What is the source of the quote you provided? — T Clark

It’s in parenthesis at the bottom of the quote.

Revisiting First Language Acquisition through Empirical and Rational Perspectives.
Abdorreza Tahriri
Published 1 July 2012
Linguistics

You don't believe that there are innate mechanisms that make acquisition of language possible? Doesn't the fact that there is only a limited time in childhood during which people can learn language, indicate there is probably an innate mechanism for learning it? — T Clark

It’s true that language learning in childhood is more rapid than in adults, and there is a window of opportunity after which certain abilities can no longer be achieved, but the same is true of many perceptual achievements. I think there’s an important difference between claiming that humans are born with general cognitive capacities that allow for conceptual symbolization, and claiming that they are born with structures that precisely dictate the kinds of grammatical
patterns we use , in an absolutely universal manner. I side with those who explain the cross-cultural commonalities of grammatical structuration ( subject-predicate , etc) as the result of commonalities in embodied interaction with our world, not some innate computational mechanism

I saw very little in "The Language Instinct" that dealt with language as a rational process. I don't see that the fact the grammar is structured is the same as saying it is rational — T Clark

This is simply the way that ‘rational’ has been used when it comes to framing the debate between innatism and behaviorism.

“The most important and probably controversial issue in child language studies is concerned with the knowledge a child acquires. Is this acquired knowledge ‘innate’ or ‘empirical’? The answer to this question might be quite different from one perspective to another in language acquisition. Two philosophical traditions with respect to knowledge in general are empiricism (Lock & Hume) and rationalism (Plato & Descartes). ‘Empiricists’ believe that knowledge is solely the product of experience and ‘rationalists’ on the other hand argue that knowledge is part innate and part experience. All approaches to
language acquisition adhere to one of these positions more or less and consequently there have been various versions of ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. The corresponding theoretical positions with respect to language acquisition are two extreme positions: Behaviorism and Nativism.”

(Revisiting First Language Acquisition Through Empirical and Rational Perspectives)

I find it hard to understand what the nuances of difference are between 'innate capacities for complex cognition' and an 'innate , and therefore universal , computational module'. Sounds like different language for a similar phenomenon. — Tom Storm

An innate language module of the Chomskian sort specifies a particular way of organizing grammar prior to and completely independent of social interaction. Lakoff’s innate capacities for cognition do not dictate any particular syntactic or semantic patterns of language. Those are completely determined by interaction.

I appreciate you providing Lakoff's comments, although not much of what he has written seems to have much to do with language. As I noted, there is little discussion about reason in "The Language Instinct," and what there was wasn't included in the part I wrote about. — T Clark

Descartes argues that humans are rational animals, and the faculty that guarantees our rationality is an innate , God-given capacity to organize thought in rational terms.
In the past few centuries, notions of innatism have evolved away from a religious grounding in favor of empirical explanations. While the concept of instinct is so general as to mean almost anything, the specific way in which Pinker uses it in relation to language is something he inherited from Chomsky. Chomsky posited an innate , and therefore universal , computational module that he called transformational grammar. In other words , there is a ‘rational’ logic of grammar , and this rationality is the product of an innate structure syntactically organizing words into sentences . In this way, Pinker and Chomsky are heirs of Enlightenment Rationalism. Chomsky has said as much himself.

My quote from Lakoff was intended to show that embodied approaches to language tend to reject Pinker’s claim that innate grammar structures exist. They say there is no language instinct , but rather innate capacities for complex cognition , out of which language emerged in different ways in different cultures.
As far as the relation between Damasio and Lakoff is concerned, you are right that Damasio does not deal with the origin of language. But given his credentials as a an embodied neurocognitivist, it is highly unlikely that innate computational grammar structures are consistent with his general approach , which is anti-rationalistic.

the notion of a tree is not the tree. We actually see the tree, not our notion. My notion of trees is not out in my front yard. The Kukui nut tree is though. What we believe about the tree is our notion. The tree is not equivalent to our belief about it. We can be wrong about the tree. The same is true of all that exists in its entirety prior to our picking it out to the exclusion of all else. — creativesoul

We actually see an idealization or abstraction. Without our ‘notion’ filling in for what is not actually presented to us , in the form of memories and expectations, what we would ‘actually’ see is a disunified flow of perceptual
phenomena, not the idealized object we define as a ‘tree’.
What you are doing is taking the constructed idealization we create ( the ‘tree’) , ignoring the fact that it is a combination of actual appearance, recollection and expectation, and then treating the derived idealization (the object we call ‘tree’) as if it were the true and actual basis of the name ‘tree’, and our job as perceiver is merely to accurately represent it as it is in itself.

When it comes to these kinds of issues, about which no empirical confirmation can be found, I remember something Nietzsche said: there are no truths, only perspectives — Janus

He meant that also with regard to issues about which empirical confirmation can be found. And in the case of the relation between affect and abstract conceptualization, a wide range of contemporary approaches in psychology and other social sciences has arrived at a model which they have confirmed empirically.
In a previous post you said that “verbal reasoning would be impossible without the affective underpinning of pre-verbal reasoning; and that the latter is more basic and more important; abstract reasoning would be vacuous without it.”

In recognizing that affectivity is the necessary underpinning for abstract cognition, you are in agreement with these new approaches. But you go on to characterize feeling as concrete and verbalization as abstract. By concrete , do you have in mind bodily sensations? According to embodied approaches to affect, feeling isnt just directed toward the body, it is directed toward the world. It is the situation that feels bad, not our bodily sensations that are triggered by it. Feeling is world-directed and intentional. It involves appraisal and judgement concerning the relevance of situations to our goals. This is because feeling isnt simply an underpinning of verbal thought, it is so inseparably intertwined with it at all levels of abstraction that it makes no sense to try and tease out what aspect of our experience is felt and what is conceptualized.


Eugene Gendlin writes:

“Before speaking we do not usually think all the words or concepts which we are about to say. What we mean exists in us as a subjective feeling. When we speak,
we refer directly to this feeling and the proper concepts or words come to us. If the words or concepts that come are not the right ones, we say, "now let's see, what did I
mean?" again referring directly to our subjectively felt sense of what we meant.
This observation can be formulated by the following assertion: intellectual meanings are experienced as aspects of a subjectively felt referent. If we refer to this referent, we can differentiate and conceptualize meanings. Thus intellectual meanings are in their very
nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized.
Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in our subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling"
about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I
read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling"
functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”

Sure you could they are kinds of signs, but not symbols with determinate meanings. — Janus

They are determinate enough to evoke a cultural context, to produce a narrative , to unsettle beliefs , and to be preferred over words by many as a way to tap into the most profound depths of abstract meaning.

Think about a text about zen buddhism that produced a powerful feeling of enlightenment and creative joy for you the first time you read it. Subsequent readings didnt produce that same profound sense of meaningfulness even thought the words were the same. Why? Because words only imperfectly determine sense of meaning. The feeling of pure conceptual discovery cannot be encoded in the words in a reliable way because of the changing way we interpret the same word concepts over time. Music is the code we use to capture the original meaning of concepts. It reliably brings us back again and again to what it was about the way we interpreted a text that produced the profound conceptual meaning that first time. It does this by giving us only the general outlines of that meaning by representing it as a soaring melody. But not just any soaring melody. Only a certain general
context of thinking fits the particular way the piece of music is constructed. When we hear the music we fill in that particular context. So music is more accurate than words for preserving the ‘real’ meaningful power of abstract conceptual domains , but at the cost of specificity of content. Words give us this specificity of content but we can’t preserve the identical sense of meaning of words (their conceptual power) when we repeatedly return to them.

We could go for weeks having conversations, thinking to ourselves, or reading texts about those ideas that initially meant so much to us conceptually , and none of this verbiage may be capable of recapturing that meaning. But one special piece of music can be capable of immediately elevating our understanding to that special place of enlightenment. The only drawback is that it delivers us over to a general range of abstract meanings that encompasses more than just the particular content of the buddhist text that we read. But once , thanks to the percolate language of music , we have arrived back in the general vicinity of the powerful conceptual terrain we were attempting without success to attain without success through verbal means, we can then use words to tighten, clarify and definitively articulate the impressionistic space of ideas that the music put back at our disposal.
So there is a back and forth cycle between musical and verbal articulation, each insufficient without the other.

↪Joshs Music consists in concrete auditory imagery (sounds). Music presents, it does not represent in my view. — Janus

I think you’re wrong here. A concrete auditory image is a door creaking or a train whistle , not a highly organized pattern of notes and pauses designed to represent thought in ways similar to the highly organized sequence of letters that form words and sentences. Notes ARE special kinds of words , creating a kind of impressionistic variation of what verbal concepts do.

The kind of reasoning animals may do, and humans also do pre-verbally or non-verbally is reasoning based on concrete visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and proprioceptive images. — Janus

Are you saying that music is based on concrete images, or that music is not a kind of reasoning?
What about the pre-verbal valuative assumptions that motivate all kinds of human decisions, In psychotherapy, the aim is to make verbally articulable these driving values. We often do things
for good reasons that we know we can justify , but have difficulty putting them into words. These reasons are
quite abstract, but hard to pin down.

According to Pinker,

Human grammar is an example of a “discrete combinatorial system.” A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. — T Clark

I dont think Pinker’s approach is strictly compatible with Damasio. The latter understands mental phenomena from an embodied standpoint in which affectivity is inseparably intertwined with cognition. Pinker holds to a model of cognition rooted in Enlightenment rationalism. I recommend psycholinguist George Lakoff’s work in language development, and his book with Mark Johnson, ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’.

Here’s Lakoff on Pinker:

“For a quarter of a century, Steven Pinker and I have been on opposite sides of a major intellectual and scientific divide concerning the nature of language and the mind. Until this review, the divide was confined to the academic world. But, recently, the issue of the nature of mind and language has come into politics in a big way. We can no longer conduct twenty-first-century politics with a seventeenth-century understanding of the mind. The political issues in this country and the world are just too important.

Pinker, a respected professor at Harvard, has been the most articulate spokesman for the old theory. In language, it is Noam Chomsky’s claim that language consists in (as Pinker puts it) “an autonomous module of syntactic rules.” What this means is that language is just a matter of abstract symbols, having nothing to do with what the symbols mean, how they are used to communicate, how the brain processes thought and language, or any aspect of human experience — cultural or personal. I have been on the other side, providing evidence over many years that all of those considerations enter into language, and recent evidence from the cognitive and neural sciences indicates that language involves bringing all these capacities together. The old view is losing ground as we learn more.

In thinking, the old view comes originally from Rene Descartes’s seventeenth-century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the twentieth century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky in the 1950s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it) “old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here, reason is seen as the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic. The new view holds that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames, image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s recent MIT Press book, From Molecule to Metaphor, discusses such mechanisms. Contrary to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’ Error, rationality requires emotion.”

I don't think feeling is essential to abstract meaning; abstract meaning consists in generalization. 'Tree" refers to whole class of concrete objects, whereas a class is an abstract object; a concept.

I didn't know that about people drawing similar images after listening to instrumental music. Can you cite references for that study? Does it work with all instrumental music or just some, like for example Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony?

In any case music is gentle, calm, slow, racing, violent, aggressive, chaotic, ordered, happy, sad, eerie, dark, light, and so on and these are all feeling tones, it seems to me. So, if the similarity in the drawings is on account of the feeling tones in them which echo the feeling tones in the music, that would not surprise me.

Haiku is a very "pictorial" genre of poetry; generally it evokes concrete images, the classic being Basho's best know haiku:

The ancient pond

A frog leaps in.

The sound of water.

I am not aware of poetry which is abstract like abstract art is. The Abstract Expressionists aimed to dispense with any representational associations with things of the world such as human figures or landscapes, under the influence of Clement Greenberg, they wanted to produce paintings emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the surface, which were to be judged in purely formal, compositional terms. Yet of course some of these paintings seem to evoke landscape such as Jackson Pollock's Autumn, Blue Poles and Lavender Mist.

So they skirt the edges between representing recognizable objects and evoking the feeling of natural textures: patterns of moss on walls, or the general fractal forms of foliage, rock-faces, clouds and so on. I suppose you could say that evoking generalized forms, as opposed to clearly representing particular objects, is a kind of abstraction, so maybe I'll rethink what I said earlier about "abstract" being an inappropriate label. But then maybe not, because again I think it comes down to evoking the feeling tones, and even representing or at resembling the patterns of these natural forms.

In any case, none of this changes my mind about whether it is possible to think complex discursive ideas without using language. As I said earlier my belief that it is not possible is based only on my own experience and the reports of some others I have put the question to. so I am not totally ruling out the possibility, but find it hard to see how I could be convinced, since any counterargument could only come in the form of reports by others who claim they can do it. So far only @Mww is the only one to have claimed to be able to do anything like this, and going by his descriptions I'm not sure we are even talking about the same thing. — Janus

Let’s draw up a general conception of language for our purposes and see what we can discern from that. We know that even the simplest forms of perception draw from conceptuality in that they involve a meeting between expectations and what actually appears to our senses.
A remarkable feature of a word (or a picture) is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities(visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. This is what I mean by abstraction here, the creation of a more complex synthetic unitary concept from simpler perceptions or concepts. For instance , abstract art isn’t interested in representing the photographic details of a scene in order to tell its story , but strives to begin from deeper and more meaningful conceptual forms. It is looking to bring out inner truths rather than getting bogged down on surface aspects.

When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources. How does language do this? It builds up to this complex whole step by step from simpler associations, starting with the recognition of the shapes of letters or the phonemic characteristics of spoken words. Of course this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When we are presented with language, we are already expecting the visual or auditory units to be meaningful symbols, because we already know what a language is. So we are priming our brain to rapidly recognize these shapes as words , and words that belong to a meaningful context that is already ongoing.

The bottom line is that words are technologies, ways that we reconstruct our world in order to develop our culture.
All of our built environment( our architecture, communication and media devices , produced arts , manufactured goods) acts a language in this sense, speaking back to us and pushing us to further levels
of abstract thought.

How does this background summary relate to your contention that words have a distinct advantage over other forms of language in enabling abstract conceptualization? Assuming we can accept my definition of abstraction, it seems you’re making two points
First , that only word symbols allow to a brain to attain the deepest forms of synthetic unity in a manner that is usable. For instance , when we are in deep thought, we tie together a continuous string of words. This allows us to sustain a recognizably clear and meaningful flow of ideas that we can build upon. Painting, dance and music, by contrast, while allowing for a certain. degree of synthetic abstraction, gives us only murky, vague felt signposts of meaning. This merely ‘felt’ kind of meaningfulness is different than abstract knowing. For one thing, it is hard to imagine how a felt experience can build’ on itself exactly in terms of intensity. How can there be conceptual development in a medium devoid of concepts?

This assumption seems to repeat the traditional divide between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking.
Supposedly , only verbal cognition is rational , conceptual. Feeling is mere spice, coloration, window dressing. It’s an important motivator but does not produce ideas in and of itself.

Recent approaches to emotions and feeling overturn this divide. Affect is now assumed to provide the very basis of conceptual meaning. As Ratcliffe(2002) puts it,“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”.
There is no concept without affectivity , because affect has to do with the meaningful way in which we embrace new concepts , or the extent to which we are able to coherently embrace new concepts at all. I reading these words, you are understanding them in an affective contextual out of how they are relevant to you , how they matter and to you. Every text is accompanied by a kind of ‘music’ but we usually don’t notice this aspect and instead assume a conceptual content can be divorced from its significance to us. By the same token, feeling never occurs apart from a conceptual domain that it is intrinsic to. To feel
something is always to experience an intrinsic aspect of conceptualization, the relative coherence and consonance of meaning. Just as we can pretend that the music of felt relevance is not intrinsic to the use of all word concepts, we can ignore that a piece of music
is presenting an unfolding conceptual text while we focus exclusively on the feelings that this unfolding conceptual text is delivering.

In accord with this newer thinking, let me make the following claims:

Music, painting , dance and other non-verbal arts produce ideas , and these ideas evolve in parallel with theoretical conceptualizations in the science and philosophy. The history of painting, for instance, is an evolution in how we see and think about ourselves.
The octave scale of music is organized similarly to a subject-object proposition. And these ‘sentences’ belong to larger ‘paragraphs’ developing the ideational theme of the song. By the end of the song one has learned something , travelled somewhere, not just ‘emotionally’ but conceptually.
Instrumental music can be profoundly political and subversive.

The difference between these vocabularies and words is that the language of the arts is more ‘impressionistic’ and incipient. This can be an advantage over words, which have a tendency to lock us into old ways of thinking because of their concreteness.

No object simply exists for us as what it is outside of changing contextual relationships of sense.

