Thanks I will have a look

Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or has thought learned to cloak itself in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other? — Pantagruel

Another option, expressed in the work of New Materialists like Karen Barad, is that material does more work than the old notion of materiality assumes. Rather than passive, static substance, matter is creative, intra-active and agentive ( not in the sense of pan-psychism), and thus already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought — Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? I know lots of people would draw the line of consciousness at homo sapiens. I prefer the bio-evolutionary perspective that can discern intelligent behaviours in coral colonies. That is more the type of awareness that interests me. People like to draw a certain line in different places.

I wouldn't be too sure about the "abandonment" in actual practice . . . . down deep scientists have ideas they hope will be substantiated by experiment or shown to be wrong. Preferably the former. They are, by and large, human and hope to get there first. On the other hand pure curiosity can be a driving force. — jgill

Your expression gets at a split in my thinking on the subject that's not easy to negotiate -- there's the historically real science as actually practiced, and then there's the philosophically attractive abstraction of that process which tends to look a lot cleaner than the real deal.

The former is real, the latter is at least questionable to me. But in designating the historical as the real contrast to the ideal -- "Falsificationism" cannot count as a criterion that differentiates the scientific from the not-scientific anymore because it, as a description, fits in the latter -- it's a prescriptive theory of science addressing the problem of induction rather than a descriptive one addressing what scientists actually do.

And yet it's the prescriptions which seem to help a person try and "be objective" -- like it's more of a role rather than a fact. But if that were the case... well then there's no method at all, it's a social designation and function! And whatever those who have that designation or function do is what science is.

And that's the tension in my thinking between these two ways of looking at science.
***

To answer your OP @Mikie -- What I think the take-away is is that "Anything goes" works when we're trying to universalize to a prescriptive theory of science which demarcates science from not-science for all cases of science, but almost always we're not thinking at that level of abstraction where we're comparing historical periods of scientific practice and describing their methods of thought and inference in an attempt to understand why this practice seems so fruitful, or in the case of Popper, how it gets over the problem of induction.

We're instead thinking "What makes it different from..." some other thing, in which case, it seems like we're able to point out methods that differ, or differences along the way. But it won't sound as impressive as a single, rational criterion that demarcates the scientific from the not-scientific. For that I'd just say Popper did a pretty good job, and Feyerabend shows the limitation of that approach. It gets at something, but it misses something too.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought
— Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? — Pantagruel

Animism and panpsychism tend to begin from the Cartesian dualist split between inner subjectivity and outer materiality and simply inject the outer with the stuff of the inner. New Materialism doesnt do that. It rethinks the nature of human subjectivity and empirical objectivity along the same lines, so that relational process becomes more fundamental than the steric identities of intrinsic inner subjectivity and material substance.

Thanks I will have a look — PhilosophyRunner

:up:

Interesting that my new read, Nicolai Hartmann, contests this fundamental dyad of object and subject, saying it is a hypostatization of the relational nature of consciousness (i.e. an unfounded metaphysical assumption) and that there is an avenue to pure being through some kind of pre-reflective 'natural attitude.' This smacks of Collingwood's 'absolute presuppositions.'

However Hartmann's method is also aporetic, embracing the antinomian nature of the development of philosophical thought and its key problems. So I can see this challenge to my fundamental intuitions about the inextricability of objectivity and subjectivity as part of an overall dialectical progress.

The thing that makes science science are the activities of a community of self-identified members who are recognised as such by other members of the community who share a particular set of approaches, values and standards, that shifts as their perspectives change. Primary values of this community are a belief in the provisional nature of our knowledge and, as Whitehead puts it, 'a vehement and passionate interest in the relationship of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts'. These values also currently include quantification, objectivity and replicability, but these are only included as they are seen as furthering this relationship between principles and facts. — Richard Goldstein

:up:

Nicolai Hartmann, contests this fundamental dyad of object and subject, saying it is a hypostatization of the relational nature of consciousness (i.e. an unfounded metaphysical assumption) and that there is an avenue to pure being through some kind of pre-reflective 'natural attitude.' — Pantagruel

Sounds interesting. I found this paraphrase:

According to his new ontology, epistemology depends on ontology, not the opposite.
Thus, the “being” of objects is a necessary prerequisite for thought or knowledge about them. The knowledge that people have of reality is itself a part of reality, as an event among other events.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolai-Hartmann

One way to get at this is to consider that no epistemology can be installed without appeals to the nature of the subject. We might talk of the entanglement of epistemology and ontology, because the ontologist has to make a case for claims, and the form of such a case will presumably imply or manifest an epistemology.

One way to get at this is to consider that no epistemology can be installed without appeals to the nature of the subject. We might talk of the entanglement of epistemology and ontology, because the ontologist has to make a case for claims, and the form of such a case will presumably imply or manifest an epistemology. — plaque flag

Yes. Hartmann goes further and talks about something which encompasses both the object of ontology and the subject of epistemology. Now you could get sticky and say, well, that more comprehensive reality is itself what is ontologically primary. But Hartmann elects to maintain the posture of separation, which allows for further investigation into their unique natures. His dyad of Dasein (the ontological ) existence and Sosein (the epistemological) essence are linked together through a kind of pragmatics of primitive action. Sosein and Dasein are related in almost systems theoretical terms, where the Sosein of a specific individual tree (its unique essence) has its Dasein in its place in the forest.

The knowledge that people have of reality is itself a part of reality, as an event among other events

This I firmly believe.

Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature tries to incorporate intentionality as well, although from a different angle. He focuses on how absence can be causally efficacious, e.g. hemoglobin is constrained by the absent oxygen it has to be able to bind, but also easily let go of. But his argument from where intentionality comes from is more based in thermodynamics. I haven't finished the book yet though.

Barad's thesis, if I'm understanding it right, seems closer to pansemiosis? I

And Hoffman has a similar attempt to ground intentionally with his Conscious Realism. He posits agents as fundemental and has a toy universe model for how we might be able to build up physics and natural selection starting from agents with a menu of choices.

These are all necessary efforts since there are clear problems with the current dominant paradigms, but the variety of ways in which intentionality is "put back into the world," is a bit dizzying. I've read a lot of theses like these, and they often resort to creating their own new terms, e.g. Deacon's "ententional," etc., which makes them even harder to compare.

My guess is that these ideas will keep sloshing around until one can actually make unique predictions through its formalism that are then verified. New paradigms always start off in this sort of muddy, difficult, philosophical work. Whether they can replace existing structures seems to depend on if they can predict outcomes in novel ways.

While these authors are quite right that there is institutional bias against their ideas, I also think that one of the barriers to their acceptance is the surfeit of different theories bouncing around. What is to set one above the others?

It has occured to me that this might indicate another problem with trying to explain intentionality. It might not come from one sort of thing. Intentionality might be sort of like natural selection, where there are good arguments to be made for group, individual, gene, and functional selection. Are we best off looking only at genes, largely ignoring challenges to the Central Dogma, or should we look at evolution in terms of high level "core algorithms," like "lighter than air flight," and "shelter construction?"

Or, since all different levels of explanation have merit, should we be looking for something that occurs through a sort of fractal recurrence, where the same pattern is generated in ever larger, more complex ways through similar principles? E.g., selection occurs on multiple levels, intentionality emerges not only from from the relational nature of the most basic physical interactions, but also through a series of similar, larger scale recurrences of that same general pattern? This would explain why we can have many different theories that all seem to work to some degree, but which operate on many different levels. Such a view might also open up the path to explaining how and why consciousness develops the way it has historically.

But conceptualizing and formalizing such theories is a bear. I start to wonder if maybe we are running into a limit on our understanding set by our own cognitive capabilities, our inability to consider multi-level parallel processes acting as a set of blinders.