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

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

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

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

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

What about male prostitutes?
— Joshs

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

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

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

What about male prostitutes?

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

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

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

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

A principle of constructive alternativism
— Joshs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James goes on:

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

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

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

In the same chapter of the Principles James also writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does this mean that cooperation is not an evolutionary adaptation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some more Husserl from the lifeworld link:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

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

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

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

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

It's an open question to me what the place of the history of ideas, and of the history of philosophy, should be in our discussions, and I expect people to give very different answers — Srap Tasmaner

In authors you mentioned like Derrida, Foucault and Heidegger, a distinction is made between history and historicism. Philosophy is always historical in the sense that the past is changed by how it functions in the present. This as true of historical analysis as it is of fresh thinking. Historicism, by contrast , treats history as a static objective grid that one can traverse without altering its sense. Historicism fails to recognize that history is nothing past and gone but is immediately present and operative in the now that it co-determines. Both American Pragmatism and scientific naturalism can be treated that way, as a past that is still operative now.

I do see what I infer to be your interpretation of Kuhn's and Popper's thinking to be a bit simplistic. Popper recognized the importance of falsification to recognizing faults in one's naive hypotheses/intuitions. Kuhn recognized the importance of new paradigms arising in the aftermath of naive hypotheses/intuitions being falsified — wonderer1

Popper’s concept of falsification assumes that the practices and methods of science that are involved in making the determination that a theory has been falsified are independent of the content of the theory in question.
Kuhn argues instead that the understanding of method , the determination of what counts as evidence, use of apparatus and norms of measurement and a host of other features that come into play in falsifying a theory change along with changes in paradigms. As a result, paradigms do not change via falsification, but through a re-envisioning of all of the above practices. This is why Kuhn said that paradigm shifts are more like transitions from one artistic movement to another than like a linear progress.

:up:

Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear? — wonderer1

So asserting the Kuhnian proposition that empirical knowledge has a paradigmatic structure which makes Popperian progress incoherent is just a kind of temper tantrum designed to lay waste to every position? I gather Stephen Law is more sympathetic to Popperian realism than to Kuhnian relativism, but perhaps one can counter his ‘Going Nuclear’ model with one that posits someone named Stephen who, in getting over their head in a philosophical discussion, decides to impugn or psychoanalyze the motives of their interlocutor rather than attempt to revise their own construction.

The bias, background, politics, wealth, or any other factor of a reporter or news outlet doesn’t matter. To say otherwise is the genetic fallacy. — NOS4A2

Paying attention to genesis ends up in fallacy if one
makes the wrong connection between an organizing bias and news content. But there is no news without bias.

...aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible
— Joshs

Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture — wonderer1

And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from?

↪plaque flag Are the two vases the same, or different? What's "the" vase?

I've in mind something along the lines of the analysis of simples in Philosophical Investigations, §48 and thereabouts. You have some understanding of Wittgenstein. Hilary Lawson seems not to have moved past the Tractatus.

I do not wish to conclude that there is a vase, since that there is exactly one vase is taken as granted in Joshs' story. I am just pointing to the error in concluding either that there are only vase-phenomena or that there are no true sentences about the vase. — Banno

I tend to agree with Josh in spirit, but on this issue he may not give the world enough attention. We experience the [ same ] red flower differently (in a series of adumbrations perhaps). — plaque flag

Let me see if I can clarify what is at issue in the notion of ‘same vase’ or ‘same world’ for all. In my reading, the later Wittgenstein and post-Husserlian phenomenology complement each other in re-thinking the idea of a private experience. Witt’s focus on the emergence of meaning from discursive interaction locates linguistic sense in situated, contextual interpersonal responsive performances, while phenomenology turns perception into a discursive interaction between subjective and objective poles of an event of sense.

If one wants to argue, then, against the idea of sense as private, I am in agreement with Witt and phenomenology that discourse must by considered primary and grounding. That being the case, it seems to me that the idea of a same world for everyone is precisely the sort of thinking that the above philosophical perspectives put into question as relying on the assumption of a private sense. In order for such a notion to be coherent , we must be able to extract from particular vantages something not only common to them all but identically in common. That which is composed of identical parts is a kind of deistic entity, purely enclosed in itself as self-affecting. As Merleau-Ponty argues,

...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores.

Now let’s see how Philosophical Investigations discusses the relation between same, rule, agreement and identity.

We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a thing with itself. I feel like saying: "Here at any rate there can't be a variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing identity too." Then are two things the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shews me to the case of two things?
216. "A thing is identical with itself."—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted. We might also say: "Every thing fits into itself." Or again: "Every thing fits into its own shape." At the same time we look at a thing and imagine that there was a blank left for it, and that now it fits into it exactly.”

Witt reveals ‘same’ as the expression of a rule. The question then becomes what is involved in learning and obeying a rule that dictates something as ‘the same’.

224. The word "agreement" and the word "rule" are related to one another, they are cousins. If I teach anyone the use of the one word, he learns the use of the other with it.
225. The use of the word "rule" and the use of the word "same" are interwoven. (As are the use of "proposition" and the use of "true”)

According to Rouse’s reading of Witt, “No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”On could say, then, that the rule for the use of the word ‘same’ is instantiated in performances that are bound together by family resemblance, which means that they have no one thing in common.

Our interpretations (our worldmaking techniques ) are constrained. Without calories and oxygen, we die. Our environment rewards some techniques and ignores or punishes others. For this reason, I wouldn't call the environment constructed but only partially constructed. There's something like a deep layer that we are forced to deal with, though we can and will endlessly debate the details of stubborn giveness, at least while bloodsugar continues to flow through our brain, the famous glucose hog. — plaque flag

Well, there’s certainly SOMETHING that constrains our constructions, but aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible?
Why claim on the one hand that constructive processes ground and alter social phenomena, but that something called material nature is protected from such contestation?
Why not say that the material constraints are themselves species of discursive constraints?

There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others — Srap Tasmaner

How does each individual respond to their culture inheritance? Do they simply introject and internalize it? Does the culture enforce conformity on us through this inheritance? Or is it the case that even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture?

As George Kelly wrote:

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955)

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the person’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and persons manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

Yes, I do appreciate this and I understand something of the source material. We know our ideas can be tracked back to other ideas. What I am referring to however is that most of us don't have the inclination to 'look under the hood and tinker with the engine — Tom Storm

I don’t think you’re missing much. Philosophy was an acquired taste for me. And to this day my favorite thinker is not an academic philosopher but a psychotherapist and personality theorist, George Kelly. Sure, one could translate his ideas into a full-fledged philosophical treatise, but that’s just dressing up the language and tying it with a bow.

I suspect these rarified debates about the nature of reality and how language functions are primarily for the benefit of the cognoscenti, a bit like Star Trek lore or stamp collecting. — Tom Storm

Don’t believe it. As someone who works in the field of mental health, you may appreciate the fact that every major shift in approach to psychotherapy is directly linked to the outcome of these rarified debates. For instance, Freudian psychoanalysis is grounded in a certain form of realist materialism . Client -centered approaches rebelled against the authoritarianism this thinking authorized by tapping into existentialist strains of philosophy. Beck and Ellis’s cognitive therapies relied on a form of realism by deeming emotional distress to be the product of irrational thinking. Enactive cogntivism dumps this language of correspondence with one of adaptivity, due in large part to the influence of Pragmatist and phenomenological influences from philosophy.

It's easy enough for a relativist to simply claim, without actually backing it up with an argument, that they are not a relativist, even though their works as interpreted certainly seem to fit the bill — Janus

Try this. It’s only 6 pages:

What Do You Do When They
Call You a 'Relativist' by Richard Rorty

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There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

So you might wonder how we get from this relativistic web to anything that can be considered to evolve or improve, much less to anything that can offer any stable grounds for making distinctions. The answer is that, just as what we consider a solid object is actually a web of such relations on the quantum level, so are larger social and empirical understandings. But just like our use of the fiction we call a solid object, our use of cultural and empirical knowledge allows us to anticipate changes in the world around us in reasonably stable way.
It also allows us to see the revolutionary paradigm shifts from one era of science to the next as an improvement. This is how Rorty puts it in ‘ What Do You Do When They Call You a 'Relativist'?’

”…the intuition that we are making intellectual progress is simply the intuition that, in respect to self-conscious­ness and intellectual responsibility, we are getting farther and farther away from the cavemen; it does not need backup from notions like "closer to Real­ity" or "more nearly universally valid". This would be analogous to saying that the intuition that inquiry is in touch with reality is simply the intuition that it is constrained by reality; it does not need backup from notions like "corresponding" or "mapping.”

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I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source. — Tom Storm

That’s a cartoon version of relativism that Rorty often made fun of , and which is why he rejected the label of relativist.
Within a given cultural , ethical or scientific milieu, there is a certain dynamic stability of shared values which makes possible agreement on matters of common concern. This is why scientists are able to reach consensus, technologists are able to build machines, there can be agreement on legal matters.

Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong — Janus

It is just plain wrong , and it is not what Derrida is saying. First of all, differerance doesnt just refer to words, it refers to all forms of experience. Second , Derrida isnt arguing that the chain of referential meanings of words leads to an infinite regress. You’re just offering a confused mishmash of Saussurian linguistic structuralism here. For Derrida, performing a deconstructive analysis of a culture milieu reveals intricate, stable patterns and themes.

For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy. ( Derrida, Limited, Inc)

I was arguing that people seeing the same vase, when they paint it, and in support of that I made the point that people will agree on small and precise features of objects if questioned. You have not addressed that argument but have instead changed the subject — Janus

The differences in how each painted vase looks gives more insight into how individuals are interpreting it than their verbal agreement on small and precise details. One can agree with others on small and precise details because those small and precise details are couched in abstractive linguistic terms that cover over all sorts of subtle differences in the sense of what those small and precise terms mean to each person. This flattening of individual difference is what language is designed to do, in order to foster communication. That’s why we have to employ more intricate means of determining exactly how someone means their use of a small and precise term. Heidegger never said that in using a hammer, the hammer itself as a present to hand object can be extracted and separated from the sense of how it is used. The difference in the appearance of the vase in each person’s rendering of it reveals the intricate differences in how those agreed upon small and precise terms are being used. ( You still think I was changing the subject, or do you now see the connection?)

Same" and "similar" are not the same. Phenomenology will only add to such confusion.

↪Joshs You specified that multiple people were to draw the same vase. Not similar vases. Each will draw a different drawing, have a different perspective, give a different interpretation, of the same vase. This is not the same as each drawing a different vase. — Banno

Same and similar are two of many species of difference.
Did you read this?

‘similar’ is a species of difference, as is disparate, homologous, analogous, synonymous, opposite. Identity and same are also species of difference. Unlike similar, people tend to use the concepts of identity and same in circumstances (A=A) where difference goes unnoticed even when it implicitly forms the basis of the comparison. This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth.