I am never disappointed when I return to Hume. As a young man I foolishly preferred the Enquiries, so I am eternally grateful to you for getting me to engage more deeply with the Treatise.

Of course!

I don't recall if I discussed it much in that thread, but one thing that was very eye-opening for me was reading Galen Strawson's interpretations of Hume regarding causality and (especially) identity: The Secret Connexion and The Evident Connexion.

Though he can be quite dense in exposition, he's an excellent interpreter of those he discusses. It made me approach the Treatise with a different lens.

I'm gratified you found so much to agree with.

I was very impressed by the idea (in Mercier and Sperber) that participants in a discussion systematically simplify and exaggerate their positions, in both the definiteness of their view and their confidence in it, and that this is strategic: you're responsible for bringing a view to the table, others bring others, and you argue to some kind of consensus that would enable group action. (Reasons are in part excuses you offer others to make going along with you palatable.) We're crap at judging our own views but pretty good at criticizing others.

It reminds me of the way apo talks about "sharpness". It also explains, for me, why I found so attractive Dummett's occasional comparison of assertion to wagering: you can calculate the odds to a fare-thee-well and make your model as complicated as you like, but then you have to bet, which is sharp, rounding all probabilities to 1 or 0, and that's the nature of decisions.

And it's pretty obvious that something like this is right at the root of language use. We talk digital even if we mostly live analog.

you can calculate the odds to a fare-thee-well and make your model as complicated as you like, — Srap Tasmaner

We talk digital even if we mostly live analog. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. Whatever model you have needs individuated states in it though. Like if you're simulating the weather, you need states corresponding to air pressure, space, time etc. In that regard air pressure, space, time need to be conceived as distinct but related.

As you were saying with object permanence, or rather as I read it, there is a sense in which we learn to perceptually differentiate our environment into meaningful chunks relevant to a task. Environmental objects can help in this by having stable properties with respect to a (class of) environmental interventions or exploratory activity. Like reflectance spectra, topography, friction, wetness, what chemicals they emit...

I think we tend to talk about talk as if we talk digital. But I remain unconvinced that language is principally made of chunks, or properties/predicates/relations which induce chunks. You can think of it like that, but it seems to be the same thing as above to me. Whatever you lose in words which music expresses is also part of language.

I like thinking of our capacity to individuate along extant joints in the world+nature as building sensory organs out of enacted patterns. Which is obviously pseudoprofound bullshit made out of weasel words, but I believe it all the same. Like you can learn to smell a linear relationship on a graph.

Whatever model you have needs individuated states in it though — fdrake

For what we do, sure, but I keep thinking the brain is so much messier. The individuated steps there are each neurotransmitter binding to a site or not, an individual ion passing through a pump or not, all subject to randomness, with overall effects that are more naturally described in analog rather than digital terms. (Slightly more or less this or that.)

I think we tend to talk about talk as if we talk digital. But I remain unconvinced that language is principally made of chunks, or properties/predicates/relations which induce chunks. — fdrake

Yeah that's better. I was simplifying and exaggerating. I do believe that our misunderstandings about language are not fortuitous, even this one, but almost required. Language is a system that misrepresents itself to us, encourage us to misunderstand it. (One of LW's motivating interests.)

For what we do, sure, but I keep thinking the brain is so much messier. The individuated steps there are each neurotransmitter binding to a site or not, an individual ion passing through a pump or not, all subject to randomness, with overall effects that are more naturally described in analog rather than digital terms. (Slightly more or less this or that.) — Srap Tasmaner

I'm going to continue talking in metaphors because I don't have better structured thoughts. And also because that seems fit for task.

I think the body is very much messier yeah. I was speaking in terms of any model you can write down, it has typed states. Like "this number means air pressure", or "this subset of the model's nodes correspond to proposed actions".

Maybe even for those models, their generated representations don't have states in the pre-typed manner above. We pre-allocated air pressure at a space/time and a value in a model. Our neurones conversely can somehow create an ensemble which tracks such changes, with appropriate "holes" in it for variables and concepts and worlds. Neural networks of sufficient size can synthesise predictive features. We tend to individuate those features ourselves, keep track of them, record them, create sensors for them...

The body somehow solves a problem of individuation. Somehow out of all the passage in and out the permeable membrane of our body-environment, we end up with sensory-conceptual-comportmental organelles sensitised to the body-environment's self differentiating trajectories. I can somehow attune to the undulations in air underneath my desk to feel it rattish, as a rat, but outside it's a suitcase on gravel. I can somehow read an opinion and get a sense of whether it would offend a group. I can know if I'm hangry or whether my partner has been inconsiderate.

It's at this point that I realise we've had this conversation before about 8 years ago with @Streetlight.

Overall, I share your position, and you developed a high-quality argument. I want to add a few remarks.

There may be a giant hole in this argument. I gestured at the evidence that infants have a concept of object permanence, later acquire object identity, later still recognize other minds, and so on. That's all infra-linguistic, so aren't these very studies evidence that we have such concepts and that they are among the metaphysical assumptions I would place in our unconscious brains? — Srap Tasmaner

You could strengthen your argument by emphasizing the role of the social environment in infants’ acquiring patterns of permanence. The features of psychological development could be attributed to the historical but most stable factors of a child’s socio-communicative medium.

Another way I could put it is this: if there are invariants in the models our brains use, something we might call artifacts of those models, then those would in some sense be our "metaphysical assumptions." But I think there's a whole separate set of invariants at work in our linguistic communication with one another, and they need not be based on how our brains are modeling our bodies and environments; they are what we've landed on as the structure of our communication, and I think by and large the structure of our introspective thought reflects that structure, not the modeling our brains are doing below the level of our awareness. Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. There do seem to be a whole host of assumptions underlying our speech and our conscious thought, but no reason to think they are the "assumptions" of our unconscious modeling. — Srap Tasmaner

What do you mean by writing, ‘the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication’? It looks closely to Searle’s explanation of the relation between sets of socio-behavioural, potentially linguistically articulated codes and blocks of ‘know-how,’ built into domains of our institutionalized milieu: “There is a set of dispositions that are sensitive and responsive to the specific content of the constitutive rules… The ‘Background’ is the set of “nonintentional or pre-intentional capacities, abilities, dispositions, and tendencies that enable intentional states to function. There is a parallelism between the functional structure of the Background and the intentional structure of the social phenomena to which the Background capacities relate”. (Searle, ‘The Construction of Social Reality’, pg. 143)
So, no unconscious modelling is built into the infrastructures of our brains or conscious thought. Yet, there is still a problem explaining the nature of Searle’s ‘parallelism’ or your thesis that ‘the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication.’ Is there an utterly isomorphic relation? Do we rely entirely on the existence of self-sufficient processes built into a socio-technological system that functions independently of the personal motives of the participants? If so, we could explain inherent to ourselves identical repetitions, but the phenomenon of conscious intentionality becomes the secondary effect of the institutional practices conditioned by the ‘Background.’

I was speaking in terms of any model you can write down — fdrake

Yeah, just wanted the distinction in print. "Model" is a pretty tricky thing that covers a lot of ground.

the role of the social environment in infants’ acquiring patterns of permanence — Number2018

I don't actually know what to say about that with object permanence, but a big yes yes yes to social context. Tomasello has this beautiful stuff about triangulating, how the infant doesn't just look at the toy but makes eye contact with the caregiver, apparently in reference to the toy. You can see this in real life any time you like. Very cool stuff.

The questions you raise about introspection being derivative of communication, kinda, that was all pretty hand-wavey for sure. It's the hunch that I quickly had as I found myself addressing how to interpret experiments with infants, which is a little controversial.

Have to think about that a lot more, and you might be right to bring in Searle.

defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states — Joshs

I wouldn't say it is just this, but also organisms acting on the external environment in order to realize the sensory experiences which confirm their own existence - to describe it in a Friston-esque manner.

I would say the bit at the end of your quote, which Thompson accuses standard cognition of leaving out:

how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity

Is exactly what Friston's theory is about.

At the same time, I think it's maybe worth noting that on Friston's account, there are Markov blankets within markov blankets on every level. Organisms are comprised of things with Markov blankets; they might also plausibly be construed as part of wider systems which have Markov blankets.

Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.

Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible. — fdrake

I acknowledge that pp models have moved in the direction
of ecological embodiment, and that enactivism itself is a big tent that overlaps with pp at certain junctures (Andy Clark and Daniel Hutto are examples of this).It is actually a small group of enactivists that I am interested in (Shaun Gallagher, Thomas Fuchs, Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson, Ezekiel De Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, Matthew Ratcliffe). Their brand of enactivism draws strongly from
Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and hermeneutics. I don’t know to what extent Barrett’s work is representative of pp, but if her model of emotions is the best that pp can come up with, it falls far short of what Ratcliffe has achieved, and exemplifies the extent to which pp hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than Barrett’s approach recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.

There was something that struck me about Barrett’s youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples, the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the person’s interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states.

In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isn’t that pp doesn’t have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question.

Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time
reciprocal causality. When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of
suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how one’s reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how one’s legs seem primed to race one’s body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients one’s inclinations to relate to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client's aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud's id-ego-superego psychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.

I'd just like to show appreciation and support to the contributors. This thread initially piqued my interest since it seemed relevant to my own position on a few things, but given my lack of knowledge regarding formal logic, I wasn't at all certain. I've chosen silent reading until now. The recent tangents regarding the early development of human thought and belief(mind) have been interesting as well.

I've nothing much to add aside from gratitude.

I was referring to the reduction of one science to another, and all of them eventually to physics.

Yup, me too. Conciousness comes in because supposedly it can be reduced to physics.

Now let's take a step back. Why did it occur to you to raise a counterexample to my observation? There wasn't much riding on my being right. I hadn't used the claim as a lemma in an argument. If you show that I was wrong, how do you expect that to affect whatever position you think I hold?

Well, from my view, what people think about the world shapes culture and how they behave. This makes it important. You can't divorce what people think about justice, beauty, and truth from philosophy, and these play a major role in history. Looking back historically, you see philosophical thought playing a major role in politics (and thus everyday life) in the Reformation, Enlightenment, etc. I don't think we have some how "moved beyond" this influence. The anti-metaphysical movement has just obscured this influence by redefining what philosophy is and trying to deny it a determinant role in culture or in the arch authority of "science" (which of course, is its own sort of "philosophy influencing culture").

At least in my experience, "the world is just atoms in the void, atoms don't have purposes, thus either there is no such thing as good and bad or else good and bad is something we 'create'" is a series of statements I see in all sorts of conversations: discussions of politics, discussions of fiction or movies, discussions of romantic relationships, etc. But this is clearly a view that is based on a sort of corpuscular metaphysics, even if it isn't examined that way and is simply taken to be "the way science says the world is."

And similar sorts of things pop up elsewhere. The idea that the world is a "simulation," the idea that reason is fractured and can't apply to certain areas of human life (ethics, religion, etc.). These seem pretty central to human life and identity. To say that, "people don't question if God exists in the way sets do," is evidence that they aren't interested in philosophy just seems to me to be too narrow of a definition of philosophy.

I think there is a lot of philosophy on the non-fiction best sellers list. It just doesn't tend to be written by academic philosophers. Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe," Pinker's "The Blank Slate," Scharf's "the Ascent of Information," Eddington's "The Rigor of Angels," Eckhart Tolle, etc. all have plenty of philosophy in them. In general, I think most good theoretical work in the sciences (and a lot of popular science) tends to involve philosophy. Not without reason is Einstein also called "the most important philosopher of physics of the 20th century." Likewise, folks like Rawls and Nozik get assigned to our future leaders in public policy programs, while undergrads in biology get asked questions in the philosophy of that field like: "what is life and are viruses alive?" or "are species real?"

I tend to think the philosophy that permeates the popular imagination often has pretty major consequences, even if it's hard to see in the moment, simply because this seems ostentatiously true vis-á-vis prior eras (now that it's all in the rearview mirror.) This is part of why I am not a fan of the anti-metaphysical movement.

Anyhow, moving back a bit:

Caveat number 2: it's widely understood that even statements of fact -- observations and such -- in the context of science are relative to a given theoretical framework. There's no pure non-theory-laden observation to be had, and no one pretends otherwise; rather, it's the theory that enables the observations to be made at all. (More Kant, etc. And absolutely every philosopher of science.)

Yup, but the conclusions which are drawn from this vary quite a bit. We are drawn to ask: "where do theories come from?" That they have cultural, linguistic, and historical determinants is obvious, but there is a weird tendency to move from this insight to the idea that this makes them in some way arbitrary, and thus disconnected from truth. "X is socially and historically determined, thus X cannot tell us about the way the world really is." Well, shouldn't history and culture themselves be determined by how the world is? The ghost of the positivist ideal of "objectivity as truth," seems to be lurking behind this, as well as the assumption that ideas, theories, language, etc. are all what we know instead of how we know.

Hegel's stance, that knowledge must come to involve an understanding of how it comes into being, seems like the more warranted response here. This will be circular, but all epistemology is circular if "the truth is the whole." Funny enough, there is an overlap between Popper's evolutionary account of science and Hegel's conception of all culture advancing due to internal contradictions.

To the extent that theory ladeness is used to support more pernicious forms of relativism, I tend to see the modern focus on potency over act at work. We can imagine theories being constructed and differing in seemingly infinite ways, thus we have a problem. But the reality is that we don't have infinite theories, we tend to have just a few competing ones, and they don't evolve arbitrarily.

Essentially, I think the historicity of knowledge is not a barrier to truth at all, but rather an aid to it. Culture, like words and ideas, is something we use to get to/through the world, not merely the object of our knowledge. All effects are signs of their cause, so culture just points back to that from which it emerges. Like you said, pluralism doesn't entail that everyone is right. I also don't think it entails a problem for truth unless truth itself is denied (the pernicious sort of pluralism/relativism). Gallagher puts it well:

Only the abstract is non-historical. Philosophy is, or should be, an effort to think the concrete. That is why it cannot attempt to surmount the conditions of temporality by seeking out categories which seem to be exempt from history, as do mathematics and logic. It is true that any mind at any socio-historical perspective would have to agree on the validity of an inference like: If A, then B; but A; then B. But such truths are purely formal and do not tell anything about the character of existence. If metaphysics views its categories as intelligible in the same manner, it has really taken refuge in formalism and forsworn the concrete. That is why a metaphysics which conceives itself in this way has such a hollow ring to it...

...Let us now consider the second aspect of the sociology of knowledge, its positive contribution. For the impression must not be left that the social and historical dimensions of knowledge are simply a difficulty to be somehow "handled" by one who wants to continue to maintain the objective value of our knowledge. This would be to miss the very real contribution made by the modem historical mode of thought to our appreciation of what objectivity is. Here we may advert to the remarks made in connection with Kant's view that we can only be properly said to know things and that only phenomenal consciousness (a combination of formal category and sense intuition) apprehends things. To this we may add, with Dewey and the pragmatists, that action is also involved in the conception of a "thing."24

Now with this in mind we may confer a very positive cognitional relevance on the social and historical dimensions of human existence. For if metaphysical categories like "being," "soul," "God," "immortality," "freedom," "love," "person," and so forth are to afford us the same assurance as phenomenal knowledge, they must be filled in with some kind of content-they must begin to bear upon something approximating a "thing." Now obviously this content cannot come from the side of sense intuition as such, which cannot exhibit these notions. It might come, how-ever, from action of a superior kind. And here is where the social and historical dimensions become extremely relevant. For it is through his higher activity as a social and historical being that man gives a visible manifestation to the meaning creatively apprehended in these philosophical concepts. His grasp of himself as a trans-phenomenal being is weakened and rendered cognitionally unstable unless he can read it back out of his existence. Therefore, the historical process by which he creates an authentic human existence for himself is integral to the cognitive grasp of the transcendent dimension of real.

Kenneth Gallagher - The Philosophy of Knowledge

existence for himself is integral to the cognitive grasp of the transcendent dimension of reality. [/quote]

Emotions come already world-directed — Joshs

Maybe Barrett is explaining how emotions are world-directed in terms of how interoceptive states are integrated with external environmental context and allostatic responses to stressors / in service of some kind of evolutionarily basic goals.

We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. — Joshs

Well think about all the different kinds of scenarios that may coincide with release of (nor)adrenaline in body and raised heartbeat. This is a dimension of the bodies response to scenarios which is present across many different contexts, anger, anxiety, excitement even. It may seem obvious how this can be distinguished in all these different scenarios but I think to some extent your conscious cortical regions actually have to learn to hone your bodies basic allostatic responses to the environment and then recognize different contexts because knowledge about the self doesn't come for free - under these accounts, what we know about ourselves is inferred in the exact same way as learning about the external world. Different social contexts (e.g. in different cultures) may then result in slightly different emotions which, while perhaps sharing a similar underlying basis in visceral(bodily) motor responses and ethological response programmes similar in various animals, is coupled to environmental contexts in different ways (and probably more complex ways than other animals). And we have to recognize these in our selves as well as in others - and we all have various levels of skill at it from very good to very poor.

the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it — Joshs

she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes — Joshs

I am not really sure I see an inherent conflict here. What she talks about just may reflect her priorities on what she wants to describe or explain compared to someone else.

but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole. — Joshs

But isn't talking about emotion in terms of components together what she is doing?

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). — Joshs

If you look at this from a free energy / active inference perspective (not sure if Barrett goes this far but I am trying to show that the contested views you are talking about are not actually inconsistent with each other), emotions would be linked to an organism which modulates its behaviour in response to how well it is minimizing free energy. What is minimizing free energy? It is fulfilling the predictions of an organism about the states it wants to exist in - it is about a goal-directed organism that is actively manifesting the sensory states which confirm its own existence, and when met with different obstacles or successes in this, you may have various emotional reactions and moods which reflect the organisms continual adaptation to its external circumstances in order to realize its own existence.

After all, the absolute is not reality with appearances removed, but reality + all appearances. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right: the absolute does not exclude the relative but the relative does exclude the absolute. I have been wanting to read more Schindler.

Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this point is even better made one step removed. Theological disagreements are implicit in many mundane disagreements. For example, the disagreement over Original Sin (theological or philosophical anthropology) underlies very many moral and political disagreements.

The crucial distinction is that signs are always "how we know," whereas more pernicious forms of pluralism often seems to rely on the claim that "signs are what we know." But if everything is signs, "appearance," then there can be no real reality/appearance distinction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agreed. I think this is important and I think the oversight of semiotics leads to a lot of problems.

-

Yup, but the conclusions which are drawn from this vary quite a bit. We are drawn to ask: "where do theories come from?" That they have cultural, linguistic, and historical determinants is obvious, but there is a weird tendency to move from this insight to the idea that this makes them in some way arbitrary, and thus disconnected from truth. "X is socially and historically determined, thus X cannot tell us about the way the world really is." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right: the inferences are not sound. I think Hume feeds into these unsound inferences:

I'd say that Hume's constant conjunction and the probability theories that tread similar ground are intellectually problematic insofar as they pre-pave a meta-rut for cognitive bias. For instance, we are now prone to mistake anthropological habits for natural probabilities. — Leontiskos

The reduction of sense data to constant conjunction brings with it a destruction of a posteriori inference, and with it a posteriori knowledge. This is the logical conclusion, and even those who do not embrace it are still sipping on it unconsciously. Once the idea of demonstrative (a posteriori) inference is abandoned, people can say whatever they like and it will appear just as "rational" as anything else. Thus the claims that things like languages or history exclude truth, despite being inferentially unsound, continue unabated. The real error here is what you have noted: the idea that an absolute cannot account for any form of relativity. It is the idea, for example, that truth cannot be mediated by language or history or what have you.

---

And I think that other way is captured, in part, in your usual suggestion that everything we do and say involves a metaphysics, generally unacknowledged and unexamined, and thus properly called our "metaphysical assumptions." — Srap Tasmaner

Compare the way that Sider connects quantification to truth:

To avoid triviality, a first step is to restrict our attention to meanings with a “shape” that matches the grammar of quantifiers. We may achieve this indirectly, as follows. Understand a “candidate meaning” henceforth as an assignment of meanings to each sentence of the quantificational language in question, where the assigned meanings are assumed to determine, at the least, truth conditions. “Candidate meanings” here are located in the first instance at the level of the sentence; subsentential expressions (like quantifiers) can be thought of as having meaning insofar as they contribute to the meanings of sentences that contain them. Thus quantifiers are assured to have meanings whose “shapes” suffice to generate truth conditions for sentences containing quantifiers. — Sider, Ontological Realism, 8-9

And he's right. Infants acquire the idea of object permanence even before the idea of object identity. They're not born with it, so far as we can tell, but it develops predictably, and so that pattern of development is more or less "built in." And it comes before language, and evidently would have to come before anything like rational thought, so it's not like you could reason your way there anyway. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that what very often happens with Humeans is that an assumption is made and everything follows from the assumption, but the assumption is contested and question-begging. For example, the neat and tidy understanding of reason as conscious discursive inference is not at all accepted by pre-moderns. If we accept that notion of reason then the infant is not using reason to know that an object has permanence, but why accept such a notion of reason? According to Aristotle repeated experience with, and memories of, an object(s) provides a condition whereby one is able to understand things about that object, such as its permanence. Knowledge is already had long before one gets to the point where they can write formal inferences on the chalkboard.

We could assume with Hume that each time we experience the sun and the sunrise we have a purely separate experience, unconnected to previous experience and memory. If this is right then we could never know anything about the sun, whether this knowledge has to do with its rising and setting or its heat. But why make such a silly assumption? The fact that we do know things about the sun is enough to dispel such a strange assumption. Yet if we do make the assumption then reason becomes weakened such that irrational things will appear rational, just as anything follows from a contradiction. If we make those sorts of weak assumptions universally, then our whole philosophy will be brittle and unsteady, along with everything built upon it. At this point the only reason to retain the odd assumptions seems to be that we have built much upon them, and to abandon the assumptions would be to abandon the edifice set upon it. ...Like a poor foundation that cannot be remedied without demolishing the house that sits atop it. But I wonder if this is really the case.

Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. — Srap Tasmaner

These sorts of assumptions, along with the sort of brain-physicalism moves, presuppose a strange skepticism which then makes rationality an epiphenomenon or artifact. Yet the performative self-contradiction again comes to bear, for the brain research you have read is purportedly rational. The scientists who do that research are using reason to access knowledge of the brain and thus behavior, and if rational inferences are nothing more than post-hoc rationalizations of something that occurs for an entirely separate reason, then there can be no reason to favor the scientist's rational inferences to the metaphysician's.

I want to say that the reason this is mistakenly taken to be rigorous is because of the democratic turn that has occurred. In Plato's day the common opinion was largely understood by the philosophers to be suspect. In our day if enough people (and scientists) promote Scientism or related theories, then even the philosophers accept these theories to be true. The Humean and probabilistic premises support such an approach. Reason has become more of a force to be measured, like the wind, rather than an art to be practiced.

That's pretty weird, but the main thing is that it suggests there's an entirely separate route to belief available: you saw the car accident happen, I only heard you talk about seeing it, and we both hold beliefs that it happened. — Srap Tasmaner

Er, this is just testimony or natural faith. It is the thing that the Enlightenment was determined to eradicate, and apparently it worked ("Sapere aude!").

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

Or maybe object permanence is simpler than you think. Maybe the infant can recognize an object, and he also believes that when the object disappears from sight it will reappear again. Maybe that's all we mean by object permanence.

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I was very impressed by the idea (in Mercier and Sperber) that participants in a discussion systematically simplify and exaggerate their positions, in both the definiteness of their view and their confidence in it, and that this is strategic: you're responsible for bringing a view to the table, others bring others, and you argue to some kind of consensus that would enable group action. (Reasons are in part excuses you offer others to make going along with you palatable.) We're crap at judging our own views but pretty good at criticizing others. — Srap Tasmaner

And it's pretty obvious that something like this is right at the root of language use. We talk digital even if we mostly live analog. — Srap Tasmaner

With @Count Timothy von Icarus, I think there are non-sequiturs occurring in these sorts of things. All of this is true, as well as the other things, like neuroscientific research, but does any of it really imply the metaphysical claims at the root of Hume? I don't think so. I'm not really sure why we would think such a thing. "We systematically simplify and exaggerate positions in discussion," ...therefore? What we have here, I aver, are data points that many different philosophical positions can and have taken into account. I don't see how they favor Humean or probabilistic views. :chin:

...So yeah. Hume? I don't see the appeal. I was recently looking at Hume's treatise on the passions, and it reminded me that if one is accustomed to Aristotle or Aquinas' deeply syllogistic method, Hume reads like a popular magazine article. I just don't see a lot of strict reasoning occurring there.

Edit: Worth quoting, I think:

Phaedo: Likely indeed, he said, but arguments are not like men in this particular.

Socrates: I was merely following your lead just now. The similarity lies rather in this: it is as when one who lacks skill in arguments puts his trust in an argument as being true, then shortly afterwards believes it to be false—as sometimes it is and sometimes it is not—and so with another argument and then another. You know how those in particular who spend their time c studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument, but that all that exists simply fluctuates up and down as if it were in the Euripus10 and does not remain in the same place for any time at all.

What you say, I said, is certainly true.

It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, when there is a true and reliable argument and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with such arguments as appear at one time true, at another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality.

Yes, by Zeus, I said, that would be pitiable indeed.

This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. — Plato, Phaedo, 90b..., tr. Grube

Jason De León's book — Srap Tasmaner

Last night won the National Book Award for Non-fiction.