. She accounts for these two seemingly disparate goals by claiming it is a misconception that the world is already “fixed”—as I take it: is an already-created object which we just come to know—and that the world actually becomes a certain thing (“determinate”) through our interaction with it. — Antony Nickles

And the world becomes what it becomes not just through human interaction with it but through its own intra-actions with itself. Our knowing the world is a matter of one part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.

. But it is just Barad’s position, or wish, that criteria should be held to one standard of “objectivity”….there is no singular standard for our criteria like “objectivity” to make them all certain. — Antony Nickles

What would be Barad’s standard of objectivity other than the measurements determined via the criteria offered by contingent configurations of phenomena? These configurations, what Barad calls apparatuses, are entanglements between non-human matter and human conceptions, purposes and goals, which are themselves
produced through cultural-linguistic-material entanglements. Thus, there is no separation between the material and the discursive. There are also no hard and fast distinctions between scientific, political, economic and literary domains. Because the engagement between the human and the non-human revolves around what matters to us in our discursive material practices, ascertaining the real is simultaneously an empirical, ethical and political endeavor.

Scientific apparatuses are constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings. That is part of the creativity and difficulty of doing science: getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose (which is always open to the possibility of being changed during the experiment as different insights are gained)”

In the work of Joseph Rouse , a close collaborator of Barad, one can find a more fully fleshed out explanation of the implications of agential realism for the understanding of the role of scientific objectivity.

“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. The practice itself, however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted.”

[/quote]

Otherwise I don't see where agential realism goes. It appears to me be more societal oriented, with emphasis of feminist related issues. — jgill

Joseph Rouse does a better job than Barad at pointing to the implications for the sciences of an agential realist approach.

“Often the stakes in such shifts are fundamental to human self-understanding. Dobzhansky's work helped form the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which not only placed evolution by natural selection at the center of a more unified biology, but also had wider consequences ranging from the biological eclipse of “race” to classifications of intelligence and culture as evolved adaptations. Postmodern quantum mechanics rejects the quasi-theological fundamentalism governing much of recent high-energy physics, abandoning the quest for a unified “Theory of Everything” in favor of more local, situated comprehension. Similarly, the phoenix-like emergence of developmental biology from the ashes of embryology, and the concomitant eclipse of genetics by genomics, challenge the now-familiar conception of genes and DNA as the calculatively controllable “secret of life” and biological surrogate for the soul (Oyama et al., 2001, Keller 1992, Nelkin and Lindee 1995). We need to understand these far-reaching shifts in scientific significance (where “understanding” is meant not narrowly cognitively, but in Heidegger's sense of ability to respond appropriately to possibilities).”

I get that systems theory, cybernetics, etc. aren't anything new, but the big proponents of complexity and information theoretic understandings of phenomena always make it sound like they are the cutting edge. I'd be interested in any critiques. I have this sneaking suspicion that we haven't seen a full scale shift for reasons I'm not aware of, which aren't presented by advocates. — Count Timothy von Icarus

New Materialist philosophers like Protevi, Massum and DeLanda attempt to meld the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze with complexityand dynamical systems theory. Here’s Protevi’s take on why Continental philosophy has been luke warm to such ideas:

“I'm not sure why the connection between Deleuze and Guattari and complexity theory, which Manuel and Brian Massumi have been making since the early 1990s, has not been followed upon in organization theory (and unfortunately, not too much in philosophy either). I suspect those with scientific backgrounds might be put off by the sheer exuberance of Deleuze and Guattari's writing (this has nothing at all to do with a “postmodernist playfulness” or what have you, which aims at signifier effects), as well as by their Marxist orientation (more on that later). On the other hand, for those with the typical “continental” philosophical background (phenomenology, post-phenomenology, or God help us “postmodernism”), the science connection is probably anathema, either because of anti-realist commitments or because they just don't want to take the effort to come to grips with the science.”

I think it’s the realist orientation that complexity theory presupposes that keeps it from being integrated into post-structuralism , phenomenology and related branches of philosophy.

The language of complex systems science allows us to explain how processes can demonstrate stability and regularities. We can talk of attractors and valleys, topologies, life as a sort of knot, etc. However, these terms are currently unfamiliar to most people. But does this explain the slow switch to a metaphysics of process?

It seems to me like philosophy in general is lagging the sciences in this respect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The language of complex systems can be linked to post-Hegelian dialectical strands of philosophy, but are subject to critique from a range of other, more recent approaches in philosophy. Lagging indeed.

Yeah, although his philosophy seems a bit to "out there," to get mainstream appeal. What is weird to me is that there hasn't been a movement to replace current philosophy of science with a process based one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s what New Materialism is all about. For instance, Joseph Rouse’s career has been dedicated to putting forth a process-based philosophy of science.

They're trying to thread the needle between scientific reductionism on the one side, and religious dogmatism ( including what is described as 'degenerate romanticism' in this talk) on the other, by situating natural science within a broader context which includes the (re)introduction of levels of reality taking into account the qualitative dimensions of human existence — Quixodian

I think Vervaeke does a good job of encapsulating the main themes of 4EA cognitive science, which he then inflates into a kind of spiritual worldview. I have a few quibbles which mostly pertain to the scientific framework rather than Vervaeke. Unlike new materialism, which I discuss in another OP, the empiricism Vervaeke endorses. feistiness a split between supposedly pre-existing external reality and the cognizer who interacts with it. What is needed is not just a subject-object interaction model, but an INTRA-actionist approach which rejects the idea of a pre-existing world. For instance, Vervaeke claims that video games produce a flow experience that doesn’t allow adequate reality-testing, but I question the coherence of this distinction.

I should add a note of caution. If you’re going to listen to his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis youtube series, you might want to take his reading of Heidegger with a grain of sand. He incorporates Speculative Realist Graham Harmon’s interpretation of Heidegger, one of the worst I’ve come across.

Interesting. Do you have a handy link to this? — apokrisis

Sure. Here’s a good place to start.

https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements.

So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions, and that these descriptions can be translated or interpreted, one into the other. — Banno

Doesn’t our judgement that someone agrees with us on some matter depend on how well we can anticipate their verbal or behavioral response to our own actions or utterances? On that score, our anticipative efforts are quite successful in social situations that require only a superficial level of engagement, which pertains to most gatherings of strangers in public. We dont need to know very much about each other in order to share the highway with them.

But how effectively do we translate descriptions between individuals or groups in situations of severe political polarization, or in crises of trust between friends or lovers, or in daily examples of anger or righteous indignation toward people we encounter? What if we agree the cat is on the mat but can’t agree on whether the cat should have been put on the mat, or whether the car is happy to be on the mat? Are these just subjective affective colorations that have nothing to do with the facts of the matter?

-

They agree that there is someone who did certain things on the internet and that as a result folk found out a lot of stuff which other folk thought they should not have. They agree on the overwhelming picture of a world with people, cities, computers, networks, nations and all the other paraphernalia within which this drama can take place. And I suppose most folk would agree that Assange's ability to move from place to place has been somewhat curtailed over the last few years. — Banno

Why was it decided in the first place that this was newsworthy, and who decided it? Isnt the perceived relevance of the story constructed into the very facts contained in it? Hard-core supporters of Assange will agree only on the most superficial concepts contained in the piece, and disagree about everything else, including much of what is alleged to be factual. So if we are to say that the things on which people are likely to agree in this news story overwhelm their disagreements, we would have to add that from the point of view of the purpose of the story, on those fact that MATTER to readers of different political persuasions there may be overwhelming disagreement, and translation of descriptions will fail to overcome this mutual unintelligibilty

What notions? Where did I talk about observation and measurement? You're just projecting, which -- it's just weird. Do you need me for this conversation? — Antony Nickles

Yes, and I don’t seem to be getting much help from you.

Here's the thing. I could explain what my actual conception of science is (communal, pragmatic, predictive, sensitive to feedback, self updating, blah blah blah), thus defending myself against your charge of philosophical sin. But I don't have to. — Antony Nickles

I’ll tell ya, a bit more explanation from you would help a lot. Or you could just continue expressing bemused exasperation at my projecting and not getting you.

What does your "correspondence" charge amount to? Suppose it's true and "correspondence" is inscribed in the Great Book of How to Do Science and What It Really Means. Then you could object that correspondence to the real is -- what? Is refuted? Is bad? Is a discredited metaphysics? Is problematic? — Antony Nickles

Is this a version of “If pomo claims there is no objective truth, isnt that claim itself an attempt to locate truth?”

What my charge would amount to is an invitation to see how the intrinsic CONTENT of scientific theory changes, including how the RESEARCH is conducted and interpreted, as a direct result of a shift in metaphysics or philosophy of science. For instance, phenomenologically informed enactivist and autopoietic approaches in cognitive psychology are based on such a conceptual shift, and new materialism ( which is different than pomo) interprets the results of quantum field theory through a different metaphysics than older materialisms.

Should science care? If it works, it works. You can stand outside all day shouting, "This whole enterprise is a farce! They believe in correspondence to the real, those scientists!" No scientist will care. No one else will either. You will maintain your philosophical purity, as you understand it, but so what? Science will go on doing what it does. — Antony Nickles

All accepted science works, but changes in the metaphysics of science leads to changes in our understanding of HOW it works, and as a consequence de leads to fresh concepts. It matters much to physicists that Quantum field theory works differently than Newtonian mechanics, even if they don’t realize this is due to a shift in their own metaphysics. The same goes with the shift from behaviorism and positivism in psychology to Cognitivism to embodied, enactive approaches.

Which is of course the point. Science is successful. Art is also successful. Literature is successful. History is successful. All of them in different ways, and it's no knock on art or literature or history that they are not science. Science is also only what it is. Is philosophy successful? I think most people feel it's a little harder to say whether it is -- but it's easy if you count spawning the natural sciences as part of the history of philosophy, because philosophy ought to be proud of that.

I still don't see any good reason for philosophy to be ashamed to be seen in the company of science. — Antony Nickles

It shouldn’t be ashamed since they are intertwined aspects of the same company. My point is the ways philosophy and science are different is much less significant than you think they are, such that it is silly to even try to distinguish the domain of philosophy proper from science proper, other than as a matter of the conventionality and generality of the vocabulary.

To the extent that we can talk about a progress in science it is due not to successful theory per se, but to its ability (which it shares with philosophy, the arts and other cultural domains) to undergo revolutionary shifts in the way it understands the criteria of success, and those shifts are metaphysical revolutions.

↪Joshs

As Derrida writes:
— Joshs

I don’t speak gibberish. Perhaps you could translate into plain language? — apokrisis

You mean you arent familiar with the philosophical history of structuralism, the class of approaches which unify elements on the basis of a shared logic. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss posited a structuralist semiotics for describing anthropological systems, but didn’t give an adequate account of the origin of such wholes. Piaget’s little book Structuralism deals with the attempt by various kinds of structuralist accounts to integrate genesis and structure.His own genetic epistemology was one such attempt , and he saw Husserl as a kindred spirit. Derrida recognized that Husserl’s melding of genesis and structure avoided both the temptations of Historicism, which would posit an a priori dialectical organizing principle to unify historical development , and empiricism, which would produce a skepticism of facts of the matter.

It sounds like science to you is tied to a notion of correspondence between scientific observer and observed reality
— Joshs

Nope. You got all of that just out of me using the word "research"? Geez. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh, there’s correspondence there all right. It may be in the form of indirect modeling, but there is something in your notion of scientific observation and measurement that keeps science apart from the humanities and other areas of cultural creativity, and I think it has to do with how science gets a grip on the real.

But wasn’t the pragmatism a reflection of early psychological research - the work of Helmholtz, Wundt, Donders, Fechner and the rest? — apokrisis

My understanding is that Helmholtz et al were under the sway of neo-Kantianism. Dan Zahavi writes:

“Helmholtz took Johannes Müller's theory and the evidence he presented as a scientific confirmation of Kant's basic claim in Kritik der reinen Vernunft concerning the extent to which “we can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only […] as an appearance” (Kant 1998: B xxvi), and he argued that contemporary science on the basis of physiological evidence were reaching the same kind of insights as Kant had reached by a priori considerations. Our knowledge concerns reality as it is represented within ourselves, and not mind-independent reality as it is in itself, which remains unknowable.”

James, Dewey and Mead were heirs of Hegel rather than Kant.

In my reading of the history, you have Cartesian representationalism and British empiricism creating the familiar disembodied notion of mind as a clutter of sense impressions and ideas. The justification of phenomenology as the method of inquiry. — apokrisis

The above justified Husserl’s phenomenological method as an alternative to the above, an attempt to navigate between empiricism and idealism, relativism and skepticism.

As Derrida writes:

“Husserl, thus, ceaselessly attempts to reconcile the structuralist demand (which leads to the
comprehensive description of a totality, of a form or a function organized according to an internal legality in which elements have meaning only in the solidarity of their correlation or their opposition), with the genetic demand (that is the search for the origin and foundation of the structure). One could show, perhaps, that the phenomenological project itself is born of an initial failure of this attempt.”

Lots of people have interesting ideas, it's the research that matters. It's the research supporting and extending Darwin's insights that makes his ideas matter. Picking ideas you like -- well, we all do that, but that's not science. — Srap Tasmaner

It sounds like science to you is tied to a notion of correspondence between scientific observer and observed reality wherein the evident world that appears to the scientist’s instruments of measure can be partitioned off from entanglement with cultural influences. So science as research means a certain.l purity with respect to such outside influences, including the influence of philosophy. After all, philosophical research doesnt have its eye on the mathematically measurable and testable facts, does it? Science’s method thereby gives it a privileged access to, or at least privileged ability to measure and verify, the real, so the traditional thinking about science goes. Wittgenstein’s insights appear irrelevant to what science is about, according to this thinking.

m

I'm right now reading a book of psychology that I would argue is in some clear ways compatible with the later Wittgenstein.

On the other hand, who cares? Wittgenstein is interesting, but aligning your theory with Wittgenstein or with any philosopher really should not be a goal of any scientific research program.

Inspiration taken from Wittgenstein? Absolutely. But inspiration can come from absolutely anywhere and ought not guide you toward a particular result — Srap Tasmaner

Inspiration ought not guide you toward a particular result? Would you prefer lack of inspiration as your guide?
Inspiration can in theory come from anywhere. In practice, it often comes from a handful of prophetic thinkers who had to wait decades before the larger culture was ready to embrace their ideas. One example is the eventual embrace of the ideas of American Pragmatists and Phenomenology within psychology. It s not a question of artificially ‘aligning’ your scientific work with a philosopher, but of enriching your ideas by interlacing them with giants who preceded you.
Most empirical research is drudge work that aligns itself with myriad references from the field. Breaking with an accepted theoretical orientation means turning your back on those conventional references and finding new sources of inspiration. Heisenberg and Bohr understood this, delving deep into the philosophical literature for guidance.
For my money , any empirical psychology which hasn’t absorbed Wittgenstein’s insights(or those of the pragmatists and phenomenologists) is not a very interesting psychology.

I've been on the other side of this argument as Isaac could attest. I've tried defending the specialness of philosophy. I think there's still some room for stuff that science isn't quite suited to or that it doesn't bother with, but I'm through chasing science off my lawn. I think it's a betrayal of the spirit of philosophy and resentment of the success of science. — Srap Tasmaner

As I tried to point out in my previous comment, I don’t think the issue that Antony is touching on has to do with a limitation of science with respect to philosophy, but the limitation of a certain set of philosophical assumptions that inform specific approaches in the sciences. Antony may or may not be aware of them, but all one has to do is search for those theorists contributing to research in cognitive neuroscience and other domains of psychology who cite the later Wittgenstein as a key inspiration. Such a search will reveal philosophically reformulated notions of brain, body , language and culture that are much more compatible with Wittgenstein than the ones that Antony has in mind.

But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is some of what Barad says about agency:

There are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change…it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies.
…the primary ontological units are not “things" but phenomena -dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/ (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not “words" but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.”

So what does all this verbiage mean? If I were to take a stab at a one-sentence definition, I would say agency is the power to affect and reconfigure. This is more like an intention than a cause, but does not originate in a constituted subject. Agency doesnt make sense outside of Barad’s concept of apparatus. Unlike for Bohr, one of her heroes, an apparatus is not a set-up that pre-exists and remains unchanged by the activities it organizes. Rather, an apparatus is a material configuration of entangled agential elements that produces a normative organization. For instance, interacting bits of space dust or dirty socks i. our washing machine are already interacting with us such that a certain apparatus of organization configured what is going on in a certain way. Our recognition of the washing machine and the socks, as well as the context of cleaning clothes are organizing apparatuses for our determination of what is going on. Entangled with this is the patterns created by the interacting socks ( of course there would be no patterns for us to see if we didn’t already recognize the socks as objects).

A nice supplement to Barad’s work is that of Joseph Rouse, whose main foils are post-analytic writers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Brandom, Putnam and Rorty. Rouse has heaped praise on Barad , and their ideas have much in common as an antidote to models that separate the human-cultural-linguistic from the material-natural-empirical.

But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this really anything new? It’s not that patterns, norms , regularities cease to exist as the nature of configurations shift. It is only the specific identity of elements which ‘cease to exist’ in their previous role.

(1) Science is not the land of certainty. People talk this way sometimes, sure, even scientists, but when it comes down to it, science is a dogma-free zone. So if you're looking for certainty, it's religion you want, not science. — Srap Tasmaner

Science can never be a dogma-free zone. It can be a practice that is self-aware with regard to its reliance on guiding presuppositions concerning not only the contents of its theoretical paradigms but the nature of its methods, the relation between observation and transformation, fact and value, and other assumed grounding structures of science. But most scientists haven’t arrived at that point yet. The fact that science tends to embrace falsificationism these days would seem to indicate the abandonment of the quest for certainty, but to the extent that scientists embrace the language of mathematics as the quintessence of precision, and separate observation from production, a different and more profound notion of certainty is still at work.

I think Antony is on the right track. I would just supplement his discursive interactionism with a phenomenological analysis of perceptual construction. Husserl’s account of the constitution of a spatial object gets to the OP’s question of how we arrive at the recognition of objects, and I think it does a better job of this than empirical accounts positing subpersonal, strictly unconscious mechanisms. For instance, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it. Am I consciously aware of this relation between my potential movements and my recognition of an object? No, but this doesn’t mean that such knowledge is simply unconscious. Rather, it is implicit in my perceiving an object qua object.

If time measures change, or gives change substance, it is a bit strange that the metrics in special relativity allow for a change of spacetime when there is no change of position in space. — jgill

Quantum field theory, or at least certain interpretations of it, might offer more fertile ground than special relativity for thinking through the relation between time and change.

What about male prostitutes?
— Joshs

As far as I know this applies to all possible sexes and genders. — Jacques

I have plenty of acquaintances who worked as erotic masseurs or escorts. Most came from good backgrounds free of abuse, and there no coercion associated with their experience as sex workers. The gay male sex industry is different in this respect from female sex work.

Prostitution is mainly human
trafficking and the exploitation of people in distress for entertainment purposes — Jacques

What about male prostitutes?

I know Thomas Reid held a direct realist notion of memory. To him, every memory was the apprehension of the actual past. But you are talking about views in which both realist (retentional) memories and representative (presented) memories exist? That makes sense, but how do these view-holders determine which memories are retentional and which are presented? — Ø implies everything

I had in mind phenomenological and poststructural writers like Husserl and Deleuze. For Husserl, retention does not require a second act of turning back to examine what has past. It is bundled inseparably into the experience of the now.

if one is already postulating the ability of simultaneous apprehension of distinct percepts, there is no explanatory need to postulate a temporal extension of consciousness. However, if our experience of the past is merely through memories (representations of the past), as opposed to an actual, direct apprehension of the recent past, then we incur the question of memory skepticism. — Ø implies everything

A number of philosophers make a distinction between retentional memory (what you’re calling actual
memory) and presented memory. The former always accompanies the present as a past that was never present, whereas the latter, as a represented and reconstructed past, is itself a new present.

A principle of constructive alternativism
— Joshs

Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice? — apokrisis

, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order — apokrisis

I’ve been fascinated by my recent engagement with the agential realist approach of physicist-philosopher Karen Barad. I think their reworking of causality exemplifies the spirit of constructive alternativism , the mutual responsiveness not only of human subject and material nature, but between the non-human and itself. The differences with your summary are instructive.

“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differen­tial becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds
for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phe­nomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.

This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: dif­ferent cuts enact different materialized becomings….

Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed. Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do.”

↪Joshs Is it? I thought the concept of the thermodynamic arrow of time was fairly 'fundamental'. — Pantagruel

Yes, what I should have said is that a description of time in physics is already a metaphysics. That is, it uses the conventionalized language of empiricism to express a metaphysical position on time. The thermodynamic arrow model brings physics closer to recent approaches in philosophy, butI think you’ll see further modifications, perhaps along the lines of Karen Baead’s agential realism.

↪Pantagruel
Yeah, I am only attracted to the physics of time. Metaphysical notions/projections/handlings of time are a little like watching sci-fi, great fun, very entertaining, sometimes even thought provoking, but not real. — universeness

To me it’s the opposite. It’s the physics of time that’s not ‘real’. Or put better, such empirical accounts are profoundly limited by their ignorance of the subjective structures that make them intelligible.

My preference is for William James’ notion of specious time:

“The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and the future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past.”

James goes on:

“the original paragon and prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.”

In another formulation he enters into more detail, and says something about what this short duration contains:

“The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward—and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it.”

In the same chapter of the Principles James also writes:

“Its content is in a constant flux, events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one … Meanwhile, the specious present, the intuited duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the waterfall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that stream through it. “

James clearly believed that there is an unvarying structure or mechanism underlying our temporal awareness, as did Husserl after him. If this is right, and if (as many believe) consciousness is essentially temporal, then this structure (or mechanism) is an essential component of consciousness itself, in all its forms.James is well-known for emphasizing the continuity of experience

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up into bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly … It is nothing jointed, it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is naturally described…”

and James’ stream metaphor strikes many as apt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

However it seems like the arrow of time might be fundamentally related to the physical gradient of entropy — Pantagruel

Isnt this a description of a content that takes place within the structure of time rather than an elucidation of the form of time itself?

If evolution can code for cooperation , [ then ] it can just as easily code for the opposite.
— Joshs

That does not follow. At least in the human context, that seems highly unlikely. We are born helpless and mute. Our killer app is language, which depends on trust and cooperation — plaque flag

Does this mean that cooperation is not an evolutionary adaptation?

↪Joshs Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said — apokrisis

But then that might deflate your ego and we can’t have that. :grimace:

I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place. — apokrisis

I think the psychological and ethical insights of your approach are limited by conformity to assumptions about the ‘way things are’. I respect your world but I wouldn’t want to live in it. It’s too rooted in past certainties and not sensitive enough to future possibilities. A principle of constructive alternativism should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy.

Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated. — apokrisis

G H Mead was also an important source for constructionist thought, as was George Kelly (b. 1905) and Jerome Bruner, but Pragmatism, constructivism and constructionism, gestalt theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics all had to wait decades till behaviorism and cognitivism’s stranglehold on mainstream psychology weakened.

Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even. — apokrisis

Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology.

Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention. — apokrisis

Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it?

t'd be weird to have large language-ready brains and not ethical systems centered on the cooperation of Us which is sometimes against Them. This (coincidentally?) mirrors the cooperation of the organs within our bodies. 'Inefficient' ethical systems would seemingly be filtered out in something like memetic evolution, while efficient ones would spread --- perhaps by conquest, but maybe just by trade, missionaries, etc. — plaque flag

That certainly commits one to a reductive evolutionary model, in which our most human capacities for bonding are at the mercy of arbitrary mechanisms. If evolution can code for cooperation , it can just as easily code for the opposite. Even if the former wins out as an advantageous adaptation, the idea that an ‘immoral’ ethic could emerge biologically, even briefly, reveals much about how ethical relations are being conceived. It may seem that this one-sided naturalist adaptationism is the only protection against a subjective idealist notion of will, but there are more effective ways of grounding ethics than these two choices.

. Our understanding of our own epistemic structures and worldviews is an understanding of ourselves, our culture and our language, and that is not metaphysics. — Janus

Of course that’s metaphysics. Metaphysics pertains to the fact that language, culture and how the world appears to us empirically are inextricably bound together as a unified web.

A metaphysics which is in accordance with how the world is, as we experience and understand it scientifically, is at least more plausible than a metaphysics produced by speculating about reified concepts which are based on linguistic and cultural associations, that is all I meant to say. — Janus

What does it mean for a paradigm to be ‘in accord with’ how the world is? What happens to how the world appears to us when we turn a worldview on its head? That world doesn’t become more or less true, but we observe it differently. What used to count as evidence no longer does, and what was previously not considered as evidence, or not even visible to us, now becomes fact. This openness of the world to potentially endless alternative constructions is the result of the entanglement of culture, language and perception.

I am often disagreeing with Wayfarer that traditional metaphysics is a discursively viable subject of discussion if the aim is arriving at the truth; I say it isn't because there is no clearly decidable way of establishing the truth of such metaphysical propositions as God, transcendence, eternal life, free will and so on, or whether materialism or idealism are closer to the truth about the absolute nature of things, or even whether such ideas are coherent or whether we know what we are talking about when we try to address such issues. — Janus

What about non-traditional metaphysics , or metaphysics period? If analysis of the origin and nature of the paradigmatic structures and worldviews that make empirical facts and truths intelligible do not produce clearly decidable ways of establishing their truths or coherence, what do you think it is that makes empirical facts and truth decidable and coherent? Perhaps your answer is in the next quote:

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. That said, it's not always easy to establish just what the truest current findings in the sciences even are, or to have confidence that anything we think today will hold up for another hundred years — Janus

So the findings of the sciences are what makes a metaphysics plausible? I would say you have that exactly backwards. How can the results of a methodology whose central concept, observed evidence, is only intelligible within an overarching paradigmatic framework be used to validate that overarching framework?

Well, is there not a paradigmatic value system that makes such vocabulary intelligible? Is not each fact flowing out of this system of thought framed with expectations and anticipations? Is not each assertative empirical statement a form of question put to experience, an expectation that subsequent events will validate rather than invalidate it?
— Joshs

Can you tie this more robustly to is/ought for me? — Tom Storm

A paradigmatic scientific worldview implies a moral
value system, even when the participating scientists insist their empirical descriptions of reality are completely independent of their ethical stances. For instance, a naive, or direct, realism implies a non-relativist thinking concerning the moral.

You and Wayfarer both seem to want to emphasize the primacy of the subject and make the world as mere spectacle for or ex nihilo creation of some kind of constituting transcendental subject.

But serious objections to this claim are (it seems to me) simply ignored. For instance:

I need a nervous system to see a tree, but I also need eyes and a tree in an encompassing world. Or are we to claim that the eyes create themselves ? — plaque flag

I know Husserl is tagged with the charge of solipsism and idealism, but Merleau-Ponty knew better. Husserl’s genius was in the recognition that the being of meaning is in the in-between, the interaction between a subjective and objective pole, rather than in the acts of a pre-constituted transcendental subject. Husserl’s transcendental ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity. What is central is the synthetic constituting activity that remakes both the subject and object poles. If Husserl didn’t make clear enough the importance of the in-between, the baton was taken up not only by Merleau-Ponty but also Heidegger and Derrida. I think in relation to this synthetic structure, the biggest problem from your point of view isnt just Husserl’s treatment of the subject, but what he has in common with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and has led to the charge of linguistic idealism against post-structuralists leveled by the realist-materialist crowd. What this alleged ‘linguistic idealism’ has in common with Husserl’s synthetic subject-object acts is the dependence of world as well as subjectivity on a reciprocity that leaves no room for the coherence of any ‘material’ aspect of world independent of this reciprocal interaffecting.

Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:

In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have m the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.

I don't quote Husserl as an authority, but only to show that he wrestled at times with what a Cartesian approach cannot digest. The articulation of the egotranscending sociality of reason (of logic and language) [which Husserl helped to do in arguments against psychologism ] defeats methodological solipsism. It makes no sense to construct the world from 'dreams' alone. — plaque flag

The above quote is from page 110 in my edition of The Crisis. I imagine the we-subjectivity of a world for all is closer to your thinking than Husserl’s talk of a solitary ego constituting this world-for-all as a world-for-all from one’s own vantage. But keep in mind that the primal ‘I’ of the epoche which he discusses is on page 182 of Crisis. He uses the space between page 110 and 182 to demonstrate why your quote represents an incomplete understanding of the basis of we-subjectivity. The point for Husserl isnt about which modes of givenness we construct the world from (dream, imagination, memory, sensation), but how we manage to constitute from the movement among all of these modes more and more complexly interwoven strata of correlations.

↪Kaplan You can't get an ought from an is. Oh, I see Jesus got there before me. Just because you have determined that something is nature doing its job does not make it ipso facto right. One could argue that cancer is just nature efficiently doing what it does. Does that make cancer good — Tom Storm

Hmm. Perhaps we might tease out a way in which the ‘is’ is always normatively complicit with an ‘ought’ ( you know, the fact-value entanglement folks like Putnam, Sellars , Davidson, Brandon and Rorty go on about). Where to find such a complicit ought in straightforward talk about organic machinery? Well, is there not a paradigmatic value system that makes such vocabulary intelligible? Is not each fact flowing out of this system of thought framed with expectations and anticipations? Is not each assertative empirical statement a form of question put to experience, an expectation that subsequent events will validate rather than invalidate it?

The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. Originally, all judgments of the real were to be "bracketed" or suspended, and then analyzed to bring to light the role of consciousness in constituting or constructing them. With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted — plaque flag

And yet, at the very end of his career, Husserl reaffirmed that the intersubjective life world is an constitutive accomplishment of the solitary ego. Zahavi claims that for Husserl “a radical implementation of the transcendental reduction leads with necessity to a disclosure of transcendental intersubjectivity”. Husserl insists, however, that a radical reduction reveals the philosophical solitude of the absolute ego, which is prior to the constitutive accomplishment of transcendental intersubjectivity.

“...one of the main tasks of pure intentional psychology is to make understandable, by way of the progressive reduction of world-validity, the subjective and pure function through which the world as the "world for us all" is a world for all from my—the ego's—vantage point, with whatever particular content it may have. ...”(Crisis, p.256)

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. 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. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)

Hence the argument does not support your rejection of ↪Janus's point, a repetition of Davidson's observation that we overwhelmingly agree as to what is the case.

And this in turn fits with Wittgenstein's analysis of doubt, in On Certainty. To doubt, we must hold some things as indubitable. A view not too far from Quine. — Banno

Are you saying that overwhelming agreement on what is the case is a form of hinge proposition? I understand Witt’s notion of hinge propositions to concern pre-suppositions that function like Kuhnian paradigms. They make possible the determination of rational truth and falsity of propositions within their purview, but are not themselves rationally derived. As arational, they can neither be rationally doubted nor can belief in them be rationally generated. Thus, hinge commitments can not strictly be considered to be beliefs. I would add that, like paradigms, these commitments undergo continual, if gradual, transition.
How would overwhelming agreement function within a paradigmatic scientific community? Given that paradigms constantly change, wouldn’t agreement require a reciprocal back and forth, and begin as partial and among a minority before it became overwhelmingly majoritarian? And wouldn’t this near unanimity pass into a phase of overturning of the at-one-time overwhelming agreement?