Essentially, the whole truth of "the cat is on the mat," requires an elucidation of how the related concepts evolve and unfold globally, and how the subject comes to know these things as well as their own process of knowing.

Truth then, knowledge of how it is that "the cat is on the mat," involves knowledge of how it is we have come to know that the cat is on the mat. The truth is the whole. Both mind and nature play a role in defining truth, and the attempt to abstract propositions into mindless statements of fact simply miss this.

Hegel's argument is more convincing if you get into his arguments vis-á-vis ontology as logic (the Logics) and his theory of universals, but those are too much to elaborate here. I think Pinkhard's "Hegel's Naturalism," does a good job at outlining this reformulation of knowledge and truth in clear, concise terms, but at the cost of some major simplifications and deflations. Houlgate's commentary on the Greater Logic and Harris' "Hegel's Ladder," clarifies this better, at the cost of significantly longer and denser projects, and in Harris's case, significant use of Hegelese. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll read Pinkhard. Thanks. Unfold globally? You mean historically and throughout disparate cultures?

So, this means that when we talk about propositions and their targets, their truth-makers, and related facts, we aren't actually stepping into some external frame outside of mind. "The cat is on the mat just in case the cat is actually on the mat," is just a statement of our own confusion. What does it mean to be a cat or a mat? We'll never get outside belief asking what it is these propositions actually mean and what their truth-makers would actually be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, there is no outside. The idea is patently absurd, as if, as Rorty put it, the perceptual apparatus were a mirror of nature. But then, it is clear as a bell that the world is there, and it is not a representation at all, but is stand alone there, and by this I simply mean its existence as thereness possesses something that is, as Kierkegaard put it, its own presupposition. When we observe an object, the object becomes what it is in the observation, making it both a transcendental object, as the distance is never bridged, as well as an object of finitude, and this latter is what Heidegger holds. See how he talks about the art work:

The artist is the origin of the work. The work
is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole
support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are
each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which
also gives artist and work of art their names – art.

Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

To me, this is rather mesmerizing. In it lies the key to understanding knowledge claims implcit in the perceptual encounter. He captures the dynamic of hermeneutics, suggesting a dialectics of meaning making, only with Hegel there is this unfolding of divinity, which Kierkegaard argues against because Hegel ignores the dialectical tension in one's own existence. Hegel is too impersonal for Kierkegaard, and I think there is a good point made here: this encounter with the world is my encounter, and the historical dialectic is discovered within me. Knowledge may be wrought out of the ages, but its existential core is within the singularity of agency. And this core is radically affectively intense, this human dramatic unfolding.

Interesting the way Heidegger shows his Kierkegaardian influence. This talk about the "third thing" is derivative of Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. He writes

A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite,
of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity,
in short, a synthesis.2 A synthesis is a relation between two.
Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self
In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a
negative unity,3 and the two relate to the relation and in the
relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the
psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical
is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this
relation is the positive third, and this is the self.4

He is likely mocking Hegel, but he is also serious, and you find this same idea in the Concept of Anxiety. This "third" thing that Heidegger is calling art is the synthesis in the dynamic interplay between artist and artwork. Art emerges in the tension, and I think this is the way to think about knowledge, which is that there is in the interface between perceiver and perceived a third thing, and this is meaning, tossed around casually and "reified by familiarity." I see a cow by the barn and if I am simply "going along" with normal affairs, there is created a matrix of meaning that is spontaneous, and this is, to keep with Heidegger, Rorty, others, essentially pragmatic, a forward looking event in time.

Of course, this analysis goes way back to Augustine in his Confessions. I was trying to read paul riquer's Time and Narrative, but found out I had to read more Aristotle for this, and so I quit, but the point I will make is that a truly important concept to have in mind in trying to understand what happens when I see and recognize the cow is the concept of time. Brentano, Kierkegaard, Husserl and of course Heidegger are very enlightening.

How would you differentiate his notion of the pure encounter with that of Merleau-Ponty or Husserl? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as corporeal intersubjectivity has been incorporated into the reciprocally causal models of embodied, enactivist approaches. Husserl, however, considers causality to be a product of the natural attitude. We have to bracket empirical causality to arrive at its primordial basis in intentional motivation. — Joshs

The matter goes as far as the reduction can take it. Husserl said the natural attitude pov understood the world and its objects as transcendental, and he meant that there was nothing in this thinking that made the essential connection and the object remained remote and inaccessible. But he never denied this about the phenomenon, that it was true that there was something beyond the "noematic sense" So there is an object "inherent to the sense" as well as the transcendent world that is put in parentheses. Husserl excludes "the real relation between perceiving and perceived." When he talks like this, he proves himself not to be an idealist, acknowledging what is there and actual, just suspended, and he does present the basis for following through on the promise of the reduction which is to establish the ultimate marriage between what is known, liked, disliked, approved, rejected, accepted and so forth, and what is "there," for the status of the noematic world is not to be deemed simply derivative or representational. This, to me, is the strength of Husserl, the perceiving AS perceived, the remembered AS remembered has no diminished ontological status, and is thereby admitted into evidence for a foundational thesis in philosophy. Now, as Henry tells us, we can give the affectivity discovered in our existence its due place, without the traditional prohibitions, what was called the "irrational" parts of our nature. Affectivity is now ontologically front and center, delivering us from, among other things, ethical nihilism (not that I've Husserl going on like this. HIs "spirit" talk in the European Crisis sounds like Heidegger nationalistic turn towards the nazis in the thirties).

Enactivism begs the very question at issue, which is, how do objects (of any kind) acquire their status as objects in the world? To speak at all of organisms interfacing with the environment, one has to first affirm that organisms would survive the reduction. They don't.

Truth is analysable in terms of T-sentences.

"The cup has a handle" is true if and only if the cup has a handle.

A few things are important here.

First, the equivalence is truth-functional. It's "≡", and you can look up the truth table in any basic logic text.

Second, the statement on the left is in quotes. It is understood as a reference to the utterance in question. If you like, the statement on the left is mentioned, the one on the right is used.

Pretty much all other analyses of truth bring problems. This is far and away the simplest, and pretty hard to deny. It sets out a bare minimum for any understanding of truth.


The statement on the left is about language. The statement on the right is about how things are. T-sentences show that truth concerns how language links to how things are. — Banno

Thinking like this leads to a failure to understand the world. "How things are" is exactly where the issue begins.

Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. "The cup has a handle." is true, or it is false.

Beliefs are stated as a relation between an agent and a proposition. This superficial structure serves to show that a belief is always both about a proposition and about some agent. It might be misleading as the proposition is not the object of the belief but constitutes the belief. Adam believes that the cup has a handle.

So truth is a monadic predicate, while belief is dyadic.

A statement's being true is a different thing to its being believed. — Banno

Well, an agent judging a proposition is an agent of a propositional nature "it" self. Agency conceived apart from propositional possibilities is metaphysics. So it is really that beliefs are between beliefs and beliefs. I judge the cup to have a handle, but what makes for such a judgment if not the body of implicit propositional beliefs that are at the ready every time I encounter cups, handles and their possibilities. I am doxastically predisposed in any occurrent doxastic event.

So truth is a monadic predicate? But this just assumes truth to be some stand alone singularity in the world. Such a thing has never been, nor can it be, witnessed apart from belief.

You're saying that the "assumption" is not about a specific P being true prior to verification, but rather about truth in general being knowable and recognizable as such. Or if not truth in general, then truths of the sort that can (putatively) be verified by simple perceptual experiences such as seeing a cat, coupled with some basic background information. This procedure would reveal "truth-makers," if all goes well. — J

But one does not know a truth. Knowing IS the truth. My position is that knowledge, belief, truth, at the level of philosophical inquiry, which is the most basic, while obviously useful expressions in varying contexts, are events in the perceiving agency. In order to make a move to talk about something that is outside of this agency ( cat and cow agencies alike) would be a transcendental leap that is not demonstrable. NOT that there is nothing "over there"; this is absurd as well. But to say we have an avenue open to the thing over there FREE of the perceptual act would be like talking about moonlight as a astronomical phenomenon while altogether leaving out mention of sun light. As if the moon were a stand alone radiance of light. Things do not simply present themselves free of perceptual contribution. In fact, apart from G E Moore's hand being raised in defiance of the idealist's skepticism, and Moore does make a very good point in doing this, I am aware, there is NO explanatory basis for affirming anything about the "cow thing" over there that altogether overthrows Kant. Physicalist just have to admit that a brain-thing is massively complex, and the survival of the "thing out there" in the processes of brain chemistry is patently absurd.

This is perhaps the point of the OP. Moore's hand raised is a POWERFUL argument, as I see it. The hand IS there, notwithstanding the presence of synthetic apriori structures that are IN the hand's being there. So we are at this really impossible crossroads where at once we know something is there, over there, and not me but separate from me, a cat, a coffee table, etc., yet the only tool in the physicalist's basket is causality, and I don't mean at all physicists do is talk about one thing causing another...but this is implied in everything they say, obviously, and if you think unproblematic cases of causality, and there are zillions, you will find nothing that can make my thoughts about the cat really ABOUT the cat. They would be more about the physical systems of the brain...but wait, not even this. How, after all, would neuronal systems generate awareness, a knowledge claim, of themselves???

Such is the paradox of an uncompromised physicalism.

I don't understand this question re truth-makers. What does it mean for an affirmation to be "weighed"? Do you mean "judged true or false"? If so, one can only reply that there is a distinction between states of affairs, which would exist without any perceiver, and the statements we make about them, including judgments of truth and falsity. I suppose that is an assumption, if you like. We don't have to use the word "true" (or "false") at all if we really don't believe there are such things as statements that correspond (or don't) to reality in a Tarskian T-truth sort of way. And yes, it's very vexing that no account of how this works seems flawless. But to affirm P, and to have a justification for doing so, doesn't make P disappear into a vicious circle of linguistic/logical assumptions, unless you're a severe sort of Idealist . . . which is maybe what Count Timothy von Icarus is getting at, above, with his Hegelian analysis. — J

States of affairs existing without a perceiver is nonsense, unless you can say what this would be without "saying" what it would be. The moment you begin to speak: there is the history of your language and culture education and the structures of a remembered past informing the perceptual moment as to the what, the how of it, stabilizing the givenness into familiarity. Hegel gave us, in part, Heidegger, only Hegel thought that IN the moment of intimation of the things before me there was a metaphysical historical disclosure.

It is not that causality is not flawless. there is a difference between a paradigm that leads to others because it possesses possiblities for a new thesis. Rather, causality possesses nothing at all that, on the assumption of physicalism, or some variant thereof, that can deliver knowledge. The moment you say, well, the light radiates upon the cup, and the surface reflects or absorbs certain of its wavelengths, and those reflected reach the eye....and I stop you there where you haven't even entered the eye, and I ask: how is a wavelength of light anything like the object? And the same applies to all of the sensory data. How is a sound wave even remotely like the object? In the exhaustive analysis of sensory data, one will not find the object. This is the point. And once the brain actually get hold of these vibrations or light waves, forget it. A brain event is NOTHING at all like cup or cow.

This may sound simplistic to you, but it is this simplicity that is so remarkable. One is so conditioned by everyday talk and referencing that the philosophical question is entirely ignored. And again, philosophers in the science-friendly analytic vein are just tired of Kantian or neo Kantian thinking. This changes nothing about the radical deficit in explaining the simple knowledge claim.

...is simply working at different aims. Knowledge is simply no longer justified true belief, its a process being unfolding itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The trouble as I see it lies exactly in the unfolding itself, as if unfolding were a cognitive discovery. Which it certainly is, and I have to affirm this because agency requires this, meaning I can't imagine any account of ontology or epistemology without a structured self, which is what a science based metaphysics is. So what is agency, being a self? It is a pragmatic structure, in terms of its knowledge claims, though, to remember Kierkegaard, there is this "qualitative movement" that lies in our midst, which is realized when we understand the foundational indeterminacy of our existence; that is, we realize quite literally that we exist (something K thought Hegel had forgotten). So THE grand question that faces philosophy emerges here: either one is ontologically committed to the unified totality of our finitude (Heidegger) which is "open" yet free of essentially divisive features of the Cartesian kind; or one holds that there is a foundationally divided world, like Kierkegaard, whose "spirit" manifests as an existential anxiety of, as Heidegger will later put it, not being at home, feeling alienated in the everydayness. For Kierkegaard, faith breaks anxiety's grip as one affirms God in faith in freedom, while for Heidegger freedom is an ability to look upon one's "potentiality of possibilities" to self create.

But there is a middle ground, which is the Husserl inspired French theological turn, so called. This is Levinas, Marion, Henry and others who invite us to look at the phenomenological reduction in the most radical way: not to bridge the gap between subject and object epistemically, ontologically and morally with intentionality, but to embrace the distance, so to speak. And this has a tradition in Eckhart, pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, and others. And yes, this means that the matter of the question between me, the perceiving agency and the cow near the barn and the knowledge claims that leap into play the moment I see it, whether these knowledge claims are mostly pragmatic (Heidegger) or otherwise, is "threshold mysticism".

But knowledge certainly is not what is sought in all this. It is value. All of these endless ruminations in philosophy end here, in the pursuit of what can be generally called value. Any utterance made by a human dasein (or a fish, cat or cow dasein) has its telos in value, and value is the ONLY, I claim, no reducible phenomenological dimension of the world's presence. The only absolute.

This is all arguable to the death. Heidegger was right calling it a feast for thought, this endless inquiry. One stops inquiring when one is happy enough, and no question (the question: the piety of thought!) intrudes.

I suppose what I have put out here is a response to your "process unfolding itself" and the idea being that such a process has context, and the context here is the human condition at the most basic level of inquiry. And here, one encounters the value we extend into the world as the highest epistemic/ontological priority. Value-in-Being, call it.

Just a thought.

What do you mean deliver aboutness in the mind to an object? Aboutness stays in the mind, it doesn't go anywhere. It is not necessary that something delivers information to us, yet we know it does all the time. Light shines on a red cloth, the red cloth reflects it towards my eyes, my nerves capture the stimulus and my brain produces information. We equate that with real world objects.
How about the converse: Is knowledge non-causal? If not, does it pop into existence randomly? — Lionino

Yes, I understand your position. But asking "does it pop into existence randomly?" is not an argument. It is a deficit. If not causality, then what? Well, something, certainly. I am simply working through a quasi-physicalist model. Assume I am here, the sofa there. How would a physicist say a knowledge claim I have about the sofa works? Much like you said above. But then, the philosophical question: how does this causal sequence generate a knowledge between the two, the brain on the receiving end and the sofa on the other?

Perhaps we are monads in a preestablished world of epistemic harmony and my knowledge of the sofa is already IN my monadic constitution. One thing does not cause another by this, but events in some primordial telos. But I doubt it. It is not that I am offering an alternative to causality. I am simply observing that there is nothing in this simply principle that makes knowledge possible. Philosophy is mostly negative, putting doubt where there is thoughtless certainty. And this is pretty serious doubt brought about the apriori argument that causality as a principle sijmply has nothing epistemic in it. the proof? There you are, there is your lamp or coffee cup; so ask, "how does that get in my head at all so that I know it?" Light waves are not lamps. Nor is brain chemistry. This should be clear.

For me it's important to distinguish between claims (statements/propositions) and facts, i.e., states of affairs. If a statement is true, then it represents a fact or facts in reality. The idea that there is an ontology connected with the truth has some merit, i.e., we're referring to the existence of particular states of affairs or the possible existence of a state of affairs. A statement is true if it mirrors a fact, but facts exist apart from the statements themselves (at least many facts). A statement can be true quite apart from any justification, which is to say, I may not know the justification, in which case I don't know it's true. I may claim it's true as a matter of opinion or mere belief, but it's not knowledge. All of us have opinions, some of which are true, and some are false. A claim is never knowledge in itself unless we're referring to statements like "All bachelors are unmarried men." Of course, one could claim that the statement refers to linguistic facts based on the meanings of the words. So, even in this e.g., we could use a linguistic justification.

Truth is always about claims, which come in the form of propositions. I can claim that X is true with little to no justification, but it's not knowledge unless it conforms to one of the many methods we use to justify a claim. I'm a Wittgensteinian when it comes to justification, i.e., we use several methods in our language-games to justify a claim—for example, testimony, reason (logic), linguistic training, sensory experience, and others. Justification is much broader in its scope than many people realize.

I think there is an ontology behind the truth of our statements, and it's in the form of facts, the facts of reality. — Sam26

I have trouble with this notion of representation. If a proposition represents some state of affairs, then one has to say what it means for something to be a state of affairs, and this would itself be done cast in more propositions. Then the post modern madness hits the fan: if a statement is true, it mirrors a fact (as you say), but facts themselves are statements that are true. If your statement beongs to a certain language game, then the game is always already in play the moment recognition of the state of affairs comes about. And what are facts if not IN the game? Or ON the grid of language possibilities? None of these establishes a knowledge that can allow the world to be posited in this stand alone way.

I see that there is a lot of talk here about states of affairs and facts, as if once a fact is established, a knowledge claim thereby has its basis, and no knowledge claim can stand if there is no fact to correspond to. But surely you see the radical question begging in this: How does one establish a fact, a state of affairs, to be there at all save through a knowledge claim about facts and states of affairs? It may be a fact the the sun is bigger than the moon, but to call the sun "the sun" is a knowledge imposition on "something" that itself is not a construction of language at all. It may well be that language and its non- language counterpart, the "existence" of an actuality that "appears," cannot be separated, for they are a unity.

This is a major point of Heidegger, that language and the world are "of a piece." But there is always a "distance" between language and such actualities that cannot eliminated. To understand this is to see something really quite profound. I "know" that my cat's existence is "other" than the language I deploy to think what it is.

Otoh, a reciprocal , recursive, self-organizing model of causality can do the job that linear causality cannot. Reciprocal causality produces normative, goal-oriented sense-making consisting of anricipatory acting on and modifying a world that in turn feeds back to modify the cognizer, forming a loop of ‘aboutness’. — Joshs

Which does not sound like aboutness at all to me. To conceive of a world such that the foundational epistemology is causal in nature will not be sustainable, it can be argued, because the affirmation of the world itself is constructed out of this very causality, notwithstanding the complexity of reflexivity. I believe the bottom line has to be the "bare phenomenon" which qualitatively reaches beyond the way one thing mere influences another. Michel Henry's sense of the pure, or the "raw" and fleshy" encounter must stand as its own presupposition, not reducible to anything else.

Perhaps the problem here is that we’re not understanding what you mean by “simply assuming ‛P is true’”. As I read JTB, no such assumption is made. The truth of P needs to be independently verified, yes, but by using the term “justification” for this (presumably perceptual or scientific) process, we get unnecessary confusion, as if the whole thing were somehow circular. But, as has been pointed out, truth-makers aren’t usually the same things as justifications. Truth-makers are states of affairs, not propositions. JTB states a hypothesis: If P is true, and S has justification for this belief that P, then S knows P. So, could you clarify where the “assumption” comes in? — J

There is a lot in this. When you say no assumption is made, I disagree. It is implicit in the premise "P is true" that being true is of a certain kind. The question about what it means to be true AT ALL is not taken up and it is just assumed that if P is right there before your waking eyes, you can affirm that, say, my cat is right before my eyes, and this is unproblematically true. But it is only unproblematic if the problems are ignored.

The problem is basic and comprehensive to ALL possible affirmations in knowledge claims about the world. If the proposition "my cat is on the sofa" is true and justified by my witnessing the cat being there, three must be something that intimates the cat's presence on the sofa that warrants the proposition's truth. So one has to examine the basis for this intimation, that is, what IS it that makes the proposition true? And so there must be some connectivity between me and the cat, that makes the proposition "about" something "over there". Keep in mind that all those ridiculous attempts to address the Gettier problems, the severed hands and barn facsimiles, etc., try to reconnect S to P causally! As if causality just did the job. But it doesn't. Not even remotely, for there is nothing at all in a causal relation except causality. One will either have to redefine causality or look elsewhere to explain how it is that I "know" this about something.

"Truth-makers aren’t usually the same things as justifications." This is interesting. What does it mean? How is a state of affairs outside of the logical grid of language and logic possible to affirm since any affirmation itself is weighed within that very grid?

All one has to do is examine causality for what it is, and it becomes clear that causality doesn't deliver knowledge
— Astrophel

This doesn't make sense. — Lionino

Yes it does. Just ask how a causal relation produces a knowledge claim. Can't be done, simply because there is nothing in the apodictic principle that an event in the world requires a cause that can deliver an "aboutness" in the mind TO an object. Knowledge is a relational issue and no model of causal relations demonstrates epistemic connectivity. You are welcome to try to conceive of this and let me know how you think it goes.

You might be interested in Husserl's zig-zag explanation of the emergence of correspondence truth in phenomenology.

In general though, I think you might be confusing "justification" with what makes something true. Justification is what makes some person think something is true. The "truth-maker" is supposed to be the externally existing state of affairs in virtue of which a proposition is true. If there are problems with placing us into such an abstract realm, it wouldn't seem to be one of justification though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But there is nothing abstract about it. It might appear abstract based on the assumption that a pragmatic understanding vis a vis "a world" remains "about" something that is actually there and this abstracts from the real stand alone thing-in-the-world.

Husserl "brackets" the world of transcendent objects of the "naturalistic" attitude. He says this in Ideas 1 (which I am coincidentally reading):

What it comes to is this: we suffer all these perceptions, judgments, and so forth, but only on condition that they be regarded and described as the essentialities which they are in themselves; if anything in them or in relation to them is presented as self-evident, that we establish and fortify. But we allow no judgment that makes any use of the affirmation that posits a “real” thing or “transcendent” nature as a whole, or “co-operates” in setting up these positions. As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we “do not place ourselves on their ground”, do not “co-operate with them”, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.

Now Husserl is not trying to be all that clear on this. He obviously struggles, and this is as it should be because the issue itself is difficult. And he gets very detailed. But speaking generally, he sees phenomenology not as an idealism, rejecting what we encounter as being truly real like Kant, nor does he dismiss these "really reals" ("we do not for that reason cast them away"),but is being simply descriptively honest about what stands before one in an account that is reduced to its essential presences. This opens up a very wide range of issues and complications that have to treated as they arise. But here, I am just being faithful to the simplcity of it: Naturalists (like Quine) place physics at the top of explanatory efficacy, and physics, even in its vast extensions into theoretical concepts, has causality as its foundational principle in describing reality. And this makes epistemology impossible. Phenomenology recognizes this, and in order to make it right, one has to conceive much more fully of the agency of perception.

This is a much contested theory. But what's the alternative? A logician can simply decide that "know" is primitive; but that's just abandoning the idea of defining it. — Ludwig V

The alternative is to do a philosophical examination of truth, and unpack the notion of justified true belief.

This is focuses on first-hand knowledge — Ludwig V

Yes, disentangling is the right word. First hand knowing is what is under review. No need to complicate the matter yet, simply because complications rest on assumptions of a more basic kind, and this is the first step in disambiguating "P is true": isolating what makes something true from things that are incidental, like there being ten coins in the pocket of someone you make a knowledge claim about, you know, those Gettier problems. Gettier didn't bother to question this essential connectivity.

But the question is profound and foundational for basic epistemic connectivity is assumed in everything that is affirmed. If there is no possible way to make sense of this in familiar terms, like causality, then something unfamiliar is required. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

And there is massive philosophical literature on this "improbable." It is just difficult.

This is the place analytic philosophers fear to go!

Discovering something is revealing it, and makes perfect sense when applied to truths. One would need to explain what "constructing a truth" in a good more detail for it to make sense. — Ludwig V

Ah, revealing it. This implies there is something revealed, of course. so all eyes are on this that is revealed, and for something to be revealed there are two parts, the revealing and the revealed. Now, if you thing the revealing is entirely unproblematic, then the revealed, those cows over there by the barn, make there way into the proposition in the most transparent way, that is, the receiving and revealing agency, me, is like an epistemic mirror, registering most accurately what is there, outside of the mirror's physicality. That is what mirrors do.

But then, really?? Does this metaphor really work.....at all? I cannot think of anything more opaque than a physical brain.

This is the way it goes when philosophy meets the simplicity it has been seeking all its life, so to speak. It goes into denial.

That's true. But the grid of language (including logic and mathematics) does allow us to speak of conditions in the world. Truth would not be possible if it didn't. It is true that sometimes we need to develop or change the concepts that we apply to the world, and that seems difficult if you think of language as a grid - i.e. fixed and limited. But language is a hugely complex system which can be developed and changed - as is logic (as opposed to individual logical systems). — Ludwig V

So what is it to "speak conditions in the world"? One cannot just rocket by such a thing. Take the scientific method, a principle of, essentially, repeatability in experimentation. But how does this actually spell out in the defining of what a thing is, like, say, nitro glycerin? You provide a sufficient impact to this material and it explodes, speaking roughly. But not speaking so roughly, the scientist will quantify the hell out of this in varying event environments, and so we will get a "thick" definition of nitro.

But what does this say about truth and knowledge? It says these are pragmatic concepts. Forward looking toward anticipated results, and this is an event of recognition that is localized in the perceiving agency, you or me. The object over there, the cow, "outside" of this is entirely transcendental because outside in this context means removed from the anticipatory temporality of the event.

We bring into the world language and logic. Of course, there is a regularity in the way the scientific method reports about the world, but this certainly doesn't warrant knowledge claims about things being independent of the perceiver. Thick definitions (see above) require a "thick" account of perception, for language and logic is what WE do.

But rarely will a statement be true simply because of the observer — Banno

Not simply because of the observer in the sense that "I love haagen dazs." Objective in the sense that there is agreement in language and gesture and, as the scientific method tells us, repeatability. There is an event in what we call a brain where truth occurs. But to say what this event is "about" in reference and meaning, is limited to language possibilities.

Try not to "strawman" this argument by reconstruing what is said to say something it doesn't that is easily assailable. This is an informal logical fallacy.

The cows are over there" will be true entirely and only if the cows are indeed over there; — Banno

Then you would have to explain how the cows over there make their way into the equation of the proposition. It is a pragmatic assumption made by science and our everyday handling of affairs that truth has this kind of objective status, but philosophy takes the matter beyond the mere assumption. This has to be shown to be accepted. But how does one demonstrate such epistemic connectivity?

This kind of thinking in no way at all undoes or second guesses our general knowledge claims. It simply says that when you look closely, you find this absurdity that knowledge claims REALLY are pragmatic functions dealing with the world. They are more than this, for such a statement does not speak about the qualitative nature of what is there, but they are essentially this.

So this should not be restated in another form. The onus is on you to explain this magical epistemic connectivity.

Everything you know is true. That's not an assumption. If you think you know something, but what you think you know is not true, then you are mistaken about your knowing it. — Banno

Everything I know is true is true enough. But what is truth? A grand philosophical question, but here presented in the most basic analytical sense: how is it that any of those cows twenty-five meters from this brain of mine being in an entirely separate spatial locality make their way into my truth statement? There is this "chasm of epistemic distance" that needs to explained. It is a radical distance, and by radical I mean it takes a very strong turn away from familiarity.

And also, a seperate point, in the JTB account, a statement's being true is quite distinct from it's being justified.

But having said that, there is indeed a close relation between epistemology and ontology. Statements being true or false is indeed dependent on what there is in the world. — Banno

Yes, you are right about the JTB. My point is that the JTB is seriously question begging. Absurdly so. I know you would like to dismiss these concerns. Well, then you should say this.: it is impossible to demonstrate epistemic connectivity. All we have in the assumptions of truth bearing propositions is their being true and not false, but these conditions remain, in the physicalist's world, inexplicable because causality is simply not an epistemic concept. Not even remotely.

Epistemology and ontology are the joined at the hip because it is impossible to imagine the one without the other. Not difficult. Impossible, apriori true.

Do you honestly believe that propositions are somehow IN the things we talk about? I don't know why this is not clear. There are no propositions over there where the cows are. A proposition is where the observer is. The truth is a property of a proposition. Therefore truth lies IN the observer, jnot to put too find a point on it. Just as sight, sound, and many other things belong to the observer.

It is a simple matter, really. You have trouble because you seem to insist that truth has a locality beyond its existence. The idea of a transcendental object is the best we can do when we leave the logical grid and try to talk about things.

So are you saying that the cows are only over there when acknowledged? That gives a vast power to acknowledgement.

I suggest that the cows are over there, whether you say so or not; and that it is the sentence "The cows are over there" that is constructed. And further, we can use the term "...is true" in the following way:

"The cows are over there" is true if and only if the cows are over there.

Further, isn't it the case that the cows can be over there even if it is not the case that you, I or anyone else knows that they are over there, or has justification for claiming that they are over there.

I don't have any idea of what a transcendental cow might be. Nor of what a cow might be, apart from the things we calls "cows". Some might maintain that had we not been raised in a culture that does nto use the word "cow", we might not be able to identify the cows from the trees. That might be so, but even if the cows might thereby cease to be spoken about, the cows would not thereby cease to be. — Banno

No, no. You said, " the cows are only over there when acknowledged" and I said, "when I acknowledge this as true, this true event is a logical construction that only comes into existence when in the acknowledging."

Think about the difference.

So you can't say anything without using words, and so you cannot say anything? Or is it just that you cannot say anything true? What would you have us conclude here? — Banno

It's not that there are no cows and trees over there next to the barn. But it is that when I acknowledge this as true, this true event is a logical construction that only comes into existence when in the acknowledging. To say the truth is over there IN the cows, or that it issues forth from the cows, and I am some alethic receiver is absurd, don't you think?
And it is certainly NOT that I don't think there are real things over there by the barn. They are, outside of the propositional structures that make affirmation possible, transcendental.

There are no unknown truths? Then I will bow to your omniscience, since you know everything that is true. — Banno

It is to say that truth occurs in the proposition, and there are no propositions "out there". Discoveries are events of constructing a truth. It seems pretty clear that conditions in the world are really impossible to speak of outside of the grid of logic and language.

That is, it may be true, or otherwise, regardless of any relation to an individual knowing it to be true. — Banno

If it lies outside of any relation to an individual, then it lies outside of propositional possibilities.

Your antirealism betrays you. — Banno

Antirealism? I am a realist when it comes to conditions that are real, and this goes to the palpably real, the real In the apprehending object event. But no, I certainly am not a "physicalist metaphysician" kind of realist. Such an idea is instantly refutable.

There are unknown truths — Banno

No, not really. It is not as if there are conditions in the waiting for discovery that are true outside of discovery itself.

The "is true" in the JTB account simple rules out knowing things that are not true. It is distinct from the justification.

One cannot know things that are not true. — Banno

But ruling out thnigs that are not true presupposes what makes a thing true. To say truth is "distinct" from justification is question begging, for if I ask you how it is distinct, you will have to give an answer grounded in a justified propositional account in order to be "true," that is, doxastically compelling. There is NO way around this: truth is a property of propositions, and this brings the matter of truth right back to square one, with the condition of "P is true" entailing a requirement for justification. It is impossible to separate truth from the conditions that make thing true.

You did say the Gettier problems had their possible solution " only if there is a true causal connection between P and your justification." So how is it that causality makes for a connection that satisfies the conditions for knowledge? All one has to do is examine causality for what it is, and it becomes clear that causality doesn't deliver knowledge. Unless you have something in mind that shows it does.

Well, that is the rub, for causality is not an epistemic concept. If it were, then the world would be a very different place. Does the dent on my car fender "know" the offending guard rail? Granted, mental causality, if you will, is a lot more complicated, but how does complexity make for causal conditions that are epistemic? They don't. Never did. It's just something analytic philosophers assume because they were sick of Kantian idealism. But it is such a ridiculous assumption.

Objects in the world are, let's face it, transcendental in a physicalist or materialist description of things.

It certainly does. How would you interpret the meaning of transcendence as Husserl uses it to refer to such entities as spatial objects? For instance, when he says that a real object like a ball is transcendent to the various perspectives of it that we actually see? Does he mean the ball is external to the constituting ego, or that we constitute its transcendence via an idealizing gesture immanent to the ego? — Joshs

Looked around for the best way to look at this, and found in the chapter on noesis and noema (Ideas I) where he speaks of the transcendental object only in the context of the naturalistic pov. But the external object is, in the epoche, found in a systemic eidetic horizon and the object is epistemically secured in the intentional relation. So in the phenomenological reduction, the ball is no longer a ball, but its taken-as-a -ball (I see where Heidegger got this); the ball as a ball in space is suspended.

No, we’re dealing with personal constructs, which to say that emotional pain and pleasure are inextricably bound up with the breakdown of our constructs to make sense out of the chaos of events. Moral emotions like anger and guilt express our struggles to cope with the changes in others and ourselves which take us by surprise, which force us to choose between a sweeping overhaul of our ways of understanding them and trying to put the genie back in the bottle by demanding conformity to our original expectations. Unfortunately most approaches to morality take the latter route. — Joshs

Can't argue with that.

But this goes to the very point I am trying to make: This embeddedness of our affairs in complexities that defy categorical answers makes the value dimension of our lives seem chaotic, and I agree that this is so. But this does not undo the nature of what is IN these entangled affairs. What is painful can be ambiguous, which is why the strong examples are revealing: there is no ambiguity in a sprained ankle qua outrageously painful event. That is no construct to work out in one's entangled affairs. The world "does" this to us.

Two of the greatest impacts on the history of philosophy are St. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Thomism, and Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology. We see two ways of doing philosophy: A philosophy concerned with the nature of Being and a philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness and this union births Phenomenological Thomism (sometimes called Existential Thomism). It is through a marriage of the classical Aristotelian-Thomist tradition and the modern phenomenological-existential tradition that we find an objective ethical and metaphysical dogma; One needs both objective fact and subjective experience to understand reality. The project undertaken by Edith Stein, the Lublin School of Thomism, and to some extent Dietrich von Hildebrand all sought to fulfill this. A version of personalism, another movement in philosophy and theology, could be considered the brainchild of this marriage, and John Paul II called this "Thomistic Personalism," which I identify closely with. Inspired by the ethical personalism of Max Scheler, John Paul II saw the union between these two as essential for the development of a concrete Christian ethics. Personally, I think it is unwise to try to base everything in phenomenology or humanistic existentialism (Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Buber are a different topic). There needs to be some presupposing objectivity. On the contrary, it is unwise to boil everything down to the nature of Being. There needs to be room for lived experience. Phenomenology and existentialism provide adequate methods of analysis of Thomistic metaphysics. The traditions of Phenomenological Thomism and Thomistic Personalism provide a healthy balance between subjective experience and transcendental truth. — Dermot Griffin

If you are looking for a way to breathe some life into phenomenology, perhaps you would find Michel Henry helpful. I for one find the epoche is only as meaningful as one is predisposed to predisposed to reduce the world. Some will read Husserl and find it jarringly out of place with common sense, as
Maritain seems to. But if one takes Heidegger's pov on gelassenheit (Discourse on Thinking and elsewhere) and allow oneself to stand in the openness of being, withdrawing one's "totality" of possible engagement to let the world stand forward, and allow the epoche to find its mark, then all forms of naturalism fall away.
Naturalism has, putting aside the way it fits with our familiarity of the world, only one foundational principle that lies in its analytical depths, and that is causality. And causality has nothing epistemic about it, and while this really doesn't refer to the epoche, it does make an astounding discovery: the naturalistic realism cannot conceive of how any knowledge claim about transcendental objects, those out there, the dogs and cats and fence posts, can be grounded. This needs time to set in, but it is a powerful motivation to seek knowledge affirmation somewhere else than in a naturalistic account.
Certainly not that one is trapped in some solipsistic idealism; this is not what phenomenology reveals, for nothing really changes in our day to dayness. Phenomenology insists there are objects in the world that are not me/ Itis just that when one thinks in the phenomenlogical attitude and out of the naturalistic one, the world becomes a very different place.

I do not understand why the better explanation would be “these are moral facts” than “these are deeply rooted sentiments, which are presumably biological, that can have heavy impact on our behavior”. I don’t see how these tell me what I ought to be doing as the subject: just because my body is biologically wired to enjoy falling in love and not sticking a needle in my eye it does not follow that those are morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things to be doing.

For example, imagine, that we discover that human beings on average, along with not liking being stabbed in the eye, really love torturing animals for fun: this seems to meet your criteria of something that would be factual morally good...but I am not seeing how it would be factual nor moral. — Bob Ross

Hard to remove one's perspective from scientific orientation that is ingrained in us through our education. Not many out there telling us how to analyze the world from a philosophical pov.

I did say that there are many explanatory contexts that can be brought to bear on bringing to light what pain and joy are. But a biological analysis doesn't rise to join with the experience and its content. The absurdity of attempting to do this, and in general to reduce experience to ready to hand paradigms, is clear if we let the matter itself make the case: stick my hand in a pot of boiling water and while the evidence is made clear to me regarding what pain is, proceed to tell me that how my biological wiring is producing this, or how pain was "selected" in the evolution of our bodies because it was conducive to reproduction and survival. You do see the radical incongruity of "reducing" what lies before me to an explanation like this.

Biological accounts and the like work, of course, in explaining common matters of contingency, I mean, ask me what a dentist is or a bank teller, and consulting a text would be entirely appropriate. But talk about ethics and pain is about what is Real, and reality is not something exhausted by references to something else. Biologists cannot talk about what is real because this is no more up their alley than knitting wool sweaters is, so I am not going to ask them what pain is AS SUCH, and this is where this is going. I look at pain as a geologist would observe a mineral deposit. What IS it? One has to first look and register its properties. A experience the pain and observe the prohibition to be at one with it.

And then, no one is saying there is a one to one correspondence between what one should and should not do and the realities of pain and pleasure (not to put too fine a point on it). This is a very important point: We are examining a dimension of our existence, NOT matching the chaos of our affairs to their Real counterparts that existentially address the each occasion of moral indeterminacy. That is absurd. The prohibition that is apriori joined at hip with our moral obligations does not sort out the massive oddities of our lives as some kind of metaphysical counterpart to whatever comes up. Again, pain, joy and all of the ooo's and ah's and ughs of our existence have this moral dimension such that when such a value is in play, we are not dealing with mere social constructs.

Are you saying?

People may experince pain and suffering. We ought not do anything which deliberately cases pain and suffering to others. Doing so is morally wrong and thereby an objective moral fact?

Is that an ought from an is?

I agree re Descartes - I have generally held that 'I feel pain therefore I am' is a lot more explicit than thinking and 'aming'. — Tom Storm

Right, and I think you get the idea. "I think" is frankly vacuous if plain thinking is going to be the ground for existence, because thought's purest form is logic, and logic is only about the form of propositions, not the content, making "I am" merely a formal concept. (I picked this insight up from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation.)

But this is/ought issue: It is quite right to insist that an "ought" requires and ought already in the "is" but this makes the is/ought a tautology, saying the ought itself is logically embedded in the is, thus, the moral insistence not to smash another's knee caps is part of the essence of the pain of having one's knee caps smashed. Pain entails the prohibition against causing pain. This is right.

However, this does not generate unproblematic conditions for moral decision making, for out moral affairs are entangled in complicated ways contextually with other facts, and this holds for our attitudes and predilections and beliefs in the world. The idea here is that there is this dimension of morality that grounds such things in the real, making our ethics real, if contextually ambiguous.

Interesting. So, let me see if I am understanding you correctly. It seems as though you are advocating that either (1) moral facts are ingrained in or (2) inextricably tied to our primitive, basic biology (akin to feeling pain when getting stabbed in the kidney).

Would this be kind of like a hedonist view that the moral facts are identified with the primitive notions of pleasure and pain (or happiness and suffering)?

Am I on the right track? — Bob Ross

I think close, yes, but the devil is in the terminology. When I observe the pain, it is not a biological description I am observing. Nor a moral fact. These are accounts that presuppose the pain actuality that presents itself for analysis in the first place.

As to hedonism, primitive notions of pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, these terms are at least delivered from extraneous explanations, but once there, attending to the pain in the kidney, that is, literally IN screaming agony, one then asks then asks the question, how is it that this is NOT real? One needs a reality test, and this would require a nonproblematic example of what is real to be able to answer it, and what, in the matter of the real, is nonproblematic? and this is a hard question for the obvious reason that the real deeply ambiguous.

I hold that the only way to address the question of what is real, is to witness what is clearly free of ambiguity regarding its ontological status. We find Descartes useful, for his method was to do just this: discover what cold not be doubted and entirely beyond ambiguity. Though Descartes made the mistake of affirming the cogito as this, failing to first define being. I think, therefore I am? Well, what do you mean by the verb "am"? The Being question is begged, but the method sustains: what is absolutely beyond doubt? How about this agony in my kidney? I CAN certainly doubt the multitude of prepositions one can make about the pain dealing with categorical knowledge claims (the pain is really this or that or some other reference to a science category), for these are constructs ABOUT the pain; not the pain itself.

This is where Moore comes in. Pain, the qualia of pain, if you will, or the pure phenomenon of pain, does not belong to interpretative error because it is not an interpretation. It, if you will, screams reality!

And once again, the extreme example is only to make for poignancy. Ethics is at its core, about value, and value is the general term for this dimension of reality, only made clear by example--you know, fall in love, stick a needle in your eye, ice cream and ice picks to the groin, and everything else one can have amoral issue about. Something has to be at stake like this, or no ethics. And things "like this" are as real as it gets.

SHOW ME WHAT YOU'VE GOT! — Bob Ross

Well Bob, the way to understand moral realism is to first go an account of what it is for anything to be real. I ask: is the pain you feel when someone deposits a spear into your kidney real? I argue that not only is it real, but value events, call them, like this are more real than any of your factual reals, which is something found on Wittgenstein's logical grid in his Tractatus. There is a reason Witt wouldn't talk about ethics, which is not so much that such statements are nonsense, which he famously holds to be the case, and more at the depth of their importance that would be trivialized by theory. He called value transcendental. Anyway, if that pain in your kidney is real, then pain qua pain, not as a concept, and not the "essence" of the pain, as when we would find license to "speak" what it is, which Witt denies is speakable, would have to be examined. So: apart from all that could be said of the pain, is there an existential residuum that remains after a reduction that suspends all that can be said? You see where this goes? Once all that can be said about this pain is removed from our consideration, and this includes everything Mill or Kant said, or evolution or a neurologist, and so on, is there something that remains standing, once these contingencies are removed, is there anything that is NOT a contingency, something stand alone about pain which is not reducible?
I argue that there is such a thing, which lies with Moore's claim that a moral Good or Bad is inherently a matter of a "non natural property." Of course, this is the very talk prohibited by Witt. But why did Witt write the Tractatus knowing full well he was speaking about the unspeakable? There are those that say it is meant to be a ladder to be used as a means to abandon all bad metaphysics. But he took ethics very seriously, saying the importance of the Tractatus lies in what is NOT said, and herein lies the case for moral realism: more real than real, this pain in the kidney; a Real that is in the "fabric of existence" itself, which is why it is both irreducible and and unspeakable.
And so, the moral prohibition against stabbing people with spears has this dimension of the real at its very core. And since all moral claims are essentially of the same nature, this example pf the spear in the kidney being only a radical example of what lies behind ALL moral issues.

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist? — Gregory

I would pull back form invoking Buddhism, a method, really, that leads to enlightenment and liberation that has little to do with an analysis of the structure of rational judgments. But then, the Buddhists do claim, along with Kant, that desire for things in this world stand outside of ethics and higher meaning. Finally though, Kant's "method" of reducing the pursuit philosophical truth is a turning toward an anaysis reason as such and applying this across the board, while the Buddhist terminates all processes of engagement. This make their endeavor more like phenomenology's reduction, that is, the Husserlian reduction BUT as this is played out in post Husserliam thinking (Husserl himself being too much like Kant's detailed analyses. See Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation where he explicitly brings the Copernican Revolution up as the beginning for further investigation.

I wil have to look into COJ.

Hermes? There is a book by John Caputo that places Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as the cord of connectivity between our philosophical endeavors and the revelatory possibilities in the world. And he invokes Derrida, first Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Husserl, but Derrida as the radical interpretation that is at the end of where hermeneutics can actually go, which is to the "radical" confrontation with the world's "presence". A long story in this, continued by Michel Henry and others. But Hermes: Derrida wrote a paper on Levinas on the Metaphysics of Violence, and he explores, here and evlsewhere, this impossible interface with the world where "totalities" (Heidegger's term lifted from Husserl) are mitigated to yield, what Heidegger called in his Discourse on Thinking gelassenheit, a familiar term among the Amish, meaning a kind of yielding, a withdrawing of interpretative imposition to allow the world to "speak" if you will.
What does Hermes deliver from the gods? a true encounter? But Heidegger's position is one of a radical finitude, so Hermes is more like a single shaft of light issuing from a source that is beyond reach. But note, we have left Kant's rationalism altogether, have we not? Kant seems like he does well understand what Wittgenstein said about logic and value, that these are only shown to us, but one can never speak of their nature and logic, value and world to understand what they are would require a perspective beyond them, which makes talk like this impossible and nonsensical. But the reduction! Where does this actually take us? To the things themselves, says Husserl. This si a movement that suggests a mysticism, something of the order of Meister Eckhart, who Heidegger briefly allows into the conversation in Discourse.

This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves — Gregory

What an interesting thing to say. Where does he say this?

Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity — Gregory

But you can't really take something like Kant's pure reason as a basis for understanding what our existence is about. Reason doesn't give one knowledge as it is the mere form of knowing, and in itself has no value at all. Nor does sensory intuition, as Kant calls it. The intuition of the color red or a tone in middle C played by a clarinet does not as such carry one to understand the our world. Because these do not, conceived as such, have any meaning. Kant failed to understand the basis for meaning in the world. It is not definitional meaning, but affective meaning that is first philosophy.

As to contingency and necessity, Kant's apriority had only to do with logic's pure form. Consider what this is: a complete abstraction, devoid of the palpable content of experience, the ooo's and ahhh's and ughs and yuks, you know, the blisses and miseries we experience. Herein lies the theme for analysis that can reveal the essence of what is meaningful. Other matters are important only to the extent that they are useful to this end.

For science the world is contingent while for philosophy the thing in itself is necessary, only by being in-itself can it make the contingent share in its necessity by application of universal laws. Fitche comes to mind — Gregory

Share in its necessity. But this which is shared is, for Kant, found in logical necessity, not in the full reality of what we experience. One problem with Kant is the same for Descartes who gave a privileged place to thought with the cogito, I think, but inferred from this being, I am. Rationalism always ends up making an abstraction out of being, Kant's TUA being no more than a formal definition of a unifying synthesis. It is patently absurd, as if our existence were reducible to this.

To the things themselves" said the phenomenologists. For them experience was primary. Colors may be said to be in the mind but everything is. Color is "there" just as much as primary qualities. I think this is what they meant. — Gregory

Well then, there is some sense in calling it realism, but generally this is not the way the term is used, which is not the affirmation of the reality of the totality of phenomena, but rather an affirmation of science's physicalism, of some sort or another. To the things themselves! This is Husserl, of course. if there is a single way to find favor of a view like this, which entirely rejects the popular metaphysics of science, it lies here: the can be witnessed only phenomena. Period. Any references to something that is not a phenomenon is a reference to something it is impossible to know, and thus, the existence of which is impossible to conceive, the very definition of bad metaphysics.

This of course runs counter to our education, which puts science in the privileged position of authority not to be second guessed. Philosophy is not, however, science.

The turn from Kantianism to modern phenomenology was a turning toward realism. It was for the world. Which is not to say it's not spiritual in any way. Mystcism has been a big part of German philosophy since the Romantic period — Gregory

Why call it realism?

But, with respect to that comment, I’ve been there myself. Pure reason’s intrinsic circularity has been obvious for millennia, and advances in neurological science has made it even worse.

The brain goes so far as to manifest itself as an immaterial something-or-other, imbues the seemingness of knowledge into it, but prevents the seemingness of knowledge for informing the immaterial something-or-other of what it is or where it came from. Like, brain says…..YOU are allowed to know whatever YOU think YOU know, in a progressive series, but YOU are not allowed to even think YOU know anything at all in a regressive series, which, of course, includes YOU.

The brain in its mighty magnificence gives its self-manifested subjectivity QM science, a progressive series. One of the tenets of QM science is the fact that observation disrupts the quantum domain by intruding into it, also progressive. A sidebar given by the brain in its mighty magnificence is the incredible density of the constituent parts of itself, informing its self-manifested subjectivity of its ~3b/mm3 synaptic clefts, which is the very domain of QM science….progressive. So eventually the self-manifested subjectivity goes so far as to invent a device for exploring the quantum domain of itself, progressive, searching for a YOU that has been allowed to know…..oh crap!!!!…..regressive.

Now the self-manifested subjectivity takes the chance of disrupting itself, in which case….was it ever there? The brain has tacitly allowed the extermination of its own avatar. — Mww

Disrupting or liberating? Consider that these are the same. What you call QM disruption is reducible to "the question," the piety of thought. It precedes science, even the most disruptive, for it is the essence of disruption itself: the dialectical mechanism that allows no thesis to go unchallanged. Brain talk always ends up in refutation simply because the question it begs subtends everything conceivable. I have no doubt there is a brain/experience connectivity, and this needs some emphasis. But if some form of Cartesian doubt (the question!) always already insinuates itself between belief and its objects, one is left trying to find an Archimedean point, if you will, that is unmovable to thought at this level, and QM is not this, for it remains a concept embedded in a context of "regionalized thought" and one remains in the hermeneutic indeterminacy.

My position is this: Such indeterminacy is impossible to overcome, and Derrida makes this clear. But Rorty and his pragmatism (as well as others) make all of our language endeavors into pragmatic endeavors and philosophy is just this pragmatic reaching out into metaphsyics, where language terminates, which is impossible. But if you follow Husserl and post Husserlian thought (the French "turn" with Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al), you are taken to the only logical extenson of hermeneutics and Cartesian doubt (this all encomapssing aporia!), which is to the things themselves, the revelatory appearance of the world in the wake of the most radicial reduction.

What makes this radical and opens the door to discovering philosophy's real purpose is that the phenomenological reduction is not simply a thesis; it is a method. An existential method, if you will, one that brings one into greater intimacy with existence by bracketing or suspending everything that is not, to put it roughly. Even Husserl didn't understand this.

Disruption is only a beginning.

Yes. Kant, who died in 1804, was not aware of what is described today as Enactivism and Innatism. However Philosophers working today in 2023 should be aware of these concepts, and should take them into account when contemplating about non-propositional knowledge. — RussellA

Heh, heh, I don't mean historically. I could equally say the post Heideggerian insights of Michel Henry are entirely missed by the positvism that seems to rule the thoughts of science oriented metaphysics. Henry died early this century.

Transcendence has different meanings. It depends what you mean by transcendence. For Kant, "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them. (Wikipedia - Transcendence (philosophy). Kant does not explain how we can know objects before we experience them. Today, however, because of the concept of Innatism, we are able to explain how we can know objects before we experience them. — RussellA

Sorry, you have to look at that "before" term very differently. He means logically prior, such that when one encounters an object, analysis reveals a structure that is invisible to observation, but is latent within it. In other words, before making, or, in order to make, experience possible at all, there has to be these structure in place just due to an analysis of what experience is.

Why? Why should it follow that because the understanding of causality is innate within the brain the principle of causality would not apply outside the brain? The concept of Enactivism shows that an understanding of causality is innate within the brain precisely because the principle of causality applies outside the brain. — RussellA

Because, to borrow Rorty's reasoning, the innateness is not out there, in the same way that propositions and their logical forms are not out there, in the tree, the chair or the compute mouse. Truth, moving into a strong but inevitable position, is not out there, among things. There are no numbers, no concepts out there. We do this.

It depends what the word "brain" is referring to. Yes, in the sense that the "brain" as a word in language is a construct of the brain as something that physically exists in the world. — RussellA

But to affirm what is not brain, you would have to step out of one. Otherwise, all of your brain references will be about other brain produced phenomena. All the "out thereness" would remain among the complexities of neuronal interface. Keeping in mind that this is NOT the position I represent at all. I am pointing out the impossibilities of such brain talk.

For the Idealist, reality only exists in a mind, meaning that the reality the mind perceives has been created by a mind. For the Indirect and Direct Realist, there is a reality outside the mind which the mind relates to. This reality outside the mind has not been generated by the mind, but how the mind relates to this reality is generated by the mind. For the Indirect Realist, the reality they perceive is a representation of the reality existing outside the mind. For the Direct Realist, the reality they perceive is the reality existing outside the mind.

There are different opinions as to the source of one's perceived reality. — RussellA

For the phenomenologist, reality is just reality, it is exactly s it appears, and when I say the tree is over there and it is not me and there is spatial separation that separates us, etc., all of this stays in place. Recall that Kant said just this. He just further said that when it comes to philosophy, we have to deal with transcendence and the presuppositions in ontology and epistemology have to be explored and this leads to a whole diffenent set of questions and ideas.

You know, Ryle knew this; they all did and do. Kant wasn't dismissed because he was essentially wrong. He was dismissed because he had been worn out, and after more that a century of post Kantianism, it was understood that there was simply nothing left to say. But analytic philosophy then took a course away from this into common sense (Moore holding his hands up declaring "here is a hand!") and positivism and took off, ignoring what Husserl and Heidegger and the French were doing with phenomenology, basically initiated by Kant. And the further it got away from this, the more science informed its grounding.

Maybe the noumena is that which connecs the appearances to reason, not behind but within — Gregory

Yes, I ma sure this is right, but it is not going to be a causal connectivity, as causality in itself is a term that belongs to finitude. What causality really is is like asking what modus ponens really is: it belongs to Kant's impossible metaphysics. As I see it, Kant drew boundaries where he should have. Can one really talk about where eternity and its absolute being ends and finitude begins?

Agreed, having space and time already eliminated from them as conditions for being appearances. But it remains that they were conceived for some purpose, and it turns out there were two. — Mww

I can't see where we disagree, then.

There needs to be some flexibility in what we mean by knowledge. For example, I have the innate ability to see the colour red but not the colour ultraviolet. The distinction between knowing how and knowing what is relevant here, a distinction that was brought to prominence in epistemology by Gilbert Ryle who used it in his book The Concept of Mind. (SEP - Knowing-How and Knowing-That). I am born with the innate knowledge of how to see the colour red even if I don't have the innate knowledge of what the colour red is.

In today's terms, we can account for our a priori knowledge by Innatism and Enactivism, given that life has been evolving in synergy with the world for at least 3.7 billion years. We are born with a brain that has a particular physical structure because of this 3.7 billion years of evolution.

Enactivism says that it is necessary to appreciate how living beings dynamically interact with their environments. From an Enactivist perspective, there is no prospect of understanding minds without reference to such interactions because interactions are taken to lie at the heart of mentality in all of its varied forms. (IEP - Enactivism)

Innatism says that in the philosophy of mind, Innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism. (Wikipedia - Innatism)

Innatism and Enactivism explain our non-propositional knowledge of red. — RussellA

But of course, you know this is miles from Kant. Ryle thinks within a tradition that explicitly against Kantian phenomenology and those who follow through in what is called continental philosophy. This tradition has the utmost respect for science and well supported theory of evolution, and does not dismiss any reasonable thing it says. But then, this is not Kant at all. Start talking about an account for the apriority in the structure of thought, and the way hard wired organic brains produce phenomena that have this sense of logicality making all that we experience appear as rigid rules of thought, and you will have to face the obvious question begged: This whole structred conception of evolution itself is just this, a phenomenological consturction, leading right into Kantisn thinking's hands, which is that the true source of rational thought is transcendence.

We see a snooker cue hit a stationary snooker ball and see the snooker ball begin to move. It is not our ordinary experience that snooker balls on a snooker table are able to spontaneously move. Whenever we see a snooker ball start to move we have seen a priori cause, either another snooker ball or a snooker cue.

Where does our belief in causality come from? For Kant, our knowledge of causality is a priori because the Category of Relation includes causality. In today's terms, our knowledge of causality is a priori because of the principle of Innatism, in that the principle of causality is built into the very structure of our brain. The brain doesn't need Hume's principle of induction to know that one thing causes another, as knowing one thing causes another is part of the innate structure of the brain.

Suppose we perceive the colour red, which is an experience in our minds. As we have a priori the innate knowledge of causality, we know that this experience has been caused by something. We don't know what has caused it, but we know something has caused it. We can call this unknown something "A", or equally "thing-in-itself."

The fact that we know "The most distant objects in the Universe are 47 billion light years away" does not mean that we know 47 billion light years. The fact that we know "for every effect there has been a prior cause" does not mean that we know priori causes. Both these statements are representations, and the fact that we know a representation does not mean that we know what is being represented. Confusion often arises in language when the representation is conflated with what is being represented. What is being represented is often named after the representation. For example, Direct Realism conflates what is being perceived when we say "I see a red post-box" with the object of perception, a red post-box.

So what exactly is "thing-in-itself" describing? When we say "our experience of the colour red has been caused by a thing-in-itself", the thing-in-itself exists as a representation in our mind not something in the world. — RussellA

This account of causality is one example how absurd this account can get. First, it should be made clear that what we call causality is actually an historical construct, and the term is, like all terms, merely a hermeneutical designation, a taking something up "as" causality. This point here being that our language is essentially a pragmatic mode of engagement, so we use this term and refer to soemthing in the world, an intuition, a nonverbal apprehension, like the color red or, here, the impossibility is imagining a spontaneous cause, and this referring is done in a context of an entire body of coherent language use that is implicitly in play as a contextual matrix out of which meanings arise. In other words, there are no stand alone meanings, no one to one correspondence between the term causality and any given occasion of its appearing. Meanings and worldly designations are "whole language" phenomena" and to see this argued out, one should go first to Sausseure's Semiotics, and then on to Derrida. Not that Derrida really cancels the dignity of individual references, but he does undo any confidence we might have in language's ability speak about the world. Second, the absurd part, which is just mind blowing: Localizing the apodicticity of what we call causality in a brain's structure suggest that outside such that this the principle would not apply. So what is outside of a brain? Well, a brain is a finite object in the company of other objects, so outside would indicate being among these other objects---plants and hills and stars and cats and dogs, etc., and the conclusion is, that these objects are not subject to the principle of causality, not being IN the brain matrix, and my pencil may start rolling across the desk with movement being ex nihilo!

Sorry, perhaps I am missing something. Anyway, as I see it, phenomena, and the logical intuitions that bind them in causality and other principles, are all that is and that ever will be experienced. Brains must therefore be phenomenologically conceived; but brains are also what generate phenomena, that is the appearances acknowledge routinely. Therefore, the brain is a construct of the brain.

But, as I like to remind people, it gets far worse: So causality is an innate, brain generated manifestation? But how does brain generated anything produce a reality that is anything but brain generated somethings? This writing I am producing is reducible to brain activity, and so the term brain activity, is also this, as are all sentential constructions, thoughts and any other manifestations, which includes self referencing. One is literally nowhere.