So o hope you can see that this complex and intricate subjective and intersubjective system of reciprocal coordinations is anything but a ‘ divine synchronization’.
It is instead the actual way that we jointly build up a shared world. — Joshs

Note, my friend, that you still don't deal with the problem of the substrate. I think you grant a plurality of subjects? Is there a world that precedes or contains them in any sense? If not, how do we communicate without the synchronization? (I dream that I wave at you and you dream that I wave at you at the same time, etc.)

The real object is in fact an idealization. — Joshs

Yes, I get that. Call it part of the mediation.

Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'. — Joshs

This too I understand.

As a tentative indirect realist, I'd include all this in mediation. The stuff-in-itself from which the idealized table is constructed by our nervous systems and cultural conventions/habits is something like a point at infinity.

In order to attain that notion of objectivity we must be able to recognize other egos as being like us. We do this not simply by constructing some sort of internal model of how we think others think. Rather , we directly perceive them as ‘alter-egos’ as beings like us but also different from us. — Joshs

The order of theoretical construction might not be the order in fact. Perhaps the self is peeled off from the tribe as the baby is peeled off from the mother. If one stresses consciousness as 'pure witness,' then one is perhaps tempted to construct others from perceptions. But if one grants language priority, then the subject is co-created with the others, an effect of language and other physical habits, despite having his/her/their/its own body. Consider what I take to be Heidegger's view, that one is primarily 'one' or the generic/default layer of habit/interpretation of a generation (and class and gender, etc.)

By thoughts I mean self talk, visualizations, and any other perceptual modality you use to think. — hypericin

Depends what you mean by 'self.' I'd include the body, so a passed out person is still a self.

Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view. — Joshs

This vision seems to require either some kind of 'divine' synchronization of our video games or a substrate of some kind (what some thinkers have probably meant by 'matter'). Let's say a man runs off to live alone in a cave and writes a philosophical masterpiece. A century later the manuscript is discovered and assimilated in the living speech of a community (alive in the dreams from which it was long absent). What makes possible such a detour? What is this substrate with memory?

I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is. — Joshs

Cool. I was just looking for clarification. I acknowledge the complexity and sophistication of your position. It's a highly developed 'left wing' vision, while I've moved from the left toward the center over time. I reluctantly grant the claims of an exterior.

A little more on 'pure witness':

We begin with the realization that the pure Self or transpersonal Witness is an ever-present consciousness, even when we doubt its existence. You are right now aware of, say, this book, the room, a window, the sky, the clouds…. You can sit back and simply notice that you are aware of all those objects floating by. Clouds float through the sky, thoughts float through the mind, and when you notice them, you are effortlessly aware of them. There is a simple, effortless, spontaneous witnessing of whatever happens to be present.

In that simple witnessing awareness, you might notice: I am aware of my body, and therefore I am not just my body. I am aware of my mind, and therefore I am not just my mind. I am aware of my self, and therefore I am not just that self. Rather, I seem somehow to be the Witness of my body, my mind, my self.

This is truly fascinating. I can see my thoughts, so I am not those thoughts. I am aware of bodily sensations, so I am not those sensations. I am aware of my emotions, so I am not merely those emotions. I am somehow the Witness of all of that!

But what is this Witness itself? Who or What is it that witnesses all of these objects, that watches the clouds float by, and thoughts float by, and objects float by? Who or What is this true Seer, this pure Witness, which is at the very core of what I am?

That simple witnessing awareness, the traditions maintain, is Spirit itself, is the enlightened mind itself, is Buddha-nature itself, is God itself, in its entirety.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/



This 'God itself' in entirety neglects other subjects it seems to me. We are all God, and yet we still have to figure out who to trust !

Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense. — Joshs

I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness?

Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness. — Joshs

I get that, really. Call it the transcendental ego or the 'pure witness.' It seems to be a collapse of consciousness into being. All that is is consciousness. The empirical ego (my handsome mug in the mirror) is just a thing for that which things primordially. Nothing else ever. Substrates ? Matter? A mere product or manifestation of consciousness.

The following quote is not my kind of reading material. I discovered it when searching 'pure witness.' But perhaps you'll see a sort of parody of Husserl that's too close for comfort here.

The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate-each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.

This realization undoes the Great Search that is the heart of the separate-self sense. The separate-self is, at bottom, simply a sensation of seeking. When you feel yourself right now, you will basically feel a tiny interior tension or contraction—a sensation of grasping, desiring, wishing, wanting, avoiding, resisting-it is a sensation of effort, a sensation of seeking.
...
One hundred percent of Spirit is in your perception right now. Not 20 percent, not 50 percent, not 99 percent, but literally 100 percent of Spirit is in your awareness right now—and the trick, as it were, is to recognize this ever-present state of affairs, and not to engineer a future state in which Spirit will announce itself.

And this simple recognition of an already present Spirit is the task, as it were, of the great Nondual traditions.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/

Wittgenstein agreed with Kuhn, against Popper, that scientific change is like change in the arts , a matter of aesthetic shifts rather than an asymptomatic approach of truth through falsification. — Joshs

I don't know about this. I don't doubt that you can find fragments and build a case in this direction, but the older W wasn't exactly systematic, and probably an opposite case could be built.

I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed as variations on an ongoing theme. — Joshs

I don't find the underlined sentence to be obvious. Instead you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what?

Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). — Joshs

I'd prefer to quote Popper himself, but I don't have a digital copy.

The logic of his theory is utterly simple: a universal statement is falsified by a single genuine counter-instance. Methodologically, however, the situation is complex: decisions about whether to accept an apparently falsifying observation as an actual falsification can be problematic, as observational bias and measurement error, for example, can yield results which are only apparently incompatible with the theory under scrutiny.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically for falsification, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

One way to look at this is: evidence against a scientific thesis should be possible. Maybe we don't drop it right away. Life is complex. But it should at least look bad when it fails at prediction. It has to be specific enough to fail.

Logically, a measurement is constructed to be a binary switch. What number should I attach to some modelled aspect of the world? And then a measurement is made by plunging the mechanical switch into the boiling flux of world. The switch is tripped and you pull your measuring implement out to read off the appropriate numerals. — apokrisis

This makes excellent sense. I'd add that Popper is also including the social element of technique and communication. I have to 'believe' in a purported measurement. Did the technician do it correctly ? Record it correctly? Did the device perform correctly? Was the device constructed directly ?Do we worry about 'sense-data' tickling technicians soul? Or do we 'black box' the issue ? 'Look through' the whole mess, in a manifestation of trust, as if transparent and toward/at what is currently/actually a matter of living doubt?

A measuring stick doesn’t seem immediately like a switch, but it is. You can only read off some definite number and write it down on your log when you decide the analog continuity of the reality looks close enough - for all practical purposes - to one digit and not some other digit. — apokrisis

I agree that it's a switch. Measurements seem to be forced to choose one among a finite number of options. (A Turing machine has an arbitrarily long tape, but real devices are finite.)

I see no mention of Peirce. Did I miss something? — apokrisis

I like what I know of Pierce, and I'm fairly familiar w/ pragmatism (James, Rorty). It'd be great to hear what you can add from that angle.

I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed. — Joshs

If one assumes that an ego is 'given' or 'primary,' then perhaps one can cast everything else as an appearance for that ego. But I don't think this story is plausible. To me it makes more sense to take the ego and the world as 'equiprimordial' or conceptually independent.

Note that I grant the importance of a functioning nervous system in a particular human body. I don't think John Smith continues to feel or think after his cremation. I can't say much about what the world/universe is/was once all life is extinguished or before life arrived. So the subjective aspect should be acknowledged.

They belong to communities of research which, when they undergo change , displaces not only the former theories but the accepted methods of proof that were tied to theories. — Joshs

I think there's some truth in this, but I don't know if it's best to leap from the impossibly of exactly specifying the nature of science to the worthlessness of decent approximation. Dictionaries are 'stupid' and yet useful.

He does not believe the word is my dream. He , like Derrida , Nietzsche and Heidegger believes that a world is enacted , produced and continually transformed through my perceptual and intersubjective engagement. My anticipations of events are subject to continual validation or invalidation from an outside which is always already co-defined by my interpretations of it. — Joshs

If other subjects exist, then so does the world? Yes?

If you are retreating to a group of subjects constructing a kind of interpretative layer on top of some given layer, then that's just a reasonable version of indirect realism, seems to me.

Popper rejected Hegelian dialectic in favor of a Kantian notion of an assumption approach of science toward truth He could not accept the notion that all aspects of thought, empirical theorization and methods and practices of scientific verification are contingent. — Joshs

I think you need to support this claim. I've been reading Popper's Logic, and I was surprised how flexible P was, probably because people like to paint papa Popper as the grinch who stole Christmas. He liked an alternative view (conventionalism) but defended his own. I think it's wrong to frame such a decision in terms of 'could not accept,' as if he was a child afraid of thunderstorms.

Some more Husserl quotes, that may come in handy,

All of modern philosophy, in the original sense of a universal ultimately grounding science, is, according to our presentation, at least since Kant and Hume, a single struggle between two ideas of science: the idea of an objectivistic philosophy on the ground of the pre-given world and the idea of a philosophy on the ground of absolute, transcendental subjectivity - the latter being something completely new and strange historically, breaking through in Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.
...
I myself use the word "transcendental" in the broadest sense for the original motif, discussed in detail above, which through Descartes confers meaning upon all modern philosophies, the motif which, in all of them, seeks to come to itself, so to speak - seeks to attain the genuine and pure form of its task and its systematic development. It is the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower's reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposefully, are stored up as acquisitions, and have become and continue to become freely available. Working itself out radically, it is the motif of a universal philosophy which is grounded purely in this source and thus ultimately grounded. This source bears the title I-myself, with all of my actual and possible knowing life and, ultimately, my concrete life in general.
...
What is, in respect to sense and validity, the "objective world," objectively true being, and also the objective truth of science, once we have seen universally with Hume (and in respect to nature even with Berkeley) that "world" is a validity which has sprung up within subjectivity, indeed - speaking from my point of view, who am now philosophising - one which has sprung up within my subjectivity, with all the content it ever counts as having for me?
...
The naivete of speaking about "objectivity" without ever considering subjectivity as experiencing, knowing, and actually concretely accomplishing, the naivete of the scientist of nature or of the world in general, who is blind to the fact that all the truths he attains as objective truths and the objective world itself as the substratum of his formulae (the everyday world of experience as well as the higher-level conceptual world of knowledge) are his own life-construct developed within himself - this naivete is naturally no longer possible as soon as life becomes the point of focus. And must this liberation not come to anyone who seriously immerses himself in the Treatise and, after unmasking Hume's naturalistic presuppositions, becomes conscious of the power of his motivation?
...
But how is this most radical subjectivism, which subjectivises the world itself, comprehensible? The world-enigma in the deepest and most ultimate sense, the enigma of a world whose being is being through subjective accomplishment, and this with the self-evidence that another world cannot be at all conceivable - that, and nothing else, is Hume's problem.

Husserl is not an empirical realist. He does not believe it is coherent to make the claim that a world precedes, outlasts and contains me and everyone else. On the contrary , the natural ‘ world’ is constituted via progressively more advanced intentional acts. — Joshs

That seems to be the case, and I find that problematic. The plausibility of the thesis that the world is my dream depends upon common-sense experience of myself as a social animal who understands that sense organs can be damaged so that this or that human is shut out from a realm of color or sound. The very notion of an ego seems dependent on other egos. The notion of truth-telling seems to depend on some kind of community in relation to a shared world.

Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible? — Joshs

This basically collapses consciousness into being. If everything is X, then 'X' is useless, cuts no mustard at all. Did you hear about the solipsist who refused to turn around because everything was always in front of him anyway?

In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. — Joshs

I think we can naturalize this psychedelic vision by talking about the way the 'same' system of language 'lives' in all us who have internalized various cultural norms and habits. The philosopher can methodically ignore whatever seems contingent in his 'lifestream,' hunting for a primordial structure (some kind of postulated self-presence or eternal 'Now' that frames or accompanies that which changes.)

Didn't mean to come across as hostile. Sorry. — frank

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I was starting to think you were trolling me.

So thinking is immaterial? Or there's no such thing as thinking? — frank

You tell me. I think you are trying to frame the fireman for your own act of arson here. Check out my thread on Popper's swamp. IMO, no one knows exactly what 'material' or 'immaterial' is supposed to mean. I think the issue is best approached in terms of basic statements, those which might be said to support or falsify a theory. Some thinkers have tended to speak in terms of sense-data. Popper evades such implicit quicksand by explicitly accepting the swamp at the bottom of theorizing. Ambiguity seems to be a fact of life, and we can adopt conventions to ameliorate its negative aspects.

All of the above -- that's why I'm saying about no dichotomy exists. — L'éléphant

I prefer to emphasize the limited applicability of the dichotomy. To eject it entirely is to eject Popper's conventional demarcation of science from non-science. IMO, familiar distinctions tend to be justified in familiar contexts and only become problematic when taken by philosophers as absolutes.

Let's get concrete again. How does one test whether a pill causes weight-loss? A controlled experiment, right? We measure the weight of the participants before and after. We might say that "participant #20 weighed 156 pounds" is fact because no justification is expected or given. We 'trust' in this measurement process. It's transparent for us. We might want to check the math and the application of statistical principles though. This would be checking the interpretation, which is such because it must be justified/supported.

It does not specify the exact nature of some action. It instead narrows the scope of the possible by eliminating every other alternative. — apokrisis

I am reminded of the real numbers being defined as systems of nested intervals of rational numbers (Bachmann's largely forgotten vision.) The real number is progressively but never finally specified by the ejection of rational numbers from consideration/possibility.

Dawkins, in his emphasis on " natural selection" has simply replaced the idea of God with that of chance. — Jack Cummins

Dawkins expounds and supports a detailed theory of how complex organisms can develop from extremely simple forms of life. So there's no 'simply' involved. These days humans can experiment with evolutionary ideas using computers. We can watch the complexity of creatures increase in simplified, simulated worlds. We can use genetic progamming to solve problems. Darwin is the 'Newton of biology' now, and critics of evolution who aren't biologists seem to be in a very weak position.

the dichotomy between "theory" and "observation", — L'éléphant

Excellent theme. This is also thinkable in terms of interpretation and fact. As I understand it, facts tend to include interpretations that are so uncontroversial that they are perhaps even unnoticed. We look 'through' our measuring devices. They become transparent for us.

Popper's view seems to make interpretation easier to understand and more exact than its murky substrate of fact. In some ways this is not surprising. Our science hovers above the domain of metaphysics which only aspires to play the role of a weight-bearing foundation.

The bridges would've had fallen a long time ago if it weren't the case. — L'éléphant

The issue in this context is how do we know the bridges haven't fallen? Let me be clear. We do know this. Do we explain knowing this in terms of sense-data? Or do we start with testimony? Can and should we formalize checking that the bridges haven't fallen? Popper wants to avoid an infinite regress.

Let's take a narrower example. Let's say a theory predicts a reading of between 23 and 25 kilograms. A scientist records a measurement of 24 kilograms. All is well, right? But what goes into taking a measurement? Do we worry about the device's proper functioning? The eyes reading the needle, scooping up sense-date? Is the scientist delusional? Should he measure 20 times, 2000 times? The point is that worry/doubt must come to an end at some point. We must trust in a swampy informal layer of 'experience' or 'common sense' or 'ordinary language.' This recalls On Certainty.

Behavioralist-dispositionalists regard beliefs as dispositions to act in certain ways in certain circumstances (see Braithwaite 1932–1933). Eliminativists regard talk of “beliefs” as designating convenient fictions that we ascribe to people in folk psychology (see Churchland 1981 and the entry on eliminative materialism). Primitivists think of beliefs as basic mental states which do not admit of analysis.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/#NatBel


IMO, 'regard' as used above implies too much commitment, though qualifications must finally come to an end if one tries to communicate. The 'primitivists' may be right in some sense, but 'not admitting of analysis' does not exactly recommend a primitivist approach if one wants to figure something out and not just fetishize human ignorance. If your objection to behaviorism is simply an objection to pretending that tendency-to-act is an exhaustive description of the meaning of belief as opposed to a convention, then I concur.

To define it, we could play 20 questions. We could hierarchically constrain the possibility of being uncertain as to what "it" means.

Is it animal, vegetable or mineral? Is it a large or small animal? Is it a domestic or wild large animal? Is it a herbivore or carnivore wild large animal. — apokrisis

As others have noted, a thing can be described in terms of everything that it is not. Difference/distinction plays a central role.

And in case you haven't considered the art involved.... — apokrisis

I find that this is often overlooked. Of course lexicographers are just people who go to school to study the art/science of creating these very strange books known as dictionaries. Unless they are equivalent to high priests, they merely articulate/condense what words do in the wild. The art is to minimize the violence involved in decontextualization. As others have noted, you have to already be 'in' a living language to use a dictionary, for words are defined only in terms of other words. The signified terns out to be (or at least to seem like) nothing but more signifiers.

But what about in your case? You believe it (we assume, since you asserted it). Does this mean anything other than that you'll utter a particular sentence at a certain time? — frank

I understand the gist. It's roughly equivalent to checking whether Popper's falsification theory of science can itself be falsified. Even though your question misses the point, I'll still answer it.

My belief in the value of the convention of approaching belief in terms of tendencies toward various public actions will itself plausibly be 'cashed out' publicly not only in further speech acts but also in which books, friendships, and careers I pursue or fail to pursue.

Immaterial? If you think about P, is that not a concrete event in the world? If not, what is it? — frank

How many angels fit inside an intention? What is the square root of coveting your neighbor's ass?

So it's a stipulation, not any sort of analysis? — frank

I'd call it a tentative articulation of an otherwise fertile but useless ambiguity. In other words, it's both. Examine the analogous theory of computability. Everyone had a rough idea of what an algorithm was, but that rough idea was too vague to do anything with. So Turing, Church and Post suggested concrete/detailed articulations of this vague concept that turned about to be equivalent.

The alternative to something like belief-as-tendency-to-act might be a sloppy folk psychology that never gets anywhere, a tour through the quicksand of grammar mistaken for necessity.

How would you say this particular belief determines action in the world? — frank

I'd say it could/does inspire/constrain psychological research (eventually in actions which are not 'just talk', like this or that researcher getting a direct deposit or a chair being set up in a room.) It should be stressed though that talk/writing is a kind of measurable action (as opposed to immaterial thought), and that even influence of the speech acts of succeeding philosophers counts here. Of course public talk would be less interesting itself if we weren't animals using that talk to coordinate less talky things like work, war, and reproduction.

As I mentioned above, I compare the installation of this convention concerning 'belief' to Popper's suggested convention of understanding science in terms of falsifiability. It is a prescription for specialists, not a definition of the word used in the wild. I believe @Isaac is/was a psychological researcher. Perhaps he could provide some input on this.

Probably an 'ideal' is something you strive towards. Like Christians want to be like Jesus, so Jesus is their ideal. 'Ideology' might refer to world view that takes a person over completely, like 'communist ideology' or 'transgender ideology'. — stoicHoneyBadger

Again, I like this theme. What do we call the ideology that would like to transcend all ideologies? What is the ideal that puts every other ideal in question, that takes a distance from it? Cast a cold eye on life and death, O traveller on horseback. Pass by.

http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group4/analysis6.htm

What is it like for you to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow? How do you know that you believe it? Is your belief simply the sound of you talking to yourself in your mind saying, "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow".? — Harry Hindu

I like this gap that you insert between the believer and the belief. Belief is only interesting if it determines action in the world. If I claim to believe I can fly and nevertheless carefully avoid high ledges, then maybe I'm wrong about myself or have an uninteresting conception of belief.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. — Joshs

I imagine a prisoner in a cell. One of the walls is a paper-thin painting of a brick wall.

But within a system of language practice, words come to exert constraints over some state of interpretation. — apokrisis

:up:

Or even when used as the self-adressed speech of our inner voices - our thinking - they are employed to narrow uncertainty about what it is that we actually "have in mind". — apokrisis

I like that you stress narrowing as opposed to elimination...and those scare claws around have in mind.

If a word in fact fitted all exemplar cases too closely, speech would cease to have its creative edge, its flexibility of being able to encompass any number of one off, or particular, locutions. — apokrisis

:up:

the idea of absolutely pinning down a word meaning goes against the whole spirit of effective communication — apokrisis

:up:

That which makes talking worthwhile makes 'perfect' talk impossible. The possibility of recontextualization comes at the cost of an irreducible ambiguity. The 'mind' is interpretation?

I guess what I’m wondering is if there’s a word or phrase that denotes the difference between the working definition someone uses in daily life and the formal definition they’d give if asked — Brad Thompson

I think the 'working definition' is what dictionaries offer. The second kind of definition is sometimes called a convention (Popper suggests 'defining' science in terms of falsifiability, but of course none of us own the language, and dictionaries, unlike many philosophers, are descriptive rather than prescriptive.)

I like Husserl, and he's clearly pro-science. He sees the problem too, which is the clash of two 'obvious' realizations: (1) there is a world that precedes, outlasts, and contains me and everyone else and (2) only my functioning nervous system and living body allows me to be a me who is aware of is.

Part of transcendental philosophy's own meaning was that it arose out of reflections on conscious subjectivity through which the world, the scientific as well as the everyday intuitive world, comes to be known or achieves its ontic validity for us; thus transcendental philosophy recognised the necessity of developing a purely mental approach to the world. But if it had to deal with the mental, why did it not turn to the psychology that had been practiced so diligently for centuries? Or, if this no longer sufficed, why did it not work out a better psychology? One will naturally answer that the empirical man, the psychophysical being, himself belongs, in soul as well as body, to the constituted world. Thus human subjectivity is not transcendental subjectivity, and the psychological theories of knowledge of Locke and his successors serve as continued admonitions against "psychologism," against any use of psychology for transcendental purposes. But in exchange, transcendental philosophy always had to bear its cross of incomprehensibility.

The difference between empirical and transcendental subjectivity remained unavoidable; yet just as unavoidable, but also incomprehensible, was their identity. I myself, as transcendental ego, "constitute" the world, and at the same time, as soul, I am a human ego in the world. The understanding which prescribes its law to the world is my transcendental understanding, and it forms me, too, according to these laws; yet it is my - the philosopher's - psychic faculty. Can the ego which posits itself, of which Fichte speaks, be anything other than Fichte's own? If this is supposed to be not an actual absurdity but a paradox that can be resolved, what other method could help us achieve clarity than the interrogation of our inner experience and an analysis carried out within its framework? If one is to speak of a transcendental "consciousness in general," if I, this singular, individual ego, cannot be the bearer of the nature-constituting understanding, must I not ask how I can have, beyond my individual self-consciousness, a general, a transcendental intersubjective consciousness? The consciousness of intersubjectivity, then, must become a transcendental problem; but again, it is not apparent how it can become that except through an interrogation of myself, [one that appeals to] inner experience, i.e., in order to discover the manners of consciousness through which I attain and have others and a fellow mankind in general, and in order to understand the fact that I can distinguish, in myself between myself and others and can confer upon them the sense of being "of my kind."

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm

A little later he writes:

All of modern philosophy, in the original sense of a universal ultimately grounding science, is, according to our presentation, at least since Kant and Hume, a single struggle between two ideas of science: the idea of an objectivistic philosophy on the ground of the pre-given world and the idea of a philosophy on the ground of absolute, transcendental subjectivity...

create a ‘science of consciousness’. — I like sushi

Do you not think such a science would also depend on the same swamp? How would theses in such a science be supported? Do we confer and co-articulate what we agree is an apt description of an otherwise private consciousness ?

I have put some time in w/ Husserl & I'm a fan, and his later stuff might be said to amplify Popper's point in different style. His earlier stuff, which I don't know as well, seems to be mired in subjectivity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Husserl was after something like meaning-giving or meaning-bestowing fundamental intuitions. I don't see how such intuitions are checkable, though I empathize with the desire to give science something like an exact and profound meaning.

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible. The “objectivity” requirement in Popper’s account of basic statements, by contrast, amounts to a rejection of the view that the truth of scientific statements can ever be reduced to individual or collective human experience. (2002: 25).

Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. (2002: 86)

However, Popper contends that while such a decision is usually causally related to perceptual experience, it is not and cannot be justified by such experience; basic statements are experientially underdetermined.

Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or a rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them—no more than by thumping the table. (2002: 87–88)

Statements can be justified only by other statements, and therefore testing comes to an end, not in the establishment of a correlation between propositional content and observable reality, as empiricism would hold, but by means of the conventional, inter-subjective acceptance of the truth of certain basic statements by the research community.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

I naturally haven't read the whole thread, but I'd like to interject this theme:

"In particular, he [Nicholas St. John Green] often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism."

I take such a 'definition' to be best understood as a convention suggested for adoption. A similar idea seems to be expressed in 'put your money where your mouth is.'