Trouble is of course that if something is beyond discursive thought then it cannot be said. We could not have an argument that reached such a conclusion. And indeed the ending of elenchus is often aporia - the method of dissection ends without resolution. — Banno

Aporia can be seen as precisely the points where dialectic ends and noetic insight is required. The fact that language and symbolic thought is inherently limited, is something that can and has been a subject of philosophical discourse. Wittgenstein’s aphorism at the end of the Tractatus ('that of which...') is often treated as a full stop — a way to shut down discussion of anything that can’t be stated in propositional terms (especially by you!) . But it can also be read as a threshold: an acknowledgment that there is something beyond what can be said — something that may be shown, enacted, or lived. Anyway, the idea that wisdom might transcend discursive articulation isn’t foreign to philosophy — it runs through Plato, Plotinus, and arguably into Wittgenstein himself. It’s also central to Eastern philosophy, where sometimes silence becomes the highest form of answer, akin to 'see for yourself!'

Mysticism is often a pejorative term, shorthand for vagueness or woolly-headedness. And, to be fair, it often is that. Theosophical Bookstore shelves are full of ‘mystical aphorisms,’ and it’s not hard to generate vague-sounding phrases that mimic profundity (we've had more than a few here, I remember 'Brother James'). But the actual mystics — whether Buddhist, Christian, or other — are people of of great discipline, clear insight, and spiritual rigor. What they describe is often not fuzzy at all, but the result of a highly refined insights. Easier to say than to enact.

There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [of metaphysics]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself...~ Plato, Seventh Letter — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting that the root of the word 'Upaniṣad' is 'sitting closely' - the relationship of chela to guru.

Philosophical type activity moves from naive common sense, to the analytic dissection Banno enjoys, to the metaphyisical more constructive type (building more things to be dissected), then to more mystical transcending type... — Fire Ologist

There's a stream that might be called 'analytical mysticism' in Catholic philosophy. At least, it has its mystical elements, from its inhereted neoplatonism and the presence of mystics in the Church (You've mentioned that you're Catholic). Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, William Desmond - all great philosophers in that tradition. There are many more.

"Something in particular," not "some particular thing." Which is just to say, the term wisdom has to have some determinant content or else philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be the "love of nothing in particular." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let's recall Lloyd Gerson's most recent book Platonism and Naturalism: the Possibility of Philosophy.

Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.

No thanks, C.S. Peirce is my go to American. Pragmaticism, not pragmatism, thank you :grin:.

Now, that's just co-occurrence to demonstrate a dyad between the two to the standards you laid out. But I think that "...is true" and "...is false" presuppose one another to be made sense of. That is, there is no "...is true" simpliciter, but rather its meaning will depend upon the meaning of "...is false", and vice-versa.

So there is no prioritizing one over the other.

While they are contrary opposites, on the view of truth as a transcendental property of being, falsity is parasitic on truth for the same reason that evil is parasitic on good—it is an absence. If truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being then its lack is a privation. Likewise, without ends, goods, the entire concept of evil makes no sense, since nothing is sought and so no aims are every frustrated.

I asked you what a critic is supposed to criticize if there is no builder, and in response you pointed to a critic who criticizes a builder. Do you see how you failed to answer my question?

This began when I said that if there are no builders then there can be no critics, and you responded by saying that in that case the critics would just criticize themselves. So again, your example of a critic who criticizes a house-builder is in no way an example of critics criticizing themselves, sans builders. — Leontiskos

Do you see how it's correct for the critic to still say that they don't know?

That's what I was hoping the example to demonstrate -- they don't have to say "Look, here's a better house" in order to say "I don't know how to build a house"

Their opinions may not be relevant to the construction of the house, sure -- but they'd still be right in claiming ignorance, so there are circumstances where it's better to claim ignorance rather than propose a solution.

I'm just asking you to give me an example of an assertion of falsehood which presupposes no truths. Can you do that?

"John wrote 2+2=5 on his paper. Bill said that his answer was false. But no truth needs to exist in order for Bill to say that the answer is false."

Something like that. Something straightforward. An example. — Leontiskos

Oh, OK. Sure, I can.

Your examples of the kinds of examples helped me get what you were after better.

So you want a circumstance where bill said some statement is false, and there is no truth that needs to exist in order for Bill to say that the answer is false.

Correct?

So it's about the conditions of assertability? When a person can assert they believe something is false?

Still thinking about a good one, just asking for more information

While they are contrary opposites, on the view of truth as a transcendental property of being, falsity is parasitic on truth for the same reason that evil is parasitic on good—it is an absence. If truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being then its lack is a privation. Likewise, without ends, goods, the entire concept of evil makes no sense, since nothing is sought and so no aims are every frustrated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

How is it you understand the truth without falsity, though? What's this part where you're not thinking about the false, but instead -- prior to falsity -- only the true?

"2+2=5" is false.

There's a sense in which we have to know things about "2" and "+" and "5" and "=" and "...is false"

So it seem easy to assert, without much specification on priority, that such an assertion would require some truths.

In just a first-go thought, that one would not qualify.

There's a stream that might be called 'analytical mysticism' in Catholic philosophy. At least, it has its mystical elements, from its inhereted neoplatonism and the presence of mystics in the Church (You've mentioned that you're Catholic). Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, William Desmond - all great philosophers in that tradition. There are many more. — Wayfarer

Mystics often make perfect sense to each other and can follow each other’s logic.

Appreciate the references.

I just don’t give analytic dissection the priority. We need to assert, and then dissect. Whatever is left is truth about the world.

There is very little truth about the world that has survived the dissection. But I see it. — Fire Ologist

Well, yeah. It's right there!

Banno and Count seem to be arguing what wisdom is.

Well it is not error or nonsense, and it is not a ham sandwich. So it is something. And I see it is worth scrutinizing to try to define better.

For sure. I find philosophy pleasurable, so even supposing the skeptic is correct I'm not a Pyrrhonic skeptic. For me I just don't think philosophy is scientific knowledge, strictly speaking. I apply different standards to both disciplines, and tend to think they're better when they stop trying to control one another towards the "right" way to think. (But then can be productive together when both are valued)

"This sentence is false" seems to fit to me, but I'm not allowed to use it. :D

In a straightforward way if the LNC and LEM holds then there is nothing this sentence is about "in the world", right? It points to itself. Its referent is itself. Is the sentence an object in the world?

I'd say if we maintain the LNC and LEM as the standards for what can be considered, or all that is worthy of consideration, then a straightforward assignment of "False" to "This sentence is false" is an example of a falsehood that needs no truth.

Sorry, I chose it for a reason last time and it's still the one that fits now.

It's a question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed it is. But we agreed:

I won't respond to the rest, because it's all based on this misreading.

And your

...you are also ruling out: "I have truth"

is just such a misreading. Indeed, I gave an example of how truth might work, following Kripke's formal example, to @J earlier in this thread.

Of course there are truths, and we can "have" them.

You are once again conflating "something" and "some thing." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let's look at that, then.

"Something" means: There exists an x such that... ∃(x)φ(x)

"Some thing" means: There exists an x that is a thing, and... ∃(x)(thing(x) ^ φ(x)

Now in both of these "x" is an individual variable. It stands for some individual. That is, in both, the x is treated as a thing.

So you want to draw a distinction between “something” and “some thing” as if this can do substantive philosophical work—as if the former is lighter or more deflationary in its ontological commitments. But this distinction collapses under scrutiny. In both formulations, we are quantifying over a domain of individuals using an existential quantifier. The variable x in both cases ranges over individual entities, regardless of whether we label them “things” or leave them bare.

This is still treating wisdom as a thing, not, say, an activity, disposition, virtue, capacity or what have you. It is still reifying wisdom.

Yet my point is merely that a vacuous term (or one that is indeterminately mutable) cannot be the criteria for "what goes," (i.e. which "narratives" are accepted) else "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here you have it again. I don't see that you have explained how "wisdom" (our present example) is a vacuous term. I haven't said that it is vacuous - far from it. You appear to think that something I have said leads directly to that conclusion, but what?

Lets' backtrack - it's always worth keeping an eye on how we got here. You said

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, it is presumably the love of something in particular — Count Timothy von Icarus

To which I objected, because it makes assumptions that I think are unreasonable. It presumes that for some notion to be coherent or meaningful, the object of its love (wisdom) must be determinate—a particular something. It presumes that “wisdom” must function like a referential term—picking out an object in the way that “the tree” or “the number 2” does. It presumes that this object must exist in some way that justifies the pursuit.

It comes back to a picture that has you enthralled, such that there is wisdom out there somewhere, wisdom as a treasure hidden in the world or the mind, and our job is to find it; but why shouldn't wisdom be instead what we do?

Philosophy need not be the love of some particular thing called wisdom. It might be the love of wise ways of being—and those are not found but lived.

Consider the limit case. There is only God, who is omniscient, and the seven spheres He has created. Now, that the spheres exist is true. It is true because truth is convertible with being. If they exist, it is true that they exist.

There is arguably logical convertability as well. To say "a man is standing," is to say "it is true that a man is standing," (assertoric force), which is also to say "one man is standing" (unity).

God knows everything that is, so there is adequacy of the intellect to being. But there are no false beliefs, since God is the only intellect. Yet God knows and knows that He knows, fathoms and understands.

Do you see how it's correct for the critic to still say that they don't know? — Moliere

Sure, but I never contested that and it doesn't intersect with what we were discussing in that line of the conversation. My question to you was literally, "Without builders what do you say that the critics criticize?" Do you have an answer to that question?

So you want a circumstance where bill said some statement is false, and there is no truth that needs to exist in order for Bill to say that the answer is false.

Correct? — Moliere

Yep. I am saying that, "If you claim that something is false, then you must already hold to some truth in order to say so." The counterexample would be, "Here is an example where someone claims that something is false even though they do not hold to any truth in order to say so."

Sorry, I chose it for a reason last time and it's still the one that fits now. — Moliere

If you have to resort to the extremely controversial example of the Liar's Paradox then your answer is going to be highly implausible and controversial. I've already given you my thoughts on the Liar's Paradox and I obviously think your analysis is incorrect.

While they are contrary opposites, on the view of truth as a transcendental property of being, falsity is parasitic on truth for the same reason that evil is parasitic on good—it is an absence. If truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being then its lack is a privation. Likewise, without ends, goods, the entire concept of evil makes no sense, since nothing is sought and so no aims are every frustrated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's right, but I think it is even easier for an Analytic to see that falsity presupposes truth by looking at arguments which attempt to demonstrate falsehoods.

But then what is wisdom
— Count Timothy von Icarus

And again, asking this supposes that there is a sequence of sentences such that their conjunct sets out all and only what is wise and excludes all that is not wise. — Banno

Asking “what is x?” doesn’t suppose anything, except there is x.

"This sentence is false" seems to fit to me, but I'm not allowed to use it. :D — Moliere

Note too that in the past you have claimed that, "This sentence is false," is an example of a sentence that is both false and true simultaneously. So in that case it fails the criterion of presupposing no truths. If you now want to change your analysis to say that it involves falsity but no truth (and therefore does not violate the LEM after all), then that looks like an ad hoc attempt to try to answer my challenge. The Liar's Sentence can't be true and false when you want to disprove the LEM, and then merely false when you want to object to a claim about the primacy of truth. Changing your mind in this ad hoc way is unprincipled reasoning.

If you have to resort to the extremely controversial example of the Liar's Paradox then your answer is going to be highly implausible and controversial. — Leontiskos

Sure, I agree with that.

Surely you've noticed these aren't things I attend to :D

I do in fact think of the implausible and controversial.

I've already given you my thoughts on the Liar's Paradox and I obviously think your analysis is incorrect.

Yeh, a bit of an impasse. But if asked it is what comes to mind.

Yep. I am saying that, "If you claim that something is false, then you must already hold to some truth in order to say so." The counterexample would be, "Here is an example where someone claims that something is false even though they do not hold to any truth in order to say so." — Leontiskos

This may be koan like, but it is at least a concrete example from the opening of the SEP's article on Pyrrho.

With the exception of poetry allegedly written while on Alexander’s expedition (which, as far as we can tell, did not survive that expedition), Pyrrho wrote nothing; we are therefore obliged to try to reconstruct his philosophy from reports by others.

I don't see it as unprincipled when I'm directly telling you why I'm thinking what I'm thinking. I think we really can use different metrics at different times -- different solutions to the Liar's Paradox are valuable to know. There isn't a single way to respond to the Liar's Paradox as evidenced by the philosophical literature on the Liar's Paradox. There are times when dialethia are appropriate and times when the simple logic of objects is appropraite.

You're again doing that thing where you ignore the central conversation where you are having the most difficulty:

Sure, but I never contested that and it doesn't intersect with what we were discussing in that line of the conversation. My question to you was literally, "Without builders what do you say that the critics criticize?" Do you have an answer to that question? — Leontiskos

We can't just paper over your invalid objection to my claim that without builders there can be no critics. That is the central and older part of the conversation, and it is the part that an auto-didact will have an easier time with. I focused on it for a reason.

We can't just paper over your invalid objection to my claim that without builders there can be no critics. That is the central and older part of the conversation, and it is the part that an auto-didact will have an easier time with. I focused on it for a reason. — Leontiskos

The critic criticizes themself. They don't have to learn how to build in order to do that. Suppose the builder goes away and the buyer decides to try what they had said they wanted. It falls apart like the builder said, and the buyer becomes a builder.

But there is Pyrrho's option of simply not building. How does that not count to your mind? The very point is to not believe -- so one does not need to know how to make inferences in order to stop making inferences, or even pointing out ways in which they are unsatisfactory. It's not like Pyrrho kept to this stubborn skeptics task, at least in the telling of the story -- he learned how the rationalists spoke and used their arguments against them.

Other examples could be Wittgenstein or Kant -- anyone that sets a limit to philosophical knowledge would in some sense qualify as a skeptic, I think, in a softer sense. There's something we can't know, and it doesn't build up from our prior knowledge. Else that'd be a rather uninteresting philosophical skepticism: if we could eventually find out everything then are we really skeptics in a meaningful sense?

Considering it I can make sense of the notion, but given all of my stated perspectives. . . :D

Seems to me that once we understand what's true we also understand what's false -- at the very least the object is an object and the object is different from the foreground which is what makes an object an object and not just a wash of meaningless perceptions. To see any individual we have to be able to say when it is-not the background.

Aporia can be seen as precisely the points where dialectic ends and noetic insight is required. — Wayfarer

I agree.

(especially by you!) — Wayfarer

Well, sometimes. True.

But there's stuff after the Tractatus, and not just from Wittgenstein. The stuff that can't be said can still be evaluated, by examining what it does.

Think I've pointed that out before.

So there is I think not all that much difference between our positions... the vanity of small differences, mostly.

You occasionally lean on a dualism or idealism, and it's mostly these to which I object - where things are said that don't work.

Sure, but falsity is not related to truth as negation (contradictory opposition), but as a contrary.

Aristotle has a distinction that I think holds up:

-Asytheta: truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity); and

-Adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance)

We can also consider the "three acts of the mind:"

1. Simple Apprehension, "What is it?" (produces terms - deals with essence)

2. Judging, "Is it?" (produces propositions - deals with existence)

3. Reasoning, "Why is it?" (produces arguments - deals with causes, or we might say "reasons" today because "causes" has been butchered).

All of these related to the adequacy of thought to being. Now apprehension must come prior to judgement or else there is no content to make judgements about through predication, composition, division, concatenation, etc. And there must be an analogous sort of "sense knowledge" prior to any intellection about what is conveyed by the senses. So, positive apprehension, i.e. some content (adequacy of the intellect) must be prior to the judgement stage where falsity enters the picture.

Likewise, nothing can be known as false without knowing at least something as true already, because no inference, to truth or falsity, can be made from nothing. Hence, falsity is posterior.

When you say apprehension comes prior to judgment I can't help but think of Kant whose whole project can be read as "Judgment is the single fundamental unity to Reason in all matters philosophical" :D -- I'm not sure there's such a thing as apprehension prior to judgment at all. Hence theory-ladenness, though I wouldn't put it at the level of structuring our perceptions very frequently. More that our ideas give us an idea about what's important to consider, and this is a learned kind of judgment, and there was no such thing as apprehending before learning how to judge -- it was just ignorance.

So I wonder if the notion of a contrary can do the work you're wanting it to do here in demonstrating that falsity is posterior do to our state of knowing. Seems to me that we can explain our state of knowing in terms of Judgment, which in turn requires a notion of the true and the false, sort of like the categories. In the state of ignorance we lack any sort of notion of either truth or falsity.

I mean, I kind of get the idea, but where my thoughts go is that you needcan't have one without the other. I don't really think of falsity as a privation of being. If anything falsity has more to do with how we judge, and being cannot be privated by such things.

Aristotle has a distinction that I think holds up:

-Asytheta: truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity); and

-Adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance)

We can also consider the "three acts of the mind:"

1. Simple Apprehension, "What is it?" (produces terms - deals with essence)

2. Judging, "Is it?" (produces propositions - deals with existence)

3. Reasoning, "Why is it?" (produces arguments - deals with causes, or we might say "reasons" today because "causes" has been butchered). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Excellent.

So many ways to properly be wrong. :razz:

I don't really think of falsity as a privation of being. — Moliere

yeah, not a bad reply at all.

The whole architecture is authoritarian in form. That style of philosophising is structured to preclude objection. Each term is defined into place. Every disagreement is downgraded to a misunderstanding of the system. There’s no space for a counter-example, because nothing is allowed to count as one unless it already fits the scheme. That is the problem of the “grand theory”: not that it's false, but that it's closed.

So the come back will be that you haven't understood... becasue the monolith protects itself.

The question arrises, how this is to fit with @J's idea of not critiquing until the whole is understood, when the act of understanding closes of critique.

Puzzling.

The whole architecture is authoritarian in form. The style of philosophising is structured to preclude objection. Each term is defined into place. Every disagreement is downgraded to a misunderstanding of the system. There’s no space for a counter-example, because nothing is allowed to count as one unless it already fits the scheme. That is the problem of the “grand theory”: not that it's false, but that it's closed.

So the come back will be that you haven't understood... becasue the monolith protects itself.

The question arrises, how this is to fit with J's idea of not critiquing until the whole is understood, when the act of understanding closes of critique. — Banno

As usual I’m probably missing something but I don’t think the concern is “everything”. It’s not a monolithic theory of all things. It’s about a unity, or just one thing.

One thing in the world. We strive to know the essence of that thing, because we understand there is something there. We don’t preclude critique in order to proceed towards that essence. Critique is welcome. But only after there is some positive move to criticize.

Philosophizing is one thing as well. You just said style of philosophizing, and gave it the essence of authoritarian. You said “whole architecture.”

“The monolith protects itself”.

This is metaphysical speak as much as it is critique of one particular “style” (which I would refer to as “aspect” but that’s may just be my style.)

Just as puzzling.

Of course this doesn't mean that we can't make use of rules at all in our explanations, only that we be willing to revise them

Well, in my experience the issue in (real or concocted) Philosophically problematic situations aren't violations of pre-set rules directly, rather situations where rule #1 plays against rule #2 (classically a conflict of legitimate interests). Thus the "philosopher" must choose which of his rules should be violated. Viola, the pre-set rules are not universally applicable.

When you say apprehension comes prior to judgment I can't help but think of Kant whose whole project can be read as "Judgment is the single fundamental unity to Reason in all matters philosophical" :D -- I'm not sure there's such a thing as apprehension prior to judgment at all.

In Kant? Isn't there apprehension prior to judgement? There is intuition/understanding/reason, which is clearly influenced by the three acts. He takes quite a bit from Aristotle. That's sort of Hegel's critique. "Oh look, I started presuppositionlessly and just happened to find Aristotle's categories." (I never found this critique of Hegel's strong, maybe the categories have held up because they are themselves strong).

Kant would deny truth as the adequacy of thought to being in the strong sense, or the idea of form coming through the senses to inform the intellect. I suppose the response here is that he rejects this because he presupposes representationalism and he has no good grounds for doing so (totally different subject). I'm also pretty sure he falls into identifying falsity with negation. So there would be other differences. I just don't know if the differences hold up without also accepting the fundamental axiom of "we experience only ideas/representations/our own experiences, not things," and of "knowledge of things in themselves," (as opposed to things as revealed by acting, actuality) as a sort of epistemic "gold standard" to aspire to.

More that our ideas give us an idea about what's important to consider, and this is a learned kind of judgment, and there was no such thing as apprehending before learning how to judge -- it was just ignorance.

I think this is perhaps missing the point. To judge "x is y," predication, one must first understand x and y. Now if we are talking about a judgement of something newly experienced in the senses, it seems clear that "x" must be there for "x is y." How could one even say y of x without specifying x in at least some way?

In the state of ignorance we lack any sort of notion of either truth or falsity.

This is fair. I think this is consistent with both Aristotle and Kant in a way. A notion of truth as truth does require judgement. Aquinas has it that truth is most possessed when we know something and we know that we know it as true. Obviously, simply being aware of something, does not represent this sort of grasp. So, the priority of truth in the mind hinges on the idea that truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being, but that we can also speak analogously of truth. Hence, sentences can be true. Speech can be true in several senses (e.g. lying vs truthful speech, truth vs falsehood), models can be more or less true to life, and there must be truth in the senses to some degree, as well as in things (as the measure of truth). The truth that is prior to judgement is not as fully truth. Likewise, judgements that are known as true judgements are even more fully the realization of truth.

But if a duck is the measure of true things said about a duck, and a tree is the true measure of judged of the tree, then truth is first in the measure, and only later in judgement. Man is not the measure of all things. Kant tries to preserve this, even as his representationalist assumptions make this difficult for him. So this is another sense of priority. That is, it does not become true that the duck has wings when we judge it to be so. It was already true prior to our judgement (when the possibility of falsity enters the picture).

Indeed it is. But we agreed:

You cannot answer the question: "in virtue of what does 'anything not go' given we have already said that we do not possess the truth?

The rest is just an example. Feel free to ignore it. Surely you have some criteria in mind by which it isn't "everything goes?" Or do you? Is it sentiment? Another appeal to democratization?

That was the question. I cannot see why it requires me explaining my conception of wisdom, and my understanding of principles (in formal logic even), in order for you to answer a question about how you determine "acceptable/correct/true narratives" and discard "unacceptable/incorrect/false narratives," or if correct/acceptable/true narratives can contradict one another? Can they contradict each other? That was one of the questions.

Of course there are truths, and we can "have" them.

Ok, but you were the one who made "I have truth" a claim of hubris. Instead we need: "something to sit between "I have the truth" and "Anything goes." (Your words).

What is that "something?"

You often accuse arguments of being "merely rhetorical," but what exactly is it that such arguments lack once logic is determined by usefulness and "I have truth" is off the table?

Here you have it again. I don't see that you have explained how "wisdom" (our present example) is a vacuous term

I didn't claim wisdom was vacuous, I merely said it cannot be the standard by which accepted narratives are judged if it is vacuous. Likewise, the love of wisdom would be the love of nothing, or nothing in particular, if wisdom doesn't mean anything. I don't think that's that difficult a point. No need for formal logic. Vacuous terms don't do anything. Wisdom has to signify "something" in that it cannot signify "absolutely nothing."

I'm not sure there's such a thing as apprehension prior to judgment at all. Hence theory-ladenness, though I wouldn't put it at the level of structuring our perceptions very frequently. — Moliere

Theory-ladenness notwithstanding, A99/B160 should make clear that apprehension, in the Kantian sense, has to do with the possibility of perception, and as such, is very much methodologically antecedent to discursive** judgement with respect to empirical cognition.

Aesthetic judgement, on the other hand….that which regards the inspiration of some feeling relative to the representation of a perception….presupposes that the perception has already been structured.

Personally, given the emphasis on apperception and its rather more convincing necessity in the overall theoretical construct, I can do without apprehension in this Kantian sense.

Anyway….just my opinion.

(** philosophically archaic definition, so as not to be confused with the way the term is commonly used on this thread, yet consistent with the immediate subject matter.)

The whole architecture is authoritarian in form. That style of philosophising is structured to preclude objection. — Banno

There's a lot of truth in this, but I want to dwell on why it appears this way. Let's take math. Is math authoritarian? Is it structured to preclude objection? Well, yes, if by "objection" we mean an alternative correct answer in a given math language. Math is deductive, apodictic -- in some grand sense, if we could really understand numbers, we could have predicted the Mandelbrot set. Even incompleteness was "there from the beginning," from this perspective.

Now let's take music. Is musical creativity authoritarian? Does it preclude objection? I admit it's not clear just what that might mean, but something like: Is there a right and a wrong way to write music, are some musics intrinsically beautiful, apart from context, and others not? etc. Surely not, because creative work is not deductive. You can't start from some axioms and work out what's going to be great music. My "objection" to Haydn might be to write like Bartok. But that doesn't make Haydn wrong. This whole terminology is a misfit.

OK, so where does philosophy fit between these two extremes? If one thinks of philosophy as a deductive system, beginning from something like axioms or first principles, then you get what I call "armchair philosophy" -- it appears one could just sit and think, and with rigor and persistence discover all the correct answers. So, is such a philosophy authoritarian? That's a bit strong, but it rather depends on how the first principles are justified. If there is some literal appeal to authority, then yes, philosophizing in this way can be quite uncompromising. Moreover, if the principles contain moral elements, this will collapse the idea of "being wrong" as mistaken and "being wrong" as immoral, definitely an authoritarian move.

Is this kind of philosophy structured to preclude objection? Not in the sense that it may not welcome questions and critique. But it takes "objection" to mean "something that can be overcome by the system," not "something that casts legitimate doubt on the system itself." That kind of objection is presumably ruled out in principle. This is because, as you say, "Every disagreement is downgraded to a misunderstanding of the system." Or if this is not the case, we need a clear explanation of what could make a closed deductive system revisable -- perhaps internal inconsistency?

To me, one of the most interesting questions is, "If you have a longstanding and vigorous commitment to some philosophical method, what would it take to change your mind about it?" Needless to say, this question applies to analytic philosophers just as much as Kierkegaardians or whoever. But I do think that deductive, foundationalist philosophies run a higher risk of being trapped in a method that, for structural reasons, cannot see a different viewpoint as anything other than a deductive mistake or misunderstanding.