So, why do some of us want to be nomads, and is it a better life (interpret better how you want)? — Ø implies everything

When I was in school and didnt hand in assignments on time, or deviated in any other respect from the demands of the conventional structure, my teachers would say “In the real world, you can’t get away with shirking your responsibilities.” It was always about this alleged ‘real world’. Even then, I never bought into the idea of a ‘real world’. I’ve lived a nomadic life ever since college. Not in the sense of constant physical travel, which can end up just as conventional and constraining as not travelling. My nomadism is a creative wandering. I think we all want to be nomads in this sense. We all want to expand and enrich our sense of value and meaning. Physical travel can achieve this, but only if done in the right way.

We all want to be Peter Pan, if that means retaining from childhood the passion for enchantment and adventure. But each of us must do it in our own way. How aggressively we are able to wander is a function of a balance between structure and novelty. If we try to wander into new territory that isnt structured enough, that is so alien to our previous experience that we can’t find any familiar landmarks to navigate by, then our experience will not be one of magical delight and wonder, but of fear and confusion. That’s why most of us need the familiar structure of externally imposed conventions and institutions (social, corporate, legal, educational, governmental).

, I don't think he believed we can't know whether, e.g., socks are real or that there's something real we can't know, but rather that our use of language can "trick" us into striving to know what's "really real. — Ciceronianus

He believed language can even trick us into striving to know what’s only provisionally real. The point isn’t whether we can know what’s real. Whenever we use the word ‘real’ we know what it pertains to. But like all words, there are infinitely many usages, and therefore senses of meaning, of ‘real’. So the fundamental truth of the ‘real’ for Wittgenstein has to do with what we are trying to do with other people when we use the word in any given context.

Consider though that, if you could teach a fly that it is a fly, that it is in a fly bottle, and what a fly bottle is, you might be able to help the fly stop flying back into the same fly bottle over and over.

In any event, it seems to me like Wittgenstein's influence on metaphysics has really waned. Scientific realism seems more the default position than his anti-metaphysical stance — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that wouldn’t stop the fly from remaining trapped in the grammatical fly-bottle of propositional truth statements (this IS a fly, this IS a bottle , the fly is IN the bottle).

Didn’t scientific realism precede Wittgenstein? I’d like to think that New Materialism and Enactivism are beginning to catch on , at least in the social sciences, and certainly in science studies.( it’s always a slower process for the natural sciences). Wittgenstein is enormously important to their thinking.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought
— Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? — Pantagruel

Animism and panpsychism tend to begin from the Cartesian dualist split between inner subjectivity and outer materiality and simply inject the outer with the stuff of the inner. New Materialism doesnt do that. It rethinks the nature of human subjectivity and empirical objectivity along the same lines, so that relational process becomes more fundamental than the steric identities of intrinsic inner subjectivity and material substance.

Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or has thought learned to cloak itself in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other? — Pantagruel

Another option, expressed in the work of New Materialists like Karen Barad, is that material does more work than the old notion of materiality assumes. Rather than passive, static substance, matter is creative, intra-active and agentive ( not in the sense of pan-psychism), and thus already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought.

Are you sure we are disagreeing ? Is the target bad or do you just think we'll never hit that target ? Because I don't think we'll hit the target often or at all. But I've never drawn a perfect circle either. Yet the concept of the circle helps make those imperfect circles circles to begin with. I grasp the failure of a communication structure in the light an ideal or telos — plaque flag

I don’t think there is a single target to hit. As Gallagher writes:

The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.

He imagines a dialogue like the following between Gadamer and Lyotard:

Gadamer: That I, as an individual, find myself always within a hermeneutical situation, a conversation, signifies that I am not alone. Even if I am only talking with myself, my language is something that I have inherited from others, and their words interrupt and make possible my conversation. Even if there is no universally shared human nature as a basis for Romantic trust, within the hermeneutical situation there is still some shared aspects, a certain range of background knowledge, some limited common ground which enables the particular conversation to happen. Otherwise communication would be impossible. Neither the common ground, nor the communication it makes possible, will necessarily guarantee community, consensus, or a resolution of differends. We are not focused here on outcomes, a particular consensus to be reached, but on what is anterior to (as a condition of possibility for) conversation. This anterior common ground may only be the battlefield on which our conflicts can be fought. Isn't the principle something like, no differends without a battlefield?

Lyotard: You know yourself how even "the battlefield" is open to conflicting interpretations. This was a favorite example used by Chladenius in his Enlightenment hermeneutics. Differends are not fought out on the battlefield; they remain outside the circumference of the battlefield, unable to enter the conflict within. So we must define many small battlefields, each of which might be called a community of difference, which is not presupposed but accomplished in and through conversation which remains dialogue without ultimate synthesis. Conversations, in such cases, always remain incomplete, imperfect. In them the we is always in question, always at stake, the consensus always local and temporary, community always deferred. Perhaps, within these conversations, a trust which is not good will is required; a trust that we are different and for that very reason require conversation to create a we. This is not a trust in a preexisting we, but a trust in the promise of a we, a not yet we which will always remain not yet, defined by our differences. I have stated elsewhere, "the true we is never we, never stabilized in a name for we, always undone before being constituted, only identified in the non-identity between you ... and me ..."A conversation "could do no more than put the we back into question"

In Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, then, the lived body is a lived center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world. — plaque flag

Is corporeality is fundamental to transcendental subjectivity? What then do we make of Husserl's analyses of the primordial stratum of constitution in which no body has yet been constituted?

In Ideas II, Husserl points to a pre-bodily stratum in which consciousness is possible without a body: He identifies a lowest level stratum of constitution of the sensuous thing, wherein sense perceptions exist prior to the construction of a corporeal Body (“no dependence on the Body has yet been taken into account”(Ideas II, p.319)).

“If we think of monadic subjects and their streams of consciousness or, rather, if we think the thinkable minimum of self-consciousness, then a monadic consciousness, one that would have no "world" at all given to it, could indeed be thought - thus a monadic consciousness without regularities in the course of sensations, without motivated possibilities in the apprehension of things. In that case, what is necessary for the emergence of an Ego-consciousness in the ordinary sense? Obviously, human consciousness requires an appearing Body and an intersubjective Body - an intersubjective understanding.”(Ideas II, p.303)

Again, in a note , Husserl speculates

“It is thinkable that there would be no Bodies at all and no dependence of consciousness on material events in constituted nature, thus no empirical souls, whereas absolute consciousness would remain over as something that cannot simply be cancelled out. Absolute consciousness would thus have in itself, in that case, a principle of factual unity, its own rule, according to which it would unfold with its own content, all the while there being indeed no Body. If we join it to a Body, then perhaps it becomes dependent, though in the first place it still retains its principle of unity and does so not just through apriori laws of consciousness in general.” (Ideas II, p.3)

Note that you write we can’t use the ‘reality’. Who is this brainless we ? I think it's Feuerbach's 'we' of 'Reason.' It floats 'above' (independently) of any particular embodied human subject, but it is simply not intelligible as independent of all such flesh. — plaque flag

For Husserl, the pre-bodily ego is utterly particular in its mineness, even though it has not yet constituted itself as a human subject.

I agree, but we don't want to smooth out the actual personal subject too much, because rationality seems to be normative on the personal level. I can disagree with you but not with myself — plaque flag

If we take a page from self-consistency theory in psychology, we can say that the self is a continual achievement of the anticipatory construing of events, and among the most important event is one’s own self-reflections. Thus the self is no more internally integral than the events the person is able to construe intelligibly. Examples of a disordered self include emotional distress. Emotions such as guilt, threat and anxiety can represents situations which put into question the coherence of our core sense of self. Put differently, these are situations in which the basis of my rationality crumbles , I attempt to ride off in two directions at once, and I end up disagreeing with myself.

I take Appel to be sketching a minimal foundationalism, relying primarily on the exclusion of performative contradiction. This is not so far from Brandom's coherence-aspiring subject. Behind it all is a quest for autonomy. — plaque flag

Have you read Lyotard’s The Differend? For Lyotard a differend is “a wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. To put it another way, it is a wrong or injustice that arises because the prevailing or hegemonic discourse actively precludes the possibility of this wrong being expressed. To put it still another way, it is a wrong or injustice which cannot be proved to have been a wrong or injustice because the means of doing so has (also) been denied the victim.”

As Shaun Gallagher explains:

“What we have in these instances are what Lyotard calls differends, and it is precisely differends that are excluded from the conversation of mankind which operates on the basis of shared vocabulary and "civility" (Oakeshott, Rorty, and Caputo all use this word). The conversation of mankind reduces deprivations to negations. As Lyotard puts it, "to be able not to speak [= a negation] is not the same as not to be able to speak [= a deprivation].

The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it is a metadiscourse and worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends. But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something which cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation.”

I get that, and often refer to it, but I think to deny the reality of agency is a slippery slope towards nihilism. I mean, given that there may be no 'ultimately defineable' subjects or objects, there are still subjects and objects. — Quixodian

Does the reality of agency require persistent self-identity? Can’t relative self-similarity over time do the job of providing a perspectival point of view, a way continuing to be the same differently?

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.
— Joshs

So are there subjects of experience? — Quixodian

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act. These are inseparable aspects of experience. For Heidegger there is the in-between, neither subject nor object. For post-structuralists like Deleuze there are processes of subjectifcation, of which a subject is merely a contingent effect.

As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself. — plaque flag

For Husserl, the brain is indeed ‘real’, but then he analyzed the real as a higher level construction of intentional acts, just as real spatial objects are constituted out of correlated perceptions. The object, whether brain or rock or atom, is not an illusion, rather it is an achievement of subjective and intersubjective idealization that is never completely fulfilled. All facts of nature for Husserl are contingent and relative. Consequently, we can’t use the ‘reality’ of the brain as an explanatory grounding for the constitutive process out of which it emerges as an ideal object. The real for Husserl is only ever a secondary and derived grounding.

I make the structuralist point that, call it what you will, we engage as human beings in some analogue of fundamental ontology, albeit more or less seriously in terms of openness to criticism — plaque flag

Care to opine concerning the level or mode in which this openness to criticism takes place? What criteria have to be already in place in order for scientific criticism to be intelligible within any given community of researchers? And what sort of discipline is best suited to question and replace these criteria within which normative questions of truth and falsity, and correctness of method, gain purchase?

We know nothing of reality as it is apart from its being given to and through personality. Those who imagine otherwise are of course personalities using their imaginations, dreaming of serene landscapes without a trace of angsty primates. — plaque flag

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. Heidegger was not a humanist, and poststructuralists like Deleuze and Foucault ground the person in something that is pre-personal and pre-human.

Does anyone still believe a “method” of science really exists, and that it essentially defines and differentiates science as a sui generis human endeavor?

Shouldn’t we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete? — Mikie

Or, to quote @Pantagruel, it’s ‘quaint’.

I do feel philosophical studies form part of the balanced project of the advancement of human knowledge, but that has to be ratified on an ongoing basis by collective will and consensus. What hope is there in a shattered milieu of alternative facts? — Pantagruel

What better field than philosophy to deconstruct concepts like collective will and consensus in order to reveal the necessity of a shattered milieu of alternative facts?

I know this is a bit different than what you are getting at, but there is an important sense in which philosophy was never relevant. — Leontiskos

Good point. The fringe role philosophy played with respect to establishment culture may also be marked by the fact that so many notable philosophers worked outside of academia.

Are you saying that there are fundamental philosophical principles that are "built-in" to sciences, for example? — Pantagruel

Yes, and as those principles evolve, so do the grounding assumptions of the sciences, including what the scientific method is, whether there is one method, whether it is unchanging, whether there is any way to tease out what is purely empirical from what is philosophical, etc.

Has our civilization evolved to the point where philosophy can be dispensed with? — Pantagruel

Would you say that the various disciplines that have grown out of philosophy are ‘applied’ forms of philosophy? If so, what exactly is it they are applying? This I would say is the role of philosophy. Other disciplines are founded on presuppositions that are built into their chosen vocabularies, but those presuppositions remain outside of their purview of examination.

what would be an example were we make a practice more responsible and accountable? And how? — Antony Nickles

For Barad there are no isolated autonomous subjects. Responsive interaction is a given and is prior to situated subjects or objects. What is not a given is the nature of responsive interaction. What is at stake and at issue, that is, what matters within a given set of practices among the participants, is constantly under contestation in partially shared circumstances.Responsive interaction can act to exclude and oppress rather than to coordinate harmonious agreement and justice. Thus, we can learn to become differently accountable and responsible in our interactions so that these coordinations can become more just.


Citing Levinas, Barad says:

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?”What if we were to recognize that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode" of objectivity as well as subjectivity?”
“Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

“Justice, which entails acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly…How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?”

“This work marks a shift from an ethics figured as individual responsibility to an ethics of “response-ability” (see especially Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008;Schrader 2010, 2012). More than a clever play on words, response-ability, Donna Haraway argues, is not about aligning one’s actions with a set of universal ethical principles. Instead, it requires cultivating practices of response. These practices are developed and done with others, both human and non-human, in a process of ongoing exchange. Feminists have written about this kind of responsive ethics in the context of agility training (Haraway, 2008), harmful algae research (Schrader, 2010), brittlestars enlisted in biomimetic and nanotechnology research (Barad,2007), affective and bodily mutual articulation in human-animal co-domestication (Despret,2004), and longterm patterns of relating between orchids and insects (Hustak &Myers, 2012). In each of these accounts, the authors illustrate how skills, knowledge, and even bodies emerge from dynamic choreographies of response, or processes of becoming-with one another (Thompson, 2005).”

The direct contact with the general relational field does not ground the materiality of discourses. There is no immediate access to a world external to thought — Number2018

Thought is itself inextricably material and discursive in Barad’s sense of materiality as intra-action. She replaces the notion of a world internal or external to thought to that of a world entangled with itself, and though is just one of infinitely many sites of material entanglement.

It’s important to note that there is also no inherent separation between the human and non-human in these material-discursive practices. This is where Barad moves beyond Bohr, seeking to resolve the residual human exceptionalism in his and other explanations of quantum theory. — Possibility

:up:

As I've said before, white people don't like, trust, or respect black people. "Racism" is a euphemism that rounds over the sharp corners and takes out some of the sting — T Clark

Hmm.. racism vs anti-blackism. I think the problem is the ‘ism’ that is implied whenever we pit one broad category (white) against another (black).

On the other hand, Physics Stack Exchange tries to avoid even discussing agential realism in that science. It seems to have status similar to many-worlds speculations. That is to say nothing has come of it in actual physics.

I welcome any thoughts to the contrary. — jgill

Is this surprising? Because of the conventional and generalized nature of its vocabulary, an empirical field like physics is designed to accommodate a wide range of philosophical approaches, but the vast majority of physicists will identify with the more traditional realist accounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[/quote]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure. Here’s a good place to start.

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↪Joshs

As Derrida writes:
— Joshs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Derrida writes:

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

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

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

m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is some of what Barad says about agency:

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

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

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

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

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