From an external point of view, cognition is private and indirect. From an internal point of view, cognition is public and direct. So Husserl and Descartes can be both semantically correct, provided that we don't mix their postulates and apply them in different contexts. — sime

Husserl’s point is that the external , third person point of view is a derived abstraction constituted within first person subjectivity.

The second is fiction, while the first is an act of mind remembering (while I am sleeping) people I know and whom I interacted with. — javi2541997

I’m confused. Above you say that an act of remembering makes something non-fiction but below you write that remembering the past makes it fiction.

I can assume that a past version of myself is fictional — javi2541997

Even if I agree that strict remembrance of my experienced past is non-fiction, I dont recall ever having a dream that simply recalled a past event. They always tell a new, never before experienced story or adventure. I don’t think we are even capable of strict remembrance in a dream. Their style of thinking is not linear.

They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others
— Joshs
How can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you? — noAxioms

Their experience is available to me as their experience as seen from my perspective of them, through my interpretation of them. Thus, I don’t have direct access to their thoughts as they think them, only mediate access.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are.

Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist. — noAxioms

In his book Cartesian Meditations, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl praises Descartes’ method but critiques him for treating the cogito as a private object among other objects in the world, whose property is that it thinks. Husserl argues instead that the cogito is not a private object with the property of thought but exists by always being about something. It is not an objective fact but the subjective condition for the appearance of any world. Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Exactly by following my feelings, I came to the conclusion that you exist. :smile: I know that an image (like a mirror) can prove me wrong or cheat me. — javi2541997

What’s the difference between dreaming about me and being a novelist who writes a story with me as one of the characters? Novelists often say the characters come to life and tell them what they want to do. Do you think a novelist distinguishes between the reality of their dreams and that of their writerly imagination? Does my appearance in your fiction prove my existence?

I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics.
— Joshs

But everything in your previous post was "third-person mechanics — Apustimelogist

I was trying to point to methods ( hermeneutical, phenomenological, enactivist) which go back and forth between first and third person , between the found and the made, without giving precedence to one over the other, but instead showing their radical inter-dependence.

Even if I was in a dream, my ability to have these thoughts, including interacting with you, proved your existence — javi2541997

Doesnt the strange world of dreams teach us that just as important as the question of whether something exists is how it exists? Have you ever noticed that when you try to make sense of a dream strictly on the basis of remembered perceptual data (the identification of people, things and the actions that are being performed, like flying) the narrative of the dream appears bizarre and incoherent? And yet if asked to make sense of that narrative from the vantage of the emotions and feelings accompanying the perceived images and actions a much more intelligible picture emerges? For instance, one may perform an act, likely floating or flying, which in waking life would trigger feelings of joy, astonishment or terror.

But the emotions accompanying such feats in the dream may tell a very different story. One may feel bored , nonchalant or blasé, suggesting f that the meaning of the act should be sought in the kinds of waking activity that typically evoke such feelings. I suggest that if one wants to know what is really going on in the dream one needs to consult this affective narrative rather than the narrative of concrete perceptions and actions. This includes the identification of people in the dream. Dont be too sure you’re dreaming about so and so just because the dream image looks like them. The feeling accompanying the image may lead you to someone else. And often, what starts out as one person morphs into someone else. Follow the feelings , not the images.

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. It’s almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. — Apustimelogist

My point isn’t simply that different accounts of nature can co-exist, it’s that when you say “My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle”, I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. As to differing accounts being ‘compatible’ , I’m not sure what this means if they are drawing from different frames of interpretation. According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds.

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.
— boundless

I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing? — wonderer1

You’re missing the sleight of hand trick we perform called ‘objectivation’. The starting point of subjective experience is flowingly changing, never identically repeating events, out of which we can notice patterns of similarity, consonances and correlations. The trick of physicalism arises from comparing one person’s contingent and subjective patterns of similarity with many other persons, and then forcing these similarities into conceptual abstractions, like ‘same identical object for all’.

Not does this flatten and ignore the differences of sense of meaning between individual experiences of the ‘same’ object (private experience), but more importantly, it ignores the subtle but continuous changes in sense within the same individual. It is not only that I can never see the identical object you see, but I can never see the identical object from one moment to the next on my own, becuase the concept of identical object is our own invention, not an independent fact of the world. The mathematical underpinnings of physical science depend on the sleight of hand of turning self-similar experience into self-identical objects.

It’s not a bad trick, and allows us to do many useful things, but buried within objective third person concepts like quarks and neutrons and laws of nature are more fundamental, richer processes of experience which are crushed when we pretend that the first person is just a perspectivally private version of the third person vantage. We can keep our third person science, but we must recognize that it is empty of meaning without a grounding in the creative generating process of first person awareness.

I recommend Evan Thompson’s book ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’

“Science, by design, objectifies the world and excludes the subjectivity of lived experience, but this exclusion means science cannot fully explain consciousness or account for its own foundations.Science depends on conscious subjects (scientists observing, measuring, reasoning), yet its methods treat subjectivity as something to be explained away.

Consciousness is not just another object in the world; it is the background condition that makes any objective inquiry possible.To overcome this blind spot, science needs to integrate first-person experience with third-person methods, rather than reduce or ignore it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science — noAxioms

Third person questions imply objective answers . Objectivity implies flattening subjective experience so as to produce concepts which are self-identical over time and across individual perspectives. Such temporally and spatially self-identical objects do not have an independent existence out there in the world. They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others, and ignoring everything about what each of us experiences form our own unique temporal and spatial vantage that we can’t force into the model of the ‘identical for all’ third person thing or fact. The abstracting activity we call third person objectivity is quite useful, but it is far from our primordial access to the world and how it is given to us.

There can be first person as well as third person science. The first person science doesnt abstract away what is genuine, idiosyncratic and unique to the perceiver in the moment of perceiving, and doesn’t pretend to be a fundamental route of access to what is real.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are. They are about how things show up for one, their modes of givenness. They explain what third person science takes for granted, that the objectivity of objects is constructed as much as discovered.

↪Patterner
To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle. — Apustimelogist

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In dealing with the non-living world, we make use of accounts which are quite useful to us in building workable technologies. But these same accounts, when applied to living organisms and parts of organisms, like brains, show their limits.

We may want a reductive explanation of brain activity for certain purposes, like studying individual neurons or clusters of neurons. But if we want a model to describe perceptual-motor processes and their relation to cognitive-affective behaviors, and the relation between individual cognitive-affective processes and intersubjective and ecological interactions, and we need to show the inseparability of these phenomena, including the inseparability of brain, body and environment, and emotion and cognition, we will want an account which does not isolate something we call ‘brain’ from this larger ecology, and then reduce its functioning to a causal ‘mechanics’.

We will need a model which understands consciousness as a kind of functional unification and integration of these inseparable processes. Applying a non- linear complex systems approach can be a good start, but even here we have to be careful not to make this too reductive.

I read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard. — noAxioms

You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. And I imagine that from your perspective it doesn’t help that Chalmers only claims to tell us what third person accounts can’t do, without offering a satisfying alternative model of causality or motivation we can apply to those natural phenomena ( first person experience) the third-person account cannot account for adequately.

But while Chalmers falls short in this regard, a range of philosophical accounts dating back 150 years to Dilthey’s hermeneutics, do offer concrete alternatives to material causality. Some, like Dilthey and embodied cognitive science, allow methods strictly applicable to the human and psychological sciences to sit alongside methods designed for the physical sciences. Others , such as Gadamer with his more radical hermeneutics, the intentional phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty , Husserl and Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and post-structuralism, see the methods of third person science as secondary to and derivative of the more primary accounts they offer.

Consciousness studies is a burgeoning field in philosophy of mind and psychology , and I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness, their predictive and explanatory usefulness is profoundly thin and impoverished in comparison with accounts which believe that third-person accounts are valuable, but they abstract from experience. Third person accounts describe patterns, correlations, or generalities that can be applied across people. However, they cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing. They must remain accountable to and enrich first-person experiencing, not replace it.

Here's a thing - what does "abduction" mean? Even the SEP article can't say. So now you claim it's just making up an hypothesis. So why not just call it "hypothesising"? Why the new name — Banno

My preferred approaches to philosophy of science find the concept of abduction problematic for a number of reasons. First, abduction is too rationalistic; real science is more anarchic. Second, abduction misses the paradigm-dependence of hypothesis generation. And third, abduction isn’t a universal logic but a practice-specific activity embedded in forms of life. Maybe this is at least somewhat consistent with your objections.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. The issue concerns what is reduction as much and maybe more than any particular model of consciousness.

Neither side of the divide is presented as a given. The frames of reference are incongruent — Paine

Good point. Chalmers is suspicious of reductionism because he sees the form of description on the basis of which consciousness would be reduced ( empirical causality, eliminative materialism) to be incompatible with the form of causality or motivation applicable to
consciousness. His proposed solution (panpsychism) lets us use empirically causal methods while at the same time honoring the peculiar status of consciousness by embedding consciousness within material things.

The phenomenological approach follows Chalmers in not wanting to reduce consciousness to material causality in eliminative fashion. But it departs from Chalmers in not wanting to maintain a dualism between third person causality and first person awareness. Its solution is to reduce material causality to subjective motivational processes. That is, it sees material causality as a secondary , derived abstraction, not as a method which deserves equal billing with consciousness.

. Maybe someone knows other approaches? — Astorre

There’s repentance. I don’t mean this in a religious sense, but as re-construal. The best way to appreciate anything in our life is to refresh its meaning for us. Simple attention won’t do this. Stare at anything long enough and it disappears. We must always re-construe in order to retain relevance. The world is amenable to an indefinite variety of ways we can make sense of it. When one is feeling bored, stuck in a rut, despondent or riddled with guilt for not appreciating others, the best route to gratitude is to take up audacity , re-invention and experimentation. Treat the self as a work of art in continual state of re-creation. Appreciate what you have through re-enchantment, and re-enchant through transformation.

Here’s a counter to apokrisis‘s treatment of causality from an enactivist perspective. I’m curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood.

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. In the enactive framework, context isn’t an add-on or backdrop but constitutive of meaning and action. The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. These causal relations are open-ended, historical, and enacted, not closed or total. Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. It’s not that the atom has freedom and the void constrains it; rather, the atom–void system is a co-defined relation, a process without independent parts.

Basic point being that analysis is a process of critical scrutiny, so the people interested in it generally want to really get to the bottom of things — boethius

Not only that, but when we compare difficult philosophical texts like Heidegger’s Being and Time with work aimed at a more popular audience, the latter will be of necessity be written in a more direct and less ambiguous style. There is pressure from the readership for the author to be polemical and hammer home some clear and likely controversial points. Writers like Dennett, Pinker and Dawkins are anything if not polemical and controversial. I’ve participated in many philosophy discussion groups, and the rule of thumb is that the more the material is aimed at a popular audience, the more likely it is to encourage polarized, oppositional forms of debate.

If you want humility and open-mindedness , you’re more likely to find it in a discussion of Heidegger, where no one is quite sure what he is getting at .

Don’t all of the people you mention share competence, and perhaps even innovation, in common?

How many people known as philosophers today would actually produce original work, do you think?

How would you go about defining what it means to be a philosopher? — Tom Storm

To be a philosopher means thinking philosophically, whether one does that in an exceptional or mediocre way. So what does it take to think philosophically? Ask the average person a profound question about the nature of existence (the nature of time and space, the origin of value and feeling) and they are likely to mention quantum physics and the block universe, quote Einstein or rehash the latest models in evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience. Why do they do this? Probably because the spread of the sciences into territory of questioning previously restricted to philosophical speculation has convinced many that philosophical reflection was used in the past as a poor substitute for ascertaining the hard empirical facts. According to this thinking , now that our sciences are advanced enough to tackle such questions, philosophy should be relegated to a secondary role as ‘’clarifying’ the logical implications of the latest brilliant scientific discoveries.

I was one of those people who believed that philosophy as ‘cutting edge’ knowledge was obsolete due to the success of science and its superior method, until I read Heidegger in my mid 20’s. This led me to a host of other contemporary philosophers whose understanding of the world I believe exceeds the grasp of the most advanced scientific inquiry. My point isn’t that the sciences are not capable of catching up. It is that to think philosophically is to recognize that science is inherently conventional. That is, there are certain starting presuppositions that it takes for granted and therefore does not submit to questioning. It is the role of philosophical inquiry to make explicit this implicit starting point and submit it to questioning.

I wonder what the minimum standard would be for someone to be called a philosopher?
— Tom Storm

Minimum standard, by my lights in the world we live in, is being paid to do it.

But surely you see how inadequate that standard is. It's just the minimum standard in the world we happen to live in (and it's likely the person paid to do it has expertise, especially given how competitive those roles are) — Moliere

And it shows how the world we live in has changed. Up until recently, most notable philosophers wrote outside of academic environments and lived off of other jobs or inheritances. These include
Maimonides
Machiavelli
Montaigne
Descartes
Spinoza
Locke
Leibniz
Rousseau
Hume
Schopenhauer
Kierkegaard
Peirce
Nietzsche

very cool pic

Ok, but doesn't that mean the "other America" you spoke of is 80-85% of the population? Is that what you meant? — frank

I don’t mean that literally 80-85% of the country is hostile to the philosophical and political values that urban America stands for. My point is that the cities give us the closest
thing to a consensus on these values, allowing us to think of them as representing a ‘country within a country’

↪Joshs
80% of the US population is considered urban., but Trump got 49.1% of the popular vote..

I think the community you're referring to is educated urbanites, probably mostly white, so it's the 45% of whites who didn't vote for Trump. The group to watch is Latinos, who are now 20% of the US population, and voted for Trump in larger numbers in 2024 than previously. — frank

I’m focusing on the high population-dense cities themselves, not ‘urban areas’ inclusive of vast stretches of sprawling conservative suburbs. The former are the communities I have in mind. Around 15-20% of Americans live within the city limits of the 50 largest U.S. cities by population.

All of the those places are failing, sorry to say. You are making my point. I live in one of them. — Fire Ologist

I’m curious. Which of the cities I listed do you live in? Do you live within the city limits or in a suburb? If you live within one of those cities I listed, you must be bombarded with viewpoints that are abhorrent to you. No wonder you feel they’re ’failing’.

What are the values unique to those cities that the Dems are fostering and building up but the repubs are resisting? What values and will promoting those values help make those cities flourish? — Fire Ologist

I’ve discussed the philosophical underpinnings of the spectrum of ideas on the left that runs from Hegel through Critical theory and that defines and organizes a range of political and social perspectives of the big cities. These philosophical underpinnings are not your cup of tea, so your criterion for flourishing will likely not be consistent with them. If you dont already, you deserve to live in the America where your philosophical values are shared by the lion’s share of your community. That way, you may be less tempted to engage in shrill competitive rhetoric concerning who is winning and who is losing. Don’t worry about our flourishing. We’ll figure that out in our own way. If our ways are failing you, you need to tend to the flourishing of your own community in your own way.

↪Joshs Very interesting analysis. How do you see this playing out over the next 4-8 years? — Tom Storm

My best guess is a sharp economic downturn and likely recession will ensue, and a collapse of the crypto and A.I. bubbles will hurt many average citizens economically and cause a backlash against the political leadership.

North, south, east coast, west coast, city, farm, black, white, little Italy, china town, rich/poor - the American system survived a massive civil war. We survived the 1960s and the murder if so many politicians, and 2020 elections and a maga insurrection. Nothing really new about a free nation’s people at odds with their own unity — Fire Ologist

This time is different. During the Civil War one crucial issue profoundly divided the north and south, but on so many other cultural issues the electorate was mixed , not segregated by geography. Therenwas much more a rural or city resident of Massachusetts had in common with a resident of Georgia than what divided them. In the 1960’s the country was at war with itself, but a large percentage of the Democratic voters in urban America were socially conservative. Most of those voters have since left the liberal cites for the more conservative South and the far flung suburbs, and joined MAGA. As a result, what had been a mixed electorate for the Democratic party from the 1930’s though the 1960’s , reflecting a wide mix of social values within the big cities , has now become ideologically purified by geography ( population density) to an extent we have never seen before in this country. In the 1960’s the average blue collar resident of Chicago or San Francisco spoke the ‘same language’ as a worker living in Cheyenne Wyoming. That is no longer the case.

Trump’s success is because people in the cities, in the suburbs, on the farms, of every economic class, of all types of sexual preference, in every color, Hispanic, Native American, etc, etc, etc - so many agree. Basic street facts, like who is male, and who is the bully, and who needs help, and who is full of shit all of the time (Crockett) - they can’t be hidden forever. Media is losing and the Dems are losing with them. — Fire Ologist

There you go again with who is winning and who is losing. The media you’re referring to is urban American , the Dems are urban America and I am urban America. You say people in the cities agree? Let’s see what they agree about. This is how urban America feels about Trump; 70-80% in these major cities rejected him in 2024.

1)New York
2)Chicago
3)San Francisco
4)Los Angeles
5)Boston
6)Philadelphia
7)Seattle
8)Minneapolis
9)Milwaukee
10)Washington D.C.
11) Baltimore
12) Portland

That’s an overwhelming expression of solidarity and agreement about a way of life reflecting the values of a country within a country. As an actively participating member of one of these liberal urban communities, what am I losing beside taxpayer support from that other America? I know what I am gaining. I see it as I walk around the neighborhoods. My community has pulled together to affirm its commitments, and protect its values against encroachment from that other America, and to welcome refugees fleeing restrictive policies in red states. My own view of the larger picture is that what started out in the 1960’s as tiny enclaves of hippies and leftist intellectuals in cities has spread over the past 60 years to become the strong majority in urban America and more progressive elements which began with small groups of academics in the 1980’s has furthered the urban shift to the left. I don’t see shrinking numbers over this 60 year time span but the opposite, a steady growth and the emergence of a new kind of city way of life. Trump would not have won if the rest of the country wasn’t becoming aware of this growth in numbers , and becoming alarmed by it. No amount of legislation or political intimidation will slow its continued spread.

At some stage one might grow to recognise oneself as a member of a community, to acknowledge the need in others to also overcome themselves.

And then one might begin to consider ethics. One might become an adult. — Banno

Or one might recognize that the subject is not pre-given; it is produced historically, socially, and psychologically through morality, culture, and power networks. Ethics isnt discovered at adulthood but inscribed through practices of subjectivation from the start.

The truth of the deep leftward bias of all legacy and main stream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Wash. Post, CNN, all things Hollywood) is the fulcrum behind Trump’s continued success and appeal - since 2016.

Libs refuse to see it. It’s a total blind spot. It’s why dems will continue losing outside of the areas where Al of their sheep flock — Fire Ologist

Why are liberal communities composed of sheep but your community isn’t? Should we judge these communities by who is ‘winning’ and who is ‘losing’ , as if either side is in a position to determine the objective correctness of the other’s social , political, ethical and spiritual views? Perhaps we need instead to respect the qualitatively different ways of life each chooses to organize themselves on the basis of.
We are not one country now, we are different cultures moving further and further apart. Urban America is a country within a country and all efforts now should be focused on creating as much separation between those communities as possible rather than urban America trying to appeal to conservative society. Trump’s success isn’t due to urban America getting anything ‘wrong’, any more than Erdogan’s or Orban’s or Le Pen’s or Nigel Farage’s success is due to urbanites in those countries making some mistake of political calculation.

We simply happen to be living though an era in which the cities around the world have rapidly transformed their way of life ( including Hollywood, the urban media hubs, and academic centers) while the more traditional cultures surrounding them have not had time to catch up. It’s not that they ‘have’ to catch up, or even that they have to see themselves as needing to change in any way. The point is that I thrive in my urban community and support its values , but would wither away in a conservative environment, and will do my upmost to contribute to widening the intellectual gulf between what my community stands for and what MAGA stands for. And I urge MAGA supporters and social conservatives in general to do everything they can to further the direction they believe they need to go in. Obviously this will go most smoothly if both sides eventually give up the idea that one side must be ‘ winning’ and the other ‘losing’.

I want to enjoy my community and also look forward to travelling to the hinterlands from time to time so I can be a tourist taking in their exotic ways, like visiting an Amish village.

I agree that when it comes to claims of knowledge, justification is required. On the other hand I know many things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture.
— Janus

And this resembles the "A or ~A" case, where it's difficult to see it in terms of justifications. Still, I think the conclusion we ought to draw from this is that we're not quite sure what a justification is. What sorts of reasons may play a part in justification? (We noted earlier that a "good justification" is very unclear, in many cases.) If you ask me for my justification in believing "I am having thought X right now" and I reply, "I am directly observing this occurrence as we speak," have I offered a justification? Perhaps so; that's one way of understanding what reasons count as justification, though I'd probably also need to say something about the previous reliability of my direct observations. Or we might conclude that "directly observing" and "having" are two ways of saying the same thing, so no actual reason has been offered. Then, if "I am having thought X" needs a justification, we'd have to look elsewhere. — J

In his final piece of writing, On Certainty, Wittgenstein describes how G.E. Moore asserts something quite close to what Janus claims, that we can know things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture. Moore uses as an example holding up one’s hand and stating ‘here is my hand’. He believes one can be certain of this without a need for justification. But Wittgenstein disagrees with Moore’s depiction of this form of certainty as a kind of empirical knowledge. He asserts instead that it is a matter of our enmeshment in a “form of life”, a hinge on the basis of which to organize facts rather than the ascertainment of those empirical facts by themselves.

If the idea is that self-refutation and contradiction are avoided because what is meant by terms like: truth, correctness, constraints, etc. is always changing, and so always equivocal, then it doesn't seem that it can be saying anything at all. Every point in the discourse would be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic can’t produce its laws, and you’re clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to ‘refute’ philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.

They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage.
— Joshs

In virtue of what is this "better?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forcing intricately and intimately flowing experience into the artificial straitjacket of reified conceptual schemes takes us out of our intimate engagement with others. This is because the fact that experience is constantly on the move doesn’t mean that we cannot approach it in terms of familiar, recognizable patterns and regularities. But the patterns must be permeable , open to variation without crumbling. The unethical is closely tied to treating morality in terms of laws, essences, facts or real foundations that flatten and thus do violence to the contextually unfolding way that situations present us with ethical issues. The more fluid, open and permeable to change our thinking is, the more we do justice to the real.

it seems there was a time during which life did not exist, just as there was a time during which we each individually did not exist. During that time period, it seems that the Earth did exist. Is it not possible for the Earth to have existed or to have a determinant shape, etc. prior to the advent of life and its schemas? No doubt, the empiricist-analytic view of a "view from nowhere" is flawed, but it doesn't seem to me to follow that, if that view is flawed, then truth and intelligibility are dependent upon man and his practices (or life and its practices).

It does not follow, for instance, that because the view from nowhere is flawed, and because one needs language to say "the Earth was round before life existed on it," and a mind to know this, that Earth could have no shape prior to the "schemas" etc. that allow for this to be known by — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here we can make use of the work of agential realists like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, as well as Deleuze. So far I have been talking about the way the world appears to us as a result of how we interact with it, and that the contingently changing nature of this interaction precludes notions of the way things really are independent of our participation in the world ( even the notion of subject -independence is itself dependent on perspective). They argue that , indepdenent of human involvement, things in the world don’t pre-exist their interactions. Just as human culture achieves a relative normative stability without needing to rely on notions of fixedly real things, so the world outside our involvement with it interacts with itself via configurative patterns which produce a relative stability for periods of time which gives it characteristics which we are tempered to interpret in abstractively fixed ways.

Intelligibility is arguably a prerequisite for understanding, not a product of understanding. But even if intelligibility is a product of understanding and will (pragmatic striving), I can think of no reason to think that it is a product of our act of understanding and willing (either individually or collectively) nor a product of the understanding and willing of life on Earth more generally.

A sort of Euthyphro dilemma seems to hold here. Is what is willed (pragmatically striven for) willed because it is good, or is it good because it is what is willed? If it's the former, then what is striven for must already be intelligible as desirable (good) prior to the act of willing. If it's the latter, we have a sort of inchoate voluntarism where the direction of the will (the pragmatic drive) is ultimately arbitrary in that it is grounded in no prior intelligibility, and is itself contingent. A pragmatism that is not oriented towards some end is not so much pragmatism, as a sort of sheer willing that generates its own end. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The ‘will’ doesn’t begin inside and then point outward toward a world; it is neither inside nor outside but in-between the two. We find ourselves willing in that we find ourselves moved, affected, motivated by the way things appear to us. This isn’t a stimulus-response model. We anticipate forward into new experience based on previous experience, and this anticipatory stance sets up constraints on how things emerge as what they are for us. But what emerges as the things we encounter always involves a dimension of surprise and novelty alongside recognizability.
The things we encounter strike us as funny, sad, boring, undesirable. Our own thoughts come to us in this same way. We don’t will to think what we think, we find ourselves already thrown into the thoughts. To want something is to sap we oneself wanting it. The desire arrives to one from an ourside, not from an inside.

So where do good and bad, better and worse come in here? We find ourselves desiring and striving, which simply means that we find ourselves ‘aiming. toward’ the fulfillment of what was anticipated. Emotional cries are crises of meaning and relevance. To anticipate into the next moment and be rewarded with an experience which is unfamiliar and incoherent is a kind of loss of self, and we call this loss of self , this being plunged into the emotional darkness of chaos and confusion, the ‘bad’. We don’t choose the good over the bad so much as find ourselves in situations of relative intelligiblity or incoherence and label the finding after the fact as what we ‘willed’.

Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist.
— Tom Storm

What "fails to work" and what is "useful" is defined in terms of current beliefs, desires, and opinions, no? So, if "not anything goes" because only "useful" practices survive, but "useful practices" are just whatever practices just so happen to be affirmed as useful, I am not sure what sort of limit this is supposed to generate. What is (truly) "useful" is itself a function of current beliefs, right?

Not only does this undermine the ability for "usefulness" to function as a sort of constraint on truth, I think it clashes with our intuitions. It seems possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful. But for it to be possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful at some time, it cannot be the case that the truth about what is useful is posterior (dependent upon) whatever current practice and belief affirms as useful. There has to be a distinction between reality and appearances/beliefs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your point is relevant to certain readings of pragmatism, wherein ‘usefulness’ is measured in terms of conformity between a belief and ‘ how things are’. But this is not how ‘use’ functions for writers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. They agree with you that we can only know whether a way of thinking is useful, does what we want it to, satisfies our goals, allows for clarity of understanding, corresponds to how things are, because we already bring to the situation a pre-understanding providing the criteria of usefulness. Their interest is in investigating where this pre-understanding comes from and how it changes.

That is, whether things turn out the way we plan, the world is always useful in that both our successes and failures, our validations and invalidations take place against the backdrop of a world which is fundamentally intelligible and familiar to us. They argue that this pre-understanding is not itself a belief that we measure against the way things are. Rather, it is already the way things are. That is to say, it is the overarching totality of relevance within which things can appear to us as correct or incorrect on the basis of particular criteria. It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use.

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity.
— Joshs

Yet this is itself a metaphysical position about the nature of intelligibility. If it is affirmed over competing understandings of intelligibility without argument, obviously that would be a sort of question begging. But to merely affirm it "alongside" other understandings without argument would still essentially do the same thing. Just because the position allows contrary positions to be "equally correct" doesn't mean it isn't contradicting them, for the opposing positions might themselves deny that both understandings are "equally correct" (because they deny this understanding of the grounding of intelligibility). Even the Protagorean relativist who asserts that "whatever anyone believes is true (for that person)" ends up making a claim that has implications for truth tout court.

Plus, it would seem to me that this particular metaphysical position should want to assert itself as "more correct" than others. Otherwise, wouldn't it fall victim to the criticism in the Theaetetus that, if it is impossible to be wrong, the sophist (as a profession, not a derogatory term) is the most useless sort of person, since teaching never improves our grasp of the truth — Count Timothy von Icarus

A human, a dog, a snake and a fish all inhabit their own behavioral niches. What if one thinks of these as akin to metaphysical positions? Leaving aside the evolutionary issues of long-term survival of lineages, does it make sense to say that the behavior niche the dog enacts , and the way its world is perceptually salient to it, is more correct than that of the fish? Each has their own functional norms of correctness (the behavioral criteria for the satisfaction of needs), so each species’ norms of correctness are equally adequate expressions of their mode of functioning. And what about the human? We set up cultural niches including sciences and technologies, and political and philosophical organizations. What would it mean to say that these knowledge niches are more correct than that of other species?

We know that our ability to represent stretches of time far into the past and future allows us to use language concepts in ways that other species can’t, but in what way is this better than what animals can do? In what way does this make us ‘higher’ animals? We could claim that we are capable of a complexity of social organization unavailable to other species, but what makes that better in a biological sense? Or we could argue that metaphysical positions can be ordered on the basis of complexity. We could add that a historical trajectory results in a kind of progress in social stability due to improvements in anticipatory understanding or some such. But making this claim would not require that we deem earlier stages of cultural evolution and their accompanying metaphysics as less ‘correct’, merely less advanced in the complexity of the niches they produce, but heading in the right direction. Key to claiming the superiority for one mode of thinking over others is that it include within itself the other modes of thinking in a kind of dialectical totalization ala Hegel

Such an assumption is problematic for writers like Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that whatever criteria of progress we use, whether complexity, stability-survival, rationality, moral goodness or conformity to the way things are, such criteria are subject to continual changes in meaning. And yet one can discern an underlying criterion of progress for these writers that appears to maintain its stability of meaning throughout cultural shifts. They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. Does this mean they consider their philosophies to be better than those of previous eras based on the criterion of accelerative self-transformation?

In a certain sense yes, but it is not as though they would then claim that the Medieval scholastic period was ‘better’ than the Greek era, the Enlightenment was better than the Scholastic period , the Modern period was even better than the Enlightenment, and postmodernism is better than all previous ways of thinking. Instead, they would argue that each metaphysical era exposes the limitations of what came before it, limitations that could only become apparent within a changed perspective. But the limitations attached to each era are unique to those periods. The ethical task of the postmodernists is defined by their relation to the limitations they expose in the thinking of their time. Every metaphysic holds within itself it’s own dangers, including postmodernism. Foucault wrote:

I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.

But most metaphysics do not set any boundaries for themselves. They speak to being qua being. So if they are all equally correct in their own domain (which is "everything") how is this not the affirmation of contradiction? More to the point maybe, if everything is "correct in its own context," how does this avoid pointing towards "anything goes?" And if some of these theories are right (their claims are affirmed) then the post-modern metaphysics of language and difference is wrong.

But this gets to point 3. "Truth" and "knowledge" seem to be being used equivocally here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity. A metaphysics speaks to being qua being via a stance on what it means to be. All stances are bounded. Metaphysical stances are ‘equally’ correct only in being differently correct. That is, the criteria and intelligibility of correctness changes from one metaphysical stance to the next. But we can’t choose to inhabit all stances at once , or observe them all from a sideways on or god’s eye perspective from nowhere.

Metaphysical stances don’t simply contradict each other. They are connected to each other by genealogical historical relations. New stances emerge
from older ones contingently , neither logically nor arbitrarily.

We ourselves inhabit a particular stance, from whose vantage we interpret history. This gives us skin in the game. But our perspective within that stance isn’t static, it is temporally extended. This means that "what is at stake" for us refers back to ongoing practices while remaining open to reinterpretation through future performances. The meaning of the stance we all participate in within a community is constantly extended, questioned and reinterpreted by each of us as we use it. So the existence of the partially shared social stance provides constraints on what matters to us and how it matters, what things mean and how they show up for us as intelligible, and prevents an ‘anything goes’ relativism, but the very use of the stance extends and redefines its basis.

If this is an equivocal use of truth and knowledge, then it also prevents either of these terms from being rooted in an essence.

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes."

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Poststructuralists, hermeneuticists, the later Wittgenstein and phenomenologists all recognize that there are certain assumptions in play when we lay out a truth-propositional statement. A central assumption is that the terms don’t change their sense as we attempt to build a chain of relations. When we add a predicate to a subject (A=A), we assume the sense of the first A doesnt change in the process of having it refer to the second A. The coherence of logical refutation depends on the continued self -identity of the elements of a proposition as we construct a whole out of the parts.

When you attempt to translate the idea that postmodern thinking “doesn't allow that "anything goes” because “constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop” into a truth propositional statement, you miss the essential point that the starting point for this assertion is not a view from nowhere, but the view from whoever is speaking , and the here and now of when they are speaking, what they are speaking about and how what they are speaking about shows up for them. The constraints are always discovered anew , with a new sense, in the actual immediate context of speech and thought. One doesn’t convey this in-context thinking as a set of self-identically fixed terms that are then glued together, and then recycled as a refied proof to be indefinitely referred back to as an established empirical truth.

The ‘proof’ of contextual constraints must be enacted over and over again in different contexts, each time producing a new sense of what it means to be a constraint and a truth. It may be hard to see how this amounts to anything more than ‘making stuff up’ while ignoring the real world, and it may be equally hard to see how any sort of stable understanding can be achieved such that scientific-technological and ethico-political progress is possible. But seeing movement and transformation of sense within the fixed terms of logic doesn’t keep them from doing what they are designed to do and show. Rather, it enriches our understanding of what we are doing when we create logical and empirical identities, categories and truths, and opens up paths of intelligibility unavailable otherwise.

It's simply affirming post-modern hermeneutics above all competitors as a sort of default, i.e., absolutizing it, and going from there. It seems to me that this is often done with phenomenology as well. A phenomenology that supports a metaphysics of sheer giveness and difference is affirmed, and alternative phenomenology (e g., Plotinus, the Scholastics from whence modern phenomenology gets its terminology, Hegel, and contemporary Catholic phenomenologists, etc.) are dismissed. Now, I won't claim that something like Hegel's argument that sheer giveness is actually contentless and that it is the higher levels of understanding (Absolute Knowing) that should be affirmed (rather than dismissed as "reification") is air tight against later "post-modern" phenomenology, but neither does it seem like the alternative has a decisive refutation of it. If anything, the issue seems undecidable, and metaphysics (acknowledged or not), aesthetics, and a commitment to certain notions of freedom seem to be driving the choice between the two.

Obviously, if we assume a view like Rorty's is true, we can justify it as true. Why should we accept it as true when it refutes itself though? Why should we accept it as true when most don't, given what it says about truth? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it misses the point to treat postmodern hermeneutics and phenomenology as making arguments designed to ‘refute’ or dismiss the opposition. Rather, they claim to offer a way of seeing that leaves intact the claims of alternative philosophies. You can keep your preferred metaphysics. What the hermeneuticist and phenomenologist want to know is, can you also adopt their peculiar stance which at the same time honors a realist , physicalist or foundationalist approach, and opens up a dimension not opposed to it but beneath it, running alongside it to enrich its sense? If you can’t adopt this stance, this doesn’t make your preferred philosophy incorrect. It is perfectly correct and true, as far as it goes and within the bounds it sets for itself.

Heidegger has a lot of Kierkegaard in his ideas, though he doesn't like to admit it (See Caputo on this in his Radical Hermeneutics). All 20th century phenomenology follows through on K in one way or another in this dialectic between eternity and finitude — Constance

Less than you might think. It’s first necessary to understand the radical way in which Heidegger departs from K. You won’t find this in Caputo’s religious hermeneutical reading of Heidegger, since Caputo entirely misses this radical turn of Heidegger’s ( and Derrida’s as well. I highly recommend Martin Hagglund’s The Radical Evil of Deconstruction: a reply to John Caputo).

"truth," "relevance," "significance", these aren't mapping onto features of the world so much as they're tools we use for various purposes in different contexts.
— Joshs
How can they be tools if they do not in some way "map" onto the world? — Banno

They’re not tools for mapping onto objects, but for enacting new forms of sense in our material and discursive interactions with the world. A hammer doesn’t “map” onto nails. Its usefulness lies in how we employ it to drive nails.Truth is a tool that in some contexts we use to check agreement with facts. In other contexts, we use it to contrast honesty vs lying; in others, to resolve disputes. In addition to the sense of truth as empirical/factual, one can think of grammatical/conceptual truth, performative/expressive truth, aesthetic/evaluative truth, narrative/interpretive truth and many other senses of meaning of that ‘same’ word.

Wittgenstein would emphasize that these aren't competing theories of truth but different tools serving different purposes in our linguistic practices. The mistake is assuming all these uses must share some common essence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ There’s no one metaphysical object “truth” that the word latches onto.

↪Janus You prefer utility to truth?

Do you think you can maintain that distinction? The truth doesn't care about what is useful
— Banno

But ‘caring’ seems to go along with truth. Pesky concepts like mattering , relevance and significance are baked in whenever we ‘use’ the word truth. And those words dont care about universal meaning abstracted away from contextual sense — Joshs

↪Joshs And? — Banno

My point is that the word ‘truth’ doesn’t have any aspect of its meaning that transcends the context of its actual use. It’s not just that truth is affected by contextual relevance, it’s that there is no categorical meaning of the word ‘truth’ that exists outside of the grammar of its use. I’m not just saying that our access to truth is contextual, but that the very concept of truth is nothing over and above how we actually use the word "truth" in particular language games. There's no essence of truth waiting to be discovered, only the diverse ways we employ the concept in different contexts.

When you say “truth doesn't care about what is useful," you seem to be treating truth as something with its own independent nature. But this very statement only makes sense within a specific language game where we contrast truth with utility. The meaning isn't pointing to some metaphysical feature of truth itself, but emerges from how we've learned to use these concepts in opposition to each other. Our concepts don't get their meaning by corresponding to independent realities, but through their role in our forms of life. So "truth," "relevance," "significance", these aren't mapping onto features of the world so much as they're tools we use for various purposes in different contexts.

↪Janus You prefer utility to truth?

Do you think you can maintain that distinction? The truth doesn't care about what is useful — Banno

But ‘caring’ seems to go along with truth. Pesky concepts like mattering , relevance and significance are baked in whenever we ‘use’ the word truth. And those words dont care about universal meaning abstracted away from contextual sense.

It is hard to know how much is about splitting the past and future, or how much is holding on to the consequences of what has happened and likely occurrences in the future. It may be possible to switch this off, but awareness of the past casts a shadow, especially on mood. For example, if I had a bad day it may effect me for some future days. If I had some disagreement with someone it will have to be faced. If I have spent too much money one day I am likely to run short later — Jack Cummins

When one talks about experiencing the past or the future , one emphasizes a certain style of approach , a certain mood or attitude. I am ‘pre-occupied’ rather than just being occupied with my future. I am ‘dwelling on’ rather than flowing though the past. I suggest what characterizes these experiences as negative dwelling on and pre-occupation isn’t their temporal position as past or future but the way we move through recollection or anticipation. Since I hold to the view that recollection is a constructive activity, I don’t give it lesser status in relation to the supposed freshness of the now. Recollection is essential to imagination and thus creative thought. As far as anticipating into the future , this also depends in part both on recollection and experience of the present. If we stare into a night sky and let our mind drift off into vast futures , it can give us a sense of profundity peace view of breadth of perspective. It can make the problems of the now fade into insignificance.
How can it do this if it is not keeping us within the now?

Because the ‘now’ is the flow of nows, and this flow is always characterized by a style, an attitude, a mood. It doesn’t matter whether this mood is generated from a reflection on a long ago event , an event far off in the future or one occurring right this moment. What matters is how we are understanding the flow of events to unfold one out of the previous. Are they harmoniously intercorrelated one with the next so as to make some kind of referential sense to us, or are they a puzzle to us , a chaos of unpredictability and alienation? This is what determines ether our experience of the ‘now’ is enjoyable or miserable and isolating.

There are times when we feel stuck in our thinking and our feeling, for instance when we are depressed, and typically this stuckneas is inescapable regardless of whether we dwell in memories , focus on the present or imagine into the future. What is often needed to snap us out of this depression is to create a fresh meaningful way forward. Being in the moment isn’t enough. It’s HOW we are being in the moment. This can be accomplished from out of any of the three temporal modes , but will ultimately involve all three. I rethink my past in relation to a changed present(sometimes just rethinking the past will change one’s present) , which anticipates freshly into the future.

Or one could say keeping one’s present from becoming a stale, stuck recycling of habits of thought involves dipping into the future in order to reinvent one’s past.

God is not a seiendes (being); a claim Heidegger would have seen repeated explicitly over and over by the Patristics if he had made it further back than the nominalists (e.g., the opening of Eriugena's Periphyseon). You cannot plop the Trinity on a Porphyrean tree alongside the world. Ipsum esse subsistens, not ens supremum, i.e., act not thing. God as an in-itself is a category error. Teleology doesn't come from above, but from within, through participation in infinite plentitude.

Likewise, knowledge is not the imposition of the "in-itself," but participation in the Logos. To speak of the "in-itself" at all often gets written off as a capitulation to modern univocity. It is God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28; repeated at every liturgy). The groundedness of ethics here is not an external in-itself, but being as intelligible, given, and above all gift. This isn't violence against difference, but the very gift and sustainment of its intelligibility (the "virtual" being a secularized paradoy of participation in critiques), which is grounded in the relational love of three persons (not a static in-itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god?

This narrative is not a fiction in our lives. We have to believe in its reality. Otherwise our own identity would be unmoored.
So my pragmatism doesn’t put an end to the need for a transcendent narrative. It just opens the way to a self-conscious discussion - a philosophical discussion - of the evolution of the jumble of such narratives that we find being handed down. — apokrisis

You may believe in the reality of these narratives, but you don’t believe each is transcendent in itself. You believe they are historically contingent. What is transcendent for you is the ‘semiotic technology’ of becoming, what grounds the fact that “social theory tells us why humans have to organize under transcendent narratives”.

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis

At a certain point these begin to sound awfully similar. Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss…