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.

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? — J

Have you ever read Thomas Kuhn or Joseph Rouse?
Rouse is a philosopher of science who carries forward Kuhn’s insights:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.

Getting back to what Joshs was saying about objectivity being intersubjective, hypothesize there being a reality which affects all coexistent psyches equally - this in principle at least - this irrespective of species of life or of the life addressed being earthbound. This I would term objective physical reality — javra

Could we say that the reality which comes into play in an intersubjective community is the reality of each participant’s interaction with the world and with each other? Parsing this reality more closely, each person interacts with phenomenona that give themselves to the person in terms of flowingly changing perspectives, which change in specific ways when that person moves with respect to that phenomena. The person over time constructs the idea of a spatial object which persists identically in time as itself, with fixed properties and attributes that endure over time, even though the person never actually sees such self-identicality in the changing phenomenon. The notion of a real spatial object , then, is an abstraction that turns what is only self-similar into the self-same for the purpose of convenience. This is the origin of the notion of the spatial object. The subjectively constituted object becomes the empirically scientific, objectively real spatial object when we compare our own idealization of the flowingly changing phenomena we call a spatial object with the idealizations that others form of it from their own vantage. The resulting abstraction, born out of intersubjective consensus then becomes the empirically real object, the identical one affecting all of us equally ( even though the phenomena we constitute into what we call the object is never given identically to all of us, nor to any one of us).

How do we find out that we are mislead? By other empirical observations. You have to trust some observations to conclude that you've been led astray in the first place.

↪Ciceronianus
Right, we could adopt the pragmatist view, which is that we can accept positions based on the benefit they grant to us. In this way, beliefs don't have to be justified by their truth status, but rather by the benefits that accrue from holding them. Hume didn't have access to this line of reasoning though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that pragmatism isnt about turning our attention away from whether actual events validate our predictions, in order to satisfy subjective needs. On the contrary, pragmatism recognizes that the actual events which validate or invalidate our predictions are themselves the products of our value-oriented social and material practices. Thus we are continually having to pragmatically recalibrate our criteria of truth and falsity.

somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not say that ‘objective’ is the view with biases more or less shared among a normative community? That the shared moral objectivity with the group represents a bias is expressed by the terms it uses to refer to ‘out’ groups, alien communities that don’t share their norms.

I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works — Joshs

Evan Thompson deals with this issue in depth in his book ‘Mind in Life’. I believe the correspondence you are referring to above between a retinotopic map and perceived objects is what he calls ‘analytical isomorphism’,

“ the problematic assumption that the content of imageiy experience corresponds to the format of the under-lying representation. This type of assumption has been called analytical isomorphism (Pessoa, Thompson, and Noe 1998; Thompson, Noe, and Pessoa 1999). Analytical isomorphism is the idea that successful explanation requires there be an isomorphism (one-to-one correspondence) between the phenomenal content of subjective experience and the structure or format of the underlying neural representations. This idea involves conflating properties of what is represented (representational contents) with properties of the representings (representational vehicles).

I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works — Restitutor

Not all science of perception makes this assumption.
Francisco Varela contrasts the old representational realist model of perception with the enactivist approach, in which perceiving is not representing a pre-given world but guided action:

“According to the enactive approach, however,
the point of departure for understanding perception is the study of how the perceiver guides his actions in local situations. Since these local situations
constantly change as a result of the perceiver’s activity, the reference point for understanding perception is no longer a pre-given, perceiver-independent world,
but rather the sensorimotor structure of the cognitive agent, the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces. It is this structure – the
manner in which the perceiver is embodied – and not some pre-given world, that determines how the perceiver can act and be modulated by environmental events. Thus
the overall concern of an enactive approach to perception is not to determine how some perceiver-independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather, to determine
the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems that explain how action can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-dependent world.
In the enactive approach reality is not a given: it is perceiver­ dependent, not because the perceiver “constructs” it as he or she pleases, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of the perceiver.”

As you might guess, I have some sympathy for this point of view. I think it's similar to the view that we're participants in the rest of the world and thereby part of the real and our lives are our interaction with it. — Ciceronianus

That’s an approach to the real I can get onboard with.
I would just add to that that the real is what is constantly changing with respect to itself.

Getting back to Hershel and the think in its self. I would suggest there is an ineffable world which exists and is sometimes called fundamental reality, sometimes called the quantum foam. As the word ineffable suggests we do not have direct access to this world. All we and other organisms can do is represent this world using different models of varying complexity. Humans have several very complex conjoined representative models which together make up a very large portion of what we call consciousness. This is epitomized the fact that we have a retinotopic map of objects in the world in our brains. — Restitutor

An important difference between Husserl’s phenomenological approach ( which strongly influenced enactivist 4EA theories) and the videos you link to is that Husserl doesn’t presume an ineffable world beyond our experience of it. There is no veil between the world and our experience of it. We are always in direct context with the world via some mode of givenness ( recollection, perception, etc). There is no original territory our constructions model or map.

Dan Zahavi connects the above thinking with a neo-Kantian metaphysics.

As Frith puts it, “My Perception Is Not of the World, But of My Brain's Model of the World" (2007: 132). Whatever we see, hear, touch, smell, etc. is all contained
in the brain, but projected outwards and externalized, such that we in normal life fail to recognize it as a
construct and mistake it for reality itself (Metzinger 2009: 6-7).

Given that we never have direct contact with external states of affairs – after all, the latter remains hidden behind the representational veil – we should reject all claims concerning the existence of a seamless tight coupling between mind and world. Hohwy speaks of the strict and absolute division between inner and outer and of the “evidentiary boundary” that secludes and separates the brain from everything beyond its boundary (Hohwy 2016)

For Husserl, the world that can appear to us – be it in perception, in our daily concerns or in our scientific analyses – is the only real world. To claim that there in addition to this world exists a world-behind-the-scene, which transcends every appearance, and every experiential and theoretical evidence, and to identify this world with true reality is, for Husserl, an empty and countersensical proposition…

For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. Husserl embraces a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and thereby dismisses the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different.

Most also believe in a dualism between neutral physical stuff and subjective valuation.
— Joshs

What are you thinking of here — Tom Storm

The hard problem of subjective consciousness

Descartes isn't called the "Father of Modern Philosophy" for nothing. Descartes had, and in some respects still has, his followers. It seems to me that Kant, with his things-in-themselves, and any of those who accept dualism, the view that there is an external world, apart from us, the mind-body distinction; those that believe we can't be directly aware of the world, all participate in what seems to me to be an affectation. — Ciceronianus

Guilt by association is no argument. You don’t believe there’s an external world apart from us? Isn’t that the common sense view? If you don’t believe that the mind is divine and the body material, what about the distinction between emotion and rationality? Most still adhere to that kind of dualism. Most also believe in a dualism between neutral physical stuff and subjective valuation. This is the basis of the hard problem. Then there is the belief that the objectively real is to be determined by correctly representing what is out there by internally generated models. Are these views that most share not affectations?

If we "have to" there's something about it, or us, which requires or provides for its use. How/why is it appropriate to insist it's use must be justified if that's the case? What induces someone to claim that what we have to do by virtue of the fact we live is unwarranted? — Ciceronianus

So who is this mysterious ‘someone’? Specific examples from the last 200 years please. Perhaps a nice quote or two to buttress your argument.

According to Wallace Stevens, "Imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to the real." I think the same goes for philosophy — Ciceronianus

I wonder what ‘adhering to the real’ could possibly mean? Perhaps to the ever changing definitions of the real that have made their way into use over the past few millennia? I say we should all adhere to the mugwump, since that is about as clarifying.

:100:

Ask yourself when you last acted as if there were no other people, no things, no animals, i.e. nothing other than yourself. When did you last refrain from eating because you doubted the existence of food? When did you last believe, and treat, people you see across the street from you as if they were only, e.g., 6 inches tall because that's how they appeared to be when you saw them, and thought that they became 6 feet tall when they crossed the street to speak to you — Ciceronianus

I recognize shades of your critique of Descartes’ radical doubt here. Apart from your disagreement with Descartes, how pervasive a problem do you see this kind of thinking as being within the contemporary philosophical community as a whole , or the history of philosophy? It’s fine and dandy for all of us here to agree how silly and pointless it would be to reason in the manner you depicted above, especially given you made no effort to justify it or widen the context of its use. But without reference to concrete examples in philosophy ( preferably from someone other than Descartes), the O.P. seems to be tilting at windmills.

I make use a lot of information as noted in a more recent post which i regard as being what our minds are made up from. The part i would disagree with the last sentence. Scientists do represent biology mechanistically, this is what our understanding of biology is based on. I agree don't describe psychological phenomena mechanistically but i would suggest that this is for two reasons 1) Describing psychologically important concepts mechanistically is something most people find psychologically distressing 2) a failure of imagination regarding how to explain psychological phenomena mechanistically. The "different descriptive vocabulary", is in my opinion somewhat disingenuous people are just talking about there psychology's using different descriptive vocabulary, they are sometimes implicitly but mostly explicitly making ontological claims about the nature of the psychological phenomena. These ontological claims go the the core of how we think about and justify our beliefs about psychological phenomena so they are in no was incidental to the discussion. I am interested in how we should change the ontologies of psychological phenomena to make them consistent with a mechanistic universe and what the effects of doing this would be — Restitutor

I want to go in the opposite direction from you. Rather than accepting a handed down model of mechanism from the physical sciences and trying to force our understanding of human or animal behavior into it, we need to recognize that physics, which was the queen of the sciences a few centuries ago, is behind the curve right now. The concepts of causality and information you are borrowing from the physical sciences, which work so elegantly in constructing machine technologies, are disastrous when we try to apply them to so many aspects of human behavior, such as psychopathology and mood disorders, the nature of language and empathy, models of perception, emotion and intentionality. To translate my argument into more concrete terms, I am an advocate of 4EA models in the cognitive sciences, and of enactivism and autopoietic self-organizing systems approaches. I applaud the way that representatives of these approaches critique authors such as Metzinger and Dennett for their reductionism.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think it’s perfectly fine to strive to reduce higher mental processes to elementary ones, but I don’t think today’s physics is up to the job. It eventually will be though. Until then, it’s important to keep the conceptual vocabulary dealing with the most compact aspects of biological and psychological phenomena separate from that of physical mechanism.

Moral thinking differs, but there are commonalities rooted in emotions. And we do indeed attach morality to the fact that we have emotions. We do not say it is immoral to kill because there aren't any situations in which killing is considered a good action, we do it primarily from a primal limbic system response to the fact that being killed is an extremely negative action done onto us. It has a lot of pain attached to it and the denial of someone's existence requires a damn good argument for the continued existence of the killer for justifying that killing. — Christoffer

Can you envision a moral system build entirely of non-emotional values? If we were to turn everyone into Mr Spock, would we still have the same variety of moral stances we now see in human culture? If our moral
systems would be different, how would they change?