There is only one "the case" about the vast majority of questions science can answer. I think we would be doing a disservice to the world and ourselves by suggesting that our access to those "is the case" statements is mediated by context. It is the questions being asked that are mediated by context, and I think this is specifically what Kuhn is talking about. — AmadeusD

You claim that Kuhn avoids “true” simply because a theory is not a truth but a “best possibility,” and that the scientific method licenses us to treat it as true. This reframes Kuhn as offering epistemic humility about access, not a structural account of scientific change. But Kuhn’s avoidance of “truth” language is not merely caution about overstatement. It reflects his deeper claim that standards of theory appraisal, what counts as explanation, simplicity, accuracy, even what counts as a problem, are internal to paradigms.

I don't think Kuhn is, anywhere, suggesting that we understand truth as anything other than a 1:1 match between the world and ourselves, but that we can't actually achieve that so let's take a step down and approach what we can approach - which is understanding paradigms and contexts as motivators for what science investigates. — AmadeusD

The issue isn’t just that we fall short of a 1:1 correspondence with reality. The issue is that what counts as matching reality is itself partly paradigm-structured.You say “There is only one ‘the case’ about the vast majority of questions science can answer.” But for Kuhn, the Newtonian question “What is the absolute motion of this body?” and the Einsteinian framework that denies absolute space are not simply two answers to the same neutral question. The very structure of the question changes. So to say “only one is the case” presupposes a shared conceptual framework in which the case is described.

Paradigms don’t just select topics, they shape what counts as a legitimate solution and even what counts as evidence. Observation is theory-laden. Puzzle-solutions are judged by paradigm-specific standards. That doesn’t mean reality is invented, but it does mean that “the case” is never accessed from nowhere. You read Kuhn as saying there is one truth, and we just approach it imperfectly and context shapes our interests.

Kuhn argues instead that there is one world, but what counts as a true account of it is inseparable from the historically evolving practices that define problems, evidence, and explanation. Kuhn’s point is not that the ideal stands but is out of reach. It is that scientific rationality does not require that ideal to function. Science progresses by increasing puzzle-solving capacity within shifting frameworks, not by demonstrably approaching a fixed description of “the case.”

Kuhn is not wrong to emphasize paradigm shift and incommensurability in an argument to establish the importance of those concepts. But I think there is an implicit continuity in what he describes.
He identifies anomalies as the prime movers in the shift of paradigms. These are, inevitably, to be described in the "old" context. The point is that, in that context they appear insoluble but that they are perfectly soluble in the new context. So it is critical that the same anomalous phenomena can be recognized across paradigms, in spite of any incommensurability.
Further, it is not sufficient that the anomalies are resolved in the new paradigm. In addition, the new paradigm has to solve (explain) all the phenomena that were solved or explained in the old.
I'm not certain how much Wittgenstein talks about change and development in practices and ways of life. I have the impression that what impressed him most about them was their stability. In making this comment about Kuhn, I'm trying to reconcile the two without overthrowing either. — Ludwig V

From a Kuhnian vantage, the continuity you emphasize can’t be understood as neutral continuity. You say anomalies are “inevitably described in the old context” and recognized as the same phenomena across paradigms. But for Kuhn, what counts as “the same phenomenon” is not theory-neutral. Observation is theory-laden. Scientists working in different paradigms may literally see different things when looking at the same instrument readings or experimental setups. The “same anomalous phenomena” are not bare data standing outside frameworks; they are structured by the paradigm that renders them anomalous in the first place. After a shift, what was once an anomaly may no longer even be described in the same conceptual terms.

Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis doesn’t deny all translatability, it denies perfect translation. The fact that scientists can argue across paradigms doesn’t mean they share a fixed observational language that adjudicates the dispute from nowhere. A new paradigm preserves much of the old paradigm’s puzzle-solving ability, but it may reclassify what counts as a legitimate puzzle. Certain old problems may be dismissed as ill-posed, meaningless, or peripheral.

Wittgenstein would likely go even further by questioning the Kuhnian picture of anomalies driving development as though reality were pressing back against theory in a structured way. For him, what counts as a failure, an anomaly, or a contradiction depends on rules internal to the practice. When those rules shift, the “problem” may dissolve rather than be solved. That is not puzzle-solving in Kuhn’s sense; it is conceptual reorientation

The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subject—liberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.
— Wayfarer

That seems to mean that meaning can only be found in religious dogma — praxis

Or in hermeneutic historical life, or phenomenological intentionality, or poststructural becoming.

His Revolution is in structural applications of scientific apparati. It's not about whether or not true things can be known and adjudicated, from what I can tell. The position is more than science, as a practice, is not concerned with trivial things and so the paradigms relating to which questions to ask are unstable and go through these cycles. I don't think there's much to suggest he thinks "my truth" could be a reasonable phrase. — AmadeusD

Kuhn’s skepticism about capital-T Truth is not grounded simply in human finitude, as if better epistemic access would solve the problem. It is grounded in the historical and conceptual fact that different paradigms carve the world differently. When Kuhn says that after a paradigm shift the scientist “works in a different world,” he is not making a merely psychological or perspectival claim. He is saying that standards of relevance, similarity, explanation, and success have shifted. Your response treats this as compatible with a stable notion of adjudication, just better tools applied to the same underlying court of appeal. Kuhn’s insistence on incommensurability questions that reading Paradigms are not just rival hypotheses evaluated by neutral criteria; they partially determine the criteria themselves.

When Kuhn says “later theories are better puzzle-solvers” he introduces that formulation precisely to avoid saying that later theories are “truer” in a correspondence sense. “Better” is indexed to puzzle-solving within a tradition, not to convergence on an ahistorical truth. You seem to read this as a reassurance that objectivity is intact and that subjective variants of truth are excluded. But Kuhn’s own formulation blocks naive relativism, but it also blocks the idea that we can cleanly separate epistemic success from the historically situated standards that define what success is.

Kuhn would reject “my truth” if it meant idiosyncratic, private belief unconstrained by communal practice. A lone scientist does not get to baptize a new paradigm by fiat. But But I’m questioning whether, even within a shared paradigm, individual scientists inhabit it identically, interpret its results in precisely the same way, or attach the same meanings to its key terms. I think Kuhn’s answer is clearly no. Paradigms are learned through exemplars, not through explicit rules, and that learning always involves a degree of tacit judgment and variation. Scientists agree enough to work productively, but not so much that their perspectives collapse into a single cognitive point.

Kuhn doesn’t license “my truth” as an all-purpose slogan, but he does show how truth-claims are always embedded in practices, traditions, and shared forms of life. Outside highly regimented domains like mature sciences, where paradigms are relatively stable and consensus is enforceable, the room for divergence in interpretation is much wider.

Just because it is not 100% truth that doesn't make it the same as someone saying their own opinion, as the good sir AmadeusD is patiently explaining to you. — unimportant

If I say my truth about my own gender is unique to me, is that an opinion or true?

Their ‘truth’ is more than mere opinion, since each of us has to validate our expectations and predictions of how events will unfold against what actually happens.
— Joshs

I can't quite make sense of this, I don't think. Either their expectations meet reality, or they do not. They have opinions which they can put forward, and I can do what I do with those - or they can, as is almost always hte case, submit to an investigation whereby between us, we understand the facts of hte matter as against our perspectives. Our perspectives are what is being adjudicated against reality. I would appreciate if you could elaborate in terms that congrue with what's being put forward here - namely, that your description is precisely hte one I am trying to avoid using for the reasons I've put forward. — AmadeusD

Let me quote Thomas Kuhn:

A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.”

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth' for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving.

But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than either of them is to Newton's. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences.

I am not interested if it tells the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, if it allows us to manipulate the world to our own ends better then it serves its purpose. — unimportant

I am in complete agreement, and that was the point I was making. Science works, not because it is truth with a capital T, but because it allows us to predict events in a useful way in spite of the fact that each participant in the enterprise of science contributes their own perspective on the meaning of what is called true. But if we ignore these variations in perspective by attacking the validity of one’s ’own truth’ , we degrade our ability to manipulate the human world to our own ends.

"My truth" is more about some narcissistic thing of saying what I say is important and you must hear it and believe it. I think that is what it is about, the 'me me me' mentality. If someone says "I am speaking the truth" then it does not give them an ego boost like 'my'.

Incidentally I had a discussion about this exact same thing a couple of years ago with someone. He was saying how "that's your truth" used to be used pejoratively to basically say "you're full of shit" but it now has the opposite meaning of "hear me and take me seriously". — unimportant

Would you agree that none of us will ever experience truth with a capital ‘T’, that naive metaphysical sort of truth that was so popular a century or two ago? And what we have instead are theoretical constructs like the sort that our sciences generate, constructions which can only be falsified by not exhaustively proven? And that what we call scientific facts or truths are beholden to theoretical frameworks which are likely to be falsified at some point? If so, then each generation has its own set of scientific theories, and can in a certain sense be described as embracing its own truths in comparison to other eras.

Furthermore, I as a lone scientist might come up with a novel theory that only I have subjected to test. Do I say that the facts organized by my theory are my own truth, a truth derived from my novel framework of interpretation, or do I wait to declare them true until they have been replicated by many other scientists? It would seem to be the latter, but when a consensus is reached among a majority of scientists concerning the truths generated by a theory, do all those scientists interpret the meaning of the theory in exactly the same way, or does each adherent to those truths retain a slightly different perspective? In other words, does each scientist retain their own variant of the truth?

Isnt this even more the case with political, spiritual , ethical, psycho-sexual and gender attitudes? Do any two people interpret the meaning of these domains in exactly the same way. And what are the implications of this for navigating the day to day conflicts among family, friends and strangers? Should we scoff at the idea that the source of interpersonal conflicts and disagreements is often the result of different perspectives on the truth of situations? Do we then look to find the one objectively correct interpretation that must apply to everyone? Or do we recognize that each individual perspective is a valid datum that must not be discarded when trying to reach between-person understanding?

I think it's related to the rise of "I feel like ..." as an alternative to "I think ..." or even "I believe ..." In 21st America, your feelings are not open to critique. They just are what they are. Your opinions, your thoughts, your beliefs (but not your faith)—these are all open to critique and by saying "I think we should do this," you're practically inviting others to give their opinions or to critique yours. Not the case when you're expressing your feelings. — Srap Tasmaner

Have you asked anyone whether their feelings about an issue have changed and what made them change? What if they respond that their feelings express their personal assessment of the meaning of something, and they can reassess the basis of that assessment such as to change the resultant feelings? Would you respond that their personal assessment must be open to critique from the vantage of third personal criteria of objective empirical truth in order to be valid?

I think it's all about inoculating yourself against criticism. If what you're about to say is just your feeling, or your taste, or your preference, or your truth, then that's that. People you're talking to are expected to hear what you say and accept that it's just part of who you are. They do seem to enjoy endorsement, though. It's nice when someone shares your taste. But those are the only options.

I won't bother connecting it to the shocking levels of narcissism among young people. Most of their parents seem awfully narcissistic too.

It's all pretty horrifying. I worry about the future my children are stuck with. — Srap Tasmaner

To label a generation as narcissistic is to stop construing their ways of framing situations and start condemning. It replaces an inquiry into how people are organizing experience with a global judgment that forecloses reconstruction. Such labeling may itself be a defensive maneuver. It protects the speaker’s own construct system from challenge by treating unfamiliar forms of self-expression as moral failure rather than as alternative ways of making sense of social life. The rise of “my truth” may not simply be narcissism run amok, but evidence of people experimenting, sometimes clumsily, with ways of owning their constructions while navigating pluralism. The task, then, is not to shame those experiments, but to ask which ones expand the range of anticipation and which ones constrict it.

Sure, and that's not in argument I don't think. But attaching hte word 'truth' to it unjustifiably semantically rarefies the concept beyond "my feelings" or "my opinion" which is what we're talking about, and those terms are completely adequate. Entering "truth" into these phrases is dumb, ambiguous and unhelpful. As a couple of responses here show clearly. — AmadeusD

Except that I would argue that the kind of truth you would
claim to be beyond mere feelings or opinions is an abstraction derived from those feelings and opinions which never actually transcends them toward some reality independent of the subjective stances which they are based on. Empirical , objective truth creates the factual object by flattening and smoothing over the multitude of opinions which participate in its construction. This isnt a problem when we are working within legal theory or scientific endeavor, since for those purposes we can ignore the variations from one person to the next in the interpretation of the meaning of facts and laws. But it becomes a hinderance when we need to clearly recognize perspectival differences between. persons.

I’m sure when you get home from your job interpreting the law and you deal with your wife and children, you don’t judge their behavior on the basis of strict laws, bit instead try to see things from their perspective. Their ‘truth’ is more than mere opinion, since each of us has to validate our expectations and predictions of how events will unfold against what actually happens. We can make any kind of wild predictions, but some pan out better than others. When our expectations are validated by the actual course of events, we have achieved a provisional truth. But is the mesh between your predictions and the way events unfold in relation to them identical to the relation between my anticipations and how events unfold for me? There will certain be a lot of similarities, but they will diverge enough that I will need to construe how you construe the same events as me.

↪Wayfarer I agree with much of what he's saying, but with a Wittgensteinian twist, viz., consciousness is the bedrock hinge of reality. It's as fundamental as we are objects separate from other objects. It's the arational starting point of all that exists. — Sam26

For Bitbol and other phenomenologists we are not objects separate from other objects. Consciousness is the site of subject-object interaction. The subject is not a thing but one pole of the subject-object binary. If there is an ontological or metaphysical primitive for Bitbol or Husserl it is the structure of time consciousness. Wittgenstein doesn’t deal directly with temporality in this way, since he is not interested in ontological or metaphysical grounds, and his hinges do not function as such bedrocks.

This explains a lot about the often absolutely vicious authoritarian attitude of theists in interpersonal relationships — baker

You might get in trouble for that claim, but I can’t say I disagree.

Then how about "figuring out on your own terms" what is a mistake and what is fitting in regard to being gay, for example? — baker

I’ve never met two gay people who construe what it means to be gay , or what it means to be mistaken about gayness, in exactly the same way.

Yep.
↪baker Given that I have family, a boss (two actually) and employees under me - give me a thought experiment? I can't see where you want this to go. I work in law. We do not have "our truths". — AmadeusD

We definitely don’t have “our truths” in law, since its grounding basis assumes strict normative precedent. But we do in our personal relationships. These differences in personal truth, or I should say personal vantage on truth, come out every day in our emotional conflicts with friends, family, work colleagues and strangers. This is not to say that our personal vantage on truth is wildly different from our peers. If this were the case we could never reach consensus in law, science or publicly accepted norms. It’s just that those norms aren’t enough make sense of the more nuanced aspects of personal relations which lead to personal estrangement and political
polarization.

Thus the mainstream interpretation of Wittgenstein is contradictory. On the one hand, it insists that "Private language arguments" prove the necessity of inter-subjective truth-criteria for speaking intelligibly, and yet on the other it insists that meaning is use. These two hypotheses are in direct opposition to one another. — sime

What specific philosophical traditions (it would be helpful if you could name some names) are you drawing from in arriving at these conclusions? I’m asking because your critique targets entire schools of philosophy which intersect Wittgenstein.

↪Questioner Then you reject the limitations imposed by our shared reality?

Can someone be mistaken in your view? Even wrong? — Banno

Our shared reality isnt going to help you figure out why your perspective doesnt jibe precisely with those whose reality you share. Group consensus can take us a long way, but on some things what is a mistake and what is fitting we have to figure out on our own terms.

If everyone has "their truth," then we have no truth at all. We're left with competing narratives where facts become irrelevant, and power becomes the only arbiter of whose "truth" prevails. It makes actual investigation, evidence, and reasoned debate impossible. You see this a lot, especially from the radical left, but it's everywhere. — Sam26

Wouldnt Wittgenstein treat the phrase ‘my truth’ as staking out a position within a language game? Rather than treating “truth” as a concept with a fixed essence and then indicting “my truth” as a conceptual corruption that smuggles subjectivity into a domain where it doesnt belong, wouldn't he investigate how the phrase “my truth” is actually being used, in what situations it appears, what work it does, and how it functions within particular language-games?

The danger for Wittgenstein of the use of ‘my truth’ is not that “facts become irrelevant,” but that we may lose clarity about what kind of claim is being made and therefore about what sort of response is called for. By contrast, you seem to assume that the philosophical task is to police language against misuse by appeal to hidden semantic rules about what words really mean, as though Wittgenstein thinks there is some kind of ontological essence to the word truth that must be protected from subjective distortion.

I thought he was addressing the analytics. He had grown discontent towards this movement. — L'éléphant

He was also talking to those he was more positively inclined toward, such as Kierkegaard and James.

run it through A.I. to highlight the vantage from which each group critiques a previous group
— Joshs

You're on a roll tonight. — Srap Tasmaner

What does your list look like?

↪Joshs Points, though, for the most-to-least advanced list. That gave me a chuckle. — Srap Tasmaner

Chuckles are more useful if I know what you’re chuckling about. Pay careful attention to the family resemblances within each cluster, then run it through A.I. to highlight the vantage from which each group critiques a previous group.

Read Schopoenhauer, then read the Tractatus. It will become obvious that he's talking directly to Schop. — frank

Who is he talking to in the Philosophical Investigations?

Wittgenstein turns away from certain old ways of doing philosophy, and he seems to point—so tantalizingly!—toward a destination he never really gets near. It's why he is undeniably vague, inconclusive, difficult to interpret, why he goes over the same issues in subtly different ways for years on end. Having cut loose from the mainland of existing philosophy, he was at sea, and never made landfall. Heroic, in his own way, but tragic.

Pretty sure I'm the only one around here who thinks this. — Srap Tasmaner

My question is what you think about Kant, Hegel, Schelling, hermeneutics, phenomenology, enactivism and post-structuralism, because you won’t be able to do much with Wittgenstein without an adequate background in those areas. If David Lewis represents the cutting edge of your thinking then it doesnt look promising. Lewis belongs to a Humean tradition within philosophy. I tend to take a subsuming developmental view of the history of philosophy, and I like to make lists. So here’s my subjective list of philosophers ranked according to a developmental order, with the least advanced on the bottom and the most advanced on the top. Make of it what you will. You’ll notice Lewis and Wittgenstein are light years apart.


Wittgenstein
Gendlin
Joseph Rouse
Karen Barad
Nancy
Merleau-Ponty
De Jaegher
Varela
Gallagher
Thompson
Ratcliffe
Scharff
Donna Haraway
John Shotter
T. Fuchs
Slaby
Zahavi
Alva Noe
Colombetti
Vicky Kirby
Henry
Rorty
Gergen
Feyerabend
Gadamer
Bitbol
Kuhn
Dilthey
Lyotard

Bataille
Connolly
Massumi
Stiegler
Protevi
Zizek
Laclau
Butler
Lacan
Fanon

Sartre
Levinas
Braver
Caputo
Dewey
William James
Charles Taylor
Hannah Arendt
Kierkegaard
Alisdair McIntyre
Piaget
Vervaeke
Delanda
Stuart Kauffman
Adorno
Badiou
Schopenhauer
Byung-Chul Han
Whitehead
Schelling
Peirce
Dreyfus
Terrence Deacon
Althusser
Marx
Hegel

Habermas
McDowell
Ian Hacking
Chalmers
Nagel
P.F. Strawson
Freud
Kant

Darwin
Popper
Dennett
Jesse Prinz
Metzinger
Damasio
Hutto
Mark L Johnson
Lakoff
Andy Clark
Tegmark
Kastrup
Smolin
Searle
David Lewis
Hume

Wittgenstein isn’t mainly explaining “how we understand each other,” and he isn’t doing an inside to outside story from public talk to private thought. He’s doing grammar, how our words for feeling, meaning, and understanding actually function, what counts as correct use, and what pictures mislead us. And while some phenomenologists do emphasize embodied, world-involving experience, that doesn’t capture Wittgenstein’s point. He doesn’t need to say feelings are “world-directed engagements” to reject the inner data picture, his point is that inner feelings aren’t private objects that fix meaning. — Sam26

The relationship between Wittgenstein and phenomenology isn’t one-way, as though his grammatical approach is a corrective to their methods. Phenomenology of perception deals with aspects of experience Wittgenstein fails to address, pre-linguistic embodied sense-making. Both Wittgenstein and phenomenologists reject the inner data picture, but from different vantages and within different contexts.

Without inner feelings there would be no Form of Life. There would be no social activities such as playing football, no cultural events such as going to the theatre, no language game, no financial systems, no production, distribution and trade of goods and services, no Philosophy Forum.

As our Form of Life would literally not exist without our inner feelings, in this sense, it seems that the ultimate foundation can only be “inner feelings”. — RussellA

Wittgenstein’s focus was on how we understand each other through language , and how we then use that language when we are alone with our thoughts. Phenomenologists focus on how perception is felt bodily. For both Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, feelings are not inner data but world-directed engagements.

↪Joshs Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take? — Tom Storm

There are promising signs that mainstream neuropsychological approaches are starting to nibble at the edges of phenomenology. The popular free-energy predictive processing branch of neuroscience used to ignore phenomenology-influenced embodied enactive approaches , but lately there has been a rapprochement between the two camps.

But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws. — Tom Storm

The critique of naturalism emanating from phenomenology is, as has been mentioned, quite different from Hart’s objections to it. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argues that empirical accounts of perception succumb to the myth of the given. At the core of the myth of the given is not just the idea of “raw sense data,” but the deeper assumption that perception begins with something already fully determinate, such as neural signals, stimulus features and information, that is then processed or interpreted. Many neurological models describe perception as the transformation of incoming signals into representations: edges, contrasts, motion vectors, object files, predictive hypotheses, and so on.

The “input” to the system is treated as if it were already a perceptual unit, already individuated as visual information, when in lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. What the neuroscientist calls “input” is itself a reconstruction abstracted from an already meaningful encounter with the world. The retina does not receive “edges” or “features”; it is we who later describe neural activity as if it were encoding them. The world is perceived in terms of what it affords, not as a neutral array of data awaiting interpretation. No amount of neural description can recover this level, because it presupposes it.

First, if someone says, “I am in xyz” and there’s no shared life around xyz, no training, no examples, no circumstances where we’d say, “this is when you use that word,” then yes, it’s meaningless. But that’s not because nothing inner matters. It’s because there are no criteria for the word’s — Sam26

But is this absence of criteria for a word ever a thing for Wittgenstein except when we look for causes and explanations? Are criteria a precondition that must be in place before meaningful use can occur, as though criteria were a kind of background rulebook we consult? Do criteria hover behind use, or are they articulated and stabilized in and through use itself? Is there a moment when we first check whether criteria exist and then allow the word to mean something?

Is the mistake the Islanders made that they mistook criteria for causes, or does the mistake lies in assuming that what needs explaining is why the practice works at all, as if intelligibility itself required a causal foundation? Do inner states and causes have meaning once we see how they are governed by criteria, or is Wittgenstein trying to show us that pursuing inner causes’ , even when preceded by establishing criteria, leaves meaning behind?

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might — RussellA

You’re interpreting what Wittgenstein is doing as a behaviorist reduction, which treats outward regularities as suffficient and ignores inner causes. You’re assuming that unless we can point to a hidden causal mechanism behind language use, we’ve settled for a shallow imitation of understanding. But Wittgenstein rejects both the idea of hidden causes and behaviorism.
For Wittgenstein, ‘Xyz” doesn’t refer to a behavior, and it doesn’t refer to a cause. The intelligibility of “xyz” as a mood, a stance, a rule, or a commitment doesnt depend on a single episode of observable behavior, but on its place in a web of possible moves: what counts as evidence for being in xyz, what counts as pretending, what counts as withdrawing the claim, what follows from it, what licenses it. Someone can intelligibly say “I am in pain” or “I am in love” while lying motionless, because the grammar of those expressions doesnt require bodily movement.

Analyzing “I am in xyz” at a psychological or neurological level wont tell you what “xyz” means. It presupposes that you already grasp the concept. A brain scan might explain why someone reports pain, but it doesnt teach you what pain is, or how the word “pain” functions in our lives. To think otherwise is to confuse an explanation within a practice with an explanation of the practice.

For me, it's not about arguing for system-closure, or for some Archimedean stand-point outside of inquiry. It's about acknowledging that reason can come to understand the conditions of its own operation, and that to do so is itself a rational achievement. — Esse Quam Videri

I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequation and conformity vs creation, enaction and becoming.

I don’t buy your reading of Wittgenstein. It takes his rule following comments and turns them into a kind of norm skepticism, as if Witt were saying there are no binding standards in a practice, only “creative re establishment” in each use case. That’s not what he’s doing.

Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that practices don't have any authority to correct us. His point is that the authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance. It comes from how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together. If you deny that any regularities or shared expectations can bind, you don’t get a deeper Wittgenstein, you get the complete collapse of rule following, which is precisely the kind of picture Wittgenstein is fighting against. — Sam26

It isnt a skepticism. It avoids skepticism by showing that, as you say, ‘authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance’. But how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together can’t then be conceived as behind us either. It comes from the always novel way in which a history of previous practices, regularities and rule following expectations are made meaningful by being changed by current use. What is actually meant in using a word or following a practice occurs into what is implied and expected. What emerges is neither just the same practice as before nor a different practice, but something more intimately tied to context. Norms continue to be the same differently.

A word works when it can guide what comes next and make sense of responses, challenges, and correction. That requires more than fresh enactment. It requires a stable practice for the notions of success and failure to have application — Sam26

A word always already works as long as we don’t treat it as simply referencing a previous meaning. It doesnt require any theoretical or philosophical help from us , and to think it does is to fall back into the desire for an external grounding that Wittgenstein equated with language going on holiday. We dont impose a stable practice on a neutral terrain that is originally lacking it. We already find ourselves thrown into the midst of stable practices and forms of life.

In the actual language-games where we talk about improving inquiry, “improve” is tied to things like learning, avoiding mistakes, tracking error, increasing reliability, making progress, even if the metric shifts from case to case. If someone uses improve while also insisting that nothing could ever count as settling, correcting, or learning anything, then the word is no longer doing the work it normally does — Sam26

Wittgenstein contrasts situations where words are
doing something with those where language goes on holiday, sits idle, like when we look to consult prior criteria to explain the meaning of current word use. You want to contrast situations where words work normally with those where they no longer do the work they ‘normally do’. Wittgenstein would respond that normativity doesn’t function by reference to any prior categories but is re-established creatively in each use.

We can’t appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, and if there were they wouldnt thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. Wittgenstein’s paradoxes about rule following block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances.

Wittgenstein’s contrast between words “doing work” and language “going on holiday” isn’t a contrast between normal uses that conform to prior norms and abnormal uses that violate them. It’s a contrast between use that is embedded in an ongoing practice and use that has been detached from any practical bearings and is now being propped up by abstract criteria. The holiday begins when we stop looking at what people are actually doing with words and start asking what must be in place, in general, for those words to count as meaningful.

That’s why Wittgenstein is so suspicious of appeals to prior criteria. When we try to explain the meaning of a present utterance by consulting a pre-existing standard, like “what ‘improve’ really requires,” “what doubt must presuppose,” “what inquiry needs in order to count as inquiry”, we are no longer describing use; we are trying to ground it. And for Wittgenstein, that grounding move is exactly what causes language to lose its grip.

You want to distinguish situations where words do the work they “normally do” from situations where they no longer do that work. But Wittgenstein would ask: normally by reference to what? If “normal use” is fixed by a prior role that the word must continue to play, such as tracking error, preserving right/wrong, or settling questions, then normativity has already been relocated from practice to an abstract template. The grammar has been reified.

For Wittgenstein, normativity is not preserved by fidelity to an inherited function; it’s re-established in each concrete use. A word works when it finds its place in an activity, when it guides what comes next, when it makes sense of responses, corrections, expectations here. When it stops doing that, we don’t discover that it has violated its essence; we notice that it no longer connects to anything fresh that we are in the midst of enacting.

Language goes on holiday not because it fails to meet the standards it “normally” must meet, but because we are asking it to do something without knowing what would count as success or failure in this fresh, actual case. The holiday consists in treating meaning as something backed by criteria rather than something enacted in use.

Outside of situations where language goes on holiday, we always already find ourselves in situations where our language is characterized by being immersed in normative
usefulness. We don’t have worry about having to do anything special in order to gain purchase of normative meaning. For Wittgenstein, outside of the special, strained cases where language “goes on holiday,” we do not first confront a neutral field of sounds and then somehow add normativity to them. We always already find ourselves inside practices where words are at work, where they guide action, invite correction, elicit agreement or disagreement, and make sense without any special philosophical underwriting. Normative usefulness is not something we have to secure; it is the background against which speaking at all is possible.

Your worry is ‘what if justification, as traditionally understood, leaves out something essential, namely, the practical grasp of standards that makes justification possible at all?’ And your proposed remedy is: make that implicit understanding explicit, so that our epistemology rests on firmer ground. But for Wittgenstein, this is exactly the kind of move that creates philosophical problems rather than resolving them.

The reason is that nothing is missing. There is no gap between justification and the practical grasp of standards that needs to be filled, named, or strengthened. That grasp is not an ingredient inside justification; it is the background condition of our being able to speak of justification at all. Trying to “add” it, even under the banner of explication rather than supplementation, reintroduces the picture that something was absent or unsecured.

I’m not saying, “it never makes sense to ask whether our practices can improve.” I’m saying: improvement talk is meaningful when it still leaves room for correction. But when the improvement proposal is really “nothing can ever settle anything,” then it’s not meaningful, it’s self-defeating. — Sam26

But is this comparable to saying “improvement talk is meaningful when we notice how the word is actually being used in a current context. A word loses its meaning when we move from noticing its use to nailing down its definition as ‘correction’ or ‘self-defeating’”?
From Wittgenstein’s vantage, improvement talk is meaningful when we can see how the word “improve” is actually doing work in a particular practice. That work might involve correction, but it need not be defined in advance as correction. Sometimes “improvement” means greater reliability, sometimes greater elegance, sometimes broader applicability, sometimes simply “this now goes on more smoothly.” What makes it meaningful is not that it satisfies a condition like “leaves room for correction,” but that we can recognize the role it plays in what people are actually doing.

The problem with defining improvement as correction and “nothing can ever settle anything,” as self-defeating is that nailing down the meaning of a word by offering a general criterion for its legitimate use isnt ‘wrong’ or self-defeating. Rather, it freezes a flexible, practice-bound grammar into an empty phrase drained of connection to actual use . It’s like repeating the same word over and over again. until it loses its original context-based sense.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place — Sam26

I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions — Esse Quam Videri

I'd love to hear from Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice — J

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage.

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside. — Wayfarer

Yes, what is structurally necessary can only be revealed
though acts, because this ground is itself the temporality of action. It is what returns to itself again and again identically through repetition; namely, the horizontal structure of time consciousness.

As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.) — Wayfarer

The specter of platonism isn’t vanquished simply by denying number the status of object. The question is whether mathematical truths are true independently of any constituting act whatsoever. The question isnt whether idealities are “independent of your or my mind”, its whether they are independent of intentionality as such. Husserl’s answer is no. They are an effect of the projective noetic gesture of intentional synthesis.

“The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

For Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory because forms are grounded in esse, ultimately in divine intellect. Participation presupposes a metaphysics of being in which intelligibility is ontologically prior to cognition, even if not objectified as a “thing.” Husserl, by contrast, explicitly suspends any such metaphysical grounding. His idealities are constituted within intentional life without appeal to being-as-such. One cannot simply slide from Husserl to Aquinas by appealing to “anti-reification” without confronting that Husserl rejects exactly the metaphysical realism Aquinas presupposes.

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. Intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality independently of those conditions.

Joshs Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive? — Tom Storm

I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:


Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.

↪Joshs Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism. — Tom Storm

I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.

Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.

So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostolgia). He can be quite a bitch — Tom Storm

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.

There is a post-critical position that preserves what is valuable in the classical tradition—the claim that intelligibility belongs to reality itself—without lapsing into naïve realism or reducing intelligibility to historically contingent sense-making practices.

So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:

What must reality be like for beings like us to be normatively bound by truth, necessity, and correctness at all?

Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments. — Esse Quam Videri

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position?

If Schelling , then the gap between Schelling and Hart should be mentioned. From a post-Kantian perspective, Schelling shows how intelligibility emerges from being’s own inner dynamics, rather than presupposing a fully luminous order guaranteed by divine intellect. He accepts the Kantian critique of dogmatism but tries to move through it, not around it. Hart, by contrast, largely refuses the transcendental demand altogether, treating it as a historical detour rather than a philosophical necessity.
For Hart, intelligibility is grounded theologically and metaphysically in actus purus: being is intelligible because it proceeds from divine intellect and goodness. Participation explains how finite minds can know truth, but the structure of intelligibility itself is already complete and perfect in God. Mediation occurs, but it occurs within a fully determinate metaphysical order.

Hart and Schelling both reject Kant’s subjectivization of intelligibility, but Schelling does so by internalizing critique into ontology, whereas Hart largely bypasses it by appeal to classical metaphysics. Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding.