If knowledge is without meaning then how are you writing this and expecting others to communicate? How do you even know there are others to communicate with?

I think it's as I said before, you're kinda searching for something similar to Descartes except he had to invent god to get out of his funk. But life doesn't work like that, nothing can be definitively known beyond all doubt, it just doesn't exist. Still total certainty was always a myth anyway and we never needed it before. — Darkneos

Not quite. Nothing can be known definitively? Put your hand in boiling water for a few seconds. Can this pain be doubted?

See above: How do you know objects cannot move themselves?

But I'm pretty sure that Kant said you CAN'T know truth through pure reason alone. — Darkneos

Yes. I did affirm this.

That said I'm struggling to find the point to any of this. If it's suggesting that what we take as knowledge isn't reflective of reality, I'd hate to say that doesn't seem to be the case. The world outside our heads might be different than that which we experience every day, but unless you can provide evidence for such a thing it's useless speculation. — Darkneos

Evidence of what? Evidence for the claim that the world outside our heads is not what we experience? Well, it's really not to the point. But since you asked, the world "outside" of one's head, how is it that is actually get into the head? I'm saying it doesn't because there is no way to even conceive of this. Therein lies the evidence: one way of justifying a denial that P to be true, to show that P is nonsense.

So far in my life everything I know seems to work out just fine and it's how we can interact and to some degree master the world as it is. Evolution may have evolved us for certain aspects of survival but I have no reason to doubt the world is what I see each day unless there is some dimensional break. — Darkneos

Keep in mind that if your belief that the world is what you see rests with "things working" then your claim would rest with pragmatics. Then you would have to show how pragmatics reveals the way the world is. That is, if S knows P, and to know is to be able to use for some purpose, then knowing is mere pragmatics, but what one knows IS the pragmatics and not the world

Generally science takes a stronger view than this, affirming the nitro's independent existence apart from the pragmatics we experience. But this, again has to be explained. I think it nonsense.

Though to be honest I've failing to see the point of your question or what you're aiming to achieve here since you're kinda all over the place. I'm guessing you're hounding for something that in reality doesn't exist, some foundational ground to make for knowledge. Hate to say it but there is no such thing. We take a few things as given, our axioms, and just hope for the best. — Darkneos

I can understand this. But a pragmatist like yourself should have an epistemology, just so your claims can be useful philosophically. Reread the things you object to, and consider the simple thesis that philosophy's pursuit of truth is REALLY an affective endeavor. So looking for truth as a propositional affair that only looks to facts is going to lead only to other facts and these the same. It is not about a quest for information about meaning. It never has been. This is the historical error that has made philosophy so intractable.
It has historically been the purview of religion to deal with value/aesthetics/ethics (the same thing in essence), and philosophy has been about analytic arguments at the basic level. I hold that philosophy IS the only authentic religion.

I will add that intuition isn't a special form of knowledge but still another form of cognition (something you seem to have a bone to pick with) as it is based on prior knowledge, culture, and personal experience. It's sort of like "thinking really fast". Even feelings are rooted in some form of cognition though not one you are aware of. Brains are weird.

PS: I do wonder if there is a way to write your stuff in a way that's easy to understand. — Darkneos

Not just a form of cognition, but cognition itself. After all, how do you know modus ponens is right? How do you know objects can move themselves? The world of our understanding rests entirely on intuition.

Talk about brains: perhaps hard to see this, but brains are supposed to generate experience, and thereby give a reductive account of what experience "really" is. This is what I infer from your thoughts. but how is it one knows the brain is there to be this generative source? Why, it is through the phenomenon of the brain which the brain generates.

You DO see the issue here, yes?

My understanding of Kant's idea is just that we understand new ideas by relating them to a unified body of pre-existing ideas about ourselves and the world. The "I think" is the idea of a transcendental ego or unity. Kant did not follow Descartes in thinking this ego as a substantive entity; rather our selves are models that seem unified to us in terms of a coherent story of the self/ world relation. All of this is transcendental insofar as it is not empirically derivable from observations of the world, but rather constitutes the very condition that enables observation and understanding of the world.

So, it is not a case of knowing the noumenal, but via reflection on our experience, of thinking the necessary conditions for the possibility of that experience. We know that if we did not have a coherent, unified sense of ourselves in relation to a world that we experience, we would not be able to experience and understand the world the way that we know we do. I might not be understanding Kant rightly, since I am not a Kant scholar, but that is my take on it... — Janus

This sounds reasonable, about Kant. But I would only add that the nature of what is noumenal cannot be grasped in our finitude. "Reflection on our own experience" can still give one no more than a representation. It sounds reasonable to make this move, but all of this presupposes the very thing that needs to be shown.

Kant knew this, and I'm sure you can easily find where he says this in the deduction and elsewhere. Transcendental means metaphysical, and what is "pure" reason is just this. Kant didn't do metaphysics (or did he? He certainly doesn't intend to, but his representational thinking sets up an epistemology and an ontology that is inherently metaphysical.)

I'm not a Kant scholar either. But I've read the Critique, and others, like you, I am guessing.

Yes, I have heard about that a few times. But this "No, no" implies that my definition was wrong and that only yours is true. Which is wrong. One can say, at best, that the your definition is acceptable too. But even so, the words "justified" and "true" are incompatible with "I think". The expression "I think that" can be replaced by "I believe that", which indicate as simple belief, not "justified" or "true". — Alkis Piskas

To me, this is a bit confusing, Alkis Piskas. I doubt we disagree, in the end. Pls explain how "the words "justified" and "true" are incompatible with "I think." According to the traditional analysis, knowledge is justified true belief. This, of course, has issues; big ones. but this lies not in the analysis being wrong, but in how we define and make sense belief, justification and truth. You seem to have something in mind on making sense of these.

"True" and "possible" are incompatible. If it is true that you have sent me this message, because I read it, it cannot be also possible, at the same time, that you did so. It would be possible only if I had not received or read it yet. — Alkis Piskas

Only if you think something that is true cancels it being possible. It is true that I had chicken for dinner. Are you saying it is therefore not possible that I had chicken form dinner?

If you look at possibility as a future possibility only, then when possibilities come true they are no longer merely possible. But the term is not limited like this. There is logical possibility, something that does not violate the principles of reason. Uttering modus ponens doesn't cancel logical possibility. Same for something being causally possible, and so on. It simply says something is possible within certain parameters.

Consider a thought as an image or a series of images. These are "objects" in your mind. You can perceive and observe them as you percieve and observe anything else outside your mind, in your surroundings. The only difference is that it is you who have created these "objects", which are images, whereas objects in your surroundings have been created by some other source than you.

I think that the following experiment will explain everything in the relation of knowledge and thinking and other things I have talked about. If this won't make sense to you, nothing else I could say would.

Just watch an object in front of you, e.g. your monitor, for a couple of seconds. Then close your eyes and think of what you just watched. You will create an image of the real object. This is what we call a thought. And the process of the creation of that image is what we call "thinking". This image is a representation of the real object and it may be very close to or very different from it, depending on your ability to recall. But there will be always a difference --however small-- between what you have actually observed (knowledge) and what you thought about it.
And this is the difference between knowing and thinking about something — Alkis Piskas

So you are saying the knowing lies in the open eyed perception, while the thinking lies in the encounter with the thought of that real thing that abides in memory or in the imagination? Is this right?

Were you a scientist or mathematician you might realize the desires, loves, pleasures, etc. arising from the practice of the profession. To the contrary these experiences give meaning to one's life.

But then all of this discussion falls by the wayside of actual physical experience. Go climbing. — jgill

But this is just to the point I am making. But you need to make a further step into inquiry: when you analyze a star's light and bring forth a conclusion there is beneath this, or presupposed by it, a structured consciousness that does the bringing forth of the basic conditions for "receiving" anything at all.
What makes science singularly disqualified for philosophy is that it doesn't look at the world at this level of inquiry. Nor does it thematically take up the caring and value that you raise here. As a scientist you do indeed have more or less strong interest, occasionally exhilaration. But it goes further still: to speak at all, to have a thought and draw a conclusion or affirm a conditional or negation is inherently affective. the point I make here is that it is these analytical conditions, which are typical in everyday living, tend to reify the categorical analyses, reducing the world to its own abstract image. The actuality, intuitive givenness of things, if you will, of putting the eyes to the computer screen, implicitly drawing conclusions, rejecting others, then, consummating an inquiry! At this level the experience is a singularity.

If implicitly yes, as do I, but…..a cow??? And a cow “thinking”. Is that different than a cow thinking? Maybe “thinking” is a euphemism for instinct. Dunno, but I seriously doubt a majority of lesser animals, if not all of them, have any conception of relative heights as a function of temptation. He goes to taller grass because he doesn’t have to bend his neck so far, not because its tempting.

I agree with you, in that I know what it is to know. One thing I know, is that I don’t know what goes on in a cow’s head, and therefore wouldn’t ever suggest anything about it. — Mww

Think of Heidegger's historical account of knowing. The cow has been grazing for years, say, and it looks up a sees what memory informs her to be 'good eating over there" but not conceptualized, obviously. She moves over there. To me, this bears the mark of reason's conditional proposition. A "proto propositional" response to an environment. Cow's have histories and memories and these inform "judgment". What makes us so different is language.

Absolutely. But that isn’t so much a Kantian fallacy as the prime example of the human disposition to think beyond its logical authority. As true these days as it’s ever been. — Mww

That "logical authority" is a loaded term. In the world, what authorizes logic, so to speak, is some kind of a posteriori presence, but this presence itself stands beyond classification. I hold that presence is metaphysics, and the latter is not some impossibly distant "other"; not impossible, but a "possible" other, meaning that metaphysics needs to be conceived as an essential part of our existence, the encounter with threshold of its concepts as they take on philosophy. The more philosophy "stays put" with its positivist priority of clarity in the familiar, the more distant it is from its own nature, which is openness. This openness is essentially affective, and so when we allow ourselves to face it, in the nothing, we face both the openness of the conceptual deficit as well as the desire or yearning that is IN the conceptual deficit itself.

In other words, we can't just think in some propositional incompatibility with a world that defies categorization, and we can't think all of this is off limits to "properly authorized' logic and thinking.

Yeah, the intrinsic circularity of reason herself. Nothing to be done about the way Nature made us. — Mww

I am suggesting that "the way nature made us" has been distorted by a belief that reason simply tapers off into the sunset of an impossible horizon, metaphysics. this kind of thinking takes recognized limits of established ideas to be authoritative existentially. My claim is that this occurs only when one ignores the affective dimension of rationality itself: It is wrong to think of rationality in terms of the abstract "authoritative" logic it produces. Logic is actually "of a piece" with affectivity, and the open ended nature of this is not the impossibility and foolishness of reason grasping beyond its means, but a desire that seeks consummation. Logic seeks, if you will, consummation in a valid conclusion, but this only part of what it does. Logics IS affectivity seeking consummation. The separation we routinely recognize is merely pragmatic and habitual.

I don’t think occasions of truth are antecedent to the philosophical idea of truth. How would we know a thing is true if we didn’t already know what form any truth must have? Are not universals prior to particulars? How could particulars be analyzed without the universal to which it necessarily relates?

If all truths are contained in propositions, and the simplest possible proposition that cannot possibly be false is the gauge by which all other occasions of truth would be judged, it follows that the idea is before the occasion.

I’ll grant that occasions of truth must be revealed for what they are prior to analysis of possible truths. — Mww

Well, no one ever said at any particular time, let's call this a 'bottle" and from then on we had propositions like "the bottle is missing" and "look, a ship in a bottle." The term emerged in a language as part of an evolving system. There is no real beginning to this.

Anyway, I said, "here, I say when reason conceives of what it is to be a "rational truth" according to its own model, it creates an abstraction out of reason. Truth as a philosophical idea requires actual occasions of truth to be revealed for what they are PRIOR to analysis, not after." The idea here was that when reason is set upon something to "understand" it, it tends to produce something of its own abstract utility, a conclusion qua conclusion, which is simply a logical function. This is obviously a very useful way to address problems, but it gives the illusion of logic standing apart from its existential grounding, which is filled with interest and palpable meaning. These are not separate experiences, but one and the same. A rational inquiry IS an affective inquiry, and affectivity IS rational (we are so constituted. As I listen to music I "know" implicitly the many contexts that are there, in the constructed experience of listening).

Yes, I've said as much myself, but that doesn't change the fact that the truth or falsity of the abstractive thought exemplified in propositional assertions is not the same as the idea of truth that Alethia represents; so I'm not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with what I've said, or of what point you want to make. — Janus

Are you alluding to Heidegger's alethia? Well, I certainly do not subscribe to the impossible idea of there being something that can be known but outside of human dasein. The idea is absurd. He does bring mood, caring, pragmatics and other dimensions of our existence into philosophy, but the complaint is that he doesn't discuss ethics (Levinas, e.g.). But I don't think one can dismiss his historical analysis of knowledge claims. And I do share his nostalgia for poetry and his belief that modern life suffers an estrangement from something deeply important, keeping in mind that he was educated originally for service to the church, and this use of words like "destining" and others suggest religious meaning, and I do approve of this; but then, and this would be a big point for me: His thesis is bound to finitude. There is the notorious "nothing" encountered at the "edge" of the Totality of historical interpretative possibility. This he derives largely from Kierkegaard, who put the nothing and its existential anxiety into play.

I consider this "nothing" a very important part of the idea sketched out here. Take thought to its extremity, where words and their historical meanings run out, and one faces something extraordinary, which is the bare existence of the world that denies interpretation. This nothing loses interpretative value because it defies all rules meaning making, like Kant's "(sensory) intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty." The idea is that reality has to be construed as affectivity (inserting my concern) that is "of a piece" with concepts, and cannot be conceived apart; and the "nothing" presents an intuition that has no conceptual counterpart, but will not simply disappear in a puff of logic. Because it is IN our existence, and not a flight of conceptual fantasy.

But when you ask if I agree with you: Yes, the extent you agree with this brief bit here.

You haven't explained why you think Kant's Unity of Apperception is an impossible concept, what exactly Wittgenstein's complaint is and how it relates to Kant's idea, or what relevance Kierkegaard's philosophy has in this connection. You give me nothing to respond to unless you offer more than this kind of vague gesturing. — Janus

It is impossible because it is conceived by the very unities it presents to us. To talk about what the TUA is, we would need a third pov, one that is objective and removed from the conditions assume what needs to be shown. This, of course, comes from Wittgenstein (but I can't remember where, exactly). Logic cannot explain is own nature because this presupposes logic to do so. Like talking about the eye that "sees" the eye. A brain that conceives a brain.

The TUA is, after all, "transcendental" and noumenal. Kierkegaard I brought up because he was adamantly opposed to any kind of "rational realism". Wittgenstein's quasi-mystical position on the world and value can be found here.

Propositions are not necessarily "utilities", although they of course can be. The idea that the world is a "standing reserve", there to be exploited in whatever way we see fit, has no necessary connection with the fact that humans practice propositional thinking. In fact, the mutually contradictory ideas that it either does, or does not, have such a necessary connection are themselves examples of propositional thinking. Philosophy is impossible without propositional thinking, and that is why I say that it cannot capture the non-dual, non-discursive, affective nature of experience. Poetry is better suited for that task. — Janus

But I want to take a more basic look at all of this. I draw on "standing reserve" as a kind of objectionable reduction to something that divests human existence of its important foundational meaning. I am saying that philosophy with its endless discursivity is largely missing a big point. What is disclosure? Is it propositional? What is this? I think Dewey was right: the aesthetic/affective dimension of our existence cannot be separated from rationality and logic, and so when we make a proposition we cannot reduce this to a "fact", something on the logical grid that is imposed on a world. It IS the world; it has existence, and the most salient feature of this is its affectivity, its aesthetic/ethical dimension.

I am reminded of Rorty, who dropped philosophy to teach literature. Philosophy had become trite and repetitive and had no to say, but literature, this is existentially educational, putting forth the real drama of our situation in the world. But like Heiddeger, Rorty was committed to finitude and didn't understand religion. One doesn't encounter "nothing"' (see the above). One encounters affectivity (broadly conceived here as the "irrational" actualities we experience). The nothing is metaphysics. In metaphysics, I am saying, we encounter affectivity and its propositional counterpart, of course (otherwise I could not be writing about it).

Philosophy is actually what religion is: the encounter of affectivity "outside" of dasein, discovered propositionally/(historically, as Heidegger tells us). What Heidegger, Rorty and others fail to see is this existence is NOT confined to finitude. It is, apriori, if you like, eternal.

The problem is that I read this sentence and feel utterly unconvinced by claims that affectivity = truth. Do I trust this judgement? What’s the next step? — apokrisis

You feel unconvinced because you think you are being asked to believe that the desire or for or feeling about something is a truth all by itself, and this patently absurd, because truth belongs to propositions. This is not at all being said.

What is being said is the when we affirm, deny, question, discover, intend, and all of the cognitive expressions of human experience you can imagine, we are not, in the basic description of the event of "doing " any of these, simply trying to make ideas clear. Ideas are events in time that are inherently affective, and apart from this affectivity one thereby talks about abstractions of experience and not reality.

Science hypostatizes this quantifying dimension of reason, and gives us a picture of truth as factual truth, and facts are quantifiable and abide by the law of excluded middle, and do not bear the fluidity of actuality we see in desire, love, pleasure, hate, despair, boredom and the rest. This is THE existential complaint.

Such an abstraction belongs to the "thinking world" of AI, I would hazard. Truth never was this kind ot thing. It is always truth/affectivity in a single reality.

If you think you know then you don't know! :smile:

Knowing means understanding clearly and with certainty.
Thinking --in this context and case-- means considering something possible.
These two do not match. — Alkis Piskas

No, no; knowing is justified true belief, so says the standard analysis, but it is not wrong. And justification is essential to belief, and justification is inherently thoughtful. Also, if P is true, P is possible. This is analytic.

Indeed it's not thinking that creates knowledge, but not because the reason you give but because thinking and knowledge do not match, as I showed above.
That "the 'I' that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought" doesn't mean much. You can equally say that I am at a distance from my memories, my emotions, everything created by my mind, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. Yet, I am connected to them unbreakably. In fact, the thinker is the thought. — Alkis Piskas

When I say the thinking is at a distance, I am a bit outside the familiar discussion. One has to conceive of the cogito as first something as taken to be a rational center, a rational substance "res cogitans" as distinguished from "res extensa." But reason qua reason is just an abstraction and really doesn't exist, I claim. When I say "I" I refer to something, but that thing is supposed to be thought itself, which is nonsense. Not that thought doesn't exist at all, but its existence s discovered the same way other things' existence is discovered: through observation. What does one observe as one observes a thought? It is not only attended by affect, but affect is In the thoughtful observation: one is interested in observing, perhaps fascinated and overwhelmed, perhaps bored, and so on; but knowledge is never free of this. It is inherent to knowledge because knowledge (and thought) is an experience. I follow Dewey and others in this. But I leave aside Dewey's naturalism.

The distance in question is this: in language, the apprehension of things is inherently discursive. A word is not a stand alone entity, thus, when I notice a cow in a field, I am not facing in my understanding anything of a direct disclosure, since the language setting refers or "defers" to other thoughts, memories, feelings, that create a contextual understanding.All thinking and knowledge claims are contextual and not absolute, so if one is thinking at all, and knowing, and knowing is a strictly rationally conceived, then knowing is thereby an abstraction.

Distant from ones memories, etc. is right and wrong. On the hand, there is nothing more intimate than a memory as it rises up before you. It is an event like any other. But the distance is interpretative: when you start talking and thinking about it, what it is and how it is meaningful, you stray from this core experience into language and culture, and this is where Descartes' demon, if you will, inserts doubt, which here I am simply referring to the historical nature of language: language does not give one a direct and spontaneous disclosure; only an historical one, as language itself is a historical construct. It does not "speak" the world "out there".

For this kind of disclosure, one has to look to affectivity, also embedded in language, but then, affectivity "says" something entirely ahistorical: present experience. The historical language "meets" the present in affectivity. Both are essential to thought and knowledge.

I agree with the first. I disagree with the second. "Epistemic" means of or relating to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it. And, as I shown, thinking and knowledge are incompatible concepts. — Alkis Piskas

You can't say "as shown." It wasn't. All knowledge claims about the world rely on justification and "to think" at all is inherently justificatory. What is the most reliable justification? this lies in the conditions of immediacy. A little like Plato's critique of art as their removed from their source, the forms. Well, I am no metaphysician like Plato, but where he puts the forms, I put intuited encounters with expereince, like a mysterious punch in the face, if you will: who did this? Why? Where is he?; and so on. But then pain, well, there is no discursivity of inquiry here. It may be taken up discursively, but pain qua pain is not.

Pain, affectivity being a general term for this dimension of our existence, is nondiscursive, and affectivity brings reason in line with actuality. To know is to feel, in other words. Again, feeling does not attend knowing. It IS the knowing. The distinctions drawn between the two are analytic and abstract and pragmatic.

I agree. I have mentioned in here and elsewhere that thinking is not prove that one exists. But I have also thought that maybe by "thinking" Descartes meant "being aware". In which case, he was right.
See, at that time the terms and concepts of "consciousness" and "awareness" were not developed yet. — Alkis Piskas

I think his "res cogitans" answers this. Thought qua thought is an independent kind of existing "thing." We are this.

This is a good point you have brought up. It reminds me of what imagination and intuition meant to Einstein in relation to knowledge:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
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“I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” — Alkis Piskas

But then, Einstein wasn't doing philosophy. To imagine is to bring forth established knowledge claims, often, in novel ways, and this is a creative imagining, which is what I think he was talking about. A better understanding of imagination would be an "openness": all of our thinking and knowledge claims are open to possibilities, and none are shut, which is dogmatism. i am claiming that there is a foundational nostalgia for closure, and this should be understood not simply as a rational quest for a proposition.al satisfaction. What inquiry qua inquiry seeks is a union between epistemology and ontology.

What if it could be said what thought is by what it does? If only this can be done by thinking, then the doing of this is thinking. If I think of, or cognize, a dog as fur, teeth, a tail, a nose, in a certain arrangement, and if fur, teeth, tails and noses represent conceptions I’ve thought, than I should be authorized to say….thought is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to each other. And its negation works just as well, insofar as if I cannot connect a set of conceptions to each other, then I have no authority to say I’ve thought anything at all. — Mww

I have no doubt at all that utility lies in the "saying"; or better, the saying lies in utility. Thinking is doing, and I think this right. Is all doing thinking? Implicitly, yes; I would say a cow standing in a meadow "thinks" when it sees taller more tempting grass. A kind of proto thinking, such that the conditional proposition, "I should move over there to access something better," is obviously not in place, but the conditional function is. Symbolic language comes "after," both historically and analytically, this rudimentary relation with the world.

I agree with this idea of cognition as a synthesis. Hard not to, really. But the point I want to make is that this cognition is always conceived apart from its, call it, native setting, and in this conception we are free to think clearly and abstractly, which is good, of course, for the utility requirement put before it. But this runs into what could be called a kind of Kantian fallacy, who in his Transcendental Dialectic argued that reason, left ungrounded in worldly confirmation, moves to inventing metaphysical nonsense: here, I say when reason conceives of what it is to be a "rational truth" according to its own model, it creates an abstraction out of reason. Truth as a philosophical idea requires actual occasions of truth to be revealed for what they are PRIOR to analysis, not after.

Philosophy that seeks Truth with a capital "T" and not just truth in utility based activity. And this Truth is essentially affective, but this is ignored by philosophers, who continually argue as if philosophy's greatest hope is clarity in plain facts. They don't see that what they are really looking for affective clarity in this affair, a consummation of affectivity, which has this powerful dimension to it, the very source of religious fervor and desire.

Philosophy is the very core of religion, to speak loosely.

We can assign, in the sense of feel, "truth value" in the affective. It has the sense of actuality, of truth in the sense of alethia or revealing (or "unconcealing"). The act-ual is revealed by acting, by affecting.

But this notion of truth is quite different than the idea of propositional truth, which applies only to statements or assertions. — Janus

Is it? When you think at all, thought is attending by feeling, but then, not just this: To say it is attended by feeling is to impose on the experience an order and determination it doesn't have itself. the categorical thought takes up the experience AS a propositional abstraction. It is an abstraction from an unquantifiable source, which is the experience itself, the actuality that presents itself for analysis.The features observed are taken up as categorical.
Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception is itself an impossible concept constructed out of the very concepts it is alleged to bring forth. Part of Wittgenstein's complaint in the Tractatus is about this kind of thing, which is why he was such a fan of Kierkegaard.

It is on account of this "revealing" of actuality which is everyday experience (when we notice it) that we can say that everyday experience is (or can be) a revelation. But this has nothing to do with discursive knowledge or explanation, because as soon as the attempt is made to describe this experience in our necessarily dualistic language the original non-duality of the actual is more or less obscured. I say "more or less" because I think the sense of non-duality, of the numinous, although not capable of description, can be evoked by metaphor, by poetic language (and of course by the other arts). — Janus

Or: It has EVERYTHING to do with discursive knowledge, but propositional knowledge is "reduced" to the properties generally understood as essential and exclusive of affectivity imply because the analysis makes it appear this way; and pragmatic rationality, call it, "works" when it is calmly done and reason can proceed in a kind or pure discursivity, free from rhetoric and distracting emotion, and this has real "utility" for getting things right in science and its more mundane setting, everyday living.

But then, to be a good scientist, we have to allow the object before us to stand as it is, which is why I refer to the notion of gelassenheit: one has to yield to the world, observe in earnest, to see what knowledge is, and this observation must be a clear as possible. I witness an occasion of knowledge and I see, as Dewey saw, that affectivity is IN the experience. It is in the "originary" condition. Truth of this and that is abstracting from this original condition for utility's sake. But as it is, as an observable phenomenon, "shown," that is, an original whole.

The reason philosophy is millennia old and still haunts inquiry in same ways it always has is because it has sought propositional knowledge exclusive of substantive affective "meaning". Proportions are pragmatic constructions as well as essential to understand anything, and even essential to being a person at all. But to treat a proposition as a utility, as I am now writing this, philosophically, is a reduction of the world to a utility. And this is Heidegger's big complaint in his Question Concerning Technology.

Following Peirce, I would argue any notion of truth is semiotic. And science now tells us that humans engage in semiosis at four levels of encoding or sign relations.

We engage with the world via genes, neurons, words and numbers. Or more broadly, we are neurobiological creatures first, but have become also sociocultural creatures as well.

And so I say you are confusing the levels at which we “exist in the flow of nature”. Neurobiology sets us up as affective selves. We respond to the world as we find it in “emotional” ways. We read our surroundings in ways that deal with our basic survival. Our responses are the physiological states and behavioural habits appropriate to that level of world modelling.

Then philosophy comes in at a very different level. It is based on the abstracted notion of universalised reason and the specific of measurement. It is based on the third person absolute detachment that we imagine as the God’s eye objective point of view that it dialectically opposed to our embodied, affective, subjective, first person point of view. — apokrisis

Well, since you brought up evolution, consider that at the current evolutionary stage, we are faced with a world constructed out of pragmatic responses to its conditions, and these are generally talked about in terms of survival and reproduction, or perhaps genotypical codes translating into phenotypical traits that have the requisite utility. Consider further that the very observational matrix we exist in is an evolutionary construct. My position is that this construct is that the very terms of meaning making are not "about " the world, but are "made" and the search for this aboutness is philosophy's aim. So: if all we witness is structured, even in the very generative basis of experience, then all eyes turn to this structure for basic analysis. Evolution itself is called into question, for it is an empirical theory about a "world" that lies outside the structural features experience, and this itself raises serious doubt as to soundness. One find Descartes Evil genius, not simply "knocking at the door"---for there is no "door' in the sense Descartes conceived of the world. This kind of talk is rightly dismissed today as nonsense.

And briefly, bringing up Peirce directs me to his complaint about Descartes, that the latter was lost in aimless apriority. But his analysis fails to understand the Cartesian move as a wedding of epistemology and ontology. Descartes thought the cogito was primary because its "ontological proximity" was absolute, and to think this is exactly way to think about epistemology. He was mistaken, but not for reasons Peirce stated. The key to foundational epistemology lies in the intimacy of "presence".

So one is facing a world that is first a construct that makes a world, not a mirror that receives something from beyond itself (again, something that cannot even be conceived in the imagination). As if neuronal activity could be "abou" anything, and worse, about even itself. Physical systems have no epistemic connectivity at all. Consider how the famous naturalist philosopher, Quine, who took up Dewey's chair, committed himself to the premise that the natural world and its physics (from physics, onward to other sciences) entirely failed to explain how meaning, its semiotics, its intentions, anticipations, doubt and affirmation, and so on, can ever be about what physics is talking about. Causality is not even remotely epistemic, that is, there is not even a working paradigm to suggest the possibility.

This is why natural science cannot be philosophy.

So in reality, as living breathing human beings also carving out space in social communities, we of course feel as well as reason. We see as well as measure. It can seem impossible to split off the neurobiological aspects of our semiotic organisation from our socialcultural ones. — apokrisis

Of course, this is right, as long as you don't think neurobiology is a philosophical concept. It "rests on" philosophical assumptions that go unnoticed unless one explicitly thinks this way. Philosophy is about the presuppositions of this kind of talk.

Yet the sensible definition of philosophy is just that. It is the attempt to reach the limit of detachment from the point of view of a creature rooted in embodied subjectivity.

Reasoning still depends on affect as we well know. It feels quite different to be certain vs uncertain. We get a feeling when something clicks and seems right - the aha! response — apokrisis

yes, Dewey's consummatory moment. It is inherently aesthetic. But this has to be recontextualized, out of a naturalist pov and into an existential one. The assumptions of naturalism are undone apriori: the concept of causality simply possesses no epistemic possibility.

But in the interests of fostering philosophical detachment, that is why we have come to lean on the pragmatism of the scientific method. We take claims of feeling convinced out of the equation as much as possible. We invent statistical methods to quantify our proper position on spectrums of certainty-uncertainty. — apokrisis

And IN the statistical occurrent claim there is the "aha!, for all experience has this. It is foundational, and to try to remove this from an what truth is in a philosophical discussion is a little perverse. When we think, we want to be clear, so let us be clear about what truth is and not reduce truth to an abstraction of purely logical clarity. This is a rationalist fallacy.

You have it right when you defend pragmatism's "forward looking" scientific method. But this does not welcome natural science into foundational philosophical thinking. It denies it.

We aim to feel no more strongly about some conviction than that of the response of the click of pattern recognition. We have been presented with some complicated puzzle. There is then some satisfaction in making the last piece fit to complete the whole picture.

So sure, truth isn’t just propositional. AP types got that wrong. Truth comes in its grades of semiosis. The body has to react in ways that are “affective” to be effective in its world.

But then truth as a game being played at the highest level of detached abstraction is understood as “other” to this embodied affectiveness. It is Peirce’s community of reason that aims for objectivity via the cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Make a guess at a general causal relation, deduce the particular logical consequences of that being true, then test to see how those expectations turn out in terms of numbers on dials.

Flickers on needles rather than flickers of the heart are the currency of rational inquiry. — apokrisis

Or, truth needs to be understood as the phenomenon that is there, descriptively available. The categorical universe contrived by reason's essential pragmatic function and definition taken as an exclusive foundation for truth is a fundamental mischaracterization, for this foundation is inherently affective, and clarity in truth recognition is not simply "making ideas clear." It is making the broad scope of experience "clear" and the MOST salient feature of this, is affectivity, and certainly not the very useful movement on a dial in a statistical gathering of information.

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance. — Joshs

Put it this way: Philosophers are certainly not in the business of discovering affective "truths".

I agree with this, but this revelation is commonplace; it is with us every instant of everyday experience, in that which exceeds our discursive understandings of what is happening. We just have to learn to notice... — Janus

It is not simply a matter of understanding that there is an aesthetic dimension to thinking, and experiencing. It is a question of HOW one therefore produces Truth, with a capital 'T'. I could say that a performance of Ravel's le tombeau de couperin possesses "truth" but in our categorical tendencies, we take this to be a kind of metaphor.
Truth cannot be conceived apart from the world (logical truths are vacuous, and really, not apart from anything). To see a llama in the road and construct a proposition about this is already committed to abstraction, that of the proposition, the assertion, the existential quantifier, a factual state of affairs, and so on; that is, UNLESS one considers the whole experience of which the proposition is only a part, conceived in a social context.

This may still sound rather mundane, but I take the matter to philosophy, where true propositions meet metaphysics: What is it to conceive of the llama encounter at the basic level of inquiry? Keeping in mind that the understanding is no longer bound to an abstract proposition. The hard part of seeing this is assigning truth value to affectivity. Analysis gives us the habit of dividing such things: there is not truth in aesthetics, and therefore foundation thinking is going to be inherently "dryly" propositional. Metaphysics is going to be seen as a violation of clarity, because clarity is defined apart from its existential counterpart, and not as a "clarity" of affectivity.

It is hard to think like this, to imagine the principles of reason as "aesthetic principles," that modus ponens is REALLY is an event! This is Dewey. But Dewey never made the radical move: The idea of metaphysics is an aesthetic encounter, a reaching to "affirm" a desideratum that exceeds the desire.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics. Not a line drawn in the sand of Wittgenstein (who I admire very much) and positivists. Affectivity has no such line.

I asked, because you brought them up. I’m guessing you know what a can of worms they are, which makes me wonder….why bring them up, then do nothing with them. — Mww

You mean I should cut to the chase? I do find it a little puzzling that comments I made were in no way suggestive of "a mutually profitable dialectic." After all, the notion of an absolute of any kind should raise philosophical eyebrows. You must have views on such a thing, and my thoughts were just the occasion to bring them out, keeping in mind that one of the foundational ideas of analytic thinking is a radical rejection of metaphysics and to even mention an absolute puts the matter squarely in metaphysics.

The chase: ask. what is philosophy? It is inherently affective, and this is a very important point. To be philosophical is to address the world at the level of the most basic questions, and at this level the question turns to foundations, and foundationally, it is discovered that reason and its categories AS SUCH is an abstraction, merely. Not that priniples of logic are to be second guessed, but that what principles of logic really are, are affective events that are affective/logical/pragmatic in some inconceivable original. The "generative source" of the language that produces understanding is, as I write and think occurrently, is transcendental and not to be conceived itself as categorical, that is, as a product of what reason does.

Philosophy as an endless play of words finds itself in a kind of Derridaian loop of references that are contextualized and this contextualization has no end. Heidegger put it so well in his Origin of the Work of 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.

He thrives on the endless dialectic; so Hegelian. And he is right, I am sure. Philosophy is an "asymptotic" process, never to cross the final line to what it seeks. This is because philosophy conceived as "feast of thought" (and I put aside Heidegger's allusions to some determinate poetic grounding. I don't understand it all that well) and while it certainly is this, it begs the question, what is thought? It is an openness, and so forth, but thought is never simply thought; it is inherently aesthetic (see Dewey on this, though I don't think Dewey would for a moment agree with things I think are true), and what is this? Wittgenstein says we are out of our depths in a question like this. But here is the rub: Truth isn't, nor has it ever been, just a propositional affair (see Rorty, and, I guess, most analytic philosophers). To see a truth IS an aesthetic experience.

There is more to this, but I wonder if a mutually profitable dialectic has been encouraged thus far.

Agreed, in principle. What does any of that have to do with existential absolutes or foundational existences? I mean, you brought them up….I guess….in an attempt to lay the groundwork for something apparently about the world, but from what you’ve called our contemplative midst. I can’t seem to find a connection you’ve made between them, as yet anyway. — Mww

One has to ask what a foundational existence could even mean, first. Simple description comes first. description of the world at the basic level. Absolutes are not to be found in discursive argument. Rather, argument leads to something radically other.

And also keeping in mind that a word like 'absolute' has already corrupted the inquiry. I mention this only to make clear that references to something existential, in my thinking, takes one the the threshold where what can be spoken yields to what cannot.

As to "about the world": what is the world? I mean, when you use this term, what do you mean? What I mean by it is the Totality of our existence. By existence I mean all that is there, and interpretatively in play.

To purify one’s gaze makes none but metaphorical sense, but nevertheless observation is already delivered…..separated…..from presumptive thinking, which you’ve already granted, insofar as affective intuition is placed apart from cognitive understanding. — Mww

It is a problem to speak of it. One has to be careful, for language summons its own, so to speak.

Not simply metaphorical. It is a method of removing historically augmented thought from one's apperceptive beholding of the world. One is spontaneously inclined to deploy analytic thinking to solve a problem, it has become nearly impossible to engage is what could be called "gelassenheit", a term familiar to the Amish and others, but certainly it is not them I have in mind. Gelassenheit is a yielding to discover, such that the conceptual domination over experience is reduced to a kind of humility.

This is not religious talk. A natural scientist does this, clearly, and of necessity, as systems of thought are first responsible to listening, watching, taking in the world. Here, it is just a philosophical "taking in" which is not something the scientist can handle well, for the "evidence" to be observed lies not in the routine empiricism, but in the intuited underpinning of this. Which is ignored, generally.

Again, agreed in principle, overlooking the repetitive semantic disassociation (we in general face the world, but each subject alone, retains some original status). Still, no exposition of a relation between an existential absolutes and foundational intuitions. And yet the problem seems to be the loss of foundational intuitions and the subsequent recovery of them, or at least their status as such. But how can that be the case, in a systemic whole? Can’t lose a part then get it back and still have the system maintain itself. — Mww

That is, unless the foundational intuition in question is there not as a part at all. If I take your meaning, you are asking how some primoradial intuition can be conceived by a agency of divided thought? To think at all is divisive, analytic, manifold and the like. But it gets worse: how can intuition be wrested from the grip of history, personal and cultural, from memory as it seizes upon the present making it its own? Memory and anticipation own time and therefore, existence?

If this is the premise, then it seems hopeless, and 'nonpropositional knowledge" is impossible. But I don't think language, while manufacturing abstractions ("the presidency" say, is an abstraction; though the utterance, the thought, is an actuality) freely in a culture, constricts meaning's possibilities. I can, in other words, behold what is not language, yet is "in" a language that conceives what is beheld. Thinking only "corrupts" intuition when it is categorically insistent.

Wake up in the morning, and interpretation spontaneously seizes the day, so to speak. Not what Whitman had in mind, this "going along" into the regular affairs that carve out one's existence. What is being suggested here is that standing apart from this can restore something not simply at peace, but radically outside the Totality of what thought, as a cultural institution, can say.

I’m guessing that because intuitions are representations of observations, the rationale is that the innocence of being observed is lost to manifestation as phenomenon. While that does no harm, it also has no benefit. Seems like naught but a minor rendition of “non-overlapping magisteria”, in that observation is this, intuition is that and while one necessarily presupposes the other, neither is contained in the other. In other words, intuitions are never that which is observed, which in turn leaves observation to be just what it is, no part of it in the least undone. — Mww

Intuition as representations is entirely on the other side of the idea presented here. One has to drop this primacy of rationality as the way to understand the world. To think like this encourages the problem. Presupposition is part of a rational game of discursivity. Intuition is far and away NOT about this.

I think you’re trying to elaborate on the distinction between private philosophy (thought) and public philosophizing (thought-in-the-world), re:

It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, feeling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.
— Astrophel

So it was called “I am” in the context of “I think”, as it should be. I am that which thinks, is a singularity. Even though “I” never shows up in thought, it is nonetheless the case that all thought is the manifestation of a singular thinker, for which “I” is merely the representation. All of THAT, in the context of language. — Mww

"I am" is not a singularity. there are no such things in language. To think at all is to be in the deployment of universals. this is what we seek to step beyond, yet of necessity, stay within: to engage a singularity is impossible. To engage an intuition that imparts novel meaning, and then to look to language and find that universality of reference is really a temporal imposition that tries to "claim" the intuition and assimilate it into a common idea, puts language in a dubious position. For one then has to reconcile language with what is NOT in the Totality of what is commonly held, and indeed, what is not language at all.
This is the issue here. It is that taking truth to be a matter of the understanding, and then relegating the understanding to rationality along with the combined reductive tendency of a culture, is the very essence of philosophical error. Originally, if you will, we are "of a piece" in affectivity, conceived broadly, and reason---that are, keeping in mind, only affectivity and reason because they are so named in an analytic process. But it is an impossible whole to conceive within the discursivity of a Totality, unless that Totality is committed to a form of gelassenheit (see above).

If you can elaborate this a little more I would like to hear it. Note: plain language would help if possible. — I like sushi

Plain language in an exotic philosophical setting. Exotic because this kind of thing is almost anathema in Anglo American philosophy, as I have read.

What is it to know? If there is no way to account for this, then we are lost. I mean, if language is only self referential, and one cannot grasp even in the imagination what, at the most basis level, of knowledge claims could even possibly be, then knowledge isexistentially without meaning. What do I mean by existentially? Reference is to existence, and existence refers to the palpable "sense" of being here, and this refers to not simply raw physical feels and impositions, but, thoughts, and affectivity (a broadly conceived affectivity that comprises our ethics and aesthetics). Do thoughts exist? Of course. Existence is not to be reduced to "metaphysical physics". Does affectivity exist? A foolish question, really: nothing could be more palpable.

I think language gets lost in language, and it is the familiarity of language that removes for our sight an original existence, not original in an historical sense, as if once long ago, but original as in something primordial and "under the skin" of what we call experience.
Easy to access, in a way, because while language creates an analytic divided world, it also puts it back to gether again; in other words, language is also redemptive when the direction of inquiry goes to basic questions: those words you're thinking now, from whence to they come? I am thinking of Beckett's book Molloy. the idea is how to get around the extraordinary claim that it is language that speaks! Not "me". Molloy/Molone is dying, but it is not the death of the body, but of language, and words that linger to the end, grasping for existence, knowing soon words will not sustain the monologue that is the self.

What does one make of such a thing? You see, language creates the drama of being alive; it IS this drama. It is argued here, by me, that this, well, staged event of being a person is a constructed imposition on existence, because Molloy's existence is clearly NOT the vacuity of language, of words qua words.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Not so much looking for, as if set out to find one. But I do think the encounter with the world that is discovered is revelatory. It is a revelation to liberate one existence from the categorical illusions created by historical analyses. It is a revelation about what one intuits when intuition discovers the world that has been pushed out of sight by language and culture.

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation? — wonderer1

Revelation: something revealed. Intuition: something intuited, and something intuited reveals that which is intuited, doesn't it? Nothing ambiguous here. And the question remains: what is it, exactly, that is intuited. My position is that we live in a world which has a secret, a metaphysical secret that is brought into existence by language: language divides the world and hypostatizes these divisions making the world seem categorically diverse and analytically complex. But its not.

There is "behind" our routine knowledge claims a foundation of intuited reality that can only be acknowledged if we suspend the the abstract processes of thought-in-the-world. The revelation follows a restoration of an original intuition lost in the drive to explain, solve problems, and so on.

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rational intuitions of reality, or the nature of reality. Are you agreeing with that position or not? — Janus

I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?

Why would you want to? — wonderer1

Well, it is the point I am raising. Consider what a pure intuition would be. We are so used to absolutes belonging to the "certainty" of logic, and logic being a mere formal, content free dimension of judgment that could yield no real knowledge because it is simply empty. But an existential intuition? Both about existence AND apodictic!
Such a thing is a revelation.

There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting them into words (and thus interpreting or distorting them). The idea that there are intuitions which directly reveal the "true essence" of reality is a discursively formed idea, which is itself not a "pure intuition". — Janus

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"? If you define this as a kind of qualia, then the question is begged: for "being appeared to redly" isolates the color red from the complete engagement. Keep in mind that calling something "red" is an analytic abstraction, a category imposed on the world to identify in a social context. Our concepts (and I follow Rorty here) are inherently social pragmatic devices that divide an "originarily" undivided world. I think this is clear: when thought is brought to bare on the bare phenomenon, thought's categories slip away, and the abstraction of the social construct yields to an engagement in the world that is affective/cognitive/pragmatic all at once. Here, affect is not dismissed, as philosophy has always tended to ignore it into marginalization. Affect is now IN the qualia. Or, Moore's "non natural quality" (the good; see Principia Ethica) is reintegrated with the whole experience.

No. An existential absolute. Or, apparently, just recently, your foundation of existence. Is one the same as the other? — Mww

It's an odd question to me. One is simply directed to purify one's gaze, deliver observation from the presumptive thinking that generally steps in and makes claims and argues. One don't argue about an intuition. One can deny that there are such things, and many do just this. They say that once an intuition is observed it is already embedded in context, and the "purity" (or innocence) of the observation is entirely undone. I see a sunset and I am already in a body of understanding that takes it in, identifies and classifies it. Innocence here is just an illusion that philosophy can undo just by talking about how impossible it is to observe something "stand alone" for observation itself is crowded with predelineated understanding.

But I argue that even though we face the world in a determinate historical way (educated and enculturated), the event of acknowledging something retains its original status as an intuition. case in point: the radical example of putting your hand in a pot of boiling water. One is not bound to a contextualized setting to understand this in the ways it intuitively presents itself.

The reason Dennett and others reject this kind of intuitionism is because they see only an abstraction in the intuition. That is, analysis places the intuition apart from the understanding, the former being affective, the latter cognitive, and the understanding is distinctively cognitive. Non propositional knowledge is not recognized.

So the main thesis does not concern foundational intuitions, but rather, an existential absolute with respect to the implicit and elusive something science is “about”?

Any idea what that would be, what form it would take? Is that the scope of your elucidation? — Mww

Foundational intuitions? We have to know what these are before choosing in favor of something else. It is important to see that it is not going to a continuity that runs through familiar paradigms, but rather will jump to the chase, so to speak. Such an intuition is accessible to observation. The access lies in the manner in which one takes up this ordinary world. One can observe that there is an error in one's taxes, but then one can turn away from this and ask more basic questions about taxes, their nature, justification, and so on. The latter you could call a "meta" observation about the former. Examining presuppositions of a thing is a move toward a meta review, a review that is about itself. Here, I take this term to the threshold of possible review: the assumptions about the world AS world, the place Wittgenstein wouldn't go, and ask for "review". But now the playing field is very limited. I mean, ask for a review of a language, you step into a metalanguage, perhaps another language, or within the same language, but examining a point of grammar or semantic--THIS meta position is rich with explanatory details. But to pull away from the world, one finds oneself in a kind of no man's land: what lies before one is the world, but any reference to an explanatory source is not available, for all such sources are IN the world and that would b question begging.

But then, one is still IN the world; one has simply arrived at a point where the understanding looses its footing. The question arises, what is there that one loses ones footing about? Here is the encountered intuitive landscape. The meta question turns out to be an encounter with the foundations of existence.

Of course, this has issues.

I have a philosophy degree, but you need to dumb it down for me. I have trouble understanding that. My position is that we can know a few things about reality. Cartesian truths. Mind, thought and consciousness exist. We can't be wrong about that. — RogueAI

But consciousness is a problematic term, because ask what it is, and you refer to something else, like knowledge relations and occurrent experiences, feelings and moods, anticipations, memory and so on; I mean, it is not as if conscious is irreducible, and so one then has to go to its parts, its judgments and affectivity and the structure in which we find these.

Mind is the same. Is this a reference to thought only? But even here, there are questions begged: What is it to think at all? Can thought be "about" what lies before the thinker to be witnessed? Is witnessing something a "pure" event such that the witnessed object imparts knowledge of its nature? Or, is the witnessing bound to the relational features of perception, such that perceiving as a subject act, passive or otherwise, is actually part of the object; the point here being that when I see my cat, the "seeing" is not some impossible transparency, or "mirror" as Rorty put it, but an act thick with epistemic qualifiers. Memory and anticipation appear to be a temporal dynamic inherent to consciousness: what about an analysis of this? How does conscious ever get to be a singularity when it is reductively reducible to many things?

Descartes thought he had found in the cogito an absolute grounding for knowledge claims about the world, because the "I am" cannot be called into question (and then on to God who doesn't deceive about things), but this "I am" is no simple given, is it? It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, felling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.

No philosopher's' names here, save Rorty, in passing. No confusing vocabulary. Just straight thinking about consciousness.

When you visualize a sunset, how is that a "language presence of inner auditory qualities"? — RogueAI

To visualize anything is not to be an infant with eyes to see only. One implicitly KNOWS it is a sunset prior to witnessing, that is, sunsets, like trees and clouds, are already established in a ready to hand explanatory matrix and when one sees one understands, even if one does not actually utter the words. The words are "there" in the background. informing the moment and giving a sense of comfort and familiarity.
But do thoughts exist? Of course. They are clearly not heavy or large like physical existence, but their presence is undeniable. Do they exist when they are only implicitly there (per the above), in an unarticulated experience of a sunset or whatever? Of course, they are unconsciously attending, for the moment requires orientation to be a moment of human experience at all (contra an animal orientation, which carries familiarity, certainly, but no language contexts, save the occasional meow and chirp, that have no cognitive function, or at best, a proto-language function). So: it appears that one cannot take understand as a presence if it does not show itself as such, and implicit thoughts are by definition, not appearing. This is kind of question goes to the generative source of thought and experience itself. Such a generative source cannot be seen. We stand at the threshold of metaphysics.

Aren't you as certain that thinking/mind/thought exists as you are about the truths of logic? — RogueAI

As a thought "exists" and constitutes a presence, a language presence of inner auditory qualities, it stands irrefutable. However, what I can say about this is contingent and interpretative.

Hi, Astrophel.

As the quote from Anna and the King of Siam goes, "Is a puzzlement."

Regards, stay safe 'n well. — Torus34

Cheerio, old chap!

I don't see it as absolute. As i said, "an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions." Recognition of the evolving aspect seem important to me, as it allows for paradigm shifts. — wonderer1

I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate.

You are correct. The epistemic and ontological distinctions are of convenience.

Sadly people like Heidegger used this problem to talk meaningless twaddle :D — I like sushi

Well, I like sushi, that is a bold statement. I wonder if Being and Time can be called meaningless twaddle in the context of an examination of his thought. Or is this just bluster?

I am not correct because I think epistemic and ontological distinctions are of (mere?) convenience. I am saying quite the opposite: there is an ontology that stands behind, with, and in, all knowledge claims, rendering them epistemically non arbitrary. This is the point.

There is no wrong in speculative metaphysics; just coherence, and logical consistency to support it.

The notion of foundational intuitions initially became coherent, within its own logically consistent framework, in 1781.

Attempts to dismiss them as such, or maybe realign them as something else, began in 1818, been going on ever since. — Mww

I would first ask that the history of this thinking be put aside. Philosophical ideas are timeless, which is why even the pre Socratics still have relevance. Just argue the matter on its manifest merits.

Speculative? This, I am arguing, is not the case at the very basic level. I claim there is an existentialabsolute, that is, something in our contemplative midst that cannot be reduced to what argument can say, cannot be second guessed. This is the bare givenness of the world.

"If A then B; A, therefore B" is also a language construct. Are you a radical skeptic? — RogueAI

Of course not. But one has to see that, first, tautologies are vacuous. Logical validity says nothing about the world, but is self referential. Second, as rigorous as logic is, it is still conceived in an historical casting of terms. I may be very certain modus ponens is right, but when you ask me how my words represent this coercive intuition that binds parts of a proposition in logic, I am lost. This "binding" is simply given, and unspeakable.

I don't really know what you are trying to say here, and I don't know what "foundational intuition" would be. I'm inclined to think that rather than having a foundational intuition, I have an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions.

Or if you prefer, a poetic take. — wonderer1

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute.

Isn't the following necessarily true: there exists at least one thinking mind? — RogueAI

Keep in mind that "one thinking mind" is a language construct. How, it may be asked, did one get this? And where does its authority find its basis?

It has recently been shown, rather convincingly [for me, at least,] that we cannot distinguish between living in a simulation and living in a 'real' universe.

That brings into question whether we can truly know anything at all.

Comments? — Torus34

There is a serious question begged here: what is the litmus of knowing at all? the very concept of one standard generating conditions for deviation brings that standard into sharp relief.

But really, if you can't tell the difference between one and the other, then there is no difference, and whatever difference you place OUTSIDE of the pov in question, as with yours and my shared understanding that one is right the other wrong, it is to be called metaphysics.

The modes of necessity are interrelated with the modes of contingency, so that perfect necessity is contingent in relation to a priore necessity, a priore necessity is contingent in relation to logical necessity, and logical necessity is contingent in relation to an "ur-contingency" that would transcend non-contradiction. Each mode of contingency, in turn, represents the possibility of something different from what we see in each subsequent mode of necessity. The very possibility that, in time, we can open the window or make some other alteration in reality is a case where we deal with the contingency of present time and our ability to bring about some new possibility. What this adds up to for universals is that as forms of necessity they represent the rules and guideposts that limit and direct possibility: Universals represent all real possibilities. Thus, what Plato would have called the Form of the Bed, really just means that beds are possible. What would have seemed like a reductio ad absurdum of Plato's theory, that if there is the Form of the Bed, there must also be the Form of the Television (which is thus not an artifact and an invented object at all, but something that the inventor has just "remembered"), now must mean that the universal represents the possibility of the television, which is a possibility based on various necessities of physics (conditioned necessities) and facts (perfect necessities) of history. — Meaning and the Problem of Universals, Kelly Ross

Well, I read most of it, and I know this history, though not as well as Kelly Ross. I don't get it, this is the kind of thing a Buddhist should run a mile from .

A Buddhist, and I am not consulting text on this, is first someone who practices a method (you can argue against all of this, of course), and that method is a withdrawal from conditions of normal experience, that day to day business with one's affairs. A radical withdrawal, not simply relaxing the mind; the kind of withdrawal that makes profound changes in the way the world is perceived, at the level of perception itself. This method has an end, which is the annihilation of time. Time is the everydayness of our affairs (not some absurd Kantian intuition). It is not the taking the trash out, making the dental appointment, and so on; it is the "taking" of the taking the trash out AS the real; it is the reification of our practical world into an ontology. By ontology I do not mean to discuss Plato or Aristotle or any of that philosophical heritage at all. As I see it, that presumptuous talk causes all of philosophy's problems.

Wondering if universals are real certainly does beg that impossible question, what do you mean by 'real'? Such question stops all inquiry in its tracks. If a particular or a universal is real, then 'real' has to have meaning in order for the proposition to make any sense. This brings the inquiry to unproblematic occasions of the real, and this leads to what is apprehended "most directly". This then is an obvious Cartesian turn, for what is MOST direct is what is immediate, unquestioned, intuitive, such that nothing can stand between the affirmation and what is being affirmed.

To me, this is where Buddhism begins. Buddha, the ultimate phenomenologist, who "reduces" the observable environment to what simply appears before one as it appears, and not as it is anything else. All else in meditation is radically suspended, and by this I mean annihilated. Time is annihilated, for though one may analyze the condition in terms of Kantian time (certainly the apriority of the succession of events certainly holds, if you want to talk like that) this analysis is suspended along with everything else. The radically reduced world looms large with all presuppositions in abeyance.

In the west we have phenomenology. Consider what Husserl says in his Cartesian Meditation about his method:

I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing

Absolute poverty, of course, is never achieved here or in his Ideas nor in Heidegger, or anywhere else Only in Buddhism (and Hinduism. I drop the metaphysics and the "differences" it makes. I have little patience for the way people invent issues with religion and philosophy. Sit, observe the world. What you seek is a method, not an argument).

Entanglement is fundamental to quantum mechanics. The observer is entangled as is everything else. As I said elsewhere, there is no separation anywhere. — Rich

But notice when you refer to physics, there are the underlying terms of your perceptual/cognitive system that are always already there making the perception possible. One way to put it is that even to conceive of causality, it requires the, if you firmly hold to this ide in all things (as we must because we cannot conceive of an exception; causality is apodictic) causal matrixes of mind (not to put too fine a point on it) to do this, which is blatant circular reasoning. You could conclude that certainly the principle of causality is compromised since it cannot be conceived apart from it own application. But then, this applies to all claims about anything whatsoever. The conclusion is clear: no foundational terms like this can have meaning beyond their intuitive evidence, and this evidence is always compromised, undone, really.

Then the only course of action available is to examine the conditions of its undoing, knowing full we that this too is subject to the same objections. But at least the focus has reached a a more fundamental level, for now we are giving analysis to the very basis of this very strong knowledge claim, the principle of causality. Then all eyes turn to one place: language. Before quantum physics can be what it is, we have look at what it means know at all.

All problems in philosophy end this way. This is why science will never be philosophy.

The conversation has moved on but I wanted to adress this question: — Wayfarer

I'll have to read it. Just a bit...