mandated for him exclusively by his intellectual constitution, however speculative it may be.

Nahhhh…..the unity of apperception isn’t an achievement, even in the loosest sense. Pretty hard to achieve a fundamental principle. On the other hand, if the unity of apperception is an achievement, than it isn’t a view to which Kant is committed.

In the text, Descartes stipulates that the I exists….as a thinking thing. The common iteration of that stipulation only states “I am”, which does not necessarily indicate an existence. And even if reducing the I that exists to the I that is, merely because it is the very same as the I that thinks, re: I am that which thinks, still doesn’t say much about what that I is. Cognitive representation, and its coalescence into a system, had yet to become a speculative doctrine predicated on logic alone.

I take it -- and I'm hoping you do too --that the point of the philosophical enterprise is getting clearer on reality. Paraphrasing Kant is related to this task, inasmuch as we find his work helpful, but given that Kant scholars don't agree on the details, it's not exactly newsworthy that you find something to object to in how Brandom transforms this or that piece of his work. But then who can't find something to object to in Kant's work and what he made of his own influences ? Kant makes sense organs their own product, does backflips trying to save his God from Newton. I've read a couple of Beiser's fat books on that era, so I'm not tempted toward anything like hero worship or scripture quoting, though I do count Kant as a hero. Let me stress that I don't think either of us are here to quote scripture.

I vote for Kant (and Brandom and Husserl) as possibility rather than substance. I mean we should look to their radical intention and forgive them their absurdities, build on what is strongest and purest in their work. I know you hate OLP, and I'll join you and Popper in my insistence on looking through imperfect expressions to charitably finding illuminating concepts. Lots of linguistic issues are probably just people being antisocial --not wanting to play nice.

Brandom's scorekeeping notion of rationality (or at least his shrewd emphasis on this notion) looks like a breakthrough to me. The judgment and not the concept is semantically fundamental because it's the minimum unit one can be responsibly for. Fucking illuminating, I say. Inferentialist semantics is also brilliant and a true continuation of the Copernican revolution in philosophy. The subject ( the criticial-rational ontological community )is not on the outside eavesdropping at some closed door like a servant. Our own normative conceptuality is profoundly entangled with (or even simply is ) the conceptual dimension or aspect of being / reality/ world.

I take it -- and I'm hoping you do too --that the point of the philosophical enterprise is getting clearer on reality. — plaque flag

‘Tis vain hope, I must say, although you are nonetheless welcome to take that point.

"I think therefore I am" is a mere tautology, because in the beginning "I" is posited in "I think". Of course I can say that I am; I would contradict myself if I said that I am not. But this tells us nothing about what I am. It doesn't prove that I am a thinking substance: I might be nothing more than the thought "I am".

Descartes, in the same fashion as the ontological argument brings in the goodness of God as a guarantor that we are not deceived in thinking that I am a thinking substance; the cogito alone does not suffice to do the job.

‘Tis vain hope, I must say, although you are nonetheless welcome to take that point. — Mww

Philosophy gets us clearer on empirical reality perhaps, and I think that is the only reality that @plaque flag allows.

‘Tis vain hope, I must say, although you are nonetheless welcome to take that point. — Mww

:up:

Philosophy gets us clearer on empirical reality perhaps, and I think that is the only reality that plaque flag allows. — Janus

You nailed it. I'm with Hegel on this issue, in spirit if not to the letter. I'm not saying that I can't or won't be surprised, but to me that's just incomplete knowledge of the only Reality worth acknowledging as such, the Reality that I can't help but know as a central participant -- a protagonist who didn't ask for the part but found himself in the costume, condemned to clarify the script in front of live studio audience.
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But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit.

Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it.

Philosophy gets us clearer on empirical reality perhaps…. — Janus

If one holds with the position that it is we who decide what reality is, or, perhaps, how the reality that is, is to be known as such, that says more about the decision-maker than what is decided upon.

Philosophy gets us clearer as subjects, yes, regardless of that to which we as subjects direct ourselves.
————-

“…. But whoever thinks he can learn Kant's philosophy from the exposition of others makes a terrible mistake. Nay, rather I must earnestly warn against such accounts, especially the more recent ones; and indeed in the years just past I have met with expositions of the Kantian philosophy in the writings of the Hegelians which actually reach the incredible. How should the minds that in the freshness of youth have been strained and ruined by the nonsense of Hegelism, be still capable of following Kant's profound investigations? They are early accustomed to take the hollowest jingle of words for philosophical thoughts, the most miserable sophisms for acuteness, and silly conceits for dialectic, and their minds are disorganised through the admission of mad combinations of words to which the mind torments and exhausts itself in vain to attach some thought. No Critique of Reason can avail them, no philosophy, they need a medicina mentis, first as a sort of purgative, un petit cours de senscommunologie, and then one must further see whether, in their case, there can even be any talk of philosophy….”
(WWR, Preface, xxvii, 1844)

They are early accustomed to take the hollowest jingle of words for philosophical thoughts, the most miserable sophisms for acuteness, and silly conceits for dialectic, and their minds are disorganised through the admission of mad combinations of words to which the mind torments and exhausts itself in vain to attach some thought. — Mww

Then, they start posting on Forums.

……all too often with the inverse quantity/quality ratio.

Then, they start posting on Forums. — Quixodian

……all too often with the inverse quantity/quality ratio. — Mww

I'd say maybe beware of such nakedly self-flattering arrogance. The fool says in his heart: I'm not one of the fools. Both of you like me spend plenty of time on unworldly 'nonsense.'

Given my understanding of the conceptions the words “unworldly nonsense” represent, it is safe to say I’ve never spent one second of time on it.

If it is indeed the case there is all too often, which necessarily includes just once, a quantity/quality inverse ration on forums, or any trans-communicative medium, how is it self-flattering arrogance to state that case?

The criteria for arrogance cannot be contained in the necessity that all judgements are subjective.
————-

The Democracy of Objects is interesting, and offers clues on your writing style.

I was only kidding :sweat: