Oh, I was thinking of that as the feature and not the bug. :gasp: — apokrisis

Not clear on this. Derrida transforms Saussure's signs into traces. You like signs or traces more?

It is a first principle of clear writing that global or abstract statements are then always anchored/evidenced in the conviction of supporting particulars. You give the general principle and offer the specific examples that support it. — apokrisis

I agree! That's an ideal way to go. Examples, examples, examples. But apparently some subcultures consider that a buzzkill.

Again I wonder what sociological advantage that gives PoMo texts - except to play the poseur too clever to be understood by the likes of me and you, — apokrisis

The super-clever mystification game is definitely out there, IMO. It happens on the religious side (which denigrates the limitation of concept) and on the PoMo side (which denigrates the pursuit of objectivity as passé ).

But hey, you clearly value it. Which makes me curious as to how you don't appear to have had your thoughts scrambled by it. — apokrisis

Probably helps that I studied math formally: graduate real analysis, Galois theory, some crypto, as much computability theory as the school offered. Also learned lots of stats, and I got to (and had to) teach, which forces one to clarify.

You are managing to make Derrida seem like a reasonable guy. The question is what kind of sociology would encourage the torture of the accepted PoMo academic style? — apokrisis

Well, given how disliked he is, I'm motivated to defend my own appreciation for him and to prove to myself that I'm squeezing some juice from those indulgently difficult texts. Looking at some revealing video interviews online, it seems Derrida was inspired/gripped (lots of emotion!) when he came up with his big first idea. It came out hot. So he was maybe like a French Nietzsche at the time. Do you like Nietzsche at all?

Language - verbal or numerical - reduces the analog reality to a digital recording. But hey, digital recordings can be as good as the real thing for all practical purposes. And they can be better if you don't like the scratching and hissing of vinyl, or you want the most compressed recording possible. — apokrisis

Yes indeed. And I think of reality being modeled by digital simulations with tiny step sizes. I've programmed stochastic gradient descent in various ways. It's based on a pure math proof. Or so it seems. One could empirically discover a good algorithm. A proof in pure math is not obviously/simply a proof about the world or actual computation. We have our symbol games which primarily prove themselves practically.

Yep. That is how I would argue it. — apokrisis

That's what I take to have been inspiration for the difference that Derrida misspelled and generalized. But it's already in Saussure.

the switch is the Procrustean bed that forces such a division on the world. — apokrisis

Exactly! Yes. And you can see how Saussure's own distinctions are not erased but at least destabilized. If the signifier 'actually' refers to other signifiers and not to a signified, then the dyadic sign is not so dyadic after all. One has instead a system of 'traces,' neither mental nor physical, but that which makes distinction possible in the first place. A trace is like a sum of negations of other traces, hence the metaphor.

Can I get back to you later. Thanks. Have a good day. — Agent Smith

:up:

Peirce and other systems thinkers protest that reality at the fine grain is naked fluctuation. There is no certainty as a base, just the continuous blur that is the vagueness of an uncertainty. — apokrisis

I understand Derrida to call out the play/ambiguity of our signs. Since they primarily refer to one another (describe the blur of reality with a set of finite switch-positions like mind/matter or male/female), they aren't grounded in anything but our flexible reapplication of an old sign in a new context. This allows for drift. I read him with Wittgenstein, as a linguistic philosopher I suppose.

Thus you can see that if this is the Saussure that informs Derrida's own further rewriting of what Saussureanism ought to mean, then yeah, just give it the flick. Start again with Peircean semiosis. — apokrisis

I'll check out more of Peirce. But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy. The aspect of that prejudice which I tend to focus on is the supposed presence of some kind of sign-independent pure meaning stuff before the gaze of a pure subject. This is maybe the 'deepest' ghost story of them all.

Not sure how to translate that. But from my Vygotskian/social constructionist perspective, language was the new medium that structured the "undifferentiated continuum" of the language-less animal mind.

So to actually characterise the difference language made to animal consciousness, we have to also be able to accurately characterise what kind of consciousness that was. — apokrisis

I agree that it makes more sense to think in terms of evolution. Humans weren't dropped into the garden with undifferentiated thoughtstuff.

Ok. So you are quoting from the text that Stotlz points out is problematic as a representation of Saussure's views.... — apokrisis

Well one can get the different copies of student lecture notes, but yes I have the fusion (Course) and a book by Culler, which gives some background and is pleasantly to-the-point.

So yes, this is Janus faced. The switch has a foot in both worlds. But the thought is the logical model - which in the Bayesian brain view, sets the switch in advance as best it can, then discovers the degree to which reality has tripped it the other way, spelling some error in the prediction.

So what can't be divided is the three way deal of the model, the switch or sign as the interface, and the world. The mind predicts, the world corrects, the switch mediates this triadic interaction. — apokrisis

I like your presentation of the triadic approach above. Model/switch/world.

Saussure had different priorities ? Shows his age? Note that he thought in terms of 'form not substance' on both sides.. The phonic 'image' is something like an equivalence class of actual pronunciations. It's not sound.

In end the sounds themselves don't matter for the system at all. All that matters is the difference between them. This difference is unheard. Each signifier is 'essentially' the negation of all the others. It doesn't matter what the chess pieces look like. Only relationships mater. This is in the phonic realm. In the conceptual realm of the signified we have something similar. Mental is not-physical, male is not-female, etc. Switches. As opposed to the meaning of 'male' or 'true' or 'real' being immediately grounded by something other than difference (an intuition in the mind of god or the 'same mental experiences' of Aristotle, a beetle in the box, the 'transcendental signified.')

.
Well I was justifying my 'certainty' that language is received like the law. But take it from a linguist.

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.

The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be called colloquially "the stacked deck." We say to language: "Choose!" but we add: "It must be this sign and no other." No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language.

No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple, and it is precisely from this viewpoint that the linguistic sign is a particularly interesting object of study; for language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent. — Saussure

Every PoMo argument ever boils down to saying this thesis leads dialectially to its own antithesis. — apokrisis

A more generous rendition, which maybe only applies to good examples, is that following the implications of a text or system often reveals otherwise unnoticed conceptual tensions in that text or system. 'Text deconstruct themselves.'

Hegel has been described as showing how systems/personalities fail in their own terms and only then change. Rinse and repeat. Pile up determinate negations, a stack of informative failures. You can imagine a personality/system deaf to external criticism (because it unintelligible or lacks authority to/for him) without being able to ignore failure in terms of his/its own criteria/goals.

Then you go on to ask me how we measure uncertainty. — Agent Smith

I don't mean to offend you. Maybe the metaphor is obscure. The point is simple. You didn't choose the sounds you chew when you have to talk to strangers and deal with the business of life. You didn't....invent the English language....or do I need to prove that? Am I so bold to be quite sure that neither of us forged the code we are currently employing?

I think 'pomo' is as baggy a term as 'metal' or 'country' or 'jazz.' I like some metal, some country, some jazz. But of course not everything in the genre is good. And even the same writer might become more/less interesting as their thinking develops.

The whole anglo-versus-continental thing sucks.

I don't get how Wittgensteinian philosophers can be so certain of their claims when they simultaneously also assert that the very thing they're making the claims with - language - is inadequate for this purpose. — Agent Smith

How does one measure certainty ? As a matter of style, there are only so many qualifications and timidities that can be justified. 'Language is received like the law' is something that is obvious once noticed. You were born into a certain way of doing things, just as I was, and it's only after learning these contingent noises and marks that we can turn around and articulate that contingency which is nevertheless forced upon us if want to be understood. It could have been other marks or sounds, but it wasn't.

Your critique might apply to some exaggerated pomo-monster that claims that meaning is impossible, that truth is impossible, and so on...without any irony. Playfully, I can ask why a defender of private language might ask such a question. If words mean whatever we want them to mean, then logic is helpless or everyone has their own.

Have you come across Norman Wildberger's dissident maths? — apokrisis

A little bit. I respect his passion for the meaning of mathematics. Errett Bishop had the same fire.

Mathematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in properties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that need to be done, let him do it himself.

I like Chaitin's ventures in such philosophy too. Are the real numbers real? Yes yes we have axioms. We have constructions. And yet actual computation is done with a subset of the rationals (actually there are infinities in the floating point system too, which is nice. ) That the incomputables have measure zero is ... troubling, though one can ignore it and return to manufacturing widgets. (

The discrete = 1/continuous, and the continuous = 1/discrete. Each exists as the limit of the other. And both exist only to the degree that it is pragmatically useful to keep forcing the issue.

Maths and logic traditionally come from the other metaphysical angle. Reduction to a monism must rule. Mathematical reality can only admit the one grounding choice. Pick your poison. — apokrisis

One might argue that mathematics is biased toward the discrete in the pursuit of an ideal if not actual machine checkability. You end up using a finite alphabet of symbols when talking about towers of differing uncountable infinities.

Don't get caught up in nonsense talk about departed Cheshire cats and their still lingering grins. — apokrisis

That quote was pretty good. Group theory comes to mind. Its theorems apply to any system which satisfies certain criteria (intuitively I like to think of finite groups as sets of permutations.)

But then let's not get all AP about it and just dismiss the dichotomy out of hand as (ugh) metaphysics. Let's dance around the corpse of logic in a mad jig of delight, proclaiming now the victory of ... the irrational, the pluralistic, the absurd!!! — apokrisis

I think you're being a little too hard on it (it's not all wordsalad to me, albeit at the limit of intelligibility a little too often), but I enjoy the sarcasm nevertheless.

In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary; (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs; (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary; and finally (4) the idea that he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was a follower of Durkheim).

Saussure does imagine signs as cutting into an otherwise undifferentiated continuum of thoughtstuff.

////////////////////////////////////////
Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.
...

Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.
...
The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality — i.e. language — as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas and the equally vague plane of sounds.
...
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound.
...
In addition, the idea of value, as defined, shows that to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the
term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that
one must start and through analysis obtain its elements.
...
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine ; their combination produces a form, not a substance.
https://archive.org/stream/courseingenerall00saus/courseingenerall00saus_djvu.txt

Haven't looked into them, no.

I want to make a list too: Henry Miller, Nobby Brown, Cioran, Bukowski, Suetonius, Gibbon, Hobbes, Houellebecq, Dawkins, Dennett, Feuerbach, Cantor, Knuth, Freud, Braver, Kojève, Popper, Hofstadter, Lakoff, Bacon, Celine, Saussure...

I omitted authors I know you've looked into, like Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger, Wittgenstein ...

Are not some cultures insane by the standards of others? Can we demonstrate that we have access to virtues that transcend human perspectives? — Tom Storm

Good question.

One can say that language does not refer at all. I understand the case for that. 'Jones shot Smith' is not a 'picture' of reality-in-itself in any simple way. Other metaphors have their virtues. I don't pretend to have some sharp metaphysical description of what it means for a fact to be a fact. I don't have some final theory of truth or the real. All such theories tend to have holes in them, bite their own tail, run around against other 'necessary' assumptions. Specification reveals tensions in the network of blabber. It may be impossible to weave a totalizing coherent discourse, but is that itself an incoherent thesis?

Yet I'm fairly confident that our fancy theories are 'parasites' on a practical reality and its hazy ordinary language where Jones shot Smith or he didn't (admitting edge cases.)

You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints. — apokrisis

Nice!

How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. — apokrisis

The knight and the dragon...an enduring structure.

Your reading of Witt here reminds me of Hacker’s, which is critiqued here: — Joshs

I have the first volume and never finished it, found it a bit tame and dry. I think my interpretation of Wittgenstein is pretty radical, or I know how to lean in that direction when called for. I really don't think our views are all that different. From my POV, you want to emphasize subjectivity-under-erasure, be more radical and open and free, push to the limit of intelligibly. I want to keep at least one foot on the mud. I find you pretty readable and respect your prose, but I detect in you less ambivalence than I feel in myself toward 'pomo' recklessness/indulgence. Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze.

I don't know exactly what you are getting at, and I'm not sure I agree with those interpretations. Perhaps you can elaborate or make more of a case.

I'm interested in describing reality (no small ambition!), and part of that may be clarifying what Wittgenstein or whoever 'really' meant, but sometimes I get the feeling that you are leaning on them as authorities, or at least trying to use them as crowbars against my own supposed reverence. That's within your purview, but that's water off a duck's back on this side. And (I say this playfully!) an 'epistemological anarchist' as far on the left as you are can't give me too much grief for it, since I can hardly get you to confess that we live in the same world.

The third point concerning this “author-function” is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a “realistic” dimension as we speak of an individual’s “profundity” or “creative” power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en/

I take what I can use from the famous windbags. My authority is a 'rationality' which is never done figuring out what it's supposed to be.

But for example - given your maths background - I loved this Kauffman paper. — apokrisis

Actually saw some of this in Spencer-Brown. I like the circle notation (negation and conjunction simultaneous, clever...).

This stood out too.

In mathematics the grin without the cat is often obtained through a process of distillation. The structure is traversed again and again and each time the inessential is thrown away. At last only a small and potent pattern remains. This is the grin of the cat. That grin is a pattern that fits into many contexts, a key to many doors. It is this multiplicity of uses for a single symbolic form that makes mathematics useful. It is the search for such distillation of pattern that is the essence of mathematical thought.

And Peirce was sharp on real numbers - an example of the secondary literature on that. — apokrisis

I like the battle over the continuum. Recently I looked into nonstandard analysis, and I might get around to smooth infinitesimal analysis (which is maybe more what Peirce had in mind.) I also like Bishop's constructivism (which makes the real numbers countable, since each is basically a specified program.) Brouwer's choice sequences are psychedelic. In any case, the tension between intuitions of the discrete and the continuous has fascinated me for quite a while.

then jumped the epistemic cut to apply this systems analysis to a pansemiotically self-organising Cosmos itself. — apokrisis

This is the part that's hard to grok. I can understand viewing an organism from the outside and contemplating the way it materially encodes a model that expects and shifts attention, etc. I can't understand where the 'camera' is positioned when the Cosmos looks at itself, since the inside/outside framing seems to no longer apply, unless it is some kind of Hegelian thing where the stuff on the other side of the concept is itself just more concept and the mental/physical distinction breaks down. What's the relation of this idea to indirect realism?

as if that has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria — Joshs

But consider:

...as if 'has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria' has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria...

Consider also that such 'criteria' are tacit and received like the law, so that 'convention' (a word I use) is somewhat misleading. The sign system has its 'meaning' in the world of revolvers and juries and bodies called 'Smith' and bodies called 'Jones.'

Far as Wittgenstein goes, I think On Certainty points at the same abyss/ground as Popper's swamp does. 'Doubt' occurs 'within' or against a background of non-doubt or automatism. I manifest trust in the intelligibility in the most radical questioning I can manage by asking the question, just as stepping out of bed manifests an expectation that the floor will catch my feet.

I'll check those links out soon and get back to you. Exercise time.

Yuck. Now you are truly testing my resolve not to be so routinely dismissive of PoMo. But this is dreadful stuff. Abstract word salad. — apokrisis

Well thanks for checking it out and giving an honest reaction.

Indeed. I tend towards anti-foundational skepticism to use a rather grand term for my mostly quotidian outlook. I often find what Joshs writes absolutely fascinating but I don't really have a way to make use of such notions in life. Perhaps it seems overly academic to me. — Tom Storm

Our apparently shared general outlook allows us to enjoy lots of wild perspectives while keeping the rent paid. A few academics somehow manage to pay their rent precisely by forgetting they have feet, which actually sounds like a nice gig if one can get it.

I learned quite a bit from Rorty. He kept one foot on the ground and knew how to reel in the 'pomo' style that may be more off-putting than its content. But this content still tends to neglect the way it endangers itself. Derrida's style is grandiose/frustrating, but there's often an honesty about his dependence on the system of concepts he criticizes. Some notion of reality and truth , however vague and elusive, has to remain 'legible' or one is just Tristan Tzara.( I love Tzara, and maybe there's some kind of profound ironic mysticism to be had there, and maybe this plays an important role in one's life. )

To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC to fulminate against 1, 2, 3 to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing— hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluffmadonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m'enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause.
...
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles (half-pints to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. — Tzara

But isnt my version part of this world? And every time I elaborate or revise my version I am contributing another piece to the world. — Joshs

Yes. I can't remember who it was, but some thinker said that each movement of every fly is part of history. What if Joyce had expanded Ulysses to 50000 pages? I think Andy Warhol messed with just letting his tape recorder scoop up all the babble of him and his friends.

We hunt for density. We like models with more bang per buck, perhaps as we like nutrient-dense food. 'Most' art and 'most' philosophy is bad, repetitive, devoid of invention. Too much 'realism' (no filtering, no selection ) is a bore.

I would have to conclude that there doesnt seem to be anything pragmatically useful to gain by the notion of a shared world. I prefer to ‘sharing with others’ the idea of subsuming another’s perspective from my own vantage because that is all that I can ever experience. — Joshs

Well, that's as you like, but I find this retreat back to the 'I' somewhat questionable. The symbolic ego is part of the OS, as I see it. It's just grammatical habit. The solipsist wouldn't turn around because everything was always in front of him anyway.

Come down from the theoretical clouds for a moment. Consider a murder trial. I think it's a crisp enough empirical matter to ask whether Jones shot Smith. In the real world, the shared world, not just in your dream or my dream. Or one can ask whether Jones is the biological father of Smith. I don't think what I gesture toward with the formal indication of 'shared world' can be finally and happily specified. It's not just 'atoms and void' or 'medium sized dry goods.'

Thanks!

I mostly agree, but the boundary is blurry.

Is the hard problem of consciousness nonsense? I tend to think that 'qualia' is a broken concept, a useless beetle in an unopenable box. Yet value arguably lives in that space as feeling. What is the goodness in a good cup of coffee? Maybe a silly question...

Perhaps you downplay the importance of showing/invention in philosophy. Concept creation seems as important as arguments in terms of such concepts. Then something like philosophy has to decide what belongs to art, to science, to mysticism, etc. It's within a particular type of conversation that we discuss the norms of conversation explicitly, or something like that.

If in some way the world as I interpret it suddenly no longer appears to me to change relative to the previous moment , then I would have to attempt to alter my axes of understanding. In the meantime I would have to suffer through the experience of confusion and disorientation in a world that has become less structured for me. — Joshs

:up:

Smooth functioning ceases and troubleshooting begins. (This is an oversimplification, but what aphorism isn't?)

It is a construct that must expose itself to potential invalidation by events at every moment that I make use of it. — Joshs

That smells like a falsifiable hypothesis, which is not a bad thing !

But the constructs which organize events into such patterns only retain their ‘primacy’ to the extent that new events dont invalidate them. — Joshs

Sure. I think Quine allowed even logical principles to be put in doubt by experience. Neurath's boat. The dance can mutate in lots of ways, but such mutation must be continuous or gradual for intelligibility to be maintained. This is one way to understand the necessity/existence of time in Hegel/Kojève. We can't jump to the in. We can't jump to the summarizing thesis. For all the words change their meaning within or upon that journey. The thesis only makes proper sense if one follows the evolution of those meanings within the dialogue. I can only critique current norms within the framework of those norms. Language is received like the law. If I want to rebel against a time-worn conceptuality, then that rebellion must take place within or as that same time-worn conceptuality. The system tries to climb out of itself. To be human is to try to be superhuman.

So the world tells me when my constructs are valid or invalid. But this ‘world’ that fits or doesn’t fit my expectations is world that comes already pre-interpreted by me It is my version of the world that can reward or disappoint me. — Joshs

I basically agree, but do you see the indirect realism peeking out this? You say 'my version' of the world, which is your perspective on the one world we share. Yes, these 'perspectives' are hardly only geometrical. We all see the world in terms of projected futures constructed from our unique histories, but the philosopher seeks to transcend such bias and incarnate something like an ideal perspective. As Hegel might say, we are bearers of historically evolved software. I study the great thinkers to download the 'best' version of this softwhere and hope to add to it. The movement is toward some ideal community, toward wisdom-power-grace, toward 'God' if you like, which is maybe a projection of an ideal mind, an end of inquiry, point at infinity.

As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. — Joshs

Is this the statement of an unchangeable fact?

As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. — Joshs

I agree with this constant experimentation (usually against a background of repetition.) This 'construal' is not so badly approximated by 'nailing down unchangeable facts.' The point of finding enduring structure is to exploit it in the future.

We could then say this is teleological, that over time our revised constructions of the world produce anticipations that allow us to anticipate events as more and more intricately, multidimensionally and assimlatively consistent with our precious knowledge. — Joshs

A sophisticated view. The 'real world' lingers here perhaps as the possibility of a surprise. We might ask why we must anticipate, and look for the source of our care. We are mammals that evolved from simpler less-anticipative forms of life.

Note her that this is not a mere mirroring of intransigent external
world but a continually refashioning of the world in more an more self-consistent ways. — Joshs

I can related, but I note that a normed critical discourse that strives toward consensus seems to be implied.

So the only assumption being made here about some a priori nature of reality is the at it is endlessly amenable to reconstruction in more and more intimate ways. — Joshs

Reasonable. This downplays the everyday difference between 'facts' and 'interpretations.' I mean to say that the 'top layer' (philosophical blah blah ) is more amenable than daily practical talk (talk of hands and eyes and ears and trucks and puppies.)

Only coherent intelligible objects could ever exist in the Platonic realm. Incoherencies are banned by the Ruler of the realm. — Metaphysician Undercover

Cantor's system seems to work just fine. Gödel would allow it in, I think, and actually believe there was such a place.

The only true fix is to replace the entire system from bottom up, with principles derived from a better understanding of space and time. And that's how this discussion is related to mysticism. We need to turn to mysticism to find that better understanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

Something similar to that has been tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._E._J._Brouwer

Brouwer’s little book Life, Art and Mysticism of 1905, while not developing his foundations of mathematics as such, is a key to those foundations as developed in his dissertation on which he was working at the same time and which was finished two years later. Among a variety of other things, such as his views on society and women in particular, the book contains his basic ideas on mind, language, ontology and epistemology.

These ideas are applied to mathematics in his dissertation On the Foundations of Mathematics, defended in 1907; it is the general philosophy and not the paradoxes that initiates the development of intuitionism (once this had begun, solutions to the paradoxes emerged). As did Kant, Brouwer founds mathematics on a pure intuition of time (but Brouwer rejects pure intuition of space).

Brouwer holds that mathematics is an essentially languageless activity, and that language can only give descriptions of mathematical activity after the fact. This leads him to deny axiomatic approaches any foundational role in mathematics. Also, he construes logic as the study of patterns in linguistic renditions of mathematical activity, and therefore logic is dependent on mathematics (as the study of patterns) and not vice versa.

I think anyone can make up their own version of mathematics, but it'd be hard to get anyone to care. Even intuitionism (Brouwer's & Heyting's) and constructivism (like Bishop's) are mostly ignored in universities.

Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)? — Joshs

Not in any simple way, no.

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences. — Joshs

I understand your concerns, and note that I'm not pontificating on a political thread about the threat of Cultural Marxism or Jesus Freaks or ...

Probably best to understand me as a skeptical moderate...or a practical skeptic. I believe there's some kind of 'real world' out there in some never quite finally specifiable way. What is a body really and finally? Can't say. I confess more readily than others perhaps that I don't control my own meanings, don't 'grasp' them in some luminous fullness, never know exactly what I mean. I relate to Socrates understood as someone trying to make darkness visible. I have no settled system but only various principles that seem to get something right or at least less obviously wrong, without knowing exactly what it means to be right or wrong. (And without abandoning the pursuit for further clarification.)

You are 'rationally' concerned about institutionalized scientism and I am 'rationally' concerned about a solipsistic free-for-all that would forget the body in and through talk about that body. For me 'body' points to the world of biology and physics and the difference between the idea of bread and bread that keeps the brain functioning and makes the idea of bread possible.

But if , as I am arguing , there are only ever individual interpretations of the norm or standard, then there as many Charlestons as there dancers of it. — Joshs

In a way, yes, but the point of a single name is to indicate an abstraction.

I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm. — Joshs

You are trying to make a point using logic, yes? That feels like taking 'for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.'

You have a dangerous metaphor for culture of you assume that the mutation of the dance need not be understood from the point of view of each dancer. — Joshs

I think you are projecting or worrying too much about political ramifications. To put it playfully, I know that we are all irreducible non-fungible snowflakes. But rational inquiry (philosophy, science) seeks for some kind of truth about our shared situation. To deny this is to demonstrate it, for what can such a denial mean if it does not pretend toward the truth of our shared situation. Metaphysical attempts to specify this vague truthy stuff and this vague shared situation end up containing contradictions and possibly ineradicable ambiguities. One of my pet theories (inspired by Peirce and others) is that our signs have only as much 'precision' or 'resolution' as we have needed them to have for practical purposes. I think of how rich the 'concept' of 'the world' is in ordinary language. Or take 'truth' or 'real'. We are never done trying to figure out what we mean by these marks. What 'meaning' means is itself elusive.