And don't forget George Berkeley, the Irish priest who thought material things were just malarkey. God saved us all in his thinking as well.
I’m with Peirce in thinking that we shouldn't doubt in philosophy what we don't doubt in our hearts (which I take to refer to how we act and what we do, regardless of what we may say). . — Ciceronianus

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Peirce buttressed his epistemic realism with a belief in God. I should also mention that Dewey, James and Mead ‘doubted’ the grounding of Peirce’s ‘pragmaticism’.

So although the philosophers in question may figure something out to remedy their "doubt" the question remains why they "doubt" in the first place, which it seems comes down to a belief that we just are incapable of knowing by nature. — Ciceronianus

And you are arguing that we are capable of knowing. And what is knowing? It would seem that for you it is dependent on a process of weighing evidence, of having a belief, theory, expectation validated by reference to the world around us. I mentioned earlier that your own grounding of everyday knowledge in assured belief may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies. The doubt I have in mind is not a denial that we can know things through evidence-based methods, but a doubt that belief-validation is the fundamental basis of everyday understanding. There is remarkable agreement between the later Wittgenstein and your pal Heidegger on this, as Lee Braver explains:

For Heidegger,

“…nothing exists in our relationship to the world which provides a basis for the phe­nomenon of belief in the world. I have not yet been able to find this phenomenon of belief. Rather, the peculiar thing is just that the world is “there” before all belief. The world is never experienced as something which is believed any more than it is
guaranteed by knowledge. Inherent in the being of the world is that its existence needs no guarantee in regard to a subject. . . . Any purported belief in it is a theoretically
motivated misunderstanding. This is not a convenient evasion of a problem. The question rather is whether this so-called problem which is ostensibly being evaded
is really a problem at all.”

It’s not, of course, that we don’t believe in the world, but rather that belief is an inappropriate way of cashing out our usual being-in-the-world. Wittgen­stein gives an uncannily similar assessment of the foundational framework within which all of our actions and thoughts take place, but which itself does not belong in the arena of reasoning, justification, and belief:

“the language-game . . . is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unrea­sonable). It is there—like our life.”

There are two good reasons why we are under no obligation to dem­onstrate the validity of our belief in the external world: first, as discussed above, because the world is not external; and second, because we don’t believe in it. Not because we’re skeptical, but because our relationship takes place at a much deeper level, so that to approach it in epistemic terms is to commit a category mistake.

“To have faith in the Reality of the “external world,”
whether rightly or wrongly; to “prove” this Reality for it, whether adequately or in­adequately; to presuppose it, whether explicitly or not—attempts such as these . . .
presuppose a subject which is proximally worldless or unsure of its world, and which must, at bottom, first assure itself of a world.” (Heidegger)

It seems to me you’re trying to arrive at the conclusion these two reach without taking the extra step they take in bypassing epistemic belief entirely. But then, the price you pay for taking this step may not be worth it to you. By giving up epistemic belief as the ultimate basis of knowing in favor of language games, you eliminate skepticism concerning the existence of the world, but you turn that world into a place of relativism. After all, if evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real, then my culture’s world doesn’t have to jibe with your culture’s world. One doesn’t doubt one’s own world , but doubts that this world is the same one as another’s, and doubts that the world as it is for me now is the same one that I will
comprehend at a later date. One might wonder why anyone would find such a philosophy appealing. From an ethical point of view, while it destroys the idea of a ‘same’ world of universal truths, it opens up a path toward tolerance and empathy toward those with alien values that is not available to common sense realist thinking about ethics.

It seems to me that the view that we can never know the extent to which we (I don't think our minds are separate from us) make contact with the rest of the world is far more radical than the view that we do. The latter is based on what actually takes place to our knowledge when we interact with the rest of the world; the former is based on the belief that what takes place when we do so doesn't matter. What actually happens when we interact with the "external world" is apparently of no value. — Ciceronianus

I think that what actually happens when we interact with the world is taken into account by all of the philosophies which
you accuse of affectation in their doubting. This is why they all come up with explanations for why the world makes sense to us. For Descartes God ensures that we have rational facilities which allow us to tell truth from error in our dealings with things. For Kant, it was our innate categories which steered us in the right direction. You undoubtedly have your own explanation as to why we can reliably make sense of our relations with the world. I’m assuming you jettison (doubt) divinely-based a prioris of rationality in favor of empirically-based, biological foundations.

You’ll notice that in order to assert whatever new and improved ground for reason a philosopher is embracing, they have to show why the previous era’s assumptions should be placed in doubt. For instance, although Descartes may have done an awkward job of it , he needed to place in doubt the basis of medieval assumptions concerning knowledge in order to advance his alternative. Similarly, once you put Descartes’ divine source of cogitation into doubt, you take away his justification for rationality. And once you place into doubt Kant’s transcendental categories, you need a new basis for the relation between our conceptual schemes and the world. Your own pragmatically-based grounding of everyday knowledge may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies and psychologies.

When we say we can't know what the world really or actually, I think we make certain assumptions, the primary of which is the assumption that there is something that is real behind what we experience which can't be determined. Something hidden from us because of our nature. It's a kind of religious view, perhaps. — Ciceronianus

It’s a metaphysical view which formed the basis of thinking for the sciences until recently. It also lends support to particular religious perspectives. The metaphysics dependson the concept of substantiality. Mind and matter are composed of substance. To be a substance is to have intrinsic content, qualities, attributes that persist as self-identical, independently of their interactions with other aspects of the world. Since the mind, with its intrinsic , substantial qualities, differs from the substantial stuff of the external world, its representations of the world will always leave doubt concerning what remains intrinsic to external objects, and thus hidden from the mind’s eye. The question will always be left open as to what extent the mind makes contact with external substance. We only escape this doubt when we cease to assume the idea of intrinsic substance, and opt instead for a radical interconnectedness of subject and object ( Hegelian dialectics, phenomenology, pragmatism, hermeneutics).

First contraceptive pills came to the market in 1960.

That was a medical advance that had an impact of it's own, even if other societal changes did matter (as for example condoms have been around for quite a long time) — ssu

It certainly did. On the other hand, what sort of pill do you think influenced this song lyric from the band The Byrds?

"Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?

All my two-dimensional boundaries were gone,
I had lost to them badly,
I saw that world crumble and thought I was dead,
But I found my senses still working.

And as I continued to drop through the hole,
I found all surrounding,
To show me that joy innocently is,
Just be quiet and feel it around you.

And I opened my heart to the whole universe,
And I found it was loving,
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made,
Scientific delirium madness.

I will keep falling as long as I live,
Ah, without ending,
And I will remember the place that is now,
That has ended before the beginning ...

Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?"

The skepticism that questions the "external" world (as if we were not already world) would be, in a certain sense, the closure feigned by the subject in the absolutely immanent monad. A subject who believes he can distinguish himself absolutely from something else that he calls the "external world."… I claim a meaning of "objectivity" that is discovered by the impossibility of closure of the subject in the monad. This impossibility is what grounds the theoretical activity of the subject and forces him to be oriented to an other (which is also the world), including himself as another in the case of self-knowledge. — JuanZu

You apparently consider Kant to be a proponent of this latter kind of objectivity. But doesn’t Kant ‘s thinking, in its own way, lead to skepticism? Doesn’t he retain a gap between the thing in itself and our concepts?

The civil rights movement was the only substantive thing about the 1960s counterculture. Everything else was fluff. We are a far cry from all the drugs, wars and politicians of the 6070s, but the civil rights are here to stay. — Merkwurdichliebe

To me the politics was the least interesting aspect of the counterculture. What fascinated me were the new philosophical, spiritual, social and sexual attitudes it spawned.

I think the 2 biggest causes of the 1960s counter culture were the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights — Relativist

A central element of the counter culture was the rise of the hippies. The epicenter of the hippie counterculture in the U.S. was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and to a lesser extent NYC’s East Village. The hippies were generally apolitical and weren’t protesters. So while the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement helped to draw people to the hippies, their origins have to do more with a combining of the Beat philosophy of the 1950’s and the inspiration of lsd and other psychedelic drugs, along with rock and roll.

Is there not in all philosophy and science an intention of truth, of objectivity, of universality of discourse? Therefore, isn't the skeptic's doubt a gesture in a certain sense that is anti-philosophical and anti-scientific? Doesn't it necessarily fall into the liar's paradox? Doubting the world would be like cutting the branch on which I am sitting, waiting for the tree to fall and not the branch. — JuanZu

Isnt it precisely the intention to objectivity that lends itself
to skepticism? Since Descartes the modern formulation of the subject-object relation depends on a gap that courts doubt.

These things exist through a sort of consensus, or consensual understanding, and they aren't simply arbitrary as they have some kind of foundation in our nervous systems. When you feel shame, for example, you blush and you can feel it right down to your bones, it affects you physically. This isn't simply an imaginary or arbitrary phenonemon, and it's not merely about preferences or an intellectual exercise — GRWelsh

Don’t imaginary phenomena and fictive stories express themselves in terms of bodily feelings? Are you saying we are pre-wired physiologically for the reinforcement of certain moral attitudes? Or is it rather that such somatic manifestations are merely expressions of socially constituted preferences? ( We blush because we are embarrassed, we are embarrassed because we construe situations in a certain culturally and personally contingent way so as to feel shame) . Is there an intellectual
exercise which is not accompanied by appropriate affective tonality?

Well, but that's just it -- you don't. We stipulate that your listener can't tell the difference. You may have the intention, but it's not expressed. BTW, I agree that we're going to need some appeal to intention as a way of explaining what's going on, but I'm not sure a hardcore OL proponent would — J

Is the issue here that if we stipulate word use as strictly shared , then we have no way to explain hidden meaning and personal point of view? Wittgenstein certainly wouldn’t claim that word use is identically shared meaning.

Let’s take Ken Gergen’s social constructionist take on Wittgenstein:

“Each of the numerous ways in which I may respond will attribute or lend to your utterance a specific kind of meaning. The utterance has no commanding presence in itself. Its meaning is revealed only in the manner of my response--in the coordination between my response and your utterance. Still, we should not conclude that I create your meaning. For my responses are not in themselves meaningful or, rather, they are not full of meaning ready for transfer. Absent the utterance of your proposals, my seeming acts of disagreement lapse into nonsense.”

Gergen makes room for lying by arguing that the liar is trying to navigate between two disparate discursive communities. The lie results from their being alienated from one community. The above quote, however, still is true of the liar’s words even though their interlocutor understands their sense differently than the liar intends them.

The meaning of a word is its linguistic use. That's what Wittgenstein tries to show in his Philosophical Investigations. How can meaning be anything else?
— Michael

Easily. If I promise you something but don’t mean it – that is, I’m lying – this use is indiscernible (in that moment, and assuming a talented liar) from a sincere promise. So what makes the difference in meaning? Indeed, our aggrieved “ordinary language” response to such a situation, if it's revealed, is, “You didn’t mean it!” So what’s going on here? — J

My intention to lie is different from the use of my words in discourse. In the moment of my promise to you , I express my intention to lie, but the specific meaning of my lying words only emerges for me in the actual interaction with you as you respond to my words. It doesn’t matter that you take my words differently than I do. For both of us, the interaction determines the use of our words.

Phenomenology insists there are objects in the world that are not me/ Itis just that when one thinks in the phenomenlogical attitude and out of the naturalistic one, the world becomes a very different place. — Astrophel

It certainly does. How would you interpret the meaning of transcendence as Husserl uses it to refer to such entities as spatial objects? For instance, when he says that a real object like a ball is transcendent to the various perspectives of it that we actually see? Does he mean the ball is external to the constituting ego, or that we constitute its transcendence via an idealizing gesture immanent to the ego?

Again, pain, joy and all of the ooo's and ah's and ughs of our existence have this moral dimension such that when such a value is in play, we are not dealing with mere social constructs. — Astrophel

No, we’re dealing with personal constructs, which to say that emotional pain and pleasure are inextricably bound up with the breakdown of our constructs to make sense out of the chaos of events. Moral emotions like anger and guilt express our struggles to cope with the changes in others and ourselves which take us by surprise, which force us to choose between a sweeping overhaul of our ways of understanding them and trying to put the genie back in the bottle by demanding conformity to our original expectations. Unfortunately most approaches to morality take the latter route.

Got a phone or internet connection? Someone who believed in moral realism made that.

A car or drive on public roads? Someone who believed in moral realism made that.

Ever used a band-aid? Been to public school? Read a book? Watch a YouTube video? Eat anything beyond a poorly cooked hunk of raw animal flesh? Yup. Provided by a moral realist. — Outlander

You’re conflating nihilism and ‘nothing matters’ sentiments with moral relativism. I’m not a moral realist, and yet I believe strongly in moral progress. In fact I dont think it’s possible to achieve optimum social harmony until we jettison moral realism in favor of ways of ethical thinking that aren’t dependent on blame and culpability, which are presupposed by moral realism.

↪Michael ↪Michael The only difference is that some sentences use "is" and some use "ought", and that this verb indicates how we are using the word: the statements which use "is" have a direction of fit from the words to the world. What we say is made true or false because of the states of affairs of the world. It doesn't get much more specific than "states of affairs", I believe, unless we want a metaphysical exposition of facts — Moliere

In trying to relate the logical, propositional view with a psychological perspective, I start from the thought that ‘ought’ and ‘should’ arise where there is an indeterminate situation, with at least two outcomes being possible. In science, when we say a certain outcome ought to ensue, we mean that it is statistically likely given our knowledge of the facts involved. When we say a moral outcome ought to ensue, we dont mean one outcome is more likely than the alternatives, but that we prefer one outcome over the others. Where things get tricky from a psychological perspective is when we compare the grounds for our moral preference with the grounds for considering one empirical outcome more likely than another. Even if we believe that moral preferences can be justified on the basis of something more than whim, the social realities we might argue bind our moral preferences ( people shouldn’t happily torture dogs) would seem to be a different category than the empirical realities binding our scientific oughts. But is this distinction justified? If we say the direction of fit for empirical oughts is from the word to the world, aren’t we forgetting that the world we are relying on is already defined on the basis of the social reality of a discursive paradigmatic scheme? So it seems in both the case of the empirical ‘is’ and the moral ‘ought’ , we are relying on a grounding in a social reality that is itself the product of a pragmatic, contingent coordination of values.

A buddhist thinker likens the passage of spirit from one form to the next like the transmission of fire between two pieces of wood… All things being equal, would you rather trust the ethic of someone whose actions are premised around the belief that, when you're dead you're gone. Or someone who believes in the idea of an ongoing responsibility for deeds? — Pantagruel

China has the largest buddhist population in the world, but this doesn’t seem to have prevented them from also being the world’s highest emitter of carbon, surpassing the U.S. So much for ongoing responsibility for deeds.

I think what you say may be correct in the case of Kuhn's incommensurability /"conceptual schemes". Scientists construct models of how the world may be beyond the limitations of direct observation. It’s not just about fitting labels to observations; scientific models operate in the opposite way too in the sense that they stipulate what can and might happen in certain situations. We try to make sense of observations by constructing models of worlds which is not directly observable. Different scientists may happen to be drawn to different models that say completely different things about the world — Apustimelogist

I’m inclined to say that for Kuhn it’s not a question of a theoretical scheme, or an aspect of it, being beyond the limits of direct observation, but of direct observation being in itself an element of discursive practice. What we observe cannot be divorced from methods of measure and apparatus of observation. They are intrinsic to the meaning of what is directly observed. This is where Davidson gets confused, I think. He understands schemes as either fitting or organizing “sense data, surface irrita­tions or sensory promptings”. While it is certainly true that for Kuhn scientific practices and theories organize their subject matter, the content they organize does not consist of such stuff supposedly external to discourse.

Joseph Rouse puts it this way:

“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

From my perspective, what people like Wittgenstein and Quine seemed to do is take away the foundation out from underneath meaning and justification in both language and knowledge. Under these perspectives, everything becomes about practise but there becomes no fact of the matter about the reasons for people's behavior. The way forward from there then seems to be learning empirically, scientifically exactly why and how people behave, use language, learn, perceive, how brains work, etc. I've actually always thought these philosophers (Kuhn too) feel like they resonate amicably with the brain and mind sciences. — Apustimelogist

Isnt the upshot here, the concept so difficult for many to grasp, that conceptual schemes don’t represent a pre-given world but enact a world? That is to say, the reason we can’t link different schemes back to the one ‘same’ world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. Rather than funneling back to a unitary source, they are themselves the sources of new differentiations, new objects and worlds of meaning.

I do think there was a strangely fast break in the 60s, and though that decade is definitely the focus of many documentaries, etc. I think that the rapid cultural shift that happened can't be overstated. It is fascinating and lends itself to philosophical questions as to how much impact an event can have in the broader culture. Is it more causation or more correlation? Without going too much into how much any event can be considered a "cause", I would propose that the Kennedy assassination at least correlated strongly with a radical cultural shift that came immediately after. — schopenhauer1

I think it was mainly the baby boomers driving that rapid change. I also think that the best way to chronicle the transformation is through the evolution of rock music, which dictated attitudes, fashion and politics. Between 1962 and 1969 rock music reinvented itself on a yearly basis. Given the fact that the oldest boomers were in their late teens when Kennedy was assassinated, it’s not surprising that 1964 seems to herald a sharp acceleration of musical and cultural change. After all, innovators like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were just starting out in 1962, and reached their creative peak around 1966. I think it’s pure coincidence that this seems to come on the heels of the assassination.

Obviously, if we're to believe the official story, we must also believe in X-men's Nightcrawler as the shooter. But the members of this forum seem to be okay with official stories — Vaskane

Humans arent as clever as conspiracy theorists think. Can you think of a single conspiracy that was able to keep their secret for 60 years?

it's much the same point as Wittgenstein made in On Certainty; one might doubt something, but one cannot sensibly doubt everything; since then one must doubt the very stuff that makes doubt possible.

One can sort the shirts in the cupboard in a different way, but that would remain a sorting of the shirts. There would still be shirts, and so commonality. Two different ways of sorting the cupboard are not incommensurate. So one cannot make sense of incompatible schema in this way. — Banno

Yes, the meaning of the shirts already bound up with the integrated set of pragmatic relations that includes what they are being used for and how and where they are stored. In relation to this, I understand Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions as pragmatic presuppositions on which something like the meaning of a shirt hinges. Doubt, unworkability and breakdown get their intelligibility from within a totality of relevance uniting particulars on the basis of a network of ‘in order to’. But this totality of relevance isn’t grounded by some link to an external cause. The causes are within the totality and the totally is perspectival.

If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences.
— Joshs

Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but let’s be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science — J

When I say ‘concerned with’ , I don’t mean the way scientists have traditionally explained what they are doing when they do science. A central aspect of Husserl’s project was to show how we construct the idea of a world external us and then live naively within that construction, making the constructed the ground for the construing process. But the external is internal to the construing process.
m

it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, it’s no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isn’t observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy! — J

You should check out physicist Karen Barad’s ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ for an alternate reading. She argues, updating Bohr, that every aspect of the universe is observer-dependent, but this agency is not restricted to living observers.

Do you think that the 60s counterculture in America would have played out the way it did if Kennedy was not assassinated? Clearly there is a sharp cultural divide between the 60s prior to 1964 and after. The mid and then precipitously in the late 60s, the counterculture became more prominent. This went surely hand-in-hand with the evolution of various things- Civil Rights Movement, the beatniks (or just the "Beats" were existential writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and can perhaps be associated with 20s writers like Hesse, Elliot, etc.). — schopenhauer1

It might have been the biggest cultural transformation that took place in history in the shortest amount of time between the years of 1963-1969. I'm trying to think of a time where more change could have occurred in that short amount of time in terms of social mores, economic and social legislation, and forms of dress and speech. Perhaps the 20s comes close. — schopenhauer1

Perhaps the Kennedy assassination was as much a symptom as a cause of the rapid changes that went down in the 1960’s. A feeling of impending unhingedness was in the air already in 1960, hinted at in popular entertainment via movies like Psycho, and 1962’s Manchurian Candidate. The Twilight Zone was an interesting example. Its power to disturb depended on conformist assumptions carried over from the 1950’s of a single reality. To venture into the terrain of alternate realties, to be a freak, was to descend into terrifying chaos. 10 years later this clinging to the one true reality had been defeated. The counterculture motto was to proudly let one’s freak flag fly.

I would not underestimate the role of lsd in catalyzing and accelerating this shift in mindset from conformity to the embrace of weirdness. Lsd was legal until 1966, and in the the early ‘60’s was given to many volunteers on the West Coast as part of CIA mind control research. The writer Ken Kesey was one of these volunteers, and it changed his life. Tom Wollfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test chronicled how the relatively small 1950’s beatnik counterculture was ‘mass produced’ for a generation of baby boomers through the formation of the hippie counterculture centered around San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and Kesey’s merry pranksters . The perfect vehicle for spreading the gospel of lsd was rock music. The acids tests, one of the origins of the modern rock concert, were wild gatherings replete with a giant vat of Kool- aid laced with lsd (unbeknownst to some attendees). Psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead cut their teeth on these events and spread the gospel to the hinterlands through AM radio. Many prominent figures claimed that lsd changed their entire way of looking at the world. Among those was Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, who was convinced that dosing all of the world’s political leaders would end war. The worldviews of John Lennon and George Harrison were so radically transformed by the drug that they feared they could no longer relate to Paul McCartney, which induced him to try it.
The documentary Berkeley in the 60’s has a scene in which it becomes apparent that the old school political activists at Berkeley have suddenly become ‘psychedelicized’. A narrator recounts how they went from singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’, marking the rise of a hybrid of activist and hippie, the Yippies, a melding of Berkeley politics and Haight Ashbury counterculture.

I don’t think lsd in itself was responsible for the profound changes in ways of thinking that happened in that decade. Rather , it acted as a source of inspiration for some of those who were already headed in that direction. The Berkeley documentary articulates this well. It was a generation looking to find themselves, and over the course of that decade they became self-consciously aware. For instance, initially, the goals of campus activists were restricted to narrow changes within the system. They saw themselves as connected linearly with previous generations of leftists. But over time they realized that what they were onto was a sweeping rethinking of all values, political, aesthetic, social , sexual and spiritual, touching on all aspects of life. Lsd can help loosen attachments to old ways of thinking, but only if one is already wanting to go there.
It’s ironic that younger generations now associate baby boomers with right wing thinking, which reflects the fact that only a small percentage of baby boomers at gatherings like Woodstock were really committed to countercultural ideals.

The world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it.
— Joshs

Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have to consist of, in order for us to understand how it's separable from apparatuses, language, etc., and how it can have the kind of agency that could "speak back." — J

Can something both belong and not belong to a framing category at the same time? Can concepts like relevance, significance and mattering lead us to such a notion of a world whose very ‘outsideness’ and subject-independence is what it is only as a variation of sense with respect to our concerns and purposes? If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences. Perhaps the world we ARE concerned with does not pre-exist the ways in which we interact with it, but is instead produced ( and changed) as what it is for us only in actual interactions. Perhaps our interest in the world is not in recovering pre-existing features from it but in enacting a world in felicitous ways. Only such an enacted world can speak back to us in our own language.

This strange way of thinking about subject-world relations is common to enactivist psychology, phenomenology, the later Wittgenstein, poststructuralism and hermeneutics.

↪Joshs Are you sure Rouse is arguing here for the impossibility of pre-linguistic or pre-theoretical experience?…
The second thing I see Rouse doing is questioning what he calls the “near side” of the scheme-content duality. That is, our schemes and theories are no more innocent of empirical input than our experiences are of conceptual input. But again, this wouldn’t necessarily show that the empirical input has no theory-independent existence. — J

Rouse believes that we are never dealing with anything theory independent when we observe the world empirically. This does not mean that what we observe is nothing but what we have already schematized. What it means is that the world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it.

Rorty is saying that there’s always that sharp separation, even at the most primitive or “innocent” levels. To claim otherwise, to appeal to Wang’s common-sense experience, with its built-in and supposedly unavoidable theoretical elements, is to “change the name of the game.” We’ve done some sleight-of-hand and imported our scheme disguised as innocent content… If there is such a thing as “experiential input from nature” that is distinct from common-sense experience, then the whole project of trying to find a non-Kantian/Quinian scheme-content dualism has failed. — J

Joseph Rouse’s critique of Rorty on this point would seem to strengthen Wang’s argument by asserting that the notion of raw unmediated perception is incoherent. His claim is that the content of common sense experience is irreducibly and inextricably entangled with the schematic organization of linguistic and material practices.

“Rorty is correct to say that the practices through which utterances are connected to their publicly accessible surroundings are not a justificatory encounter between already "interanimated" sentences and something alien to language and social norms. He has nevertheless retained from the representationalist tradition the underlying conception of inferential relations among sentences and causal relations among things as alien to one another. Causal interaction with unfamiliar objects or unfamiliar noises (i.e., metaphors) can (causally) prompt new sentences, he argues, but they cannot belong to networks of meaning and understanding. Rorty thereby hopes to avoid the objectivist claim that causal relations with things can justify some of these inferential networks from the “outside.” There is, however, a different way to challenge realists' claim that causal interaction with the world can provide an external vindication of some of our theories. Rorty overlooks the possibility that scientists' material interactions with apparatus and objects are too integral to scientific discourse to provide it with the kind of external, objective justification that realists seek. The practices that connect utterances to their circumstances are not justifications of independently meaningful utterances, but instead are already part of the articulation of those utterances as meaningful sentences (and simultaneously of those surroundings as intelligible objects and processes). On such an account, the development of a science involves new ways of talking and new ways of encountering and dealing with its objects, articulated together.

Rorty says non-linguistic objects like “[platypuses and pulsars] do not (literally) tell us anything, but they do make us notice things and start looking around for analogies and similarities. They do not have cognitive content, but they are responsible for a lot of cognitions. For if they had not turned up, we should not have been moved to formulate and deploy certain sentences which do have such content. As with platypuses, so with metaphors.”

Rorty thereby maintains a sharp distinction between contentful language and the world, at the cost of relocating novel (“metaphorical”) utterances from the former to the latter. I urge a different conclusion: neither meaningful sentences or theories, nor articulated objects, can be manifest except through their ongoing mutual interrelations. Contra Rorty, both newly manifest phenomena, and new ways of talking, can be telling, but only because even in their novelty, they already belong to larger patterns of material and discursive practices. Practical interactions with our material surroundings are not external to our discursive practices, but indispensable components of them.

Rorty argues that we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality. My line of argument suggests that the “near” side of realists' supposed correspondence relation is just as problematic. We should not think of our web of belief as itself intelligible apart from ongoing patterns of causal interaction with our surroundings (good Davidsonian that he is, Rorty recognizes that utterances are only interpretable as part of a larger pattern of action, in a shared set of circumstances). To that extent, the Quinean metaphor of a “web of belief” might better be replaced by that of a “field of possible action,” or a “meaningfully configured world.”

The point of my criticisms is that these marks and noises do not form a coherent pattern by themselves, but only as part of that larger pattern of practical engagement with the surrounding world. Rorty has already argued forcefully that scientific understanding cannot be disaggregated into distinct components of meaning and fact, fact and value, or linguistic scheme and experiential content. My arguments suggest that we also cannot usefully divide human interaction with the environing world into distinct components of social solidarity and material practice, unforced agreement and prediction and control, inferential norms and causal effects, or (familiar) meanings and (unfamiliar) noises.”
(From Realism or Anti-Realism to Science as Solidarity)

Here ya go:

https://eltalondeaquiles.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/On-the-Very-Idea-of-a-Conceptual-Scheme.pdf

I was reading a paper on Nietzsche's metaphysics and epistemology last night, and apparently he was very much into Kant's TI in the beginning. The paper was saying that to Nietzsche, art was a form of perception, which gave him therapeutic comfort from the unbearable world. — Corvus

Heidegger had an interesting take on Nietzsche’s thinking about art. He said for Nietzsche art was the means by which the will to power opens up and supplements the possibilities of moving beyond itself.

The creating of possibilities for the will on the basis of which the will to power first frees itself to itself is for Nietzsche the essence of art. In keeping with this metaphysical concept, Nietzsche does not think under the heading "art" solely or even primarily of the aesthetic realm of the artist. Art is the essence of all willing that opens up perspectives and takes possession of them: "The work of art, where it appears without an artist, e.g., as body, as organization (Prussian officer corps, Jesuit Order). To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage. The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself" (Will to Power)

What reason's do people have for pursuing philosophy? I would suggest that philosophy often comes from dissatisfaction and/or curiosity. Not everyone seems to need philosophy. It's not an appetite everyone shares. No doubt many of us can afford to examine our presuppositions and reflect on life with more 'critical thought' and compassion. But philosophy? Philosophy seems to me to be an umbrella term for many kinds of enquiry and speculative thought. Much of it superfluous (and dull) to the average person (I include myself in the average category). — Tom Storm

It’s a matter of personality style. Think of the arc of a person’s life in terms of a sequence of creativity cycles. Each cycle begins with the most incipient hint of a way of being in the world, of understanding, valuing and being affected by it. At this delicate and uncanny point in the cycle, what we have is no more than a subliminal bodily feeling or impression. One might call this aesthetic intuition. From this wisp of a feeling, we may progress to a more sharpened and crisp articulation of our understanding that we can verbalize in a poetic or prose form, perhaps via a story. With more sharpening and clarifying, we may end up with a form hat has the concreteness of empirical fact. If we push our thinking even farther in the direction of completeness and comprehensiveness, we arrive at a philosophical worldview, which itself may have an aesthetic, literary, empirical, ethical or spiritual focus, depending on how fully we develop the philosophical thought. Eventually, the whole cycle begins again when we replace a failing interpretation of the world with a new one.

Some observations concerning the creativity cycle: First, we can correlate these phases to cultural modalities such as art, literature, science, philosophy and spirituality.
Everyone experiences all phases of this cycle in some rudimentary form, so each of us is an incipient artist, scientist and philosopher. Second, given the fact that all phases of the cycle will have to be repeated when we replace one worldview with another, no particular phase has any superiority over the other. So why do some end up as plumbers, some as bankers, others as musicians and still others as scientists or philosophers? This is where personality style comes into play. While all of us repeatedly go through all the phases of the creativity cycle over the course of our lives, each of us is particularly suited to emphasize and articulate one phase over the others. This is why a musician will claim that music provides the most primordial access to truth, a poet will insist that poetry is the most sublime art, a scientist will extoll their seemingly privileged access to what is truly there, and a philosopher will try to usurp all of these domains within their own.

https://images.app.goo.gl/n9ZCRD3VTj2CcKM88

Specific examples from the last 200 years please.
— Joshs

Do you really think Levinas actually approached other people in daily life as if he was "infinitely responsible" for them? That he actually felt indebted to just everyone he met simply because that other person was "an other"?

Nietzsche. Hardly an exemplar of the Übermensch himself.

Pretty much every religious philosopher. — baker

It sounds like you’re seeing philosophers as advocating a way of life and then falling short of this ideal in their own life. But I would argue the central task of a philosophy is like that of a scientific theory, to present a model of the way things are. To then say Nietzsche or Levinas falls short of this model is like saying Einstein didn’t take seriously Relativity in his private life. If a philosopher seems to fall short of what their philosophy argues for, I suggest it is not because they are hypocrites or have somehow forgotten what they have written, but reflects the limitations of their philosophy.

Nietzsche believed any attempt to nail down truth as a repeatedly producible self-same thing, foundation, ground or telos, destroys meaning and value.
— Joshs

Any relevant quotes on that point from Nietzsche? — Corvus

Well, this notion of craving for self-sameness as nihilistic and life-denying is discussed by Nietzsche in terms of the ascetic ideal in his Genealogy of Morals.

So you are interested in questions about perception and reality in case the road or a building vanishes? Or in case animals in the jungle suddenly fail to recognise each other and get eaten? How would you demonstrate that something like this has ever happened or will happen? I think that question might be more significant than whether reality is 'really real'. — Tom Storm

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, wrote:

The open question for man is not whether reality exists or not, but what he can make of it. If he does make something of it he can stop worrying about whether it exists or not. If he doesn't make something of it he might better worry about whether he exists or not.

The first thought that occurred to me was: Why would we need a reason to believe the world exists? Reason suffers when such unreasonable demands are put on it. Such doubt only arises when reason is abstracted and treated as if it were independent from our being in the world — Fooloso4

Reason itself can be unreasonable when it naively takes for granted unexamined presuppositions. For instance, what sorts of suppositions are at work in positing that the existence of a thing requires its pre-existence with respect to our engagement with it?

Rather, he considered that quest a nihilistic aim, an attempt to stifle and freeze living becoming.
— Joshs
"a nihilistic aim"? Doesn't it sounds like a contradiction? When nihilist has aim, doesn't he stop being a nihilist? What was the reasons for him doing that? — Corvus

Nietzsche believed any attempt to nail down truth as a repeatedly producible self-same thing, foundation, ground or telos, destroys meaning and value.

But didn't even Neitzsche believed that the ultimate knowledge of the true reality was impossible to achieve? In that sense, wasn't he also a sceptic? — Corvus

Nietzsche didn’t ‘doubt’ ultimate knowledge of a true reality, which is what skepticism entails. Rather, he considered that quest a nihilistic aim, an attempt to stifle and freeze living becoming. For. ietzsche, question s like whether a. external world can be justified misses the point, which is the world is not a container with furniture, but a process of endless transformation.

As I am typing this, I am perceiving my surrounding objects and the world around me vividly. So yes, I am believing in their existence for sure.  But I don't have any reasons to believe in anything else in this world I am not perceiving. — Corvus

If you want to be precise about it, as you are typing, what you perceive takes the form of a temporal flow. The world around you and your surrounding objects are not perceived simultaneously but in temporal succession. It is only via recollection that what has immediately passed is retained such that it can appear as co-existent with what is immediately presented. to you. If we had to rely only on what we are actually perceiving in this moment with no access to memory, we would not recognize objects and patterns. The world ( including the ‘I’) would be a meaningless series of isolated ‘nows’ with no sensible content. There could be no persisting objects nor processes. Your belief in the ‘simultaneous’ world around you while typing, and your belief in your own immediate existence, is no more justifiable that the belief in anything else.

On the other hand, one could argue that what is irreducibly valid is the temporal structure of retention, the present, and anticipation, forming a moving zero point of perception. There is indubitable evidence for a past as well as a present, because the past persists inside of the present. If there is is no perceived past there is no perceived present. We could call this moving zero point a transcendental ego.

Nope. Brainwaves. I know, hard to believe, but there it is. — Wayfarer

Do you still believe that brain waves can be used to detect the content of thoughts, like images? — Alkis Piskas

The issue isn’t whether machines can read thought via detecting brain waves, but what kind of thinking is involved.
We know that implanted electodes can detect neural
signals in limbs and translate them into controllable prosthetics. This is a primitive form of ‘reading’ neural waves. One could imagine teaching someone with locked-in syndrome morse-code, and implanting electrodes strategically in a part of the brain whose activity is specifically and narrowly correlated with thinking of the pattern of dots and dashes. In this way one could decipher language before it is spoken.

At the other end of the spectrum are devices
that read the combined output of massive numbers of neurons deep in the neocortex when persons are thinking in various ways. This kind of conceptual thought, which has not yet been processed by the person into discrete words symbols, tends to be what we think of interns of mind reading, but no device has yet been able to decipher these highly complex patterns of neural firing. It sounds to me what the fMRI in the video is doing is targeting areas of the brain somewhere between the morse code example and pre-verbal thought. Once one has in mind a robustly formed verbal concept or image, then the neural measuring equipment can locate consistent neural patterns that correspond to words that are being finalized by the brain in preparation for communication via speech or gesture.

you quote him as saying that conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions.” I understand the distinction – language A may countenance T-or-F evaluations over a different set of sentences than language B – but why would this make them distinct conceptual schemes? — J

Wang argues that a conceptual scheme cannot be reduced to a sentential language.

Could a conceptual scheme be identical with a scientific language? Although a scientific language is more closely related to a conceptual scheme than a natural language is, a scientific language construed as a sentential language is not a conceptual scheme either. First, many parts of a conceptual scheme, such as a categorical framework (usually a lexical structure of a scientific theory), are simply not a set of sentences or beliefs. Second, a conceptual scheme that serves as the conceptual framework of a theory cannot in itself be the theory or the language expressing the theory. Third, it would not improve matters to stipulate that a conceptual scheme is the totality of sentences held to be true by its speaker or the believer's total belief system.

A conceptual scheme is not supposed to be what we believe, what we experience, or what we perceive from the world, but rather what shapes our beliefs, what schematizes our experience (even what makes our experience possible), or what determines the way in which we perceive the world. Schemes are something ‘forced on' us conceptually, something we commit tacitly as fundamental presuppositions of our common experience or beliefs. Besides, a conceptual scheme does not describe reality as the Quinean fitting model R2 suggests; it is rather the theory a scheme formulates that describes reality. A conceptual scheme can only ‘confront' reality in a very loose sense, namely, by coming in touch with reality in terms of a theory. Accordingly, a conceptual scheme cannot be said to be true or largely true. Only the assertions made in a language and a theory couched in the language can be true or largely true.

↪Joshs I've read Kuhn but not Rouse. I think Kuhn is wrong in his understanding of the scientific project -- see Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme". — J

Davidson thinks he is dismissing the very notion of a conceptual scheme, when in fact he is only dismissing the Quinean model and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism( Davidson’s third dogma of empiricism) , which involves the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages and the thesis of redistribution of truth-values across different conceptual schemes. Two schemes/languages differ when some substantial sentences of one language are not held to be true in the other in a systematic manner.

Conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompat­ible metaphysical presuppositions. They do not lie in the sphere of disagreement or conflict of the sort arising when one theory holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. The difference lies in the fact that one side has nothing to say about what is claimed by the other side. It is not that they say the same thing differently, but rather that they say totally different things. The key contrast here is between saying something (asserting or denying) and saying nothing.”(On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Schemes and Conceptual Relativism)

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?

What we want in moral realism, then, is a sense of “objective” that at least resembles what we find in science – or daily life, for that matter. And those who deny moral facts are indeed saying that the best we can do is “biases more or less shared.” But I don’t think that’s a reasonable synonym for “objective.”
— J

Quite right and well said! :up: — Leontiskos

i agree that a moral realism should resemble the sense of “objective” we find in science. But neither realism nor objectivity are monolithic terms. Physicist Karen Barad belongs to the community of new materialists who consider themselves realists and naturalists (Philosopher of science writer Joseph Rouse adheres to her ‘agential realism’). Her account draws strongly from Bohr, but is more more radically interactive. Normativity is not foundational in this view, but a function of ‘how matter comes to matter’ within the different ways that interactions are configured, both between human beings and within material aspects of the world as a whole.

In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization.On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.”

“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. Phenomena are real material beings. What is made manifest through technoscientific practices is an expression of the objective existence of particular material phenomena. 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….” ( Meeting the Universe Halfway)

I’m sure the above language is gobbledygook to you, but I think you should at least try and acquaint yourself with these ideas before you come to conclusions about what can or cannot be considered realism or objectivity.