Really, can't this all be said quite simply? We don't (as adults with language) encounter the world innocently, seeing objects like fenceposts and cats "because they're there." Both biologically and socially, we've learned over the history of our species to make choices about how to concatenate and discriminate our perceptions into the categories that are important to us. More often than not, we're aided (or on occasion constricted) by our language, which provides ready labels. Whether some sort of "true being" is to be discovered beyond this, we don't know, or at least I don't. — J

Simply? That was simply. Open, say, a book called Totality and Infinity by Emanuel Levinas, and your head will spin. These philosophers are not trying to be accessible to anyone but those who read continental philosophy.

Keep in mind that when you think of "the history of our species" and the way we are biologically and socially embedded in the world, you have not yet reached the primordiality of our existence. Phenomenology takes such thinking and asks what is presupposed in science's observations and claims. I said earlier that Einstein didn't really ask questions like this and did not enter into the presuppositional world of themes and analysis. You saybiology, and I don't at all disagree with biology, but I do ask about the perceptual acts that are in place in gathering biological data. A biologist tells me there is a physical brain that is the "seat" of consciousness, for example, and I do not deny this in a setting where biology is being discussed. But then ask, how this brain is confirmed to be what it is, and this of course goes to observation, and then the question, well, what is observation? Biologists will then give you an extensive account of the central nervous system, various organs that receive information, but then all of this begs the same question asked about the brain: we know nervous systems and the rest by observation, so what IS observation apart from these physical accounts that is non question begging? and then you have to move away from observation as a physical manifestation, because all of this kind of thing begs the same questions about observation, and then, you are forced to move into apriori reasoning, which is philosophy, really. (If someone gives empirical proof as an evidential ground for something, it is not going to be a philosophical thesis; it will be a science or some speculative extension of a science; though, technically, "science" needs to be qualified here. Husserl thought he had discovered a science of phenomenology). Philosophical naturalism leads absolutely nowhere philosophically.

A long time ago, I read Rorty who stated that there is no way to explain how anything "out there" gets "in here" referring to, respectively, some tree or cup on the table, and his brain. Rorty was a Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian, Deweyan; a pragmatist. I found this more than curious, and thought about it a lot until I discovered he was right: that epistemic relation between me and my cat "over there" is impossible, flat out impossible, on a naturalist ground for understanding, because, as Quine put it, for a naturalist science, causality is the essential authority the underlies all things (notwithstanding quantum issues, which do not deny causality, which is impossible, for causality is apodictically coercive, but await causal connectivity down the road), and there is nothing epistemic about causality!

The weirdest thing I had ever encountered, but there was no way out of this. In fact, it gets weirder, for not only on this basis do you not get knowledge of the world, you don't get knowledge of anything, for what is knowledge but brain events, and so to affirm brain events, what is the ground for this? Brain events. But calling them brain events is reducible to briain events, and to confirm this you would need to stand apart from brain events to do this, so that what you witness is not reducible to brain events. But this is absurd, to step outside of a brain event. Where, into another brain? But then this wold beg the same question! Wittgenstein said as much: logic cannot know the ground for logic (Kant said this, too), because to affirm this, one would have to move to a thrid perspective from which logic could be observed, but this itself would be questioned as to its nature, and one would have to again find another pov to affirm the ground for this; and so on.

The only way to preserve knowledge, and the world, and everything, is to step away from naturalism altogether. This thesis leads to pure epistemic and ontological nonsense. One then must move toward affirmation where it had been all along: in the phenomenon of the givenness of the object itself, which is apodictic, just as apodictic as logic! Hence, phenomenology wins the philosophical dispute over foundational ground for existence.

:wink:

Fair enough. Can you describe the cat in terms of the more penetrating analytic, showing how a relevant difference in description occurs?

I'm really not some AnalPhil opponent of Continental philosophy. Nor am I trying to broaden the discussion to make you defend an entire approach to philosophy. I just want to get a sympathetic grasp on how it might appear to an intelligent thinker that the external world is at bottom linguistic, which I take to be your position. Far from wanting to refute it, I'd like to inhabit it, at least provisionally, and see what I can learn. — J

Then read Heidegger's Being and Time. Here is an idea: Einstein talks about time, but he doesn't talk about the nature of the perceptual event that is presupposed by his mathematics. In division II of Being and Time Heidegger talks about time, taking up the way it has been handled historically, from Augustine (Confessions, chap 11), Brentano (which I have read a bit of), Kierkegaard, Husserl , and so on. The essential idea is that time has three modalities, past, present and future, and it is simply impossible to make sense of these at all apart from the others, for (the down and dirty version) when I think of the past, I do so in the present, and the past cannot be conceived apart from the present act of recollection as if one could simply step away from the present and affirm the past "as it is," which is just impossible to conceive. No, the past comes into existence IN the present recollection, but then, as I recall something in the present, that act of recalling itself anticipates the recalled events that are about to be recalled, just as, as I write these words, the next words that will be written do not spring up spontaneously from nowhere, but are anticipated PRIOR to the actual writing, and that priorness leaps ahead of the present into the anticipated future. I write what I already know, the words, sentential constructions, the meanings are all there, but these are already ahead of the present moment as they are thought.

Heidegger calls this the ecstatic modalities of time, ecstatic because each have their essence bound to that of the others: he past IS the future, and the future IS the past, and they each are outside of themselves, ecstatically, as they are IN each other. One could say, there really is no such thing as sequential time. Time is a unity. And the present? This is freedom. This is where one will find qualia.

OK. But how does that turn the world into language? — J

So I'm not going to put out there the long version. As succinctly as it can be put: It's is crazy to think what you see before you is what it is with no contribution from the perceptual act that produces it. Its "isness" IS the act, and when I turn my attention to a fence post, say, I already know fence posts prior to attention being episodically engaged, and this recognition is part and parcel of the act that brings the fence post to mind, allowing it to be understood AS a fence post. For us, not for cats, this is a language event, for ven though you may not say "fencepost", it reveals its language dimension themoment you do, think about where it is, how shabby it is, how lost you are, who it belongs to, and so on. It is these language contexts that tacitly attend the passive understanding, evidenced by the way language is "ready to hand" and the way language confirms what it IS in language: a fencepost.

It is not that we don't share a basic structure of relating to the world with animals; I am sure we do, but a self that knows, constructs conditionals, negations, disjunctions, conjunctions, and so on, is a language construct. Consider: I say, "I am." This is supposed to be an existential declaration, but who is talking here? I want to say I am using language, but the way of affirming that it is me is in the language that "speaks". I say, "why, it is me." You see, cats do not have the ability to use the copula, "is". They cannot predicate anything of something else, and they cannot think propositionally. Language confers upon the world its "being". No, you say, perhaps, being is all that out there, the trees, the birds, and so forth, but: what ARE these without language? What am I, if the "I" is not speakable?

But you will protest again that obviously there are things there that are not language. Obviously. This is why we have the term qualia: unspoken Being (and since this is sooo succinctly put, I have settle for this here. Once you read into the matter, things get technical).

Let's switch the example to something I might really find puzzling -- an echidna, let's say. You point to the thing, calling it by name, and I say, "What's an echidna?" For starters, you'll say, "That is," and I'll have a good look and form some sense impressions. We might then discuss its features. If I then go on to ask, "What sort of beast is it?" you might have recourse to a biology text to give me some info. But that can't be the point at which what you're calling the "indeterminacy" enters. Nothing in a written text is any more indeterminate than the language you and I are already using. So for me, the question is, How indeterminate is that? At the level of philosophy, we all know the arguments that can be made. But none of them prevents you and me from agreeing with perfect certainty on what counts as an echidna, and what are the correct and incorrect ways of describing it. Isn't that good enough? — J

In a context of talking about enchidna, it makes sense to talk about enchidna. If you and I made up an animal, gave it a name, it would depend on what we say about it, but whatever that would be would depend on what is already there, in the resources of language at our disposal. Japanese or Zimbabwean connotative values would be unavailable to me, for example. Indeterminacy is not about contextual agreements, like the ones found in text books or dictionaries. These are determinacies, for all is there for one to read and agree about. Rather, it is about these contexts, and any context you can think of, having no center, no final context to which they conform and derive their essential meaning. God use to be this, and the church, for example, but in the post modern setting, God is absent and thus the ground for all things is absent, and so meanings just hang there, so to speak, by their own intercontextual agreements and possibilities, but no foundation outside of this. There is no outside. Such a thing belongs to metaphysics.

Who said qualia, or some qualia-like sense of existence, were metaphysically primordial? (Not me.) I'm asking why you think language is. Do you perhaps mean that the only alternative to the primacy of language is some story about what is self-evident about my own existence? Why would that be? — J

One has to steer clear of all of the above, stories, scientific accounts (regardless of how well evidenced), for even the "saying" the word 'qualia' stands as a violation of what it "is". For to speak is never "about" what sits before your eyes. Speech is historical, logic sees individual things subsumed under universal concepts, some think truth is made, not discovered (for we construct meanings in propositions, and propositions are bound to a contextuality of related meanings). But a quale-like sense, this makes the move, for a sense is something that intimates a vagueness not yet congealed in words. What makes all of this so difficult is that the method of discovery (real discovery) has to thought about.

In his Ideas I, Husserl spoke of a phenomenological reduction, and this is a modified Cartesian attempt to suspend language's instant grasp of things in the world, such that if one practiced just looking at "things themselves" (not to be confused with Kant's noumena, the "thing itself") rather than allowing mundane language use to do what it always does, which is to identify spontaneously, thoughtlessly, preanalytically, preontologically, one could eventually see the world as it IS, the world of phenomena, not cats, and dogs and computer chips, but the phenomenological ground that is always there, but ignored. So this word "sense" has some value in this, because as familiarity slips away in this method, and the uncanny "sense" of things moves in (Kierkegaard's "anxiety"; see his Concept of Anxiety. Heidegger had read Kierkegaard closely), there is an existential crisis, and how one understands this depends on who you read.

This innocent idea of qualia is at the heart of some of the most abstruse philosophy there is.

Private language is really not the way to frame the discussion about qualia. One's being in the world is historical and collective, but this language one inherits is inherently reductive, that is, it reduces the world of itches and tickles, and yearnings, and contmpt and interest, and on and on, into a language that gives these actualities enunciation, or even "being". Language both opens and closes a world's meanings, but the point I wold make is this: I have experiences you do not have, simply because mine are here and yours there, and I can't witness yours nor you mine. My world is a private actuality, and no one can "peek in". But language is public, and so what I am, qualia aside, is a publicly constructed self that is settled in this private world. And so these actualities of feel and taste, etc., are understood subsumed under these public headings, but they remain independent of these as well. An itch, after all, is not language as such, and by as such I mean...as qualia.

But if we agree, more or less, about this, how can language be primordial? Unless we're just disagreeing about what "primordial" ought to mean. I took it to refer to something extremely basic, ontologically, something that, at the very least, precedes human cognition. If all you mean is "Language is basic for humans, without which we could not recognize items we call 'cats'," then that's fine. Yet I sense you mean something quite different and more radical, but it still isn't clear.

I want to understand why you believe the experience bottoms out in language. It seems to me that the necessity of thinking in language does not mean that what is thought about is also language. Can you help me see why this is false? With respect, you just keep asserting it. Can you perhaps describe how that experience happens for you -- the moment at which you lose contact with a reality external to language? — J

More radical, yes. You likely won't be very pleased.

Language is primordial not because it sits in the seat of absolute authority answering questions about absolute reality. Lnauge is inherently interpretative, contingent, a system of meanings that are intra-penetrating, so nothing has this seat of authority. But the philosophical insight that acknowledges that language recognizes its own delimitations is a pivotal recognition in that it forces, really, one to face a world without the confidence and security of any authority at all. THIS is the post modern world, and you can blame Kierkegaard through Hegel, through Heidegger through Derrida and beyond (go extreme and read Blanchot or Levinas. Madness to read, at first; but then you start to get it and it is extraordinary). I say Look a cat!, you ask, whaty is a cat? I look in the dictionary, find other explanations, and each of these bears the same indeterminacy. Primordiality, as you observe, itself belongs to this indeterminacy, for it is a particle of language, has a context of discussionable possibilities, so primordiality, as Heidegger puts it, is really "equiprimordiality": a bottom line analytic that is itself manifold, complex, open to the world for more penetrating discovery. He didn't posit, but explicitly denied, any metaphysical primordiality to our existence, anything like qualia.

That is, ontology, an analytic of what it means to be. Qualia is a term that violates this, it is argued correctly. It belongs to the margins of thought, that disconcerting threshold of acceptance. See how Eugene Fink talks about it: "Having overcome world naivete' we stand now in a new naivete, a transcendental naivete'. It consists in our unfolding and explicating transcendental life
only in the presentness." (from The Sixth Meditation" early on). See, Fink takes this idea very seriously, because he thinks that philosophy must end up here, facing a world that does not conform in its essence to standard thinking, which he calls naive. Naive because the cat seen and accepted as a cat is all there is to being a cat, in this everyday world. There is another world that IS this familair world and is also a more penetrating analytic into the presuppositions of all this familiarity.

Philosophy has to go here, to this threshold, otherwise it is reduced to squabbles about things that have no meaning, like ethics without a metaethics or existence without a metaexistence. Qualia is essentially metaphysics, not some medieval theology, but "real" metaphysics: what one must allow it, yet to do so requires not a discursive move into more of the "same" but into the "other" of this very world.

Well, no. I'm happy to grant existence, for philosophical purposes, to both corporations and persons (however galling that may be in U.S. politics). But if we agree that both exist, we should also agree that they exist in very different ways. A corporation is a sort of mereological construction, whereas a person is a living biological entity. (I'm assuming you don't mean to get into the intricacies of whether every human is properly a "person."). A living thing doesn't get talked into existence. A corporation does, and must, along with a few other social requirements. — J

I think you have put one foot into qualia proper: By mereological construction, you mean nothing but a construction of relations, butthe rub is, how do you escape to what is there that is not this "nothing but"? One wants to say a "living biological entity" is the bottom line, for thought is directed to something palpable in time and space, and what could be more "real" than this, but when asked what a biological entity IS, you find more language, and this leads to more language still, untill you realize that all of you understanding of anything at all is bound to this, as you call it, mereological dimension, and there is no way out of this. A corporation, it can be said, is reducible to the thoughts of the biological entities that conceive it, andso this, too, can be held apart from the true physiology of the desirable affirmation, Consider.

Now you teeter on some fascinating philosophy, the true bottom line, if you will. Does a corporation reduce to qualia in inquiry that same way that a biological aentity does? Back up a bit: a biological entity like my cat is there, in the midst of my apprehension of things in the world, but no matter how I try to pin what the cat IS to something other than what language IS, my mouth is closed and my thoughts are suspended, for to speak what the cat IS is to deploy language! Even the term 'existence' leads to this same analytical finality. What is existence? And then, What am I?? You find language there, ready to hand, literally creating the affirmations in the propositions, but then, if you want to play the physicalist, there are no propositions in my cat!

Or are there? What is before me, that grey furry thing is speakable only in the speaking, so to speak. No words, no identity, no "isness," but then I KNOW with incorrigible certainty that there is "something" there that is not possessed by the speaking, and if you stare at this peoblem long enough, it becomes clear that a language construction (you refer to above as mereological) almost entirely constitutes the understanding of what that IS.....and yet there is this residuum that cannot be so reduced, a "thereness" or a "being" but this itself is simply language poking its head into the attempt to speak what it is. So how to move forward in understanding this, when understanding confronts its own terminus?

Well, what is the problem essentially? The problem is that there is "distance" between me and the "cat," epistemic distance. "It" is over there, and I am here, and laguage does not reach over and affirm what it IS by some impossible "knowledge at a distance". Long, long story short: The "cat" and the language that speaks it into being a cat are one. But this doesn't mean at all that cats are language; it does mean that I am allowed to speak of the "cat' as a cat in speakable terms, and the term in this conversation is 'qualia'.

Again, I recognize that this is what you're asserting, but I don't see the case for it yet. Let's imagine that all language-users go extinct; is the physical world not still there? If so, how is language primordial? It may be basic and constitutive for us, but that's a different matter, no? Likewise, we can hypothesize that our way of constituting the physical world is simply that -- our way -- but do you want to deny any independent existence to it at all? — J

Of course not. But that being a cat becomes a cat when I take it into my perceptual apparatus. Prior to this, it is not a cat. My perceptual, cognitive, affective "functions" manufacture catness.

I guess this would be a spade-turning difference between us. I am fascinated by the inner lives of animals; to me it's the least boring thing in the world. Infants, a close second. I guess you've never been close to an animal? Eating, sleeping, defecating, and staring are popular activities, all right, just as they are for us! (And you left out sex!). But they don't begin to exhaust the repertoire.

As for our need for language to describe non-linguistic things: granted. You still haven't shown me how this turns the thing described into more language. — J

Well, don't get me wrong. We have three cats and they are adorable, and they are endowed with emotional abilities, are sensitive, yearning for affection. But philosophically they are uninteresting, meaning whatever they possess that IS interesting is only seen through the interpretative gaze of a cognizing and affective egoic center that is me, a person, and this is where the issue of qualia finds its ground. Your pet is only a pet, an animal, affectionate, in short, what it IS, IN the system of its apprehension. I like to think of a company you and I can begin right now, call it "Pets for Prosperity Inc." (PFP) and you are CEO while I am cofounding affiliate, and now we need pamphlets to raise awareness, and more employees, and do community service, and take in donations, and soon we are a huge, entangled corporation that has sway politically, controls vast wealth, and so on. Now at this point, does PFP exist? Of course it does. Just ask any of our 1.5 million employees. And the world says we ARE that and that and our enemies say we ARE less savory thises and thats: we ARE.

But we were NOT just years before. How does existence simply come into being just by talking it into being? A person is like this, no? I am born, "given" a name, given a language and a culture, and PFP was constructed OUT OF that, but even as I write these words, it is the language that is doing the talking. Of course, things get done, but the question of what it IS that gets done belongs to language, as does the question of what I AM? Ask what you are, with the provision that you cannot say this. Cat got your tongue?

The point is, language is primordial, and that makes being complicated...or does it? Qualia: the not-language discovered in language, or in spite of language, or in the midst of language; it is presupposed in everything that IS, just like language! This is the world where cats and dogs appear, are brought into being in the first place, on the stage, if you will, of language and its possiblities, and this setting has a historical genesis, and there really is no "outside" of this. It's not that cats don't have an inner world, but this world, like my own, is understood through language, when I encounter my cat, it is an event, not just some passive reception.

I don't think that quite fair. Have another look at the first few paragraphs of Quining Qualia. Dennett is trying to deal withe the notion as it is presented by those that use it, but running in to the difficulty that they themselves do not agree as to what qualia are. Dennett is pointing out the consequences of their own usage. — Banno

I don't know what is supposed to be fair. I don't think it enters into it. Dennett had a naive understanding about qualia because there is naivete built into his thinking and those he was addressing. Naive because he really didn't know how to talk about what it is that makes qualia an idea at all. It would be pretty easy to go through each "pump" and show this. He holds that cauliflower's taste cannot be pinned to any particular "central" taste and therefore is hopelessly lost to discovery of qualia: one cannot "isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on." But isolating qualities that disappear as other qualities arise, says nothing about the presence qua presence of what is there before one. It doesn't matter how it appears, or the consistency of its appearing, or its intensity, or its morphing into something else, because qualia is not a property, not part of a description of consciousness, as he thinks it is. Qualia is only what it "is" when all "properties" are suspended, so it being a taste of cauliflower or wine, is already a misconception. The "taste" is not a taste nor is it of anything. In order for one to take qualia as a meaningful concept, one has to release the "taste" from its language imposition, while still in the general language setting that is foundational for being a self. How can this be done?

One has to reconceive what language is and allow metaphysics back into philosophical conversation, something anglo american thinking has an absurd and debilitating phobia about, but it's the only way to understand the world that is other than language---though, not beyond what language can say, for language can say anything. There are no limits to language in so far as what language is vis a vis the world. It is just that in basic ontology, what is NOT language emerges in the analysis. Language can say this just as I am saying it now (and this is to pull away from earlier comments a bit. Technical matters are not postable). At any rate, I claim that nothing could be more clear than this, yet philosophers thinking in the tradition of positivism are appalled because they think it smacks of metaphysics...and they are right; it does.

The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover

I think the basic assumption of your question is that, prior to conceiving of burj in your head, you were already in a system of agreement about words and their meanings. The word 'burj' itself has its status of being outside of a consensus PRIOR to it being conceived, and so it was already in language regardless: it was already IN the consensus by being outside of it, because being outside of is contingent upon the consensus being in place for an "outside" to make sense.

The nature of qualia reveals itself nicely in your example, though. One cannot present the matter of qualia unless one brings into language the reflexive act of thought thinking about the nature of thought, thereby questioning its limits, because nothing IS that is not thought, and yet, as you know, the rabbit you imagine or otherwise is not a particle of language running around. But you see the dilemma: to know this is to speak it. Ontology and language CANNOT be separated.

Right now there is a crab under a rock in the depths of the Mariana Trench, never once observed. So how is it that science has so much to say about this crab? The "saying" is always preceded by established assumptions. One never REALLY sees that which sits before the camera, the telescope or before their very eyes. If this were so, then simply having eyes would be sufficient. What one "sees" lies in memory and a symbolic system called langauge that speaks what it there.

Not sure what that is. But in any case, thinking in language doesn't make the subject of thought also linguistic. Does cutting boards with a saw make every board a tool? Nor does it mean that animals and human infants don't have experiences because they don't have language. — J

Yes, cutting boards with a saw makes the boards on which boards are cut, tools. And infants and animals do have have experiences, but these are not the kind of experiences that produce thought and philosophical discovery. I don't think about the way animals and infants experience the world because it is simply a bore. They eat, sleep, and defecate and stare at things, generally speaking. If they do possess more, then this more is interesting only because it is in the direction of being what our existence is.

I sense that you basically agree with this latter point, but are holding out for some other way to frame the idea that "Language is what we ARE." Language may be, as you say, the foundation for comprehension, but so much of my experience has nothing to do with comprehension. — J

Language is what we are, and so when I say "what we are" the verb 'to be' is what singles us out, determines our existence. I ask, what are you? and you will say you are a clerk in a store, a lawyer, a nurse, a husband, a wife, a geologist looking for fossils, I mean, the question who are you? IS a question, and the moment it is asked it belongs to language, and basic questions about what it is to be human is to respond to the question. One cannot answer such a question outside of lanuage, for the answer is inherently a construction of predication and this is propositional. The point would be that IF there is some way to disclose what IS and language has absolutely nothing to say about it, then to "speak it" really is nonsense. Everything you can say about animals, infants, paramecia, and so on, are what they are IN the medium of discovering these. Go to a dictionary to find out what something is and what do you find? More language. Ask me if an infant has experiences, and I SAY such and such.

But why would that restrict what can be imagined? I am now imagining a rabbit. Why would it be the case that the rabbit must be within language, because "language" is within language? There could conceivably be some other reasons why imagining a rabbit requires some linguistic component, but the status of the word "language" itself doesn't seem relevant. — J

It doesn't seem relevant because it is so pervasive, so integral to understanding that one hardly pays attention. One has to ask the question, what is being a "self" all about? Infants don't have a self (ipseity) .not yet. And all you can imagine has its being in language FOR US, for WE are language beings, not for elephants or giraffes: did you SAY "rabbit'? Again, whatever it IS outside of language is just impossible to conceive. If it were possible, then it could be taken up in language.

To me, one has to see that qualia is a philosophical construct only meaningful ina philosophical discussion, the same way talk about pottery or weaving techniques only has meaning IN such discussions. But this doesn't mean it is meaningless any more than talk about pottery is meaningless. One has to go there, into the issue to understand it.

I will say that if there is no private language, then what Wittgenstein states related to the limits of language follows. And this should be obvious as you think about it. All things within the private mental state (i.e. qualia) are necessarily off limits because the antecedent of the conditional is that "there is no private language." And so that's where the challenge has to be made, which is to attack the enterprise of private versus public language (if that's your mission). — Hanover

All things within the private mental state are private because we have a term for private mental states, which is 'private mental states'. Language is reflexive, turns back on itself, and like the serpent that bites its own tail, the ouroboros, finds its self in the very ground of the conclusions of its reasonings. A symbol of hermeneutics. I am not trying to irritate you. I do want to make a point about how intrusive philosophy can be in the simplest things. I am reminded of this from a book on Foucault, "Foucault associates himself with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215). Language penetrates, if you will, to the very core of what we are and all that can be summoned to "speak" us into existence.

If I had to say what my mission is, it would be along the lines of making more clear that extraordinary boundary between language and "real' metaphysics, where everything is under erasure. This erasure is, as Wittgenstein said of "that which cannot be said" in his Tractatus to a prospective publisher, the most important part. This takes philosophical work that deals with just this. It does exist in post post modern theology. Husserl through Heidegger through ....language and TO the world.

For me, the world is pure wonder and horror; pure because it has nothing to do with that or that or any particular thing at all. It is in our "thrownness," our being here as such. Qualia is about this primordial thrownness of who and what we are. I see a cat, and the "ouroboros of seeing" takes analysis right back the very seeing itself. This doesn't led to solipsism at all. It simply says that the things around me are acknowledged in me. What else? It simply leads to the much sought after simplicity of grounding our existence. It is already grounded, but one must understand this in a pure openness to the world.

So what is qualia to Wittgenstein? It is the predictable behavior that surrounds the use of that term, just like any other term. I say "ouch" to pain, so we now know what pain is. But to be clear, "pain" is a word. We don't speak of mental states.

If I say "I'm experiencing qualia," qualia is that thing I say when I perhaps express confusion at my state or I simply mean to say that I'm having a non-descript mental state, not to be confused with the actual mental state. That is "I'm feeling qualia" is known by how I use it. Mostly it's a term used in philosophy forums when other words like "consciousnessess," "Wittgenstein," "mental objects," "silence" and other sorts of words get used — Hanover

I think you are right to say this term is something that turns up in philosophy forums, but really, nowhere else, and this is because other contexts do not possess the basis for the concept to come forth. Only philosophy. You can say " I am feeling qualia" only if you are in that particular philosophical context where the issue of qualia makes sense, and you are consciously trying to acknowledge tht world without language, and you do a reduction by eliminating all that can be said about the world, as world, and not just qualia as qualia, because what keeps qualia "at a distance," so to speak, is not just some constraint on belief about qualia, but the whole totality of language that constitutes your everydayness, that is, language instantly assimilates what it sees, and it takes philosophicl work to "unsee' this instant interpretatively qualified existence. I look up at the clock in the morning, and clocks, and what they do, and their role in my affairs comes instantly in to play. ALL things implicitly are brought to heel like this. Qualia is outside of this totality, and it is important to see that to "comprehend" qualia, one stands no out side the taste of wine or the smell of a rose; rather one stands outside the general grip language has on all things. It is a standing back and away from sense making across the board. My thinking? That taste of wine (Dennett's example) is not just a taste, but is bound to a very extensive set of meanings that are the impossibly complex implicit understanding of being in the world, the being in a wine shop, walking through the door, on a floor, walls all around, and so forth. This is what possesses the non-quale dimensions of the event, making what is there conform and stand a A being. Qualia can only be understood in a radical withdrawal from language-in-the-world.

My take is that qualia is an analytic term, as are ALL such things. Nothing more or less. It is not some platonic form that finally speaks the world as it is, really. A philosophical term that says, look, language is what comprehension is made of, yet it does not exhaust comprehension of what the world is, and there is this residuum that is actuality that both is conceived in and by language, yet stands apart from language[/u]; thus, language itself must be understood differently in order to allow this. Language in its essence, in other words, is incompletely understood; it is rather open, not just to novel construals of what is already in language, but to an impossible "other' than what language, at least in its current evolvement, can conceive.

Not so clear to me. Is this the "absurd game" you're looking for a solution to? Or do you endorse this viewpoint?

It seems to me that the absurdity is evident. An "outside of language" is not conceivable because "outside" is a word? Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience. Whether we must mediate these experiences through language is a separate question, the answer to which will vary depending on which experiences. Pain, I'm guessing, is pretty language-free. — J

THIS is what you are up against: your thinking makes assumptions about what is not language, IN language. And any way you might have of understanding what something IS has its "isness" in copula 'is'. Imagine qualia without the word 'qualia'. Language is the foundation for comprehension. In matters of pain and ethical examples, this is all played out contextual settings, but without any setting of this kind at all?? Things would have no ethical dimension, because ethics comes into being by talking about ethics. The only way one can even imagine a cat's world vis a vis the pain it has, is through this matrix of goods and bads and the "issues" that arise; but there are no issues outside of what language can say. Issues are inherently propositional, and without propositions, one simply stares vacuously into space. It is impossible to imagine a world outside of language, because 'language' itself is a particle of language. Language is what we ARE.

And this by no means is wrong. It just doesn't follow through.

For me, I think philosophy's job is to first describe, not just create inhibitions on belief (which leads to the ever popular nihilism, epistemic, ethical, ontological nihilism). Comprehension exceeds propositional affirmation, which comes down to: all propositions are open, and tracing their openness leads to openness itself, and here there is a threshold at which one can stand before all things, yet possessed by none interpretatively; a 'place' where thought yield to all that is laid out before them, including, of course, the massive totality of other thoughts----Jarring, uncertain, uncanny, yet this is where philosophy takes thought. 'Pain' the concept is, at this juncture, pain the wonder and mystery. I think this is where your assumption goes where you say," Pain is surely outside of language, as is just about everything else we experience." In this you implicitly affirm the metaphysics of everydayness.

Here's my question for those who would have us talk of qualia: what is added to the conversation by their introduction? If a qual is the taste of milk here, now, why not just talk of the taste of milk here, now? — Banno

We can and do talk of the milk here and now in various contexts and metaphorical extensions, and ironically, and on and on; but what happens when the question is asked philosophically and one wants to know about the nature of an empirical encounter that is presupposed by all of this talk? One moves then into another language context, the study of the prepositional questions that no one but philosophers pay attention to. Such is the nature of philosophy.

Dennett, you will note in all of these "intuition pumps," makes the attempt to remove qualia from meaningful talk by reducing qualia to contextual affairs of meaning making, in which a quale is precisely not accessible, by definition. Such a move makes qualia easy prey, but consider: anything can be undone once recontextualized out of its native contextuality! Just read Derrida. Okay, you don't want to read Derrida. But I can draw up my own "pumps" for the science that is implicit in Dennett's every move toward affirmation. To begin with, I would ask, simply, when science encounters the DNA molecule or the rays of light from a distant start, does it take into account at all the perceptual act that constitutes the observation that "gathers" information? I mean, you follow the primitive thinking that moves, in the presuppostional physical analysis of light perception, from electromagnetic spectrum to object event in the brain, how is it possible, not physically possible but logically possible, for that out there to get into a brain? Here you will find Dennett simply puts the brakes on inquiry, and it is not, certainly, that philosophy has nothing to say about this, but that Dennett has nothing to say about philosophy.

And there are many other such pumps that can be drawn up that reveal stars and geological formations and microbiology all, in their philosophical analysis, are reducible to indeterminacies.

Dennett is essentially arguing that, if we just forget about all those pesky philosophical intrusions upon the way HE wants to world to be, it all turns out rosy. Alas, this is not the world at the basic level of analysis. Science is not philosophy, not even remotely, I would argue.

h

Cats have no language (thus "in a universe only of cats"), the cat would still have pain regardless of whether anyone could talk about it ("the cat's pain is qualia"), but he would not have "pain" (in quotes, indicating it is a word), but he also wouldn't have pain (without quotes) if you say "pain" and pain are inseperable (meaning you can't discuss pain without language; it makes no sense to do that), which would lead us to the conclusion there's no pain and no qualia (that is the conclusion: you can't discuss something without language).

It's just a silly game (a language game).

This is just linguistic philosophy. It says nothing of the cat's internal state. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's that we can't discuss it. It's beyond the language game.

I say it's silly because of course the cat has an internal state of pain that is worthy of consideration without language. It's metaphysically real and it is subject to discussion. — Hanover

But consider a way to deal with this that is not so silly. The answer to the question, what is the nature of pain? is answered in language, or there is no answer at all, and this puts pain outside of language, but this outside is not conceivable, because even the term 'outside' belongs to language. I assume this is already made clear. So even to speak of a cat's world of pain but no "pain" you are still talking nonsense for there is no "out" of "pain". All things are "in" the totality of finite possiblities of predication.

The virtue of this is in the rigorous insistence that things be pinned in language to make sense, and there really is no "otherwise" to this. The moment the the thing is thought at all, it belongs to a totality.

So what is the solution to this absurd game where the world just falls out of existence because it cannot be spoken (and recall that here the young Wittgenstein confesses talking nonsense)? One must reconceive the essence of language and its concepts and the nature pf possibilities. In short, language is a totality, is finite, but this finitude is not closed, but open to the world, and world is allowed to stand "outside" of language as long as language is conceived as an interpretative openness (gelassenheit, to borrow a term) that becomes manifest when inquiry (the question, that piety of thought) assaults, if you will, fixity, dogma, finitude. Consider the cat and move into the deconstruction of the cat's pain: Pain means what? and now language comes pouring forth ideas about biology, the central nervous system, or condemnation or affirmation of the judgment about the pain, and so on, and finally the strange move to acknowledge the "badness" of the pain in the analytic of ethical embeddedness, and talk about the contingencies of bad things and good things, bad couches and good shoes and how these refer to qualities these have, and this moves to what is desirable and not, and now one pulls back and unterstands the nature of the language game: contingency: Things are bound to other meanings for their meaning.

That is until contingencies run out, and one faces the impossible understanding that pain exceeds (superfluity, as Sartre put it) what language can say.

The reconceiving of the nature of language as an openness, rather than a closed finitude, brings into language terms many in philosophy do not approve of. Terms like transcendence and metaphysics. What they do not see is how, frankly, imbecilic analytic philosophy has become in its attempt to close systems of thought to only what is clear and well delimited. This is NOT what our existence IS, and so they live in an ontological and epistemological dream world that insists that, e.g., ethical issues are only about judgments about what is ethical, ignoring the value basis for ethics because value as such is a metavalue issue.

The world IS a metaworld always already.

A "Quale" should be understood as referring to an indexical rather than to a datum. Neuro-Phenomenologists routinely conflate indexicals with data, leading to nonsensical proclaimations. — sime

But then, what is an indexical that sets it apart from data? Pointing to a thing assumes the thing, and this thing is what, if not a datum? But try to point to a quale, and you are doing the impossible. Even calling it a quale is, if you will, under erasure the moment it is said.

Religions fail? Quite the opposite: they have provided solace for people in crisis for millennia. What did you think religion was about, the truth? Nothing so mundane. Religion is the redemptive and consummatory structure of our existence. Everything else is just incidental. And this makes the youtube simply about things incidentally true about a culture's way of dealing with metaethical indeterminacies.

This is not going to be a fun exchange. I'll need to put my first response last, because it was the most ridiculous and clearly antagonistic (possibly narcissistic) part of your response to me. I'm more than happy with the colour this intro adds to my response. I am feeling pretty dismissive of most of this, as its ... lacking, let's say. I will come across as such. It seems all you're doing is trying to talk shit about types of philosophy you don't like. Which is fine. But trying to make arguments in the way you have is embarrassing. — AmadeusD

Please don't be embarrassed. I know you don't like to read things that take inquiry down to the very ground from which they come, and this leaves out altogether the "meta" of metaethics. It also takes the meta out of ontology and epistemology, and this makes the analytic tradition pretty much washed up, and this is simply because our existence, at the level of basic assumptions, IS indeterminate, and for philosophy simply to move along as if this were not the case makes it a vacuous enterprise.

Nonsense, exactly as I had noted earlier. I assumed you'd clarify, but it just got worse and less clear what you're talking about. — AmadeusD

This is case in point: What if I asked you to "show" why it is that the "principle" of causality is, in its very nature, apodictic? This cup cannot move itself off the desk, and there is no stronger logical insistence imaginable, yet you are asked to give an exposition on why this is so, that capture in discursivity that which is makes it what it is. Of course, the request is nonsense, but why? Because prior to any account, what stands before inquiry is the essential givenness of the world, and this is where the problematic begins, for to "say" what this is, what is being explained has to be a language construct itself, but one "intuits" causality. One can of course, question the language that conceives causality, but not the unbreakable intuition.

Which brings me to reason your thinking cannot, or refuses to, grasp the same kind of simplcity in the logical bond between pain as such and ethics. Consider: it is literally impossible to reduce ethicality itself to what is itself not ethical in nature. The various ways we express regard for ethical matters, the yay or nay, the condemnation or approval, and so forth, entirely lack that which is play that makes the matter what it is, which is the pain itself. As I said: remove this value dimension of an ethical matter, a dimension that is revealed only in the content, and ethicality vanishes JUST LIKE THAT! And this is an analog to causality: remove the intuition of the apodicticity of the causal and causality vanishes. Even if one were to follow Leibniz's theory of a preestablished harmony, then it would be God investing causality with its coercive essence.

So the point is, when it comes of the basic assumptions of ethics, one encounters what will not be explained, and this is bad news for those who want nothing to do with metaphysics, because this yielding (gelassenheit) to the world IS the first order of philosophy: like a scientist, one has to observe first! Without this, philosophy becomes a self indulgent triviality.

It is. I don't really care about you asserting otherwise. This is the case. — AmadeusD

But then, not caring is not an argument, or really, anything at all. But it is a fascinating insight you're missing. Value (the general term for, well, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, as well as their affective counterparts) MUST have agency, and given that value is the essence of ethics (no value NO ethics--this has to be taken seriously if you want to understand metaethics. It is not about the judgments we make or the cultural institutions that inform them and the "relativity" this produces. It is about what makes for the very ethicality of ethics, its essence. This is where meta-questions go), agency is the essence of ethics. WE bring ethics into the world.

I can't even imagine a philosophical curiosity dismissing this. Of course, as with all things, one has to read into an understanding.

This is literal nonsense. — AmadeusD

But Amadeus, this is not an argument. Do better. This is a child's response.

I'll do a you: Nope. This is the case. This is what pain is in the mind. That's why people can handle it to varying degrees, often not suffering in light of it, where another would. That's enough on that. — AmadeusD

When I say it is deflationary, I am referring to the straw person argument that reclassifies something AS something else which is more tractable and agreeable to a particular view, thereby bypassing something problematic in the analysis. To me this is akin to what the church did to Copernicus and Galileo, nullifying evidence due to a perceived threat, and classifying this science as heretical, thus removing what is undesirable. Take the prima facie ethical injunction not to torture my neighbor and the "fact" of the pain it would cause as justification (OTOH, if my neighbor simply adores being tortured, this renders the injunction problematic. So what?---referring to your comments about "varying degrees"). Here, I am saying that when you refer to a pain as a sensation, this is an attempt to bring, say, terrible suffering to heel in a reduction by association with other ordinary sensations, as with "sensing" a smell or a sound, which, so characterized, has no ethical meaning at all.

That's enough on that!? Really? You DO sound like the church.

And look, if you say pain is in the mind, then how does this affect to ontology of pain? It IS in the mind, but then, you have no issue with affirming the weather, and that rain IS my front yard. What does locality have to do with it? Lava IS in a volcano, yet there is no issue on your part that this locality strikes out the existence of its features.

And of course, we all suffer and delight differently, with different intensities about different things. But this has no bearing here in this "meta" ethical discussion any more than how well, and to what degree, a person thinks affects what logic IS.

A sensation, delineated from other sensations. I've been over this. It seems like you're copy pasting rants from somewhere in response to buzz words like an AI. At the very least, you're not really reading my posts. — AmadeusD

I do read them. I think mostly you tell me how angry you are. You don't reason things through. You say what things are, like pains being sensations, but you don't really respond to objections, and you don't refer to ideas and you don't play them through.

Wait...your post disappeared. Errrrr, curious.

Conclusion: The Gettier problem is a distraction, not a crisis. It stems from conflating subjective certainty with objective justification, misapplying the contextual rules of language games like sensory experience or logic. JTB remains a robust definition: knowledge requires a true belief with objective justification, which Gettier cases lack. Philosophers should abandon this semantic quibble and focus on real epistemic practices, viz., how we use testimony, reasoning, or perception in daily life. Let's leave the Gettier puzzles behind to the philosophers entangled in semantic quibbles and focus on the practical language games where knowledge really lives and thrives. — Sam26

I don't see JTB as robust at all. It is simply filled with question begging. P is true? But how does one get to the truth of P being the case without assuming an epistemic connectivity? Someone like Rorty would say when is possessed by the assumption that someone has ten coins in his pocket, and makes a justified inferential move, then the actuality of there being ten coins in the pocket in question only makes a difference when thoughts turn to THAT language game, that is, talk about actualities and vis a vis beliefs. There is no truth that can be affirmed about P apart from the affirmations made about P, and these are hopelessly indeterminate. And so justifications: can a justification be pulled apart from ontologies?; that is, saying P is the case, a fact, but are facts independent of the affirmation? Is this an impossible question, because the only way to witness its validity would be to justify and affirm of deny. It is crazy to think P is true can be analytically detached from justification. And belief: a single term comprising truth and justification. So sure, JTB is robust IN common usage of language, but philosophically, it is a thesis that falls apart.
I think of JTB like I think of time and its "parts": a single term comprising past, present and future, yet the past can only conceived as a present event, and the future, in the conceiving of the past, is an anticipation bound to what is being anticipated, which is something from the past that seizes upon the occurrent event and tells us what it is; and then the present, apart from past and future, loses all meaning. JTB is, like all concepts, self annihilating.

That about Hegel needs to be made clearer. Oh well.

Consider that the the Cartesian method is to discover what cannot be doubted, and this is impossible to "say" that is, put in a proposition, because all propositions are contingent and this is because language does not produce certainty beyond doubt. All propositions can be doubted because the ground for language is not a singularity: try to say what a thing is and you will be question begging the meaning of the terms you use to say it, and those terms will rely of other terms, and this is the contingency of language. No utterance is "stand alone" about what it is about; rather the aboutness is diffuse, and is the totality of the language. Think of the way Hegel said that when you point something out, and say There it is! the term 'there' is a universal term, and can be used in a great many contexts, and so what it is before you that is being indicated with 'there' is in no way brought to light with this term. All terms are like this. Language doesn't "speak" the world as it is outside of language, for all of our possible references are universal terms, not particulars. Even the term 'particular' fails refer to something other than language.

I sometimes ask, does General Motors exist? Of course, it exists; it employs thousands, is on the stock exchange, has been making cars for more than a century. and so on. But there was a time when it didn't exist, so how is it that it was simply summoned into existence? We want to think of someting existing as being more than someone's saying so and making money in it. Isn['t GM just like some cultural institution, like marriage or funerals, and what about our names, Jim or Constance or Tiffany: do these people with these names "exist"? We want to say the people do, but the names as such really don't. The point I would make is that EVERYTHING is like this. This is why Williams has to talk about a View from Nowhere: if language is indeterminate, self referential, contingent, then anything that can be said cannot possibly be absolute. But then, what is "nowhere" is right before your waking eyes. You see the cup on the table, but you know your comprehension is tied to a totality of language possiblities, none of which have any authority to speak "about" anything outside of these possibilities. That cup has another dimension entirely, for what sits in the table is not language at all. It is "other" than language.

In the OP you talked about "reality absolutely uninterpreted by human perspectives and limitations" but
science is the LEAST able to put forth foundational meaning like this, for it thinks what is said about the world, actually discloses the world apart from the language that constructs the disclosure, as if calling somethign a fence post or a hydrogen atom "speaks" what that over there IS. Science is firmly rooted in this supposition. But most importantly, science ignores the MOST salient features of our existence (and all of existence): affectivity and "subjective" affairs like thinking, moods, apprehensions, anxieties, anticipating, remembering, resolving, CARING, and so on. And it is here I am saying you will find your desideratum: put lighted match under the palm of you hand. There are TWO phenomena here. One is the actuality of screaming pain, and the other is everything that can be said about it. We generally take the two to be one, but this is wrong. Language is inherently interpretative, and never "touches" the actuality; while this living actuality if pain: can this in any way possible be doubted? Not for a millisecond. It cannot be gainsaid because pain is not language. "It" stands apart from language, yet it is there, most emphatically in your midst; an absolute. An "absolute" is, of course, language, and I am writing these words, and yet, what I talk "about" manages to reach beyond language's totality....or does it?

This is the essential question of ontology. The ethical/aesthetic dimension of our existence is a dimension that is, by the standards of our collective understanding, nowhere.

Would anyone like to join me in analyzing this argument? And if it’s unclear in my paraphrase, I can quote more from Williams to set it up better if need be. — J

It is a naive argument. The cartesian method asks, is there anything that one cannot doubt, and this brings inquiry to bear on where doubt cannot go. There is an analytic divide in this that, at least up front, has to be understood: OTOH, there is language, and language is contingent, and this is important to see, for anything said can be doubted, and the moment is conceived, it is subject to anything that can be brought against it in metaphor, irony, exaggeration, and any of the literary devices you can think of. I like to say, in language, the Gods are just grist for the mill, for nothng is sacrosanct because language is self annihilating: the moment something is uttered, it plays implcitly against what it is not, and all I have to do is speak this: You say God loves us all, and I say, God? But does he love elephants? Paramecia? Does God have agency? Bigger than something, or smaller? And look, there is NO end to this fun. All inquiries into anything at all end up in aporia, indeterminacy, and what is there is entirely open to play. Nothing survives. Which is why Karl Rahner, the Heideggerian Jesuit priest, now tells us that none of it, the rituals, to prayers, the hymns, and the metaphysics of Jesus the redeemer, the son of God, and so on--none it is "true" because God is simply ineffability itself. I would add: God could actually show up at my doorstep and take me into the depths of her being, and language or reason would not bat an eye, and this is because language never was that which had the power to possess "the world" or anythinhg at all. Language is pragmatic, intra-referential or "deferential" but always "at a distance" from its own "ground," that is, unable yo say what "it" is (an interesting book I just began reading by Derrida, The White Mythology, starts on about the good read).

Even logic itself can be doubted, for while it does seem impossible to doubt the "intuition" of something like modus ponens, this bit of reasoning is cast in language, and language is contingent, historical, from the Greek (logic, from logos, which comes from prehistorical roots), and thus the actuality of this "intuition" (which needs to be crossed out as it is written! Because it, too, it a particle of language) and its connection to the prehistoric ground in language must at so9me point be revealed to have that foundational connection with its actual counterpart, the intuition, that makes language actually BE the intuition itself, and this, of course, is absurd. The "aboutness" of language can NEVER be shown, because one in doing so will always encounter the language itself used to show this. You see the problem here? Anyway: So there is no way science will ever do this: disclose the world's own most actuality, so to speak. Science issues from language (Rorty says science is essentially social) and language has no foundational or center of its own (Derrida. You ask me what a doctor is, and I can give answers that never end).

OTOH, take John Cleese, a master ironist (whose family name was once Cheese, and he regretted it being changed) and ask him if there is nothing that survives the death by a thousand cuts that irony can deliver, and he will say there is nothing that cannot be undone, talk about the political, philsophical, religious, the agony of death and torture, NOTHING cannot be undone, and everything can be gainsaid, DOUBTED, refuted, rendered uncertain, even logic! But put in his midst an occurrent actuality of someone suffering, bleeding, in screaming agony, you will find Cleese in a crisis that cannot be gainsaid, derided, doubted, or undone. You have arrived at your desideratum: an absolute, but this absolute stands outside language.

You want to know if Williams' thoughts are compelling. No, because he doesn't understand (based on your info) the nature of doubt and certainty. Doubt is IN every possible utterance, for language is self annihilating, and thus to speak of certainty is to be open to doubt, no matter how certain you are. But there is a paradox on our midst, for language is also the way one bears witness to what is not language.

See above:" ....agony ISN"T interechangeable" it should read.

[

Perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems a perfect "non-sense" paragraph. It says nothing to me at all. What I can respond to is the bolded. There are plenty of scenarios without this, like random bodily malfunction or pain from sources unknown. The facts are that there is pain. That's all. The person can then react how they react and that has a moral dimension to it, i suppose (though, realistically, if the person isn't affecting anyone else there's an argument that's till not a moral dimension).

Does much pain have a moral aspect? Yep. But its not in the pain. Other than these comments, I do not think the above says much that can be talked about. The point I made, and i still make, is that pain is a sensation which we can all agree is "x" when described adequately. It involves (or need not involve) any claim to good bad, moral immoral or anything of the kind. Causing pain would fall into your bucket, at any time. — AmadeusD

It "seems" nonsense, but is it? You think like this because you don't understand ethics. Take the idea that it is impossible to conceive pain without agency. Think it through. Ask what it would be for searing pain to be without agency, so absent of perception, awareness; a bit like asking what lunar moon light would be without sun light: the former IS the latter, so they are conceptually bound (notwithstanding Quine's Two Dogmas, if you've read it), and so the matter is analytic. Pain IS a constitutive feature of a consciousness that experiences it, when it is experienced. So then, if there is pain, there is agency. What makes pain inherently moral? Well, this is what pain IS, that is, moral affairs are literally "made of" pain, in the broad sense.

It is not conceivable for there to be pain, and there being no moral issue. Note that this claim has no interest the way pain varies in the objects of its affections or the way pain and pleasure become entangled and ambiguous. These incidentals are suspended, just as Kant suspended all but logic to talk about pure reason. (Of course, he was deeply in the woods regarding ethics.) Such entanglements brings analysis to a hopeless mess, which is responsible for, partly, for philosophical talk to be lost in the contingencies of ethics, which is preanalytic (prephenomenological) and this confuses as to the "essence" of ethics, and so philosophy finds itself locked into the absurd thesis that there "really" are no "ethics" to ethics, borrowing from early Wittgensteins' no value to value (keeping in mind that as he wrote this he likely had a copy of Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief in his pocket. Russell called him a mystic, yet he, like Heidegger, was bound to a philosophy of finitude), and this the ground of your thinking. This thinking is mistaken: value is not "observed" in the usual way; it is apriori, yet existential! The good and the bad are indeed metaphysical ideas, but this is because the world is metaphysical; and metaphysics' centuries of imaginative theology must be suspended to see this.

You see, it is not true that, as you say, there is nothing to talk about. And calling pain a sensation is simply deflationary, and patently absurd. Certainly, all pains are sensations, but sensations often belong to non value contexts, as in references to sensory motor skills, or Kant's sensory intuitions, or in any a number of technical references, and it belongs to casual talk that has not made the transition into an analytical setting. Philosphy brings out what is undisclosed in such settings as it asks themost basic questions, like metaethical questions.

That is precisely what I am saying. Some kind of pain can be bad. "Pain" is just a thing that can obtain. It isn't moral. It is just is. I cannot see that you're addressing this beyond trying to curtail the discussion into human reactions to pain - but even there, you're on shaky ground as plenty of pain is not considered bad. — AmadeusD

But this is the rub of it all: You want to reduce the world to what "just is" and yet you dismiss what IS in doing so in an ad hoc attempt to bring the world to heel in a reduction to mundane clarity. What IS it that you are dismissing? The metaphysics of metaethics, for one.

That dagger in my kidney is NOT my reaction to pain. Such an odd locution.

And the discussion here has nothing to do with the way complex human affairs confuse analytic concepts, like the good and the bad. There IS NO "the good" or "the bad" defended here. This point is critical. No one here arguing as if there were some platonic form called the good. It is not arguing that there isn't such a thing either, for this I leave to "bad metaphysics" somethign Wittgenstein rightly wanted philosophy its busy hands off of. Mine is simply a very straight forward position: in the analysis, and I keep strong examples in play because they are the most telling, of any ethical matter at all (and I use ethics and morality interchangeably. I simply don't care about this in a metaethical discussion, and distinctions are about just this "busyness" referred to) one MUST find value, not to put too find a point on it. No value, no ethics. Ethics is analytically bound to value, and value is the good and the bad of things. This can be understood congingently, as with good chairs, good knives--referring other language to explain what these are; or metaethically, which deals with the ontology of ethics: what it IS qua being value. Comprehension remains finite, but discovery indeterminate--but authentic, and not dismissive merely. What I call good metaphysics lies with disclosure of what is there, yet indeterminate. This IS the world.

You are very, very much not talking about the right things here. Pain isn't agential. It has no moral valence (take this, just for now). "she" being in pain is bad, because I dislike seeing people in pain (usually). The pain itself is the cause of her behaviour which is bad, to me (awkward wording, but yeah). The pain, itself, is bad to her in this instance. There will have been plenty of pains she did not consider bad in her past. You cannot design scenarios which are emotionally bad and claim we are talking about 'pain'. We are not. We are talking about human reactions to pain, as above noted. If you feel these cannot be extricated, so be it. I do, and I cannot see why not. — AmadeusD

Think of pain not as as a variable concept that accords with how people differ in their entanglements. It is an analytic concept, derived from apriori inquiry into the nature of pain. Analogous to Kant's reason as such: There is no such thing as pure reason that can be comprehended; it is rather an analytic concept only, meaning Kant can't tell you what things are in their essence, but he can give analysis of what is witnessed. The good is an analytic concept only; its meaning lies in there being IN the analysis of ethical matters, judgments, events, concretia, a transcendental element, witnessed but not understood in its ground (if there is one).

Disliking seeing people in pain goes to compassion and empathy. This is not on the table. Reactions to pain begs the question: what is pain at all?

This is not the question. You're talking about agony - a human emotion - not pain, a physical sensation presumably felt by all sufficiently ccomplex conscious entities. — AmadeusD

Agony is a human...what?" sorry, you took me aback. Are you saying that having my teeth drilled without novocain is an emotional experience? A seismic error in category.

This is precisely what labeling things good and bad is. It isn't referring to any higher order reasoning, it doesn't draw on some objective measure, it simply tells me what you think. You've done quite a bit of it here, without giving me anything more than exactly that. — AmadeusD

No. See the above. The good and the bad are not labels. Your misapprehensions rise out of invented issues, conceived by those who think too much about their own thinking, i.e., analytic philosophers. Higher order of reasoning, objective measures: these are terms discursively generated out of what you think the foundational analysis of ethics is. But you have a default critical mentality, likely conceived out of too much a nihilative thinking. Keep in mind that philosophy is mostly nihilative, in that it takes a thesis and tears it to shreds. This will get you published, NOT an analytic toward affirmation. All theses leads to aporia (see Derrida on this. Language is inherently self annihilating. But metaethics takes inquiry out of thetic delimitations because ethics is bound to value in an existential analytic, and value lies outside of language, is non cognitive.

This seems totally senseless. Facts are facts. "moral affairs" doesn't really mean anything. Morality is literally the dispositions of humans about facts (including what to do about them). You haven't presented anything to the contrary. — AmadeusD

Don't get lost in the ambiguity of a term. Facts--what is a fact? One doesn't want to posit something that is not a fact, or rather, justified in the positing. Facts depend on justification, unless you are in metaphysical la la land: no justification, no fact; so much for "facts are facts". Justifications are facts. Jutification is generally an objective matter, public, for all to see and think about, even if controversial, but when analysis gets technical, the public nature of justification is narrowed, and facts are narrowed. What is a moral fact? One can use this term like this in different contexts, but these are all preanalytic (preontological). What is a moral fact in the meta analysis? We do what scientists do: observe. Here is my friend wanting his ax back with rage and horrible intent, so it is HIS, and I should return it, yet clearly no good will come of it. Two conflicting obligations. A fact. Now we ask, like a scientist would ask, what IS it when the "parts" of this episode are laid bare? Like a geologist looking for quartz and felspar and mica, we look at what constitutes this matter, what makes it what it is. Essences for scientists are empirical and quantitative essences, and the analysis lies whatis always already there in the existing paradigms, but ethics is different: what is IN axes and murderous intent that gives pause to action? It is the harm that could be done. What IS harm? Here one stops in one's tracks: one has discovered something in the analytic that is IN the harm. It is not contingent harm, as in "this proposal could harm public image," for the harm of that could be done is not about other language that cold explain it. The harm is irreducible harm: the ax, breaking of bones, and so on, causes great suffering (agony, ofo you like), and the analytic of this lies in the term value (being an analytic term, and discovery being both true and right, yet indeterminate). You have discovered the essence of the whole affair. Were no suffering to be at stake, there would be no ethical dilemma. It would simply vanish. The "science" of this conclusion is unmistakable.

Now I have presented something "to the contrary" as you put it.

The irony is quite strong here, and I am having an extremely hard time not quipping becuase of how intensely obviously, from line one, the reverse of this was. You have made the category error, and consistently interchanged "agony" for "pain". Agony is pain with a negative moral valence. You have baked in a winning argument, but about somehting I am not talking. — AmadeusD

So you think agony is interchangeable with pain. Look to usage. Note all contexts in which you find the term agony and its "moral valance" and replace this term adjectivally qualified 'pain'. Nothing changes, for screaming agony is not screaming horrible pain.

You are inventing an issue. There is none. Half baked, I think is the expression.

The reason I've used to the term "constitutes pain to a human" is because the word "pain" must be constituted by something, and its construction involves only that agreement aforementioned. I should have scare-quoted the word 'pain' there, but hopefully you now understand what you've missed: We wouldn't know how to use the word 'pain' or what to apply it to unless we had that agreement underling it. To be brutally clear: The use of the word pain, and what pain is are clearly different things which require different treatments in discussion. You have picked up two separate points and run them together - reasonable, as I was imprecise, but please understand it is not what was being said. — AmadeusD

"The use of the word pain, and what pain is are clearly different things." Puzzling, given what you've said. So what is pain, then? A sensation, you say. But see the above.

To some degree, but that's far less interesting and nuanced that what I'm getting at. Various descriptions of pain (not our reactions to it, but it - stinging, dull, major, minor, niggling and them comparisons with other sensations (too hot, v just hot enough)) can be amalgamated to represent a category of sensation which includes much variation, but generally speaking (with grey areas) distinguishes it from other sensations. Is it the case that these sensations have a tendency to cause certain reactions in us? Yep. And those reactions are moral. The pain (inarguably, now) is not the same and (almost inarguably) is not liable to those same considerations without adding the reactions. — AmadeusD

Reactions are moral, and I see no reason to object with this. But here, this is a meta analysis of ethics, and reactions vary, but the pain does not, though it is indeterminate as are all things (the sun is an indeterminacy if you follow the ontological question down the rabbit hole long enough). You want to reduce morality to a "reaction" to pain, but reactions, the commendations, condemnations, approvals and disapprovals, the thumbs up or down, and the rest found in analytic thinking, are just ignoring foundational presence that makes morality what it is: pain. See the above: compare normal facts with moral "facts" and ask honetsly if there is no residua in the reductive comparison. Yours is a reductionist position, a deflationary position, following something irresponsibly said by Wittgenstein long ago.

If this is your position, I cannot understand why you're here doing this, or the vast majority of what you've said in this reply. It is, as best I can tell, patently, obviously and demonstrably (as I feel I have done) wrong. "the bad" is nothing more than something you think everyone else agrees on, apparently. They don't and there is no criteria for "the bad". Even if there were, "pain" would not be liable to it's confines. So, yeah. I shall leave htis here given that response. — AmadeusD

Patience. All is not said in a post. There is behind this much unsaid because you haven't read enough about it. I know you thinking pretty well, and it rather typifies the attempts to put clarity before actuality, thereby missing altogether what it means to be in a world, which is "really" what philosophy is about.

This may be part of the reason I was never much fascinated by philosophy. Arguments don't excite me much, and the experience of living teaches us enough, if we pay attention. — Tom Storm

OTOH, Heidegger's Being and Time must be read. Just saying. It is frankly profound and opens the door to all later Heidegger, and post Heideggerian/neo Husserlian responses. Not just arguments.

I think it's dispositional. As much as I find Hart fascinating and intelligent, I find his beliefs to be cloying and unsatisfying. The notion of the metaphysical God of classical theism doesn't engage me. When it comes to beliefs, like the people we love, we can’t help what we’re attracted to. — Tom Storm

Not that I am going to go out and read all of his works, but I suspect the ground of his thinking goes much deeper this classical theism. Someone like Karl Rahner, a Heideggerian Jesuit priest (weird as it sounds), takes ALL of the beliefs, rituals, hymns, sacraments, and so on, to be cognitively empty: "...so always let our statements also fall into that inconceivability of God that remains silent." This goes for Christ the redeemer and son of God, the trinity, original sin, and so on. None of these are "true" but stand in "analogous" relation to the radically Other of divinity. Now, this kind of thinking exceeds something Heidegger would allow, for any analogy one can imagine for H is conceived out of the totality of ontic-historical possibilities, that is, familiar language and culture wrought out of historical settings, and cannot be conceived beyond this (though, his gelassenheit in A Conversation on a Country Path makes reference to Eckhart, and Eckhart's great virtue lies in the absence, mostly, of Biblical references. His was a mystical exegesis). Anyway, I would have to read him further.

Reading Husserl's Ideas after Heidegger made AMNY things clear that were frustratingly confused about the world. The world was not the world anymore.

Are you suggesting idealism? — Tom Storm

Not really. The world is disclosed IN "idea" but clearly clouds and cups and cell phones are not ideas. They ARE, and they're there. The term "idea" muddles the issue for me, notwithstanding Husserl.

Are there things that are not possessed by our comprehension? Of course; but one would have to leave disclosure to encounter them, and since this would be leaving comprehension as well, then there is nothing to talk about. You can see why Rorty thought Heidegger so important: talk about other things only makes sense in sense making contexts. But, and this is most extraordinary to my thinking, What do we do with Being as such, thta strange, alien experience of not being at home, a "nothing" that doesn't "show" itself, but only apprears as an uncanniness of all things. I say, this is the self's projection of its existence on to things encountered. This cup I am familiar with in all the usual ways, but ask me if it is real, and you are asking a very different kind of question, for how does one discover its reality, given that "all the usual ways" say nothing about this? Heidegger makes his pivotal move on the verb 'to be' (see the youtube interview with William Richardson), but he retains the need to include the otherworldliness of our existence. I side with Husserl on this, but it is a very long story.

Our inner experience is the ground of reality. On this point, from what little I’ve gleaned, I see no reason to disagree. It’s easy to argue that modern life reduces everything to consumerism, surface values, and the grey managerial-technocratic lens through which most Western governments operate. But I’m curious: what practical steps might this way of thinking actually lead to? Life is more than sitting in a room reading and pondering ineffables. What does one do? — Tom Storm

My take is, it depends on the ineffables you are pondering, and, when is pondering not pondering, but "listening". What IS divinity? This means putting time itself aside, sequential time such that one sees cups and hills and fence posts, and there is no past to make into a future in the process of one's existing? How is it possible to acknowledge what is not language if language is presupposed in acknowledging? But this matter really is not an argument in the usual sense. Phenomenology begins with description of the phenomenological "world" that is presupposed by ordinary existence, and the former is not the familiar world, and so one has to make the move to phenomenological discovery, but what this IS depends on the individual. Some find this the philosophical medium of religious affirmation, while others like Heidegger, see it as an analysis of the finitude of our being (though Heidegger said he never really left the church).

I think very highly of Emily Dickinson, her life, attitude, and her daring threshold poetry. When asked why she was such a recluse, she said for her, just being here is enough. I know exactly what she meant. No greater adventure.

I agree. But we all agree about pain without a moral claim. When moral claims come in, we start having to 'make points'. — AmadeusD

Pain without a moral claim: change this to pain without a moral dimension or possibility, and now you have a contradiction. Claims can be made or not, and they are often complicated, but what it is for something to BE pain at all, that is, IN the analytic unpacking of the term, carries in it the moral possibility, and since it is impossible to conceive of pain without agency, any pain at all is a moral actuality, putting aside the ambiguity of what pain IS in entanglements and involvements, for pain, it has to be kept in mind, as a concept is an abstraction from actuality.

Perhaps. But it is not about good or bad. It is quite hard to see that you've tried to tie them together here, even, beyond hte initial (lets call it incredulous) question. — AmadeusD

That does cut to the chase. You see, we are not talking about different things, but the same things. I bring up an assault on the kidney with a spear, and we are not descriptively at odds, that is, I say it hurts and you say I'm sure it does, and we share a common understanding of what this all about. And when I say that there is a prime facie injunction prohibiting committing such a thing, you likely will still agree that there is, and for good reason. And further, when language like saying, "the pain in question is awful, dreadful, can't imagine," comes into play, you will not disagree, I don't think. And even if I say it is a moral outrage that this was done out of purely cruel intent, I am guessing you will agree as well, seeing that this kind of talk is in the everyday language of our culture, and has nothing to do with the ontology of pain as a philosophical issue; we talk like this all the time.

Where we come to a disagreement is when analysis moves to the existential core of that which all the fuss is being made about: the "badness" of the pain. An awkward term, but so what. You take issue with pain as bad as such, for surely you are not objecting to calling pain bad, because this is so common, too often to mention. No, it is the "as such" that seems to be at issue. It would be the claim that, when someone is in the throes of agony, and you ask, How bad is it? she screams bloody murder in your face for asking such a silly question. You are saying, with Mackie, that yes, you understand all of this, but in a very special analytic of pain, a philosophical analytic, the term "bad" has no place at all, for it carries with it a moral dimension that cannot be evidentially grounded in actual conditions like screaming agony ( I am assuming you are willing to allow there to be screaming agony). But what is evidentially absent from the agony, which is so profoundly manifest? This IS the question. If you think it is a fact that the sun is shining when it truly is, and it shining is not just an intersubjective agreement, but an actuality; but you think being in agony is not bad when it truly is agony, then this calls for an inquiry as to what separates the two. I think you want to regard the agony just what you would regard the sun shining: a simple fact with no additional moral essence, for, if I understand you right, you think there are no such things as moral essences, and when we use this term, it is simply classificatory for things that are intersubjectively "taken as" good and bad. Facts are facts, and moral affairs are really just facts, called moral affairs in preanalytical contexts

But are moral events no more than mere factual events like the sun shining? Is it that to be in agony has no distinguishing features not found in facts like dinner being ready or moon light being reflected sun light or this cup being larger than a thimble? I think here you would have to say they are equal in what they ARE. I mean, obviously it is things like agony that make something moral what it is, and this is different from distances and comparative sizes, but the "distinguishing features" I have in mind have to do with how facts are what they ARE, and moral facts being what they are. When you isolate the agony from "straight factuality," or, say, reduce factuality of an agonizing affair down to where the agony itself presents itself, to see if there is a residuum of something not merely factual, I do believe you are bound to agree that there is, and to ignore this is like ignoring the broad side of a barn.

This is to me quite clear. Call them moral facts, if you like: Moral facts are qualitatively distinct from "mere" facts.

Simple, really: facts have no value dimension. What is this value dimension? The good and the bad.

Descriptions (though, it may be more 'accurate' to say 'sense of sensation' which is awkward, but hopefully makes the point hehe). Then we intersubjectively agree that our descriptions match. That is what we then label pain. Again, no moral claim to be made (though, i understand most will want to make one here if asked). — AmadeusD

But most want to make judgments in what Mackie calls a first order moral view. The issue here is a second order moral view: the ontology of morals. We may intersubjectively agree that, yes, there is agony, and we have a good idea what it is. But what happened to the second order analysis? The "essence" of agony?

Sense of sensation? Well, in one classificatory designation, this is true, for this amazing Hagan Dasz certainly is a sensation, just as a tickle or an itch. But calling something a sensation binds it to a deflationary account, one that deals with non value issues. This makes for an error in category for this discussion.

And that is all that constitutes 'pain' to a human. Otherwise, we wouldn't know what to call it when we feel pain. Again, 'obviousness' is a truly terrible line to take here. — AmadeusD

Just to be clear, you did say agreement is all that constitutes pain?; "otherwise, we wouldn't know what to call it when we feel pain."?? Only true if the language conditions of agreement constituted the essence of agony (our current example). So, are you saying screaming agony in its essence is entirely exhaustible in the analysis of what is SAID about it?

This is just patently false, and supported by nothing that you've said. I'm unsure what to do with that... — AmadeusD

It stands unrefuted because it stands unrefutable, and this is because the essence of ethics is not a proposition.

Many things seem certain ways, but when you press, they aren't that way.

This, for instance, entirely begs the question of what 'bad' is, and how to put things in that box. It presumes plenty of things. This might be taken as some kind of entire scepticism, but it's really not - there are no facts about good and bad. Just intersubjective agreements. And these regularly butt into each other. There is also the fact that most people have a 'bad for me' and a different 'bad for you' set of beliefs. The murder, if tortured, isn't undergoing something 'bad' even though it is 'bad' for them.

This should be fairly clear now, that 'obviousness' isn't a good way to run this particular issue's arguments. Unless we want to invoke either relativity, or emotivism (both seems reasonable to me). But i take it those making this argument are wanting to escape them. — AmadeusD

Odd things you say, I think. Are their facts about logical principles? Is it a fact the sun shines today, when it does?

Not having read all said here, how is it that pain as such is not bad? Just asking how you get by on this. Note that even in the variations of the way pain is acknowledged, the matter is not about how agreements differ, but of the pain as it IS in privately experienced, as only pain can be. This question is logically PRIOR to anything that can occur in Intersubjective agreement, for such agreement begs the question, agreement about what? Then the matter has to be made public for others to agree, and agreement simply means there is shared content, but it being shared begs the same question, what is shared? and agreement rests with whether or not one's descriptive account aligns with others, for if it does not, others can disagree: disagree that, say, cigars are disgusting. And so there is variable accounts to cigars being disgusting or not, undermining any attempt universalize the status of cigars taste, but note, what does one do with MY disgust for cigars? Is it therefore tossed into indetermiancy? Because there is nothing at all indeterminate about my getting nauseous; but then. what makes being nausea bad? Perhaps another enjoys it. Could be. But this says nothing about my experience. We don't agree on how nausea stands vis a vis desirability, but so what? My end stands unrefuted, because the bad is as clear as day, more clear than the principle of the excluded middle or De Morgan's theorem. It locality doesn't enter into it, nor does agreement.

There seem to be religious yearnings in the frame you have presented. In relation to Caputo one might hold that his weaving of postmodern ideas back into the religion of his upbringing has an inevitability about it. Is his experince similar to yours? It often seems to me that people assiduously look for new (or perhaps less familiar) reasons to believe old ideas. — Tom Storm

Religion as such is just the metaphysics of affectivity, value, ethics, aesthetics, the good, the bad. What it is that makes importance important, the residuum of a long reduction that cancels language impositions on interpretations of existence. Good metaphysics, what is there, not language but in the world, and because it is there apodictically, of certainty (putting aside the way language philosophers and logicians can undermine certainty. They are right! And if it were a matter of anything else, I'm afraid it would thrown to contingency and relativism. For a look at how value is NOT like this, see Max Scheler's refutation of Kant in his Formalism in Ethics and Nonformalism in Value and Ethics): the knife wound that penetrates the liver causes pain that is inherently ethical: the pain as such should not exist, and this is not a contingent "should not" as if it were about contextually grounded do's and don't's of driving or child care. It has no context; all it has to be is itself, and this has its evidential ground in the reduction: remove all that would claim to say what the prime facie ethical injunction against shoving daggers into kidneys IS, and what remains is a nonlinguistic (non cognitive) pure phenomenon. Here one has discovered the metaphysics of metaethics. As well as the metaphysical ground for religion itself, for religion IS metaethics at the rock bottom level of analysis.

I’m reminded of theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart who writes that when consciousness is freed from ego, distraction, and fragmentation, it encounters reality as inherently good and radiant. Bliss isn’t something added to existence, it is woven into its very nature. Hart often stresses that the fact anything exists rather than nothing is a kind of metaphysical astonishment, something so basic we usually miss the strangeness of it. Are you sympathetic to this, or is it straying too far into specific religious mystical tradition? — Tom Storm

Let's say it is not straying, but is yielding. But yielding to what? An intuition, the res ingrata among analytic philosophers because it suggests non propositional knowledge, and so has no formal justification that can be made public and argued about. Just as the soul is absent from conversation, as it should be, simply because of its connotative density, like love: try to talk about the metaphysics of love, and you are instantly surrounded. I read a bit of Hart to know what you are talking about, and I do agree the way you put it, meaning I len toward approval. And if discovery is a matter of revelation, that is, acknowledging the "inherently good and radiant" IN the preacknowledged world, then those who do not see this are left out, and this is the problem, for cognitive mentalities dominate philosophy, not affective ones, and to make the way through to affirmation, one has to make an "objective" argument, one that doesn't draw upon what some have only, but is rather universal, as universal as modus ponens. This requires philosophical disillusionment, which is why I stand with difficult reads like Michel Henry, because there already exists a body of thought that massively disillusions, phenomenology. Still, I cannot understand why the likes of Critchley and Rorty remain metaphysical nihilists, while someone like Hart, profoundly well read, makes the Kierkegaardian "movement" of affirmation. I guess the distance between us is too great.

But I do find Hart affirming what I affirm. He is a mystic (keeping in mind that Russell once called Wittgenstein a mystic)....with an argument!

I take it this is at the heart of your thinking - this and the notion that whatever is transcendent is found in the immediate experince of being - that which seeks, wonders, hopes, dreams, desires... — Tom Storm

Cognition as such has NO value. What puzzles me entirely is the failure to see simple things, like: We are thrown into a world, a culture, language, existence, and we are tortured, not to put too fine a point on it. Some are thrown into Perilaus' Brazen Bull, others choke on their prime rib, far few died quietly in their sleep, historically, at any rate. To understand this, one has to identify with suffering, not merely wave it off in ironic dismissiveness, and suffering has be brought before Husserl's epoche to divest it of intruding discussions that mask its essence, that is, acknowledging suffering in contexts that undo its pure meaning, which is why I invite inquirers to stick their hand in boiling water and the like. Read Mackie's great book (really well done, helpful for seeing what is both right and wrong about analytic thinking), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, which is ALL about this grand distraction away from the actuality of the world. Anyway, there you are, about to be burned alive at the stake: NOW you know, and are about to know with a magnitude of certainty that makes logic seen ridiculous. the gravitas of the human condition. It lies here, not in some idiot thesis about the nonobjectivity of ethics. Just how nonobjective IS the Malum of being burned alive? Interesting question. On the other side, the bliss of Hart and Buddhists and Hindus: is this so far fetched? Listen to Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, number 2: Petit Poucet. Absolutely sublime, otherworldly. Or his Le Tombeau de Couperin, Menuet ("à la mémoire de Jean Dreyfus"). This is an intimation of immortality, to borrow Wordsworth's words. Philosophers argue only. They do not yield enough to listen, understand, because this is mostly not publishable.

This also seems to be heading toward mysticism and non-dualism, with the notion that the self (understood misleadingly as a product of culture, language, and upbringing) can be stripped of conceptual overlays and ego to realize true freedom. Or at least a new starting point. What is the next step, I wonder? — Tom Storm

What is next is Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation. It is unfortunate that this thought is buried in Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, but it rests on a foundational premise that ALL existence that has ever been received, every iota, is received in consciousness, and the two cannot be parted no matter what. And consciousness is NOT a mirror. It is an event, impossible to see "outside" this event. As I see it, the next step is understanding that one's individual consciousness is not a localized event only, though. Take Kant's noumena: infinite, but Kant was wrong to think this metaphysical True Reality could stand apart from anything. Phenomena ARE noumena, and noumena are phenomena. This is where this goes. The world is metaphysics, AS WELL AS physics. This cup on the table is something else entirely, and this something else is there in one's midst, waiting to be acknowledged.

Could you elaborate on the "basic level" you are referring to, I am really curious about it. — Showmee

Ask, what is the Good? Its essence: that without which it would cease being the Good? Without the Good or the Bad, ethics stops being what it is, and I would say this is critical, not so much if you are Mill or Bentham or Kant who talk about right actions and how to find them, but for you putting together an ontology of ethics. This ontology is presupposed by philosophers, but sorely neglected. The question, says Dietrich von Hildebrand, is about importance itself. And see Max Scheler 's Formalism in Ethics and Non Formal Ethics and Value where he criticizes Kant's complete absence of qualitative content. He says ethics "could have only empirical and inductive validity" with Kant because he ties value to use and purpose, and ignores the central question: What IS the Good that is presupposed in a good chair or a good plan for the future? Good knives are sharp, but for Macbeth, a sharp knife could be dangerous to a player on the stage, so what IS a good knife given that so many different contexts exist that could redefine what good is? It is no one thing, that's what, and so Kant rejects qualities because they are variable. But Scheler wants to tell us valueS vary, but value as such is like logic, and by abstracting from the incidentals of normal affairs to discover its essence, one sees structure in logic, but with value the difference is momentous: value as such is IN the palpable world's feels and manifest qualities, and is not the mere "form" of things. Value is IN the world (notwithstanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus), and its "importance" defines our existence AS metaphysically important.

So what is value as such? Put a lighted match to your finger a second or so. Now you know. But this is not propositional knowledge, meaning its identity is not bound up with other language, but issues forth fromthe world. Ask what a bank teller is, and one's answer will go on eternally, for what a bank teller IS refers to other words, and their accounts, and these refer/defer to others yet. This is what beingS are "made of". Literally made of language, for ask what anything IS, and it will be language that responds. (This is a theme of post modern thinkers like Blanchot and Beckett and Levinas and Derrida, et al). But ask what is bad about your injured finger, and conversation really has no place. One could talk about it, of course, the intensity, position, cause, and so on, but this does not speak at all as to what pain IS. If something is there, but cannot be spoken, both! then you have encountered metaphysics. This si why analytic philosophers will not discuss metaethics properly: they will not concede to a metaphysical metaethics. This is Mackie's brilliant error in his error theory: metaethics IS the apodictic ground of all ethical issues; it is just that its discovery and essence is noncognitive. He treats ethics in that book only as something that philosophers can talk about, and his opposition consists of thinking of ethics the way one would answer the question about the essence of a bank teller (above).

Of course, epistemology and ontology are equally enigmatic. And what is ethics if not a knowledge claim? And what is ethics if not what it IS? Metaphysics is not some impossible beyond. It is the impossible beyond that subsumes finitude. There are no divisions.

Is this where you are suggesting we look? — Tom Storm

A bit much, below. Got carried away.

That's the rub, isn't it. Someone like Simon Critchley has read everything and yet talks like a nihilist in league with Rorty, who would say he is not a nihilist at all. He thinks nihilism is born out of a lot of ancient thinking that has reached its end, along with philosophy itself. But then take someone like John Caputo, who has also read everything and he comes out swinging for a metaphysical religious affirmatio, and he takes Derrida as a closet metaphysician. I think one emerges from all this thinking with a bent towards what one already IS coming into it. I, for one, learned analytic thinking long before I had every read Heidegger of Husserl, and it left me entirely disillusioned. Gettier problems? Really? This is what epistemologists think about, and not the foundational relationship that is the ground for knowing? Quine? Ryle? Brilliant thinkers, and reading them inspires admiration, but they do not affirm metaphysics as even "existing" and one is left with arguments without meaning, or arguments whose meaning has no meaning, and they would applaud this (Wittgensteinian) characterization because they are all philosophical nihilists, and they are this way because, I argue, analytic philosophy is inherently negative, and they cannot see the apriority of existence as such, the necessity that our existence IS which is not derivative, not discursively achieved even though "discovered" in language. What IS our existence? It sounds at once vague and outside of reasonable thought, but this is because existence is taken as an abstraction, just as a term like being of reality: Just empty concepts, a nothing, which is not a category and so categorical errors cannot be said of it because it stands against no other concepts: a radical existential indeterminacy; but this kind of thinking is completely misled by a fundamental "categorical" error itself, that arises simply out of a failure to observe what lies befor one's waking analytic eyes-- two things: first, this indeterminacy IS our existence, and it is where philosophy meets the pavement, so to speak. it is where philosophy belongs in the affirmative effort to bring to light the world as it IS. The world is most emphatically NOT an argument in its ground, but is entirely alien to everydayness, into which we are "thrown". You mentioned Husserl's infamous epoche. This is the method of discovery that is at the heart of phenomenological thought, yet see how it is derided by analytic thinkers, mostly because these are smart people who are relatively affectively and intuitively vacuous, and, like Dennett, treat philosophy as if it were an empirical science. Second, it is never nothing, but is saturated with meaning, that is, value. Value permeates existence.

So having said this, consider that all of this thinking will eventually come to a single insight: that propositi0onal truth has no intrinsic value, and yet to seek at all is value driven, meaning one is excited, fascinated, longing for, seeking, needing, desiring, wondering, about the nature of happiness and horror, and THIS is what is the first impulse that drives philosophy; yet truth is defined in terms of propositional truth, which meets excitement, wonder and this whole affective dimension of our existence that is poised for consummation (you know, the desideratum and the ideatum, the ground of religion) with a concept of what this is all about that is sterile and existentially deflated. As far as I am concerned, analytic philosophers are just a bunch of pathological post Kantians, who have entirely lost the sense of what it is to be human (yes, of course, there are exceptions), thinking the Truth lies in a truth table, an argument, and well drawn up theses. At heart, logicians. Might as well be mathematicians.

So if you've read this far, then I guess I should answer your question, Where does one look? See Heidegger's Time. Look closely at this thinking (which has a history, of course, beginning with Augustine's Confessions" bk 11). You say you are not a philosopher, well neither am I. I first picked Being and Time when I was 57. See Division 2, Section 64 or so, and onward. Fascinating to read, but the point I would make is that for Heidegger, one's existence IS Time: the coming to be of the "having been" in a dynamic present which is (should be) our freedom that is essentially forward looking (for the sake of) A liner and sequential concept of time he calls "vulgar" and he can't be anything but right about this analysis, for no one modality of time can be conceived apart from the others. Try it, and you'll see that Time really is a UNITY, and its modalities are only ontically conceivable, meaning in general affairs time is divided, but go deeper and divisions self destruct. So what does this have to do with transcendence? What is it that literally constitutes one's existence? It is the "having been" of one's life, and the more distended the present moment, that is, the more the past of an occurrent present sits as an established foundation for interpretative possibilities, the more entrenched in ontic (everyday) time one is, the more "solidly" one exists (I am arguing about Heidegger's position), according to Heidegger, and you can see how this finitizes what a person IS: It makes our existence essentially historical, but here Heidegger is a bit like Kant, isn't he?: on the onehand, if you are committed to an analysis of human existence that ignores non-historical possibilities, you delimit our essence to language and culture (the very thing Kierkegaard calls inherited sin), while structural descriptions belong to ontology, a narrowly appreciated body of ideas; but on the other hand, if you see that Heidegger's finitude possesses these threshold features, as those found with Time, that insist that there is a dimension to our existence that is entirely "other" than this historical finitude (the past), then you open a door for metaphysicians like me (needless to say, my thinking is derivative: Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, Jean Luc Nancy, Emanuel Levinas--all, here and there, a tough read, indeed).

But now remove Heidegger and the rest, and just conceive the existence you are in. You do Husserl's epoche (this epoche is a METHOD, not just and idea. It needs to be practiced, like a Buddhist practices meditation, not merely argued), and all you know about the world is suspended. Everything, save the purity of presence itself (the Buddhist's ideal: nirvana). To do this, you need to erase Heidegger's self, and all of those historical "having beens" of your world are marginalized, and you no longer have an identity at all. This is, for me, where transcendence begins: to perceive the world that has been rigorously liberated from Heidegger's "the they" (the finite totality of what can possibly be meaningful for a person and her languge and culture) altogether, yet not leaving it at all, for without the they, agency itself is lost. Sounds paradoxical, but it isn't.

Not sure I follow your wording. Are you saying that Rorty is too caught up in language to see that ethics comes from a deeper, more fundamental source, something beyond what we can put into words? Or something like that? Could you restate it more simply? I think we’ve tried to explore this notion of the transcendent before, but we might be too far apart to get anywhere with it. As a non-philosopher, I take some responsibility for that. — Tom Storm

Restate it more simply? It's not really an argument. It is something that is there, and has always been there, but is ignored. Two questions; no three, though one is essentially the same as another: What is the essence of the good and the bad? And, what makes the world knowable, which is the same as the question, what IS the world? You will find John Mackie, whose Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is all over the OP, has no serious appreciation for questions like this, because analytic philosophy doesn't talk about ethics, epistemology and ontology at the basic level, the level that belong exclusively to philosophy. Anglo-American philosophy students are left with an education in philosophy that does not touch the most essentially philosophical questions in existence.

The good and the bad: what IS this? How are knowledge claims about the world actually about the world? What IS the world? If you are looking for some clarity about this notion of the transcendent, you will find these questions to be the source of it all.

I think a common flaw here would be assuming that treating all people equally is anything more than a demonstration of a particular framework of values, one that happens to be embedded in contemporary Western culture. But it’s part of a broader conversation, and that discussion is about who gets to count as a citizen with rights. Yes, cis women. But what about trans women? Some people don’t even recognise them as such.

And such advocacy of extended citizenship and solidarity, to use Rorty’s term, sits within a framework of cultural and linguistic practices. It is not something found outside of us as humans. We make agreements about values and develop practices, and these become embedded and sometimes appear to be immutable, but they are not. — Tom Storm

I think treating all people equally is, as you say, only contingently viable, as one can imagine all sorts of ways to make strong cases for not doing so. You know, it depends! It is impossible to conceive of moral entanglements to iron out in logical perfection. Even logic doesn't iron out like this (this sentence is false. And ask, while logic seems it cannot be gainsaid, how about the language that is used as the medium of its expression? Is this not historical and contingent?).

You and Rorty are right, but I think not entirely. Rorty also argues for solidarity. See what Simon Critchley says about Rorty in "Deconstruction and Pragmatism - is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Libera!?": "A liberal ironist, someone who is committed to social justice and appalled by cruelty, but who recognizes that there is no metaphysical foundation to her concern for justice." Thus, Rorty is going to argue that being kind to one another does not need religion to back it up, for it is built into, and inevitable in, a pragmatic social evolvement.
But I say Rorty misses the point, and the point is genuine metaethics that is both foundation of ethics, and is transcendental: ethics as such transcends reduction to what can be said about ethics. Rorty's failing lies in his commitment to propositional truth, that is, truth is what sentences have, not the world. But this truth is derivative OF the world, and thus, the world has to be understood inits ethical dimension, not in the finitude of language.

I lay all this out to highlight that the first premise is more fundamental—an invariant moral principle that transcends both historical periods and cultural boundaries. It is precisely these kinds of foundational moral statements that I find most compelling.

different cultures develop distinct moral systems, but at the core of every system lie certain objective moral principles that are universal to all humans — Showmee

Moral principles that are universal?? Universal, meaning inviolable, apodictic as modus ponens. What could you possible have in mind? Remember, language itself is not this. This is why once post modern culture gets a hold of anything, it is open to ruin in the "play" of contingency. Gods become mere grist for the mill of irony, metaphor, exaggeration. Ask the masters of these, Monty Python, what it is they could never mock, deride, insult, deflate, and they will tell there is nothing that cannot be undone, for, I am saying, to speak AT ALL is to place what is spoken in the vast potentialities of possibilities of language and culture. This is, essentially, why Wittgenstein would not speak of ethics. Once philosophers get a hold of it, it falls into the analytic whim of possibilities, for philosophy is in its nature annihilative (see Simon Critchley's Little, Less, Nothing). And this is because language possesses it own annihilative possibilities. You leave a concept like 'truth' to be construed in terms of what propositions are and can do, and you are simply asking to be refuted.

But then, place an episodically suffering child at the feet of John Cleese, and he will respond with the greatest urgency! No questions, no irony, no judgment. What does this tell you about the "meta" of metaethics?

The question here is not about valueS. It is about value as such.

I would say that a value is a prescriptive idea that makes its possessor believe everyone else ought to approve of and adopt it. — Showmee

But saying it's prescription and approval still begs the question, meaning it has presuppositional underpinnings, meaning you haven't yet reached the 'meta' of metaethics: What IS it that is the ground for prescription or approval? The thing that were it to be removed from the equation, ethicality itself would be removed. One can prescribe how to build a toaster, but this is not an ethical context, and so prescription cannot be the essence of ethics. One can approve of a sofa, but this will be based on descriptive contingencies of good and bad sofas. Certainly, ethical matters DO involve implicit prescription and approval/disapproval, as with the typical frustrations: should I return your ax to you if you demand it full of murderous intent? If you metaethically ground this on approval and prescription, you are bound to the general features of these, found in ethical and non ethical cases alike, and thereby ignore what gives the matter its very ethicality.

“Meta” is a prefix derived from the ancient Greek word μετά, which literally means “after.” In philosophical and broader academic contexts, however, it typically signifies an approach to a subject that emphasizes on reflection, transcendence, or taking a broader and often more abstract perspective. I mean you can understand it by taking a look at how it is used in the following examples: metanalysis, metaphysics, metalogic etc.

So in this case specifically, ethics is the field concerning the normative nature of ethical propositions, whereas metaethics sort of "takes a step back" and asks more fundamental and essential questions pertaining to the ontology and epistemology of ethics. — Showmee

I would say that is good enough. When it comes to the normative "nature" of ethics, where does your thesis take us? You step back from normative entanglements, and this is a reductive step, meaning analysis is released from the normativity that issues from ideas and principles laid out everyday ethical issues, for these are suspended so as to get to more basic thinking, that is, thinking that is presupposed by those normal familiar matters of normativity. "Meta" is disclosed, as you say, as a stepping back from the familiar, and I am saying this moves is toward what is presupposed by the familiar, so to discover this, one has ask, what is presupposed in ethics? What IS it that is IN ethical normativity such that were it to be removed, ethicality itself would be removed?

This is the question that takes one to metaethics. Looking toward the constitutive essence of something, what makes it what it IS, turns one away from the incidental (much in the way Kant turned away from instantiations of logic in ordinary language, to discover what made logic in ordinary affairs what it IS), or the "accidental" as they used to say, and move toward the essential, and this takes all analyses into metaphysics: What is in an ethical matter that, were it removed, the ethicality would vanish? Value. Value is the essence of ethics and aesthetics (see Wittgenstein, late in the Tractatus. He was right about this). No value, no ethics.

So what is value?

As I've noted above, the policing of language from a pedantic point of view has existed for a long time, but certainly not from the beginnings of language. If you're blurring the distinction between the policing of prepositions at the end of sentences and policing for social change, then you're buying into my objection above, which is that we can't priortize a descriptive linguistic theory over prescriptive ones just when it suit our purposes. This is the controversial part of my post by the way, not the other stuff. — Hanover

Prioritizing a descriptive linguistic theory OVER prescriptive ones? But I can't imagine anything I said that could be remotely associated with this.

To me it is still a yes or no question. Do you perceive/discern the speaker's intent differently if you think of them (the speaker) as usually conservative or usually liberal? — David Hubbs

There is a book, The Myth of the Left and the Right, by Hyrum Lewis, that claim those opposing ideologies are really tribal loyalties, and that really, there is no identifiable thinking that defines what they are. Part of the case made deals with studies that have shown people's agreement or disagreement with ideas politically active depend on who said it, one of their own, or the opposition. I thought the argument specious: True for some, but among liberals, not as many, because liberals are more analytic, and their affiliation with a party sustains even in disagreement because of, not tribal devotion, but basic principles. It is the conservatives, you know, the Christians with bible in hand and flags as big as houses, who believe aimlessly, thoughtlessly, and love their kings.

The problem with forced linguistic change for political aims is at least two-fold: (1) it violates the typical organic way language evolves through use and instead prescribes what words are to mean, and (2) it ignores equivocation fallacies and tries to impose ontolological change that does not comport with correspondence theories of truth. — Hanover

Not sure what forced linguistic change you have in mind. But it reminds me of Foucault's panopticon: the hope that in inserting a set of values in the conscience of all through education, the media, political debate, etc., the achievement of involuntary exposure eventually leads to a self correcting compliance. So instead of waiting for the long haul what you call "the organic way," deliberate steps are taken in school curricula, in the racial inclusiveness and gender alternatives in mass media, and so on. I see this as simply an inevitable part of a society's self conscious evolution: the more reflective we become, the more we see need for change, and in politics especially, this is all about language.

So I am happy to "violate the typical organic way language evolves." Had this kind of patience prevailed in the sixties, the civil rights movement would never have happened.

"Impose ontological change that does not comport"...you sound like Heidegger, putting the "correspondence theories of truth" aside. True, Heidegger had a historical view of the self and one's culture and language, and this view suggests nationalistic pride and a fear of cultural debasement. I've read some of his letters, and yes, he did not approve of Jewish influence in Germany. Anyway, I think you are siding here with Heidegger, and Jordan Peterson (who read Heidegger), and others who fear change. But Heidegger did not belong to THIS culture we are in, which is inherently committed to social freedom. Had he been born in this culture, his views would have been very different, for the post modern intelligentsia (which he kind of founded, ironically), into which he would have been trained and conditioned, would have been theo-ontologically radically different.

The first is simply annoying because it creates language police and demands compliance among the unwilling. The second presents absurd results. It's one thing to demand that cats be called dogs because "cat" might be now thought of as a derogatory term, but an entirely other matter to then suggest that the cats you now call dogs might be used to guard your home because we now call them dogs and that's what we all know dogs do. — Hanover

I don't think anyone is explicitly policing language, but implicitly, yes. We all are policing ourselves. Are we not already policed by language? Prior to the neologism "policial correctness," was their not an established body of rules, subtle and connotative, social mores, etc., that came down hard upon you if you stepped out of line? Never referred to this as being "policed" then; indeed, "language police" is itself a neologism conceived by the right in an attempt to, as you say, "demand compliance among the unwilling." There is something to be annoyed with.

That about cats and dogs: I think you are talking about something like, say, the calling of firemen, fire fighters, because we want to be inclusive of women in the profession. And then, sending dainty women out to actually fight fires, and is absurd. Hmmm. Not so dainty, the ones wanting to do this. But there is something to this though, to me aligned with letting trans women compete in woman's sports. A terrible idea. How to deal with such a pressing issue?? I know: who *(&^^)(*! cares! This is NOT where the current calls for inclusion, equality and diversity take our affairs. This is rather the attempt on the right to pretend these are major issues, so they can talk about them for hours in derogatory ways on talks shows.

Answer me this: what is the nature of the "meta" in metaethics?

Err, not helpful.

No. A person who invests themselves fully in the identity of Democrat or MAGA probably didn't experience neglect, whether they accept that categorization enlarges the pixels is a different matter. — frank

I don't follow this.