An agent is you or I, not a proposition. A judgement might be put in propositional terms, if that is what you mean. — Banno

Depends on what is meant by a proposition. S knows P, but this knowing has to be unpacked, and it certainly is not as if when I see my cat I am explicitly recalling all the cat-presence indicators about the look of cats, their behavioral possibilities, and the rest. But clearly, I am already knowledgeable prior to actual encounter, about cats, this cat. There is history there that informs my familiarity, so this is a recollection, if not explicit, but merely "attending" to make cat recognition possible. The cat presence a "region" of associated experiences with cats that create the affect of knowing.

So if this is a rough account of agency, and I think it is, then we are implicit-proposition-bearing agencies. This must be the case in order to explain how it is that we live in a world so implicitly comfortable all the time. To perceive is to apperceive, so we are agents of apperception.

I do not follow what this says. In so far as agency produces an effect, of course it can be put into propositional terms. I went to the fridge to get a beer. I gather that we agree that actions can be put into statements. That's not metaphysics. — Banno

But ask, how is it that prior to getting the beer, you already know about refrigerators and their capacity to contain beer? If you want to say the agency precedes knowledge, then, as I see it, you have a lot of explaining to do, for to do this explaining you would be IN a matrix of propositional knowledge. Any thing you "put your eyes on" will be well received by an understanding, even if it is alien in appearance, it will be assimilated to a standard way of fixating beliefs. See Kuhn's "Structures" for the way science historically evolved. We are living "paradigms" in a world. Agency is paradigmatic, if you will.

Are you claiming not to have any beliefs about the way things are? About chairs and cups and trees and so on? Folk believe in chairs and cups and trees, and have beliefs about them, but have enough sense to realise that chairs and cups and trees are different to beliefs. If you think that somehow all there are, are beliefs about beliefs, then enjoy your solipsism, and I'll leave you to it. — Banno

No one is saying there is no world in public "space". This is a big issue. What is there is an event. This has to be understood. And this event IS me. An event in ME. Not at all to deny there are things in the world, but that they are not me. And our shared knowledge of the world in indeterminate (see Quine, e.g.) though pragmatically effective. I am not at all locked into some cul de sac solipsism. Why? Well, just look around. There are other things and people everywhere. The idea is preposterous. But the event of knowing is Me. How do I get out of the ME? THAT is metaphysics. I can say with confidence that physicalism leads to the worst solipsism one can imagine. It does not even get THAT far. How do you make a causal relation into an epistemic one?

Simply the cup's having a handle. Sure, that the cup has a handle is a human expression, but that does not imply that the cup is a belief, or that the cup has no handle.

You sometimes misjudge, perhaps believing the cup has a handle when it does not. But if all there are, are your beliefs, then such a situation could not even be framed. — Banno

All that is there in my beliefs are possibilities, not fixity. Beliefs are open and interpretative. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. A man's head turns into a lion's head. A miracle! That is, until scientific accounting steps in. Then all is normalized. Science's paradigms take the in unknow, the unpredictable, the "radically contingent" (Sartre) and brings them all to heel. Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. No one takes the so called "four humors" seriously any more in the medical community. The world showed otherwise, but note how the terms 'four' and 'humor' are still with us. The meanings and their application change, but this is an evolving language phenomenon. Future "discoveries" will just like this.

The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs.

The world is what is the case, not what you believe to be the case.

Which is the point at which I entered the this thread. — Banno

But my beliefs are mostly public. It is not about "my" beliefs when I go shopping and do my taxes. We all know. This is what is being discussed. The self is an embodiment of this language consensus, this cultural literacy, if you will (not to invoke what E D Hirsh said back then).

A monadic predicate like "the cup has a handle". Which is a very different proposition to "Astrophel does not believe that the cup has a handle". You've segregated yourself from the world by poor logic. — Banno

My belief that the cup has no handle cannot be loosened from beliefs about cups in general that are always already there when a cup matter arises. Negative statements cannot be logically torn from their positive counterparts.

Everyone's a realist in some sense, no? :wink:

John Searle argues that many of the great modern philosophers use perceptual verbs ambiguously in two different senses.

1. In a constitutive sense. The perception is understood as what is constitutive for having it, such as brain events or a perceptual process that exists only for the one who has the perception.

2. In an intentionalistic sense, The perception is understood as what is perceived, or what the perception is about. For example, the visual perception of the lamp.

But in talk that does not distinguish between the two senses it is easy to confuse the lamp that you're seeing with the seeing in its constitutive sense, i.e. the lamp as a figment of your own seeing.

Moreover, lots of philosophical confusion arises since it is possible, by stipulation, to experience seeing the lamp without there being a lamp, such as in a visual hallucination. But when you see the lamp both senses (1 and 2) are satisfied. When you hallucinate seeing the lamp, only 1 is satisfied (the constitutive sense).

Despite being ontologically subjective, perceptions are epistemically objective in the sense that we can describe them and compare our descriptions with available facts. That's a pragmatic way among many of finding out whether a visual experience is veridical or non-veridical.

Everyone's a realist in some sense, no? :wink: — jkop

God forbid. It might seem that way if you haven’t stumbled upon a satisfying alternative view of the world, but there are quite a number of these. The catch is that they require the overthrow of deeply entrenched metaphysical presuppositions. Given Searle’s longstanding clueless hostility toward postmodern thinking, I wouldn’t count on him to offer guidance in this respect.

John Searle argues that many of the great modern philosophers use perceptual verbs ambiguously in two different senses.

1. In a constitutive sense. The perception is understood as what is constitutive for having it, such as brain events or a perceptual process that exists only for the one who has the perception.

2. In an intentionalistic sense, The perception is understood as what is perceived, or what the perception is about. For example, the visual perception of the lamp. — jkop

Not to take sides on Searle's contributions to philosophy overall, but this distinction is extremely useful, I think. You mention that this ambiguity allows us to stipulate perception in sense 1 but not sense 2 (hallucinating the lamp, or "seeing a lamp that isn't there"). But does it also support the reverse? That is, can I maintain that my sense-2 perception of the lamp is genuine, and a legitimate use of the word "perception," without committing myself to some story about how it supervenes (or otherwise connects) to a sense-1 perception?

That’s right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility. — Joshs

Hmm. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.

Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is.

This is a corollary of Fitch's knowability. If any truth can be known it follows that every truth is indeed known. If every truth is known, whence novelty? Antirealism, which I take to be your position, is indeed forced to deny surprise.

But the better way to treat this is as a reductio: we are on occasion surprised; therefore there are things we do not know; therefore not every truth can be known.

Thus we can avoid the hubris of antirealism; the irony that in attempting to humanism truth by equating it with belief, one finds one is omniscient.

If that is your claim. But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.

Which I find wearying.

compare our descriptions with available facts. — jkop

Which facts could you compare perceptions to? Other perceptions?

Depends on what is meant by a proposition. — Astrophel

Generally, a noun and a predicate, but there are complications in the syntax.

Your account is that we only have beliefs, that the world is what Astrophel believes and nothing else. But this is nonsense. We interact with the world, doing things together in it in ways sometimes limited by what is the case and sometimes expanded by what we make the case.

That is, I know the beer is in the fridge because I put it there.

You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. — Lionino

Just so. It is a bit foggy this morning, so I may be overusing misty metaphors, but here again one might hope Astrophel's cloud might eventually also condense into something a bit more transparent.

For now it might be best left to itself.

That is, I know the beer is in the fridge because I put it there. — Banno

I agree, Astrophel is being a bit obtuse in general, and I think they're going to have a field day with the above, because it satisfies their criteria for something you could 'know' to act upon under their account, being:

you already know about refrigerators and their capacity to contain beer — Astrophel

Hehehe.

. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.

Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is. — Banno

We can never be radically surprised by the world. Even objects we have never seen before are recognizable at some level with respect to a pre-understanding. We haven’t seen this particular thing but we have seen things like it , or we at least recognize it as a thing. But we dont spend much of our time simply staring at things, we use them, and their status as objects with properties dissolves into the uses we make of them in order to do things. Most of our surrounding world consists of value objects that mean what we use them for. We then notice what is novel as an interruption of our goal-oriented activity. But even when things are going smoothly and according to plan, novelty is already at work every moment. We wouldn’t be able to experience anything if that were not the case.

But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.

Which I find wearying. — Banno

How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? Heidegger? Derrida? Deleuze? Foucault? I figure if you dont see the clarity in their arguments, and they articulate in a much more effective way what I’m trying to get across, why not save my breath and just quote them?

...and?

Sure, we recognise new stuff in terms of old stuff. Yet there is novelty. The conclusion is that there are unknown truths.

How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? — Joshs

Who do you count amongst your brethren? Foucault is the better of those you list.

But here, in this thread, while it seems that you are disagreeing with what I have said, but it is far from clear to me what that disagreement consists in.

I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which apparently conflates.

What are you doing here?

We can never be radically surprised by the world.

The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter.

I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which ↪Astrophel apparently conflates.

What are you doing here — Banno

Just slumming. But dont you think that teasing out the relation between identity and difference, the familiarly same and the surprisingly novel, is relevant to the OP’s assertion that existence is part and parcel of justification itself?

Isn't that exactly what eventually but (almost?) inevitably happens when there are gaps in the Language structures. — ENOAH

In one way, I agree with you. However, I have great difficulty in understanding the philosophical dialect you are speaking after that. One problem (which does not occur here) is that I suspect that the term "language" is often taken to mean a single structure; that is reinforced when you give it a capital letter "Language". I don't think language has a single, overall, structure. (I wonder if Platonism is not the back of that idea.) Wittgenstein compares language to an ancient city with many overlapping and interacting structures, and that seems more helpful to me.
I don't think that "gap" is a helpful metaphor to describe the places where development happens - though it may be useful in some cases. In others "fault" or "extended (stretched) application" is better. I have a similar problem with "History". But we seem to be agreed that the possibility of novelty is inherent in language. It is not a closed system (a grid). On the contrary, we respond to challenges, difficulties, inadequacies to a linguistic structure in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes we adapt, sometimes we invent, sometimes we just forget. (And yes, no language is an abstract structure, though it is convenient to think of it that way. But in the end (or rather, in the beginning) it is inescapably realized in how human beings live their lives in the world.

We dont use a concept to establish a world without concepts, we find ourselves thrown into a world ( we ‘are’ a self by continually transcending toward the world) and speak from amidst the beings ( things, concepts, uses) that are actualized from out of that world which projects itself — Joshs

There is an idea that I like in this, if I've understood it. It is the idea that we need to start with the world, rather than with language. Then we can see language as part of the world and as developing within it. So the question is not, "how does language reach the world?" but rather "how does language develop within the world?". Whether it involves transcendence or not, the starting-point must be our lives as actual physical human beings.

I am not necessarily using any philosophical dialectic, although I recognize how that creates a barrier between ideas I might express and readers in a forum of highly trained. All I can do is assure you I'm not being deliberately careless, beg the indulgence of those with whom I interact, and thank you when you assist/clarify-for me. And yet, on another hand, I sometimes think it is absolutely impossible to be precise in our language and speaking loosely is more honest, open, and helpful to the ultimate cause. (But perhaps I said that too loosely)

I am using Language as broadly as one can imagine, to include all images, representations, signifiers etc., if there are ceteras, stored in memory/History and structuring what we--philosophers and laity alike--think of as human experience.

I am using History to refer to the collective of these Signifiers operating on the Natural World beyond the individual body, and constructing Narratives beyond individual personalities, all of which moves autonomously in accordance with evolved Laws and Dynamics, is inter-permeable or accessible to Itself inspite of embodiment, is ultimately Fictional, and though it affects Realty via embodiment and the manipulation of resources into Culture, it has no access whatsoever to knowing Reality, despite all of our (Its own) efforts to prove it wrong.

When I say gap (or variations thereof) I mean this: With respect to that structure (Mind/History) which is ultimately Fiction cannot access Reality by knowing, since knowing too is constructed by Language and ultimately Fiction, there is an insurmountable gap between Mind and Reality because Mind is not presence, the "locus" of Reality. Mind is re-presentation. It is, for Humans in human existence or History impossible to get out of the representational (difference, Time, becoming, etc etc) and back to presence (being) by "using" Mind (thinking reflecting reasoning). We cannot cross the gap as the Subject I, also constructed by Mind, or by any kind of pondering. Reality is only accessible in Being (presence, Organic, Body doing; Body is-ing) not in re-presenting, becoming, constructing, knowing.

What I was suggesting, in relation to Novelty, is that Novelty Only arises/exists in Language/Mind/History. The dialectical structure, difference Time, make Novelty necessary. And contrary to what some may think, a "place" or "moment" where it seems that there are no words to
speak of, that is not because therein is a glimpse of Reality (see Kant's sublime or Wittgenstein's silence, loosely, for the notion that something "transcending" phenomenal experience is taking place in this "moment" or gap). The gap is still Mind/History, still fully Language and its constructions, ineffable though it may seem. Reality cares not for effability. Its just a moment where the Narrative is about to shift, as it is structured to do. As you suggested, a moment where "we are driven to develop new ways to speak". But it’s not the Truth trying to shine through, because any access to Reality is divided from Mind/History by an unbridgeable gap. If its Reality you want, just breathe.

This was an over simplification. But, alas, oversimplifying, I find, is unavoidable in a forum like this.

That something is, is found in a proposition. Quantification or domain of discourse.

Since justification presumably makes use of propositions, then of course it has such implications.

But justification is not truth. There is a reason that both truth and justification are listed in the JBT account.

How'r the fish?

You mention that this ambiguity allows us to stipulate perception in sense 1 but not sense 2 (hallucinating the lamp, or "seeing a lamp that isn't there"). But does it also support the reverse? That is, can I maintain that my sense-2 perception of the lamp is genuine, and a legitimate use of the word "perception," without committing myself to some story about how it supervenes (or otherwise connects) to a sense-1 perception? — J

A reverse? Well, no you cant see the lamp (2) without seeing (1). The lamp that you see is genuine when the seeing is causally related to what you see.

By stipulation you could have an experience that is identical to the visual experience of the lamp although it is an hallucination. That's because the visual experience and the hallucination employ some of the same faculties in the brain, although having radically different causes. There's also a direction of fit in the brain's ability to conform experiences according to real lamps (e.g. the brain flips the upside-down projection of light on your retinas so that you experience the lamp standing upright.I suppose that it tries to make sense of hallucinations as well, you may hallucinate something identical to seeing the lamp.

Sorry if this is getting off topic.

You’re misreading the meaning of transcendence of the object for Husserl. What transcends the noematic appearance of the spatial object is not external to the subjective process. It is immanent to it. — Joshs

Yet Ideas I seems to take a different position:

The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual meaning belongs to the perception, and that inseparably. The tree plain and simple can burn away, resolve itself into its chemical elements, and so forth. But the meaning—the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence—cannot burn away; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.

But later, he does make the point clear:

As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we “do not place ourselves on their ground”, do not “co-operate with them”, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.

So I didn't really read closely enough. It is "the affirmations" that are not cast away, not the transcendental objects themselves. The affirmations are obviously there, but he is saying we make these affirmations about their independent existence out of the phenomena. Thus, it looks like Husserl's version of what Heidegger will later call "the they": a constructed "natural world" of general assumptions superimposed on a foundational ontology revealed in phenomenological analysis of Being and Time. We take, for Heidegger, the former "as" a natural world. Husserl is saying close to the same thing. The difference between them lies in the fantastic claim Husserl makes about this reduced phenomena being absolute.

So thanks for that!

What you refer to as the "3" of Heidegger's description of artist, art, and relation between these, can be found in Aquinas' description of the Holy Trinity. His description refers to father, son, and the relation between these two, represented in the Holy Trinity as as Holy Spirit. I believe this specific trinity, the Holy Trinity, was first described by Augustine, but the derivation of trinities in general may be traced back to Plato's tripartite soul. In Augustine the Holy Trinity is described by the analogy of memory, reason (or understanding), and will. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is also found in Kierkegaard's body, soul and spirit. The spirit is the dialectical tension that manifests as anxiety and alienation once one discovers the "nothing" at the foundation of everyday existence and turns away from "the sin of the race" which is essentially the temptations of the mundane affairs of a culture, especially, for Kierkegaard, the "idolatry" of Christendom. Sin begins here. Interesting to see how Heidegger plays this out in Being and Time.

Derrida in particular, bring the temporal nature of being to the forefront. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where, I wonder, does Derrida do this?

Your question 'how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible' follows from the assumption that you never see the lamp, only something prior to the seeing, in your own seeing.

To ask how it is possible to know that you see the lamp under the assumption that you never see it is not only impossible to answer but confused. You can dig deeper than Kant, but the root problem arises from that assumption, which in turn is derived from a rejection of naive realism.

Assuming naive realism, then you do in fact see the lamp, not something else in your own seeing. Seeing it, and the fact that it is there and visible, makes it possible to know that you're seeing it. — jkop

It is from Rorty, frankly. And he took a very disputatious issue and made a simple remark that really has nothing at all to do with schools of philosophical thought. I consider it a kind of primordial observation due to its simplicity: how does anything out there get in here? It is a question of knowledge, so the Gettier problems have a place, because when you examine all of the analytic efforts to deal with knowledge and the traditional analysis, the severed arm solution, the barn facsimile solution, and others, assumed that the normal causal sequencing that led from P to S had to be reestablished. But there was no recourse made to the matter of P being true being itself problematic. The problem lies in justification being separated from the truth of a thing, as if in the perception of P, P's being true had some independent standing apart from the conditions in play justify positing P. To do this, it has to be show that P can be disentangled from justification. I say can't be done.

Not so much naive realism. True, such a thing fails miserably to explain knowledge relations. But keep in mind that Quine held just this view that causality was the bottom line for all inquiries into relations in the world:
the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.(Quine, “Facts of the Matter,” 168–69)

Physics was the bottom line.

Certainly does NOT follow from the assumption that I never see the lamp. Not sure where this comes from. But a question that looks at the knowledge relation between me and my lamp and asks how it this possible? It is stunning in its simplicity as a existential query. I mean, forget philosophy. Two objects, a brain and a lamp. Causality fails instantly. So how?

Resort to talk about the "things in themselves" and their impossible "transcendental" nature is a start.It could be that what we acknowledge as apodictic causality is really an underlying metaphysical unity. Quantum entanglement seems to suggest something like this.

Astrophel is being a bit obtuse in general — AmadeusD

I beg your puddin! Obtuse? Me? Okay, here and there.

Hehehe. Equally, "hehehe" at @Count Timothy von Icarus Toad Venom comment.

I am not necessarily using any philosophical dialectic, — ENOAH

When I wrote "dialect", I did not mean "dialectic". But maybe you are pointing to the same issue - mutual comprehension. There's only one philosophy that seriously tried not to use specialized philosophical dialect/language/dialectic - "ordinary language philosophy" - and that didn't end well. (I say that it turned out that ordinary language was just another speciality.) I think we have to look at some sort of translation between philosophies if there is to be any kind of dialogue. You are clearly succeeding in that, because I at least have the impression that I can partly understand what you are saying.

This was an over simplification. But, alas, oversimplifying, I find, is unavoidable in a forum like this. — ENOAH

Everything is an over-simplification. There's no final statement of a philosophical doctrine. What matters is relevance to the matter at hand. I need to think over what you say, but I will respond - as briefly as I can.

Your question 'how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible' follows from the assumption that you never see the lamp, only something prior to the seeing, in your own seeing. — jkop

It is worse than that. If you know that you never see the lamp, you must know what it would be like to see the lamp. That means it is possible to see the lamp (under some circumstances). This "assumption" involves changing the meaning of "see". But the idea that hallucinating that you see a lamp (etc.) assumes that "hallucinating" is like seeing, but different. So even the conclusion that when we think we see a lamp we are hallucinating see the lamp, still assumes that it is possible to see the lamp.

That something is, is found in a proposition. Quantification or domain of discourse. — Banno

Surely, more accurately, that something is, is found in a true proposition (but not in a false one). But I would agree that a (meaningful) domain of discourse includes criteria for distinguishing between truth and falsity. But discourse is not, as formal logic is supposed to be, a structure fixed for all circumstances - the rules can break down, but they can be revised. That seems to me to address, at least partly, the fundamental concerns here.

Robots that make "perceptual errors" are only epistemically wrong in the sense of behaving in a fashion that their owners find undesirable. So if humans are robots, then humans don't really make epistemic errors when they fall victim to optical illusions.

Sure they do, or at least they CAN: an illusion can lead you to make a prediction, and your prediction can be *wrong*.

I'm in a desert and I see an oasis in the distance, a deep pool of fresh water. I predict I'll be drinking in an hour when I get there. I walk towards it and an hour later, there's no water and I realize I was looking at a mirage.

How is that not an epistemic error even if humans are robots? This robot had a model of it's surroundings, it used that model to make a prediction, the prediction was wrong, followed by realization that the model was wrong.

Where, I wonder, does Derrida do this? — Astrophel

Check out "Voice and Phenomena". We did a reading group on it here at TPF, a few years ago. It is a critique of some work by Husserl.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/512/reading-group-derridas-voice-and-phenomenon/p1

You'll find that by Ch. 4 he develops the concept of "repetition" which is an essential aspect of the nature of a "sign". It is a sort of recurrence of sameness. This is supported by the idea of "presence", as defined by present. The "present" grounds the presence of being, and the self in general as "I", it is an eternal sameness which transcends the individual.

Certainly does NOT follow from the assumption that I never see the lamp. Not sure where this comes from. — Astrophel

From the Kantian attempt to explain how the perceived object conforms to concepts, where seeing the lamp means "seeing" a version of the lamp that has been conformed by your perceptual apparatus.

In your previous post you write this:

I don't think perceptions are different from beliefs. All perceptions are apperceptions. When you see a cup, you know what it is IN the seeing, that is, the cup is already known prior to the seeing, and seeing it is a confirmation about the conformity between what you see and the predelineated "cupness" that you come into the perceptual encounter with that allows you to spontaneously without question or analysis note that it is indeed a cup — Astrophel

If seeing the lamp means confirming a conformed version of the lamp, then the word 'seeing' is used in a different sense. In this sense you never see the lamp but something else, a figment of conformity, whose visual features are conceptual, not empirical. Seeing a conformed version of the lamp's visible features is different from seeing the lamp's visible features.

But a question that looks at the knowledge relation between me and my lamp and asks how it this possible? It is stunning in its simplicity as an existential query. I mean, forget philosophy. Two objects, a brain and a lamp. Causality fails instantly. So how? — Astrophel

Perception is complex, but I think it is helpful to avoid fallacies of ambiguity that result in a world of conformed lamps that you supposedly "see" (a conceptualized way of 'seeing') and transcendental lamps that we supposedly never see.

Good, that's what I hoped you would say. The "direction of fit" question is important, and we don't want the two senses of "perception" to escape very far from each other's orbit. But would you agree that "supervenience" is not "causality," and that the story we tell about how sense-1 and sense-2 perceptions connect doesn't have to be a causal one?

Like you, I apologize to others on this thread if I'm veering too far off topic. Just want to give this one point a closer look.

Yes, historically and throughout disparate cultures and eras, and through all different minds. Hegel lived before Darwin. I think his ideas could make significant use of natural selection, and might have spread to "all minds."

If we were to one day meet ETs and exchange ideas with them, I think we'd be including them as well. Being coming to know itself as self happens everywhere there is subjectivity.

I think selection-like processes at work in the cosmos more generally and the sort of fractal recurrence we see at different scales would have really interested Hegel. Astronomy was in its infancy in his day though, I don't even think our galaxy was known as a thing back then, although Kant had proposed the nebular theory of solar system development by then. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hegelian Darwinsim? I like this because evolution as a physical process fails to see that the theory itself is produced IN an evolutionary manifestation. The evolved organism is neither an organism, nor anything else we can imagine beyond the framework of our own delimited determinations. Not organically delimited, but phenomenologically delimited.

But here is what I don't agree about Hegel. It's Kierkegaard who complained that Hegel had "forgotten that we exist." The way I see it, there is no account of what our existence is about that can exceed the concrete living reality of an individual experience. This rests with the brief but startling encounter itself, and things get Cartesian. I am referring to Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation, where he writes

when I say 'I am happy' or more simply 'I am', that which turns out to
be 'aimed at' by my affirmation is possible only insofar as Being has
already appeared. Thus shonld not the true object of an inaugural
inquiry be the Being of the ego rather than the ego itself, or more
precisely, the Being in and by which the ego can rise to existence
and acquire its own Being? This is why the Cartesian beginning is
not at all 'radical', because such a beginning is possible only upon
a foundation which he did not clarify and which is more radical than
the beginning.

He is following through on Husserl's reduction. The Cartesian move toward an indubitable foundation for being and epistemology gave Descartes the cogito, but his res extensa is thereby derivative. Henry is saying the cogito cannot even be conceived without an object, that is, if one thinks, it is not an independent agency of thought that is absolutely confirmed as a stand alone agency of thought. Such a thing is inconceivable. What cannot be doubted is the phenomenon "in consciousness". This makes the Cartesian method complete in determining the world as the world in a non derivative way. It is not historical, but structural. The point is, the structural comes first. It is antecedent to any historical ontology. It is the hands on "fleshy" encounter with the world that, while certainly open and interpretatively indeterminate, the therest "there" possible.
Kierkegaard was right in affirming existence over essence, if you want to talk like that. Of course, the cogito is affirmed as well, which is the whole idea of Henry Essence of Manifestation: how do the eidetic structures imposed on phenomena provide for this clarity of the affirmation of existence, given that existence can be "conceived" to be not of the nature of language at all. Case in point: put a lighted match to your finger and observe. This is not an interpretative exercise, but is altogether something else. Any form of rationalism or historicism has to deal with this.

But for me, this doesn't go far enough. It is not the phenomenon as such that steals the show for ontological affirmation. It is value-in-being. The cat is taken "as" a cat in an interpretative apprehension of "that" on the rug (as Heidegger put it). But this "taking as" is an historical apprehension in a language event. In value, the "affectivity" is, if you will, its own essence. Unspeakable, but, as Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."

There may be an historical account to the generative possibilities of experience, but this, too, would be conceived in the primordial structure of a lived experience.

Just so. It is a bit foggy this morning, so I may be overusing misty metaphors, but here again one might hope Astrophel's cloud might eventually also condense into something a bit more transparent.

For now it might be best left to itself. — Banno

Just to note, Banno, that Lionino did a hit a run, that is, made a disparaging comment, then announced he didn't want to discuss it any more. Like taking the ball and going home. Not acceptable.

His trouble was that he was confused about the issue do to a lack of reading that investigates the agent's contribution in the apprehension of objects in the world.

If seeing the lamp means confirming a conformed version of the lamp, then the word 'seeing' is used in a different sense than when seeing means the visual experience of the lamp's visible features. In this sense you never see the lamp but something else, a figment of conformity, whose visual features are conceptual, not empirical. — jkop

No, no. And Kant has little to do with it. Call it common sense: You learned a language long ago. What was that? The infant mind faces models of interpersonal relations in parents, others, and in this language is observed and assimilated and associations between things and their language counterparts established. Now there you are, years later, equipped with this symbolic system to describe, discuss, think. Asked what something is, and there is language "ready to hand" for deployment.

As an infant, the world was a "blooming and buzzing" mess. The process of it achieving some articulation in your world was through language, unlike a rabbit's world, say. A rabbit goes hopping around through hill and dale, BUT: she is not hopping through a language articulated world, a symbolic world. In that world, is a hill a "hill"? Obviously not. But it is for your world.

Do you really think the world wears its symbolic possibilities "on its sleeve" so to speak? Or are these possibilities generated in social environments, making an alinguistic world (whatever that could be; notice how my saying this stands as a performative contradiction. The difficulty of Wittgenstein's Tractatus leaps to mind) toe the line of our categories for our pragmatic (and existential?) endeavors?