Key words being "for us"... Does that include the toddler in the crib under the tree? — creativesoul

If the toddler is young enough, they will not yet have attained the level of object permanence. To recognize an object as something which remains when we are no longer looking at it , or when it is covered up , requires a constructive process. In fact , everything to do with the concept of a spatial object requires a sequential
process of construction. We don’t originally directly see objects as solid unities, we see a constantly changing flow of sensations, from perspectives that change as we move our eyes, head or body. We concoct the idea of a unitary object like ‘tree’ from concatenations of memory , expectations and the meager data that we actually see in front of us. The notion of a tree as this thing in front of me is thus a complex synthesis of what we actually see , what we remember and what we predict we will see. Most of the ‘tree’ is filled in this way. And the most important element is that we have to interact with the ‘object’ in order for it to exist for us. Animals deprived of the ability to move and interact with their surroundings do not learn to see objects. When we passively see a thing, we are understanding what it is in terms of how we can interact with it, how it will change in response to our movements. This is the standard model from developmental perceptual psychology.

The fact that science makes assumptions doesn't make those assumptions bad ones to make. I'm sure there are scientists who will deny the assumption-laden nature of the work we do. I'm not one of them. But I do deny the automatic assumption that because we have presuppositions, those presuppositions need exposing/replacing/examining. There mere existence is not evidence any of those things need to happen. — Isaac

What many postmodern approaches to science have in common is a radically temporal, self-reflexive point of view. In Rouse’s case , he likens assumptions to the normatively organized interactive cycling between organism and environment. Piaget said that this cycling shows the organism to be assimilating elements of its world to its kind of functioning, but at the same time must always accommodate and adjust this normativity to the novel aspects of what it incorporates. In like fashion, an assumption , rule or norm only exists in practice , that is in its actual performative interaction with the world. Assumptions doesn’t simply assimilate the world, they accommodate themselves to that world at the same time.
Just as an organism, in order to continue to exist , must maintain its normative functioning in the face of changing circumstances , so must empirical conceptions continually adapt and and re-affirm. It’s not that we SHOULD examine and question them , its that we always already do this even while maintaining them as stable assumptions. We simply don’t often notice this continual accommodation.

For these writers, the mere existence of assumptions IS evidence that adaptation and accommodation is always already happening every time we instantiate and use them, just as this is the case every time an organism assimilates material into its functioning.

Assumptions, like organisms, are kinds of relatively but dynamically stable ongoing self-transformations

My point is merely that the background concept of there being an external world matrix (without specifying the simples), and the idea of there being boundaries (not everything is one homogeneous mass) seem sufficiently innate to me to be premises from which we might find common ground with our fellow humans. O — Isaac

What makes the matrix we interact with ‘external’ to us? The evidence coming from the world or our starting presuppositions? What a fess do we have to a world external to our space of reasons? And isnt that space of reasons in direct and continual contact with a world whose behavior it predicts and anticipates? In other words, what is at stake and at issue within the space of reasons for a scientist is under question and subject to modification in applying it to the world , because the world speaks back to us. But it responds differently to different conceptions. So the world’s ‘externality’ can only challenge a system of conceptions relative not the nature of those conceptions.

(Not sure my last edit of the previous post came though
so I’m duplicating it here:)

If we belong causally to nature rather than standing outside of it observing it, must not the physical and biological building blocks be reconstructed from our immersion within that world? This immersion isn’t as spectators or mere modelers , but , though our practices and invention and use of instruments, as constructors of niches that reveal new and better ways of seeing and interacting with our surrounds, precisely because of the way they material change those surrounds. I suggest that in order for science to progress, the farther away from its origins it moves via its construction of the world, the better it understands those origins. Making progress in understanding the earliest and simplest building blocks of nature is a process of materially altering the world scientists and the rest of us inhabit, in ways that change the world we interact with profoundly relative to those beginnings.
To assume we are attempting to capture non-contingent intrinsic features of that world through our science may be a dream we inherited from theological notions of the world.

“I think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates. A philosophy of scientific practices denies that such an otherworldly understanding of nature is possible. Scientific concepts and scientific understanding are situated in the midst of ongoing causal interaction with the world. That is why I talk about conceptual articulation in science rather than theoretical representation. We understand scientific concepts only by understanding the phenomena they articulate. We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. That is the radical vision of a naturalistic philosophy of science expressed in my “concluding scientific postscript“.

(Joseph Rouse, Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript(2007)
1h[/quote]

Don’t we need to include the concept of ‘x’ itself as what is involved in naming.?
— Joshs

Possibly, but X here simply stands for something and the spaces between them stand for some boundary. I don't doubt you could make an argument that both concept (an external world matrix, and 'boundaries') are constructed concepts, but I haven't seen the evidence for that. All I've seen indicates that such fundamental concepts are present in very young babies and so seem likely to be hard-wired. — Isaac

We wouldn’t say , though, that the hard-wiring is itself hard-wired. That is, ‘hard-wired’ is not a metaphysical a priori like a Kantian category, but an adaptation under selective pressure, and since we can grasp the nature of this ‘categorical’ adaption as a contingent product of a non-categorical process, aren’t we capable of reducing a physiological a priori like ‘boundary’ to something more original? Might hard-wired capacities be better thought of as sources of conditioning among others rather than as irreducible determinants of meaning?
More importantly, isn’t there a danger that the myriad senses of a concept like ‘boundary’ be lost as a result of a pre-emptively reductive understanding of ‘hard-wiring’? Is this way of understanding the innate the result of science or the unintended reliance on a philosophical presupposition guiding a certain kind of naturalistic stance?

. I think the differences between us might be the foundation on which this activity acts. You might have it have nk foundation at all, I believe there are physical and biological building blocks from which these senses are constructed.

We can’t then say the x’s existed prior to our naming of them as a jabberwocky , because the meaning of ‘x’ points to a specific way of causally interacting with aspects of the world.
— Joshs

As I say, I can see how you might theorise that, but the evidence I've seen seems to contradict it. — Isaac

But if we belong causally to nature rather than standing outside of it observing it, must not the physical and biological building blocks be reconstructed from our immersion within that world? This immersion isn’t as spectators or mere modelers , but , though our practices and invention and use of instruments, as constructors of niches that reveal new and better ways of seeing and interacting with our surrounds, precisely because of the way they material change those surrounds. I suggest that in order for science to progress, the farther away from its origins it moves via its construction of the world, the better it understands those origins. Making progress in understanding the earliest and simplest building blocks of nature is a process of materially altering the world scientists and the rest of us inhabit, in ways that change the world we interact with profoundly relative to those beginnings.
To assume we are attempting to capture non-contingent intrinsic features of that world through our science may be a dream we inherited from theological notions of the world.

“I think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates. A philosophy of scientific practices denies that such an otherworldly understanding of nature is possible. Scientific concepts and scientific understanding are situated in the midst of ongoing causal interaction with the world. That is why I talk about conceptual articulation in science rather than theoretical representation. We understand scientific concepts only by understanding the phenomena they articulate. We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. That is the radical vision of a naturalistic philosophy of science expressed in my “concluding scientific postscript“.

(Joseph Rouse, Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript(2007)

Using a word changes us at the same time that it changes something in our environment.

We are in our environment. Word use changes us. How exactly does using the word "tree" as a means to pick out the thing in my front yard change the thing in my front yard?

Perhaps you have an example of a situation when language use changes something in our environment. I mean, I agree with that. At least when I take it at face value. Word use helps to create many different parts of our environment.


Words only exist in their use , and their use reveals new aspects of things.

I'm struggling to see the relevance. — creativesoul

Are you familiar with the later Wittgenstein? He argues that words do not refer to already existing objects. Strictly speaking , they do not refer at all. They enact relationships by altering prior relationships. If I see a tree, I am not passively observing hat appears to me, I am deconstructing it. And what I am deconstructing is not an object , it is a way of relating to something,- me that way of relating never repeats itself identically from
context to context. When I use a word in front of someone else, their response establishes a fresh sense of meaning of that word. ‘Tree’ has an infinity of senses that depend exquisitely on the context of a shared situation. In a situation of usage of the word ‘tree’ I am not creating a new physical object , I am enacting a new pattern of relationship with it. No object simply exists for us as what it is outside of changing contextual relationships of sense.

Yes, exactly. I like cashing out 'worldly intersubjective engagement' in terms of mostly tacit rules for applying concepts. The traditional metaphysician, our traditional foil, talks as if these contingent and blurry rules/habits were the deepest laws of reality, meanwhile oversimplyfing them until they are more plausibly handled in a quasimathematical way, so that what appear to be profound theorems can be cranked out from the comfort of an armchair. — Pie

We might want to radicalize the relation of tacit rules to concept application in the direction of the later Wittgenstein.

“…we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”( Rouse)

As I see it, this is a language trap. That it is impossible for one to step out of subjective experience is not an empirical hypothesis. It's just a lesson in metaphysical English, an articulation of how concepts tend to be used together by a particular, eccentric community (us), often mistaken for facts about immaterial entities like consciousness and knowledge and sensations. — Pie

That’s a good point. If we think about what is an empirical hypothesis, the use of words themselves provides a key example. Word use is performative, intrinsic to and inextricable to the way we causally interact with each other and our material circumstances. This includes concepts like subjectivity, which only makes sense in relation to worldly intersubjective engagement, whose reciprocally created constraints and affordances serve to empirically determine the intelligibility of concepts like ‘inner’ and ‘subjective’.

Simply put, understanding that we use the term "tree" to pick out the thing in my front yard suffices — creativesoul

Naming things with words is more than just sticking a symbol in front of a sign. Words are not just tools that we use to refer to an independently existing universe, they are ways that the world we interact with modifies our engagement with it. Using a word changes us at the same time that it changes something in our environment. Words only exist in their use , and their use reveals new aspects of things.

Could I have included the two Xs either side in my definition of 'a jabberwocky'? Yes, clearly I could have, but I didn't.

Could someone else come along and say 'a jabberwocky' is actually the first four Xs? Yes, obviously they could.

None of this has any bearing whatsoever on the existence of the three, four, or five Xs involved in what we're variously calling 'a jabberwocky'. — Isaac

Don’t we need to include the concept of ‘x’ itself as what is involved in naming.? Put differently, aren’t the words we use more than just added-on tokens to extant objects? Doesn’t the use of a word involve an activity, a set of causal interactive performances that give that word its pragmatic sense? If we look at word concepts this way, as inextricable from causal interactions with an environment , then everything we can say about a series of x’s implies specific patterns of engagement. We can’t then say the x’s existed prior to our naming of them as a jabberwocky , because the meaning of ‘x’ points to a specific way of causally interacting with aspects of the world. As the interactions evolve, so do the meanings of the named concepts.

No, for me music (without lyrics) conveys only feeling. Abstract concepts are determinate; I don't think music, like so-called "abstract" art, is rightly thought of as being abstract, but is non-representational and concrete. — Janus

“Only feeling” is the very core of abstract meaning. It is an impressionistic kind of verbiage. Rather than describing feeling as indeterminate, I would say that the word puts into sharper focus what feeling already locates in a general way. Is feeling non-representational? Is music non-representational? Did you know that if you put a group of people in a room and ask them to draw images that are evoked by a piece of instrumental music played to the group, many would draw similar images? That sounds representational to me. Is a Haiku representational in the way that an instruction manual is? Are there not forms of modern poetry that are abstract in the way that abstract art is? Does metaphorical language represent or invent?

