And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy: — Joshs

Of course. He wound things right back to raw phenomenology so as to get going again on a more solid epistemic basis. That is how he could then commit so wholeheartedly to an ontology where the Cosmos is the evolutionary product of "the universal growth of concrete reasonableness", its laws "the development of inveterate habit".

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism.

This is a good summary....

Peirce’s cosmological metaphysics is perhaps the most interesting of his metaphysical writings. Where his general metaphysics discusses the reality of the phenomenological categories, his cosmological work studies the reality and relation to the universe of his work in the normative sciences. The cosmological metaphysics looks at the aesthetic ideal (the growth of concrete reasonableness) and its attainment through growth and habit in the universe at large.

In Peirce’s cosmology, the universe grows from a state of nothingness to chaos, or all pervasive firstness. From the state of chaos, it develops to a state in which time and space exist, or a state of secondness, and from there to a state where it is governed by habit and law, i.e. a state of thirdness. The universe does this, not in a mechanistic or deterministic way, but by tending towards habit and a law-like nature through chance and spontaneous transition. This chance-like transition towards thirdness is the growth of concrete reasonableness, i.e. the attainment of the aesthetic ideal through the spontaneous development of habit.

Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology has left many commentators uneasy about its relation to the rest of his work. His development of it during his own life time led some of his friends to fear for his sanity. Indeed, Peirce’s turn towards cosmological metaphysics is often attributed to a mystical experience and crisis of faith in the 1890’s. In truth, Peirce takes his cosmological work to be the logical upshot of the normative sciences and logic, which show the nature and desirability of the growth of reason. Cosmological metaphysics merely shows how the growth of concrete reasonableness occurs in the universe at large.

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism. — apokrisis

i certainly agree that the way that we characterize the genesis and nature of human reason and logical understanding serves as a model for our understanding of the world. If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, then this will define our understanding of the world. But how would
the universe look to us, and how would we approach the structure of its reasonableness, if we adopted a post-sovereign epistemology?

What, then, does a post-sovereign epistemology have to say about the legitimation of knowledge? The crucial point is not that there is no legitimacy, but rather that questions about legitimation are on the same "level" as any other epistemic conflict, and are part of a struggle for truth. In the circulation of contested, heterogeneous knowledges, disputes about legitimacy, and the criteria for legitimacy, are part and parcel of the dynamics of that circulation. Understanding knowledge as "a strategical situation" rather than as a definitive outcome places epistemological reflection in the midst of ongoing struggles to legitimate (and delegitimate) various skills, practices, and assertions. Recognizing that the boundaries of science (or of knowledge) are what is being contested, epistemology is within those contested boundaries.

If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, — Joshs

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight.

Your quote aims at the usual fashionable social “good” of pluralism. But that seems to be “reasonable” only as an epistemic claim based on an endless capacity to doubt. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole.

So all this talk about struggles and boundaries seems only to come from a presupposition about pluralism and its need to overcome totalising discourses, particularly ones such as pragmatism which seem intolerably successful. Just too good to be true.

But let’s first address the actual epistemic difference that separates those who claim there is always going to be a reason one can doubt - hence all possibilities remain forever in play - and those who instead say being reasonable has to be founded in a willingness to hazard a guess and live pragmatically with its consequences. That is the one best way to proceed when it comes to knowledge.

Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole. — apokrisis

Well put

Here's the visible spectrum. — Michael

The light without color?

Earlier you forwarded the claim "there is no color in light". The visible spectrum is light. If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum.

Yet you offer a rainbow called the visible spectrum.



Colorless rainbows. Earlier I was pointing out that possible unacceptable logical consequence. Here it is in it's glory.

Light exposure influences the biological machinery to do different things... mindlessly. This includes the eyes, when looking at the infamous image of the dress.

The light without color?

Earlier you forwarded the claim "there is no color in light". The visible spectrum is light. If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum.

Yet you offer a rainbow called the visible spectrum.

Colorless rainbows. — creativesoul

Light is just electromagnetic radiation, which is the synchronized oscillations of electric and magnetic fields. Colour is not a property of these fields. When it stimulates the eyes this causes neurological activity in the visual cortex, producing colour percepts. Just like chemicals stimulating the tongue cause neurological activity in the gustatory cortex, producing taste percepts. Colours are no more "in" light than tastes are "in" sugar.

Your naive projection has long since been refuted by physics and neuroscience.

The light without color?

Earlier you forwarded the claim "there is no color in light". The visible spectrum is light. If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum.

Yet you offer a rainbow called the visible spectrum.

Colorless rainbows.
— creativesoul

Light is just electromagnetic radiation. When it stimulates the eyes this causes neurological activity in the visual cortex, producing colour percepts. Just like chemicals stimulating the tongue cause neurological activity in the gustatory cortex, producing taste percepts. Colours are no more "in" light than tastes are "in" sugar. — Michael

Are you saying that there are colorless rainbows?

Light is unlike chemicals.

Colors are unlike chemicals. — creativesoul

Correct, they are like tastes. They are mental percepts caused by neurological activity, often in response to sensory stimulation.

Are you saying that there are colorless rainbows? — creativesoul

It's not clear what you mean by the question, but I'll quote Newton's Opticks:

The homogeneal Light and Rays which appear red, or rather make Objects appear so, I call Rubrifick or Red-making; those which make Objects appear yellow, green, blue, and violet, I call Yellow-making, Green-making, Blue-making, Violet-making, and so of the rest. And if at any time I speak of Light and Rays as coloured or endued with Colours, I would be understood to speak not philosophically and properly, but grossly, and accordingly to such Conceptions as vulgar People in seeing all these Experiments would be apt to frame. For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour.

Rainbows look coloured because the various wavelengths of light cause various neurological activity in the visual cortex producing various colour percepts. This is the scientific fact.

Are you saying that there are colorless rainbows?
— creativesoul

It's not clear what you mean by the question — Michael

It follows from what you wrote. I showed that.

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight — apokrisis

The chair certainly produces predictable constraints and affordances in response to our engagement with it, but the meaning of ‘chair’, that is, what those constraints and affordances entail, are the result of neither of a practice-independent reality impinging itself on us anor world-independent conception forcing itself on the world. Rather, the pragmatic use defines the sense of the reality of the chair, and as our practical engagements transform themselves in tandem with the world that they shape, the meaning of a pragmatic use context, and the empirical and theoretic concepts built from it, changes its sense. Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.

t. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole. — apokrisis

We are already intimately and actively embedded within a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. Truth and falsity relate to the relative amenability of aspects within those intelligible patterns of engagement. We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions.

The homogeneal Light and Rays which appear red, or rather make Objects appear so, I call Rubrifick or Red-making; those which make Objects appear yellow, green, blue, and violet, I call Yellow-making, Green-making, Blue-making, Violet-making, and so of the rest. And if at any time I speak of Light and Rays as coloured or endued with Colours, I would be understood to...

Be equivocating.

If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum. — creativesoul

Light exposure influences the biological machinery to do different things... mindlessly. This includes the eyes, when looking at the infamous image of the dress. — creativesoul

These comments are inconsistent. The first states the visible spectrum is light. The second states the visible spectrum is biologically created. The first is a direct realism claim. The second is an indirect realism claim.

An internal experience of light can be experienced without there being any external light source. These are called phosphenes and they can be created predictably with electrodes in the brain, so much so that they can assist those with damaged optic nerves to "see."

https://www.pennmedicine.org/departments-and-centers/ophthalmology/about-us/news/department-news/vision-scientist

The point of this is that it is empirically proven that an internal, subjective experience can be evoked by direct brain stimulation. This means that you cannot conclude anything about the constitution of the stimulus from the experience. The smell you smell is the product of stimuli upon the brain, so the perception is entirely the creation of the brain.

You can no more say the electrode is a dot of light than you can say the tree is green.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world. — Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences".

We are already intimately and actively embed with a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. — Joshs

And so? Didn't I say that Peirce started to get things right by beginning over from that givenness and then carefully examining its logical structure.

We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions. — Joshs

Again, I just shake my head as you describe the Bayesian Brain at work. We come at the world armed with all the habits of anticipation that were found to be required to cope with that world. As babes, our phenomenology is just a blooming, buzzing, confusion. From experience, we learnt to pragmatically organise this into a known world behaving in predictable ways. Like little scientists, we formed the stories and lived by their consequences, continually growing and learning, updating our habits of belief to the degree that practice required.

You are not saying anything I wouldn't say here. But you are avoiding the point I made. And that is that your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted.

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me. Or certainly, self-contradicting.

If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum.
— creativesoul

Light exposure influences the biological machinery to do different things... mindlessly. This includes the eyes, when looking at the infamous image of the dress.
— creativesoul

These comments are inconsistent. — Hanover

The first paragraph shows the consequences of adding Michael's earlier claims to known fact.

The second paragraph is also known fact. It makes no difference to me whatsoever which one counts as "direct realism" or which one counts as "indirect". I'm neither. At least, I reject the idea of color as a biologically independent entity.

The point of this is that it is empirically proven that an internal, subjective experience can be evoked by direct brain stimulation. This means that you cannot conclude anything about the constitution of the stimulus from the experience. — Hanover

And yet... you and Michael are doing exactly that.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.
— Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences". — apokrisis

How does Peirce understand the relation between model and what is to be modeled? Would he agree with the following from Rouse?

Models should be thought of as simulacra rather than representations. The crucial difference is that representation too often denotes a semantic content that intervenes between knowers and the world, whereas simulacra are just more things in the world, with a multiplicity of relations to other things. What makes them models, with an in­tentional relation to what they model, is their being taken up in practices, ongoing patterns of normatively accountable use.

The recognition of models as simulacra extends the interconnection of meaning and power beyond the immediate relation between speakers and their interpreters. To see why this is so, consider a question sometimes asked rhetorically about meaning: how could merely representing things differently possibly have a causal influence on them? A similar question about simulacra cannot have the same rhetorical effect: simulacra are transformations of the world, and more significantly, they transform the available possibilities for human action. They do so both by materially enabling some activities and obstructing others, and also by changing the situation such that some possible actions or roles lose their point, while others acquire new significance.

your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted. — apokrisis

Rouse follows Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger in dissolving the basis of Cartesian doubt. Descartes’s understanding of the basis of skepticism, the gap between the perceiving subject and the perceived world, is based on unexamined presuppositions concerning the nature of subjectivity and objectivity which produce this gap (and this doubt) in the first place. We always stand within one social framework or another of practices of meaning, and the concept of doubt simply doesn’t arise at the level of the framework as a whole. It is only within the structure of a particular contingent framework (language game, paradigm, form of life, constructed niche) that we can doubt particular facts and talk of truth and falsity.A language game provides us with the presuppositions that make doubt or validation intelligible. When we move from one language game to another, it is not a question of doubting or invalidating the previous game, but of entering into a new world. What constitutes reliable or unreliable belief is only determinable within each game, but does not apply to transitions between them. Did Kuhn say that Newtonian physics was replaced by modern physics because the former was an unreliable form of belief, or because, while both were reliable in their own way, the latter solved a greater number of puzzles?

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me — apokrisis

I’m perfectly comfortable agreeing with Foucault and Deleuze that the subject is an effect produced by social processes of subjectification, and that points of view are only intelligible within larger shared practices of meaning.

Your naive projection has long since been refuted by physics and neuroscience. — Michael

Strawdogs and ad homs... wonderful.

There is a clear distinction between wavelengths of light and the corresponding colour... — Michael

Colors corresponding to wavelengths of light...

Are there colorless rainbows?

Are there colorless rainbows? — creativesoul

I responded to this above. If Newton doesn't answer the question then you need to clarify what you mean by it.

And yet... you and Michael are doing exactly that. — creativesoul

I'm not concluding anything from my experience. I am telling you what physics and neuroscience have determined. I accept what the scientists say about the way the world works, not what some armchair philosopher says.

Any other use of the word "red", e.g. to describe 620-750 light, or an object that reflects 620-750 light, is irrelevant, because the relevant philosophical question is "do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive [colour] property that they do appear to have?", and this question is not answered by noting that we use the word "red" in these other ways. — Michael

Ripeness?

Colors are unlike chemicals. — creativesoul


Correct, they are like tastes. They are mental percepts caused by neurological activity, often in response to sensory stimulation. — Michael

My question is: Why are humans such suckers for foliage?

Reds, yellows, oranges, browns. What do we get out of seeing the foliage? Is it a sign for the opportunities to come? Is it the weather we love? Is it the the photo op? Is it the beauty? Is it nature, showing us this beauty? Do we realize that?

The changing colors of leaves in the fall, for example, show their aging life phase. BUT what are animals seeing that we are not equally concerned with, or aware of, as we sip our pumpkin spice chai latte's, living our best lives under the foliage? Posing for "pictures or it never happened" to share this moment with our fans, they will see on our socials how we show off our meals and our acts in the day via Shoutbox or Instagram! It signals to people different messages than what it signals to animals, either way its updating information in our brains...were learning to "know" something more from this experience...both ends.

For animals, the leaves changing colors is a sign for the changing climate and what the next move is. Observing these changes can predict a lot about the family, tree, and the environment.

Another important part that color attributes to in nature is involved in a dynamic process occurring with plants, fruits and veggies and their color changing process. As fruits ripen, the degradation of chlorophyll reveals other pigments that were always present, and additional pigments are produced. This process is signalling ripeness to animals, which in turn aids in seed dispersal. This could show how color changes are not random but serve a purpose seemingly specific to the survival of certain species in nature.

I don't like the taste of browning bananas, I like them while they're green!

Our perception of color is influenced by sensory and neural mechanisms, but the role of color in nature points to an external reality that transcends individual perception. I'm aware that while color seems to have an objective basis in nature, it doesn't fully resolve whether colors exist independently of perceiving minds.

Maybe we have the same beetle, maybe we don't. We must realize it's irrelevant so we remain silent about it. — Hanover

Remaining silent, hiding from light might be wise if you are a liar and have no beetle after all. It's like interacting with a catfish, who is a person using another persons looks, identity, color to portray something they are not. A deception in action, pretending to be a super model, when in reality they are obese and not in the league of where they are trying to play...They didn't think that far, so the deception is real...The ugly chick knows what her type WANTS to see, the person she is fooling also knows what they want. The ugly chick wouldn't even get the time of day if they crossed paths in daylight, maybe in a poorly lit bar after heavy consumption, she gets lucky.

So she thinks, so she knows... Then of course to remain silent in irrelevance as one would anyways, is fine because no one wants to see it. No one wants to hear it. Or them. They are too ugly, words are too sad, and the lives are too painful. Not a single soul needs it. We also don't need to see what is, only what works for us to survive and reproduce. The consequences are colorful and your behavior is telling. It's called a "red flag" for a reason...we want more from things than we ought to think about in silence, in acts that never come to light. The thoughts, ideas, dreams, memories. We want answers before we are fit to handle and when we are willing to accept what those options are, it may be too late to experience again.

How rude of me to think, "Hide all the ugly people, I dont want to look at them." Ha! But how nice of me to be honest with my preferred....taste. Remember, the Lipstick Effect? How colors and visual appeal have deep-rooted significance in human behavior.

If your point is that we don't doubt our conceptual frames, we only doubt within the constraints of those frames, then of course I agree.

And also, as humans, our conceptual frames are socioculturally expanded. We are involved in some grander language game. Joshs born Aztec is very different from Joshs born in, say, 1970s Ohio, or 12th Century India.

But do you now agree that sociocultural multiplicity – that pluralism, that degree of social freedom – is still the product of pragmatic constraints? That it is a way of life that works in the usual organismic sense of being able to repair and reproduce the fabric of its being over some longer run? As a set of habits, it has proven itself properly tested against a larger ecological reality?

So to claim plurality as itself "natural" can only be true within the framework of pragmatism.

One could of course claim that plurality is natural as there is something else that transcends the pragmatism of being an ecologically-constrained organism. For example, a target beyond "this world" in the shape of a divine imperative or some moral absolute.

But is this the argument you are making? And if not, are you content with an ecological constraint on the freedom of our language games and ways of life?

We can try stuff out within those limits? We can do our best to imagine ourselves a better world by more deeply understanding the world we were already thrust into with some set of genetic habits.

We probably do agree this far. Except a lot of those with a utopian concern for the current state of human society don't really seem to want to factor in the environmental constraints on the expression of our social freedoms.

I would argue for example that social justice becomes a nice to have when the question is how do we avoid ecological disaster.

That is why I focus on the "superorganism" analysis of the human condition. The one that places our collective trajectory in its larger thermodynamic context. Our everyday choices must be seen to be making pragmatic sense within that long-run conceptual frame.

You're contradicting yourself at nearly every turn, in addition to the fact that your 'argument' leads to the absurdity of you claiming out loud, for everyone to see, that you do not conclude anything about stimulus from your experience all the while insisting that there is no color in stimulus.

But the colour just is that mental percept — Michael

Notice that this is not the conclusion of your account, but a presumption.

I am telling you what physics and neuroscience have determined. — Michael

No, you aren't. They have 'determined" no such thing. You are treating the presumption as if it were a conclusion.

You are taking the special case in which for the purposes of experiment researchers restrict "seeing red" to having a "mental percept of red" and taking this to be what "seeing red' is in every other case.

...falsely believed by the naive realist to be a mind-independent property of the tomato — Michael

An imagined naive realists and mind-independent properties. You haven't explained what that might be. Is your claim that "The tomato is red" is true only when someone is looking at it? So there are no red tomatoes in a box, unobserved? One can never order a box of red tomatoes without threatening metaphysical collapse?

The tomato is red" is true only when someone is looking at it? — Banno

Does the mildew smell nauseating when no one is smelling it?

[

there are no red tomatoes in a box, unobserved? One can never order a box of red tomatoes without threatening metaphysical collapse? — Banno

There is no nauseating mildew in a box unsmelled? One can never order a box of nauseating mildew without threatening metaphysical collapse?

You haven't thought this through. — Banno

Someone hasn't. That's for sure.

But making me feel nauseous isn't like making me see red!

Yes it is.

Was that post intended to say something, ?