Comments

  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways. — Joshs

    Ideally and oversimplifying perhaps, yes, but the drift and the targets are anything but random. I don't need an explicit valorization of unhip Truth to project myself as an enviably shrewd man, as one who deserves assimilation. 'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

    If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons.
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress. — Joshs

    Yes, this is how I understand Hegel (or one interpretation that I find plausible/fascinating.) We organize our own history triumphantly, as a progress, an ascent.

    With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’. — Joshs

    I understand this, but I'm not sure that philosophers can really mean this, or at least it's hard to maintain such claims with the proper irony. 'No one is right or wrong, logic is a fiction, and I'll now prove this to you.' The quote below articulates some of my concerns.


    Bruno Latour is undoubtedly among the foremost proponents of this irreduc- tionist creed. His Irreductions pithily distils familiar Nietzschean homilies, minus the anxious bombast of Nietzsche’s intemperate Sturm und Drang. With his suave and unctuous prose, Latour presents the urbane face of post-modern irrationalism. How does he proceed? First, he reduces reason to discrimination: ‘‘Reason’ is applied to the work of allocating agreement and disagreement between words. It is a matter of taste and feeling, know-how and connoisseurship, class and status. We insult, frown, pout, clench our fists, enthuse, spit, sigh and dream. Who reasons?’ (2.1.8.4) Second, he reduces science to force: ‘Belief in the existence of science is the effect of exaggeration, injustice, asymmetry, ignorance, credulity, and denial. If ‘science’ is distinct from the rest, then it is the end result of a long line of coups de force’. (4.2.6.) Third, he reduces scientific knowledge (‘knowing-that’) to practical know-how: ‘There is no such thing as knowledge—what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary, crafts hold the key to all knowledge. They make it possible to ‘return’ science to the networks from which it came’. (4.3.2.) Last but not least, he reduces truth to power: ‘The word ‘true’ is a supplement added to certain trials of strength to dazzle those who might still question them’. (4.5.8.)

    It is instructive to note how many reductions must be carried out in order for irreductionism to get off the ground: reason, science, knowledge, truth—all must be eliminated. Of course, Latour has no qualms about reducing reason to arbitration, science to custom, knowledge to manipulation, or truth to force: the veritable object of his irreductionist afflatus is not reduction per se, in which he wantonly indulges, but explanation, and the cognitive privilege accorded to scientific explanation in particular. Once relieved of the constraints of cognitive rationality and the obligation to truth, metaphysics can forego the need for explanation and supplant the latter with a series of allusive metaphors whose cognitive import becomes a function of semantic resonance: ‘actor’, ‘ally’, ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strength’, ‘resistance’, ‘network’: these are the master-metaphors of Latour’s irreductionist metaphysics, the ultimate ‘actants’ encapsulating the operations of every other actor.
    ...
    The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. (2.4.5). In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between ‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to toothfairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, wheth- er those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblem- atically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor.

    This is reductionism with a vengeance; but because it occludes rather than illuminates differences in the ways in which different parts of the world interact, its very lack of explanatory purchase can be brandished as a symptom of its irreductive prowess by those who are not interested in understanding the difference between wishing and engineering. Latour writes to reassure those who do not really want to know. If the concern with representation which lies at the heart of the unfolding epistemological problematic from Descartes to Sellars was inspired by the desire not just to understand but to assist science in its effort to explain the world, then the recent wave of attempts to liquidate epistemology by dissolving representation can be seen as symptomatic of that cognophobia which, from Nietzsche through Heidegger and up to Latour, has fuelled a concerted effort on the part of some philosophers to contain if not neutralize the disquieting implications of scientific understanding.

    Rather, Latour’s texts consciously rehearse the metaphorical operations they describe: they are ‘networks’ trafficking in ‘word-things’ of varying ‘power’, nexuses of ‘translation’ between ‘actants’ of differing ‘force’, etc. In this regard, they are exercises in the practical know-how which Latour exalts, as opposed to demonstrative propositional structures governed by cognitive norms of epistemic veracity and logical validity. But this is just to say that the ultimate import of Latour’s work is prescriptive rather than descriptive—indeed, given that is- sues of epistemic veracity and validity are irrelevant to Latour, there is nothing to prevent the cynic from concluding that Latour’s politics (neo-liberal) and his religion (Ro- man Catholic) provide the most telling indices of those forces ultimately motivating his antipathy towards rationality, critique, and revolution.

    In other words, Latour’s texts are designed to do things: they have been engineered in order to produce an effect rather than establish a demonstration. Far from trying to prove anything, Latour is explicitly engaged in persuading the susceptible into embracing his irreductionist worldview through a particularly adroit deployment of rhetoric. This is the traditional modus operandi of the sophist. But only the most brazen of sophists denies the rhetorical character of his own assertions: ‘Rhetoric cannot account for the force of a sequence of sentences because if it is called ‘rhetoric’ then it is weak and has already lost’. (2.4.1) This resort to an already metaphorized concept of ‘force’ to mark the extra-rhetorical and thereby allegedly ‘real’ force of Latour’s own ‘sequence of sentences’ marks the nec plus ultra of sophistry.     — Brassier

    I once 'defended'/asserted/advertised a view close to Letour's, so I 'get' it. I just think it's somewhat self-defeating, while containing various insights.
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    A curious metaphor, as there is no eye that sees anything, really. Our eyes don't see. We do. And we see ourselves with some frequency. So, just what is intended by this "metaphor"? What does it describe? — Ciceronianus

    I don't think the 'pure witness' makes sense upon close examination. But the eye seems to refer to 'awareness itself' or some kind of pure consciousness that makes experience possible, a synonym for being. 'It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical.' It's what some folks seem to be trying to gesture at with 'the hard problem of consciousness.' Hard to know for sure, but it seems like what Heidegger is reaching for with being. It's noticing that 'there is a here here.' Or that 'the world worlds.' Or it's the notion of 'the given.' For some it's that which is most elusive and profound. For others, often more practically oriented, it's hysterical confusion. I'm somewhere in the middle. 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is not an empirical question. It might just be a lyrical expression of wonder, like a wolf's howling at the moon...
  • The 'New Atheism' : How May it Be Evaluated Philosophically?
    As far as I understand, he was not proposing his ideas to imply atheism itself. — Jack Cummins
    :up:

    Darwin was quite a gentle person, very unlike a brash atheist today. I think the threat of Darwin is that he offered a detailed and evidence-supported explanation of how a 'watch' could be created without a 'watchmaker.' The complexity of organisms (ourselves especially) is such that it's intuitively/initially hard to fathom the emergence of speaking/conscious intelligence from its other.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    it seems the notion of private languages applies also to groups/societies/tribes if you will. — Agent Smith

    Yeah, this is cultural relativism. You can think of each tribe as having a generic personality and the world as a room full of these 'people' who never exactly understand one another. Interpretation/translation is an infinite process.

    Herder’s theories of interpretation and translation both rest on a certain epoch-making insight of his: Whereas such eminent Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire had normally still held that, as Hume put it, “mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange” (1748: section VIII, part I, 65), Herder discovered, or at least saw more clearly than anyone before him, that this was false, that peoples from different historical periods and cultures vary tremendously in their concepts, beliefs, values, (perceptual and affective) sensations, and so forth.
    ...
    Given this principle, and the gulf that consequently often initially divides an interpreter’s own thought from that of the person whom he wants to interpret, interpretation is often an extremely difficult task, requiring extraordinary efforts on the part of the interpreter.
    ...
    In particular, the interpreter often faces, and needs to resist, a temptation falsely to assimilate the thought that he is interpreting to someone else’s, especially his own.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    So, if we're to avoid the pitfall of talking past each other, we must come to an agreement as to what the words we use mean, — Agent Smith

    To do so would require that we use words, yes? Hence the hopelessness of starting from scratch. And what works in math won't work in philosophy. 'Language is received like the law,' and meaning evolves historically.

    As for me, I'm trying my level best to get an idea of what you're trying to say here. Do you mean, à la Wittgenstein, that language is inadequate for philosophy? If yes, why make all this effort to convey your thoughts? If no, why bring up Wittgenstein at all? — Agent Smith

    One way to grok Wittgenstein is as language trying to climb out of its own stupidity or automatism, as a snake trying to shed its own skin. In the same way a developing mind is trying to slide out of its own confusion and prejudice, but it can't help but relying on the little it knows as it finds its way about. 'Thought' is trying to figure out its own laws, its own frailties, struggling toward clarity and mastery, illuminating its own darkness Socratically.

    Why try ? Lots of motives. Among others, I get a deep pleasure from doing philosophy, almost like playing on a conceptual saxophone (I often have Coltrane playing beside me as I write.) Whether I'm good, bad, or average....I feel as if I was born to do philosophy, like this infinite quest is the point...at least for my personality type. On the road again, toward a slightly more comprehensive and stylish understanding of reality, toward that point at infinity, a limit never attained.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. — Joshs

    I agree.

    In phenomenology, the ‘horizon’ is, in general terms, that larger context of meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a ‘fusion of horizons’, then so it always involves the formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation—moreover, inasmuch as our own history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process of understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#LinUnd
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Isn’t a social ‘norm’, ‘convention’, ‘shared practice’ merely an abstraction derived from what is in fact always ways of sense-making unique to individuals who particulate in those ‘shared’ spaces? — Joshs

    I don't know if it makes a big difference to say one is prior to the other, but the symbolic/linguistic ego as opposed to the separate body looks like part of the software to me. If you want to talk about culture as 'really' just being the performance of bodies, I guess you can. If a room is dancing the Charleston, though, you might want to focus on the form of the dance, 'imperfectly' realized by each dancer. If you allow the dance to slowly mutate, then you have a metaphor for culture.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    How does a body know what is emitted ‘appropriately’? Via social reinforcement , shaping, conditioning? — Joshs

    Yes.

    How is it that each of us emit what is socially ‘appropriate’ in unique ways , with unique senses that doesn’t simply correspond to the ‘ norm’ but contributes its own variation on the ‘norm’? — Joshs

    The norm is blurry and self-updating. Some variations become more common, others fade out. One metaphor here is that culture (the one) is a distributed operating system. No one has/is the official version. Creativity is constant. But creativity would be unintelligible without some kind of average background. From my POV, we never know exactly what we mean. We are forced to play jazz, thrown into a novelty only partially tamed by social habit, contributing to that novelty ourself despite our best efforts to conform. One does not have to try to be unique. One even struggles against this uniqueness, perhaps just in this way becoming most valuably unique.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Heidegger, too. Heidegger describes the proposition ‘S is P’ as ‘seeing something as something’. He calls this the ‘as’ structure and it is the fundamental basis of perception, cognition , affectivity and theoretical knowledge. — Joshs

    Yes and others have described something similar in terms of analogical/metaphorical, embodied cognition. I think they're right.

    “...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc.
    The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.”     — Joshs

    I agree with Dreyfus that we learn how to see/use a fork or a chair as 'one' does. The background is part of the 'who of everyday Dasein.' This quote also hints toward the Wittgenstein idea of the domination of unconscious/automatic pictures that tacitly dominate and otherwise explicit interpretation.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Cognition is fundamentally anticipative. — Joshs

    This squares with what I've learned. The future haunts the present in terms of the past, or something like that.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    That's what happens to all philosophers in the end. They tend to exit one cage only to walk into another. My personal point of view; could be way off the mark. The question is am I? — Agent Smith

    I don't think anyone ever gets out of all the cages they are in. But this cage metaphor might suggest that cages are always bad. It's more like a mass of automatic habit that simultaneously helps us survive and opposes innovation. We inherit dead metaphors because they worked pretty well for previous generations. Perhaps a philosopher is someone who's invested in understanding and escaping from a certain kind of linguistic cage (and they'd only understand their 'game' this way as one of its later moves).

    A relevant quote:

    /////////////////////////////////////////////////
    ...Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
    ...
    In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out of which it arises.

    The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process.As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.
    ...
    Gadamer thus advances a view of understanding that rejects the idea of understanding as achieved through gaining access to some inner realm of subjective meaning. Moreover, since understanding is an ongoing process, rather than something that is ever completed, so he also rejects the idea that there is any final determinacy to understanding.
    ...
    Conversation always takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a common language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is, according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is also translative.
    ...
    We cannot go back ‘behind’ understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge, whether in the ‘human sciences’ or elsewhere, but to all understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence, hermeneutics.
    ////////////////////////////////
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Indeed, differences in definition is a cause of many quarrels, but then to oversimplify it as being only a definitional issue is not, in my humble opinion, a very sensible thing to do. — Agent Smith

    I don't mean definitions, which humorously supports my point. You 'automatically' (it seems) read meaning in terms of definition, but definitions are relatively artificial. No one could use a dictionary if they weren't already embedded in the living language.

    I have my concepts, my own logic, and I can understand them within the constraints and freedom therein present. You can't tell me I'm confused and nor can I say the same thing about you, oui? — Agent Smith

    On a personal level, of course I respect your freedom. Philosophically speaking, I think the point is to challenge apparent confusion/misunderstanding and try to resolve it. A thoroughgoing relativism/subjectivism (which is where that thinking seems to lead) ends up being sad and boring. Go back to simple things, like the boy who cried wolf. Or the danger in mistaking correlation for causation. Then's there's our deeper goals. What if people want to be understood? To be respected as trustworthy interpreters of a shared situation? Or just to be amusing by transcending cliché? Making a good joke. Point being that we do care about being perceived as confused, credulous, biased, or predictable, etc. We are networked beings. We depend on one another's intellectual virtues (and of course friendly intentions.)
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    make sure you're consistent in usage of words and it's smooth sailing. — Agent Smith

    Well this might not be so easy....

    In other words, Wittgenstein, whose philosophy is semantics-oriented, is taken out of the equation as it were. :grin: — Agent Smith

    IMO, He's taken out of the equation only when a person isn't interested in the problem of meaning, doesn't 'feel' it maybe. I think it's people who long for clarity that'll notice how hard it is not to spit fog and try to figure out why. The tantalizing fantasy is the ghost in machine who actually knows what he's talking about: sure, he might have trouble 'finding the right words' for it when talking to others, but he at least knows what he's trying to say 'directly.' He can see his beetle, which is the signified face of a sign understood as only requiring a signifying 'vessel' as a kind of jetpack to shoot across the air into the cogito-soul-ghost of the other, who'll hopefully dial up the same pure content. This is the nomenclature fantasy which assumes similar mental content, as if all share in the mind of a kind of language god, or come equipped with same thought crystals that just need labels (soundmark conventions) attached. This 'pure content' is the unquestioned metaphor that dominates lots of philosophical and 'sub-philosophical' talk about meaning and consciousness. But for practical purposes, it doesn't really matter. A person can have a primitive theory of meaning and still be very good at talking with people. There's a big difference between a mostly automatic skill and dialectically developed account of that skill.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    1. If God exists then God intervenes (in human affairs)
    2. God exists
    Ergo,
    3. God intervenes     — Agent Smith

    Philosophers (and regular folks) still don't agree what 'God' means, what 'exist' means, what 'intervene' means (at least in this context), and of course what 'mean' 'means.' Meaning is social and therefore ambiguous. We mostly ignore this, because we mostly stick to practical talk. Start talking religion and politics and things get ugly. Somehow the other fellow just doesn't 'see' it (the folly of his ways, his bad logic, etc.)
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Do you mean to recommend that we abandon this figurative language? — Agent Smith

    No. That's like a fish giving up water. We think metaphorically, maybe only metaphorically. The point is to not be trapped unwittingly in a metaphor.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    ↪apokrisis

    Thought you might like to glance at Derrida on Peirce in Of Grammatology.

    //////////////
    In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his termi­ nology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol :

    Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, par­ ticularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.

    Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mis­take here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognized that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of "the arbitrariness of the sign") is rooted in the nonsymbolic, in an anterior and related order of significa­tion: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs." But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: "So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo."

    But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification --understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth --- stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs.
    ...
    Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce con­siders the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains therefore the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is funda­mental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself ( truth ). On this point Peirce is un­doubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to "reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs." Ac­cording to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifesta­tion itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign." There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the repre­senter so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper, that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen.


    Also, in case you've never sampled it, Kojeve's Hegel.

    The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate “species,” capable of being revealed by a general notion"; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existence” is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into “truth” or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a “higher” and “higher” truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.
    ...
    The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    ↪Agent Smith


    Some quotes on the metaphor issue:
    ///////////////////////////////////////////////////

    A metaphysical sentence is always symbolical and mythical. The sentence “The soul owns God to the extent, in which it takes share of the Absolute.” does not contain any signs, only symbols whose colourfulness and evocative power were erased. With some phantasy it can be said instead: “The breath is seated on the shining one” (God) “in the bushel” (to the extent) “of the part it takes” (in which it takes share) “in what is already loosed (the Absolute),” and elaborate it metaphorically even more: “He whose breath is a sign of life, man, that is, will find a place in the divine fire, source and home of life, and this place will be meted out to him according to the virtue that has been given him of sending abroad this warm breath, this little invisible soul, across the free expanse.” Even at this point we would not arrive at the original figures of speech, though our fantasy would read as an old Vedic hymn. From this, says France, follows that metaphysicians rub the colours from the old myths and fables, and are their collectors. They cultivate white (colourless) [clear] mythology.
    ...
    First and foremost, there are no originary concepts. All of them are tropes, starting with the word archē – origin and principle, that is, governing rule, control. The value of the “basis”, “base”, “ground” corresponds to our wish to stand on a firm ground.
    ...
    The words for comprehending and conceiving (fassen, begreifen), says Hegel, have a totally sensuous contents that is substituted by spiritual meaning. The sensuous words are becoming spiritual in the process of their use.

    ///////////////////////////////////////////////////

    Lakoff stresses how bodily out metaphors are. Mammals.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    ↪Agent Smith

    Like I said, I'm not terribly excited by the language games game. I could squeeze some stuff out, but I'm more interested in the way the past haunts a future that haunts the present.
  • Belief
    Yeah, that's how it's generally done, but nonetheless, I'm not sure one could ever devise statements of such clarity and circumstances wherein people felt no narrative pressure to ascribe to any given one, to elimiante the problem. That's not to say it's not a very useful approach. One just needs to be aware of the limitations. — Isaac

    Understood, which brings us back to temptation of behaviorism. Or maybe to deep learning models that aren't about understanding but simply manipulation (to mention another black box.)
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Ergo, I feel justified to say, Wittgenstein is irrelevant to philosophy as it's wholly a logical exercise. — Agent Smith

    Well I entirely disagree, but it's as you like.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Once rationality or to be precise, logic, enters the picture, semantics is no longer part of the game. Logic has its own syntax and that's all that matters. Validity, as you'll recall, is all about form, the content is of zero significance. When I think logically, it's all syntax and no semantics. — Agent Smith

    So you get a machine for cranking out tautologies, or for checking formal proofs. This is on the level of programming a computer to check for checkmate on a chess board. Clear, yes, but at the cost of saying nothing at all. The life of the signs that matter is out there in the world. I like Chess, but even that is fun because there's the drama of another tricky human on the other side, or because of time pressure, or the aesthetic aspect.

    I spent years writing mathematical proofs (it was my job), and it probably helped me as much as anything else to experience just how sloppy and ambiguous ordinary language is.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    We think in pictures? Perhaps, but still in the dark about how. — Agent Smith

    I think you accidentally made a funny, unless you meant to do that....
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Minus the metaphors would you even grasp the basics (of any subject)? — Agent Smith

    I'd say....no. The basics are metaphors, frameworks, 'big pictures.'

    It's hard to say how much of culture is mistaken for nature: — Agent Smith

    A really easy example (if you are an atheist) is people sincerely burning other people to save their souls at the cost of their bodies. Or people living in terror of hellfire, etc. From the 'outside,' this is superstition (culture). From the inside, God and hell are very important parts of the world, if admittedly hidden away somehow (nature, though not the nature of godless 'scientism.')
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    As for metaphors, I have nothing against their use - it makes for interesting reading, adds zest to what otherwise would be a dull and boring interaction among ourselves to say nothing of how it makes certain subjects/topics more relatable, oui? — Agent Smith

    I think you underestimate their force and prevalence. Lakoff, Hofstadter, Wittgenstein. Folks have been trying to tell us that we think in pictures, often without realizing it. See what I mean? (With your inner eye.) Do you grasp what I'm saying? (With your intellectual hand?).

    How can abstract thoughts get themselves established in the first place?
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    It’s been a long while since I read any Derrida. And for me, I didn’t feel I was learning anything new at the time. The points were already familiar from social constructionism and Vygotskian psychology. — apokrisis

    I'm sure your fine without him. But his emphasis on difference and early concern with semiology and 'grammatology' seemed relevant. He definitely blurs/troubles the mental/physical distinction (and actually every distinction, aiming as he does at their condition of possibility.)
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    you didn't answer my question which is what's the difference between contexts and language games? — Agent Smith

    Did you check this?

    The term ‘language-game’ is used to refer to:

    Fictional examples of language use that are simpler than our own everyday language. (e.g. PI 2)
    Simple uses of language with which children are first taught language (training in language).
    Specific regions of our language with their own grammars and relations to other language-games.
    All of a natural language seen as comprising a family of language-games.

    I think of 'toy' languages, like the one where the carpenter can only say 'hammer' and 'nail' to his helper, and the helper hands what is requested.

    Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. In the example above, there is a simple context (two dudes working together to build something.) But context is a broader concept, it seems to me.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    That is already contained in Peircean semiotics. — apokrisis

    I have a collection of his essays. I've glanced at his semiotics. If there's a single best book on this in particular, let me know. Peirce seems to be dispersed.

    When it was structuralist, it was dyadic Saussurean semiosis it went for and not Peircean triadic semiosis. — apokrisis

    I'll look into the difference, but if you feel like trying to summarize, I'll be glad to read it. Dyadic plays into the rest of Western philosophy, which is not necessarily good but of course familiar.

    But then a closer examination of Saussure says he was actually so much a Saussurean either. He suffered the usual over simplification. — apokrisis

    I'm a fan of the guy. He's quite radical. I know that I initially gave Derrida too much credit that belonged to Saussure. Still, it matters that Derrida emphasizes the vague, default prejudice of the proximity of crystalline and luminous signified and some kind of subject. Phonocentrism also seemed like a legitimate target along these lines. Saussure did prioritize speech as the 'real' aspect of language. Derrida emphasized the independence of the medium, that it was all 'like writing' in the 'bad' way, not backed up by a consciousness in complete possession of its meaning, open always to a recontextualization that could shift the entire system of signs (some more than others, of course.) Wittgenstein's beetle analogy makes a similar point in a different tone and style. (I through in my interpretation for context that might help you help me understand Peirce better.)
  • Belief
    Essentially, belief statements as either speech acts or acts of agreement are only tangentially connected to beliefs as 'tendencies to act as if X'.

    More often, for example, they act like badges signifying membership of social groups - like a password one must utter to enter a building - and such belief statements are exchanged to ascertain groupings in uncertain environments. Take, for example, any divisive topic and look at the clichés exchanged. The semantic content of the statements doesn't matter and is rarely even considered. What matters are keywords which signify the group, the narrative, to which one adheres.     — Isaac

    That seems like an accurate description. Tribes and flags and badges. We're clever in some ways, but apparently quite simple in others.

    Statements are vague and it's not always clear what the speaker means by them, so any result contrasting their behaviour with the researcher's interpretation of the statement, is always going to be problematic if used to claim a relation between their behaviour and their interpretation of the statement. — Isaac

    Spitballing, I'd think you'd almost need a survey with a finite number of options for choosing between or rating statements simple enough to neutralize the interpretation problem. But maybe that would be too constraining.

    Finally, there's Rescher's problem that people do not always understand the logic of the statements they assert such that a person can assert the premise of a valid argument but assert the opposite of its conclusion. We cannot understand both assertions in terms of a belief - a tendency to act as if X - because one cannot act as if two contradictory states of affairs are both the case. — Isaac

    Good point ! I like Rescher's style, very clear and focused (if memory does not betray.)
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. — Joshs

    Why make it fundamental?

    Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing. — Joshs

    Sexy! To me this is as much poetry as philosophy...and maybe it gets a certain state of being right.

    Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
    moment t a new way of being.     — Joshs

    Alluring. Many might agree that no moment (however smeared you prefer to conceptualize it) is like any other, that life never repeats itself exactly.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Mathematics is overrated then, oui? I don't know how to respond to that, math being my hobby and all. — Agent Smith

    I love math. It's my job. I recommend reading Cantor's work directly, if you are up to the challenge. It's not very formal. I think he trusted that he was working with universal intuitions. His ideas on the order types of sets inspired me to develop a new construction of the real numbers. This just means coming up with a system that satisfies certain criteria. I think of math as (among other things) a sort of 'clay' with which to make 'sculptures.' I've made cryptosystems, new types of neural networks...fun stuff.

    I fail to see why all this fuss about his so-called language games. If you disagree you need to tell us how contexts differ from language games. Are you up to the task? — Agent Smith

    I don't find the 'language games' spiel all that exciting myself. I do think Wittgenstein is great though. I blend him with Heidegger and Derrida and others. Instead of games, I'd stress how we tend to be imprisoned by metaphors/pictures that constrain our thinking 'invisibly.' These 'pictures' are knee-jerk automatic framings of a situation inherited from the past. Think of culture mistaken for nature, the way we happen to do things mistaken for the way things must be done. If such pictures were 'conscious' or on the 'surface,' it'd be trivial to critique them. The pictures/metaphors/framings I'm talking about dominate/instruct/mislead the critique/discussion of more obvious 'pictures.' Note that I'm emphasizing the metaphoricity of thinking in all of this, flies in bottles, shadow-watchers in caves, Neo in The Matrix,... Some have claimed that our technical/abstract terms are just dead metaphors, their blood having been drained till they are imageless.
  • What is mysticism?
    Remember math is a constructed world and in being that it has an advantage viz. precise definitions which, for me, makes no intuitive sense at all. That's just how the game is played I guess. — Agent Smith

    The weird thing is that we value the dead game because it does help us in the real world. On the basic level, a person can tell the government that they have 3 kids on their tax return.
  • What is mysticism?
    There are clear-cut definitions in mathematics which don't allow either ambiguity or vagueness. — Agent Smith

    I know, and that lack of ambiguity pretty much continues as one climbs the mathematical ladder. The issue is not in the system of symbols but in the relationship of that system to the rest of the world.
    Think of one version (the formal version) of as a dead mark that's moved around according to rules with no other meaning but its relationship to those rules. Then think of what, if anything, this 'infinity' means to you beyond being a dead mark in a dead game. Is there 'infinity' in the real world? That is the zone of ambiguity. What exactly is this real world? Does 'infinity' fit in it somehow?
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    he's critiquing, what he probably believes is, the impossible standards of philosophy (impossible in the sense too rigid, lacking flexibility, exacting, stringent, you get the idea). — Agent Smith

    Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. He offers no system. He pops lots of balloons. He demonstrates an approach to philosophy via examples. The battle is against knee-jerk obedience to something like unnoticed metaphors in ordinary language. But that's one attempt among others to find a theory or main idea in the fog....
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Explain yourself. — Agent Smith

    Most language is too meaningful, too suggestive, explosively untamed. It needs context, context, context. Philosophy still doesn't know what it means by 'meaning.' But (practical) math requires much less context and yet delivers far more clarity. Math is 'hard' because...most people find it too boring for the necessary concentration ? Or they drag in too much meaning and can't just see it as a calculus? I think it's harder to understand Hegel or Derrida or Wittgenstein than to learn calculus. I don't claim to have mastered any of those thinkers. The dialogue is endless.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    Darwin's theory (to my knowledge) has never attempted to explain life on earth. — Tom Storm
    :up:
  • The Concept of Religion
    The fact that these traditions can go wrong and become disastrously perverted is a consequence of human nature. Humans can wreck just about anything. — Wayfarer

    Indeed. In that post, I was trying to think from a neutral place and acknowledge the aggressive clash of demystifications. We have metaphors of vision and light and a metaphors of curtains and veils. Zoom out to this level, and we're like a bunch of pugnacious one-eyed men calling each other blind.

    I really liked his book The Heretical Imperative. — Wayfarer

    Different Berger actually. The 'glamour' critic is John Berger. I did value Peter Berger's The Social Construction of Reality.
  • What is mysticism?
    I lost the scent there buddy. — Agent Smith

    If I tell you that a tower of infinities actually exists in something like a Platonic realm, what does that mean for you and me? If you tell me that you do believe in but not , what am I to make of that? Does it mean you therefore aren't interested in it? But perhaps a skeptic studies the system to debunk it. On the level of math, it's dry logic, something like a symbol game. This tower exists within that 'fiction,' just as the bishop exists in the rules of Chess. It's not clear what is being denied or asserted when we are talking about the outside of this game. Does the denier mean to indicate that his intuition has peeked into Platonic heaven and only found infinity classic? Or is it a matter of taste? Utility? Maybe a mix of things. In any case, ambiguity.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    I'd say mathematizing issues (transforming it into a mathematical one) goes a long way towards resolving them. — Agent Smith

    Yes. Hence the success and prestige of science/engineering. Math is brilliantly stupid.

    I'm not sure how all that relates to Wittgenstein-Popper in re science-philosophy. — Agent Smith

    In On Certainty you can find passages suggesting something like Popper's swamp. If I want to check whether a meter reads 35 kilograms, I have to trust my eyes, trust my ability to read numbers, etc. There's a deep layer of unnoticed mostly automatic skill that we mostly don't bother to question. Note that we don't have to agree whether the world is 'really' mind or matter or neither or both or whatever...to launch satellites and facetime a nephew in Spain. The 'foundation' works because we stick to relatively uncontroversial questions like 'did the rock weigh 20 kg?' without getting bogged down in semantics. As practical creatures, we only have so much time for the pleasures and torments of metaphysics.

    One point that trips people up is W's claim that belief makes doubt possible. The first quote is how I usually understand this. I trust the meaning of my language as I express my doubt. I trust that I will be heard.

    But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

    Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

    Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?

    Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?

    Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?

    All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

    At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    This is Pattee's epistemic cut. Life and mind arise because they can make physical marks - like a DNA codon or a new synaptic junction - which look perfectly meaningless to the physical world that they then sneakily turn out to regulate.

    It costs the body as much to code for a nonsense protein as it does for some crucial enzyme. The world - as a realm of rate dependent dynamics - can't see anything different about the two molecules in terms of any material or structural physics. Both are equally lacking in meaning - and even lacking in terms of being counterfactually meaningless as well. The two molecules just don't fit any kind of signal~noise dichotomy of the kind that semiotics, as a science of meaning, would seek to apply.     — apokrisis

    This I do understand, and it was your posts on this site that brought this to my attention.

    idea
    Life and mind earn their way in the cracks of existence by breaking down accidental barriers to maximum entropy - like the way industrialised humans are taking half a billion years worth of buried carbon, slowly concentrated into rich lodes of coal and petroleum, and burning the bulk of it in a 200 year party. — apokrisis

    This makes sense too. I think I grok the basics of dissipated structure.


    This is the epistemic cut issue. As I previously said, the central trick of semiosis is that a sign is really - as Pattee makes clear - a switch. And it is then easy to see the connection as well as the cut. A mechanical switch is both a logical thing and a physical thing. It has a foot on both sides of the divide.

    So that fact puts a halt to the homuncular regress. The two worlds - of entropy and information - are bridged semiotically at the scale of your smallest possible physical switches.     — apokrisis

    OK, 'smallest possible' is a new thing I hadn't considered before.

    Generally post-modernism is the backlash against its own structuralist past. It wants to kill the part of itself that was valuable. — apokrisis

    I've focused on Derrida as he follows the logic of Saussure. The signifier/signified is an echo/version of the physical/mental distinction. Derrida (as you may know) destabilizes this dichotomy. Signifiers refer to still other signifiers (not a signified made of pure thought-stuff that shines for/as the ghost in the machine.) I got into Saussure because of Derrida, and I was impressed by how much was already there in Saussure (the systematically or interdependence of signs for their meaning and the idea that language/'thoughtsound' is 'form not substance'.) The points you made in the definition thread were quite Derridean, or at least according to my interest/understanding of D. The life of language depends on a continuous recontextualization of signs that imposes the toll of an ineradicable ambiguity. To be sure, differences that make no (practical) difference can be ignored.
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