The way I think about signs has been influenced by Peirce. To give a basic account: according to Peirce a symbol is something that signifies something else but does not resemble it. An ikon is something that signifies something else by resemblance or representation. And a basic sign, such as smoke being a sign of fire for example, signifies by material association acquired by inference or expectation from the experience of constant conjunctions of things.

Words are symbols in this sense that they do not resemble or have any material associations, but do have conventional associations, with the things they represent. So not all signs are symbols in this understanding. — Janus

Derrida’s analyses of language attempted to show that what you are calling word symbols, and what Peirce calls ikon, have both conventional and inherently meaningful expressive relations with what they stand for . There is research corroborating Derrida’s claim that word symbols are not as strictly conventional as you might think. For instance , auditory characteristics of phonemes have been found to be non-arbitrarily linked to the meanings they symbolize.

Now my claim has just been that a complex argument or train of thought involving abstract concepts cannot be followed except in symbolic language terms. That said, I don't totally rule out the possibility, but I know I can't do it, and I cannot imagine how others could. But even if it were possible, how could it be shown to be such in any case? — Janus

Would you grant that a music composer is creating abstract concepts through their medium , and may consider music to be a more effective way , and perhaps the only, way to produce the deepest form of abstract thinking? And that a visual artist or dancer may make the same claim about their art? And even an actor may claim that the silences and pauses, the facial expressions and gestures , can convey more in the way. of abstract ideas than the use of words?
I would suggest that the differences among these non-verbal forms of expression are continuous with the differences within varying uses of verbal language. For instance , poetic language conveys differently than prose, and story-telling produces ideas differently than
theoretical verbiage. And words that belong to song lyrics work differently than these other examples.

Eugene Gendlin studied how verbal language and bodily felt meaning reciprocally determine and enhance each other , and developed techniques for tapping into the experiential intricacy of bodily felt sense, which is wider than verbal concepts at the same that it stands as the generating process behind verbal conceptualization.
We use a sense of the whole situation in many crucial situations in an implicit way. This is often referred to as
‘intuition’ , but it is not a phenomenon restricted to only certain circumstances. It is this relevance that makes any word meaningful to us. In generating new concepts , we do t have the new words till a fair bit into the process. Prior to the creation of new words , we have a sense of what we mean that we can refer back to and manipulate. It has a bodily quality to it. We can create thought experiments and invent new ideas well before we are able to find new word names.

symbolic thought requires symbols, and symbols are mostly words. It's true that things like love or hate or anger can be symbolized by images, but how could non-verbal images be used to symbolize abstract notions like generality, specificity, pattern, from, form, about, content, exception, logic, rationality, fundamental, absolute and countless others? — Janus

All thought and perception is symbolic in the sense of signifying something. Complexes of sound , image and sensation signify recognizable things. Music signifies complex ideas and feelings. Words are just specialized forms of signification. Many abstract ideas can be signified better by feelings( which are forms of conceptual meaning) than by words.

I think that's Sellars' explicit goal. If we imagine a species evolving a second-order tradition of norms for establishing beliefs (a way of talking and acting the world), then we are half way there? Or more? — Pie

For Rouse, what allows our species to do science is language, but language is homologous with the forms of responsive situational intentionality other animals possess. Other species enact intentional norms but lack our linguistic capability for self-reflection. Science is not centrally about epistemological belief but performances that continually define what is at stake and at issue within a set of partially shared scientific practices. Our performances enact normative pattens just as other living self-organizing systems assimilate their environment to their own normative functioning in relation to their constructed world , while accommodating those norms to the changing circumstances that their own behavior produces in their niche. In other words, science isnt representational, it is enactive.


“ Niche construction theory thus situates conceptual normativity cen­trally within the evolutionary process in scientifically intelligible ways. It can account for not only the continuities between our conceptual ca­pacities and the flexible, instrumentally rational responsiveness of many other organisms to their developmental, physiological, and selective en­vironments but also for the crucial discontinuities between them. We are adaptively and reconstructively responsive to a very different envi­ronment, which has coevolved with our conceptual capacities. The key transformation was the development of partially autonomous performa­tive and recognitive repertoires through the ability to track and assess them in two dimensions. We are responsive to a dual significance of var­ious performances and circumstances, both for appropriateness within their proximate domains and for their broader significance for our lives and ways of life.”

Imagine a chaotic soup of items which are capable of being arranged in self-replicating structures. Perhaps such arrangements are relatively rare, but once they appear they'll tend to say, precisely because they replicate themselves. If such replication is not perfect and includes mutations, it may be that some mutants are more effective self-replicators than others (perhaps most mutations prevent replication.) The essence seems to be that 'progress' is 'saved' or cumulative. We tend to find patterns that are good at hanging around hanging around. — Pie

I think the key term here is ‘imagine’. Without some implicit normative overview transcendent to the phenomena being described we can’t get from ‘chaotic soup’ to ‘self-replicating pattern’. What is it in the phenomena that differentiates chaotic interaction from replicative self-identity or self-similarity? If we reduce material events to processes that have no meaning apart from locally assigned properties, then pattern and self-similarity are concepts that we must bring to events
from somewhere else. For realists this elsewhere is a metaphysical presupposition. For Rouse, normativity is a property of systems of material nature rather than a mind split off from nature.

As I see it, it is the claims that apply concepts like evolution which are more or less justified in terms of the usual scientific/rational norms. This is what Brandom calls the primacy of the propositional, and he credits Kant for foregrounding it. We don't build claims from concepts. We understand concepts in terms of the role they play in claims (the inferences they license, etc.)

In case it's helpful, I'm happy to grant that Dennett does not know the quiet secret of the universe. We find ourselves here in the mess together (the nightmare of history), and we slowly and painfully work toward being less ignorant and confused, largely by thinking about thinking — Pie

This is interesting. I’m on a Joseph Rouse kick, reading his Articulating the World. The book is about thinking about thinking , more specifically thinking about scientific thinking. He critiques authors like McDowell, Brandom and Dennett for not taking advantage of the latest models from biology to ground our scientific/rational norms.

He understands this in terms of a difference between b1and b2 accounts of intentionality:

B1: normative-status accounts of how the performances of a system or group of sys­tems as a whole mostly conform to a systematically construed ideal of rationality
in context, such that the goals with respect to which it would be rational are ap­propriately taken as authoritative for it

B2: normative-status accounts of how a system’s actual engagement with its surround­ings is articulated in a way that renders it accountable to something beyond its
own actual performances or those of its larger community of intentional system

Rouse’s b2 account treats scientific/rational norms as the manifestations of biological niche building rather than as a realm that stands outside of the empirical phenomena that it makes claims about. Claims are performances within a niche of intersubjective practices , just as the normative functioning of organisms defines its environment, changes its environment and is then shaped reciprocally by that changed environment.

This approach rids us the the gap between normative claims ( manifest image) and the empirical world it addresses (scientific image).

“Orthodox and liberal naturalists identify “the scientific image” as a position within the space of reasons, a body of claims that have been justified and accepted scientifically, or as I earlier quoted Price, “the sum of all we take to be the case.” Scientific understanding in practice is instead an ongoing reconfiguration of the space of reasons, of what can count as intelligible and significant projects, defensible positions, reasons for or against them, and possible ways of extending or revising them. Science offers not a single “image” of the world, but a conceptual space of research opportunities and intelligible disagreements.” (Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism At Last)

But purposeful behavior must be considered fundamentally arbitrary if it is merely the product of such randomly acting bits.
— Joshs

What is arbitrary doing in that sentence?

If something is an algorithmic process it's not random, and hence not arbitrary. If something is physical, it's not based on a personal whim, and so is not arbitrary.

Evolution is not a random process — Banno

An algorithm produces a lawfulness through the recursive repetition of its formal structure. Where does the algorithm’s formal structure come from? Is it an irreducible a priori or is it the product of a non-algorithmic causal process? If the latter, do we say that the non-arbitrary order of the algorithm emerges somehow out of a process that does not have its order?

Apokrisis wrote a fair bit in previous threads about the gap between the dependence of biological and psychological phenomena on semiotic codes and algorithms vs the absence of the concept of semiosis in physics. One is left with either a kind of dualism in which semiosis appears out of nowhere in living systems or a pan-semiotics inclusive of physics , requiring an updating of meta-theoretical assumptions in physics.

Why arbitrary? Dennett's vision of a evolution as an algorithm makes sense to me. It's true that neutral traits can come along for the ride (so there's some randomness), but surely there is real selection too. — Pie

Dennett seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. He says we can understand organic and cultural evolution from within a physical, design or intentional stance. One gets the impression the physical stance is more fundamental for him than the other two. Neural networks composed of dumb bits doing dumb causal
things leads to what , within the intentional
stance, we can call purposeful behavior. But purposeful behavior must be considered fundamentally arbitrary if it is merely the product of such randomly acting bits. Concepts like evolution , order and beauty are ‘higher-order’ products of these primary processes, but how are they any more justified than any other concepts associated with the intentional stance? We can talk ‘as if’ there really is an evolution of order but the meaning of such a notion vanishes within the physical stance. What could an algorithm, much less its evolution , possibly mean within the physical stance?

perhaps we are tuned by evolution to appreciate the beauty of an efficient and graceful syntax — Pie

We wouldn’t need an evolutionary explanation if ‘beauty’ ‘efficient’ and ‘graceful’ can be understood as self-grounding concepts. If they can’t, then they must be dumped in favor of what evolutionary process implies: selection of adaptive concatenations of arbitrary causal mechanisms.

Does that work for colors? Do you think if someone said you would be seeing a gold dress that it would necessarily mean you saw it as gold and not blue? I'm not aware that color illusions work that way. — Marchesk

Apparently it does to some extent. Isn’t the gold dress -blue dress problem an example of gestalt perception? Think of the duck-rabbit or vase-face set-up. If someone tells me the image is a rabbit that will prime me perceptually to look for ways to construct it as a rabbit.

Perceptual
rooming should work for other animals too. If a vervet monkey produces an alarm call , do you think nearby monkeys are more inclined to recognize objects as
predators? What about if we associate a red-colored light with food, and then link a word command with the red light? Would an intelligent animal then be primed to see the color red by hearing the word?

https://qz.com/1454466/your-language-influences-your-color-perception-says-a-new-study/amp/

Have you read that whole article? — Tate

Yes, I did. It makes one appreciate that from
the planet’s point of view ( as opposed to human civilization), the time scale of climate change will be barely noticeable compared with that of the next ice age.

I was arguing against Pie's claim that seeing red has something to do with the public use of the English word "red". — Michael

To the extent that the public use of language brings with it expectations concerning what we are seeing , it will have an influence on our perceptions. This can be seen more clearly in actual contexts of word use (language games ). The context of use creates the actual sense of meaning of the word , and in turn shapes our perceptual expectations and thus what we actually see.
Experiments show how subjects’ auditory or visual perception is influenced by what they are told.

I don't need to have words for pleasure and pain to recognise that I am in pain or to recognise the difference between me feeling pleasure and me feeling pain. Qualitative experiences occur and differ from one another, and that they do has nothing to do with being able to make and make sense of my own and another person's vocalisations or ink impressions — Michael

There is no perception without conceptualization in humans ( and higher animals). Conceptualization doesn’t mean using formal. language. To perceive pain or emotion or colors is to construe them by paring expectations with appearance in a complex process of sense making. We dont instantly feel, we undergo a matching and fitting process to determine and identify what it is we are feeling. This is why pain changes it’s felt character in response to many internal and external contextual factors.

This constructive process happens quickly enough that it seems immediate to us. We dont need others to help us judge what we are feeling when we are along , but we need our own cognitive processes to make that judgment, that is , to validate our expectations.

. When it's elliptical, the Northern Hemisphere summers are cooler. When this happens, per theory, ice which formed in the winter doesn't get enough heat to melt, and so it keeps growing. Ice reflects heat back out to space, so increased glaciation is associated with positive feedback. This explains why reglaciation is always so abrupt — Tate

Does this M.I.T. Technology review article jibe with what you are reading?

“…cyclic gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Saturn periodically elongate Earth’s orbit, and this effect combines from time to time with slow changes in the direction and degree of Earth’s tilt that are caused by the gravity of our large moon. Consequently, summer sunlight around the poles is reduced, and high-­latitude regions such as Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia turn cold enough to preserve snow year-round. This constant snow cover reflects a great deal of sunlight, cooling things down even more, and a new ice age begins. Naturally, this process does not occur with anything like the speed portrayed in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but geological and other evidence shows that it’s happened at least four times.

In about 2,000 years, when the types of planetary motions that can induce polar cooling start to coincide again, the current warming trend will be a distant memory.This means that humanity will be hit by a one-two punch the likes of which we have never seen. Nature is as unforgiving to men as it was to dinosaurs; advanced civilization will not survive unless we develop energy sources that curb the carbon emissions heating the planet today and help us fend off the cold when the ice age comes.”

(F. Hadley Cocks,Duke U. Prof of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science)

according to indirect realism, agents aren't merely said to commit perceptual errors relative to the expectations of onlookers and their linguistic conventions, but are believed to really make those errors as a result of possessing cognitive states that have goals and beliefs as intrinsic properties. — sime

Dennett is an indirect realist, and his view of goals and beliefs is that these features of a cognitive system can be reduced to the collective activity of a network of millions of dumb bits which can’t themselves be said to have goals or beliefs. It can be useful for certain purposes to treat such dumb assemblages as if they possessed such intrinsic properties.

People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive. — Palmer, 1999

The physical properties we ascribe to the world are just as dependent on our accounts as are the colors we see. Neither is more ‘true’ to nature than the other. They are simply different sorts of interpretations for different purposes.

What you can't say is that there aren't really rules, because the rules are what makes it a particular cellular automation. Something has to determine what state the cells will change to each generation. Similarly, one could argue that the rules described by physics determine the evolution of all the world states. And we can consider other universes with different rules, and how that would change what sort of universe you get, or how long it lasts — Marchesk

I think the question for Putnam is whether any rules can be treated as non-relative to a conceptual scheme of understanding. Being a conceptual relativist he would say there aren’t really rules in the same sense that there aren’t really quarks or gravity. That is, none of these can be claimed to have an existence independent of any conceptual account of them.

I think to say that A necessitates B is exactly the same as to say "If A happens then B happens". And that is not affected by additions like "if C happens then B happens" because A is not specified as the sole cause of B. That latter could be formulated as "If B happens then A must have happened". And you can always add: " And C and or D and or E, and so on, must have happened". The idea of necessary and/or sufficient causes or conditions.

But these formal definitions seem to be lacking the essential element of our conception of causation; which is some kind of energetic forcing, not mere correlation — Janus

Putnam had some interesting thoughts on material conceptions of causation

“I have argued that materialism, which conceives of
persons as automata, inherits Hume's problems. A neoassociationist theory of understanding (the probabilistic automaton model) renders it unintelligible that anything in the mind/brain can bear a unique
correspondence to anything outside the mind/brain. (Of course, everything corresponds in some way or other to everything else; the problem is how anyone correspondence can be singled out as "the" relation between signs and their referents.) In this sense, Hume's dif­ficulties with objective reference to an external world are difficulties for the materialist too.

Moreover, if the physical universe itself is an automaton (some­thing with "states" that succeed one another according to a fixed equation), then it is unintelligible how any particular structure can be singled out as "the" causal structure of the universe. Of course, the universe fulfills structural descriptions-in some way or other it ful­fills every structural description that does not call for too high a car­dinality on the part of the system being modeled; once again, the problem is how anyone structure can be singled out as "the" struc­ture of the system.
If we say that the structure of the physical universe is singled out by the mind, then we either put the mind outside the universe (whichis to abandon materialism) or else we are thrown back to the first problem: the problem of how the signs employed by the mind can have a determinate "correspondence" to parts and aspects of the uni­verse. If we say that the causal structure of the physical universe is "built into" the physical universe, then we abandon materialism with­out admitting that we are abandoning it; for all we do in this case is to project into physical systems properties (for example, being a "background condition," being a cause, being cotenable with the antecedent of a counterfactual) that cannot be properties of matter "in itself." In this sense, Hume's difficulties with objective necessita­tion are difficulties for the materialist too.”

That's demonstrably false, since there's tons of counterexamples where appearance didn't match reality. — Marchesk

When we demonstrate the truth or falsity of an empirical claim, this is made possible because the intelligibility of what is at issue is determined within a shared set of practices. Thus , the appearance matches or fails to match the criteria that have been intersubjectively constructed. This is not an ‘external’ reality in the sense of having features entirely disassociated from those practices , but neither is it walled off from
world inside a solipsist ideal realm. Rouse argues that our scientific theories and practices are biological niches that we construct through our interaction with our social and material environment, just as an organism creates a niche that it inhabits and that produces constraints on what is real for that organism ( what is ‘true’ or ‘false’ relative to its needs and goals). So whatever you show to be demonstratively true or false is always going to be relative to a space of reasons that responds to and is altered by changing circumstances, just as an organism’s niche adjust itself to an environment that changes in response to the organism’s interactions with it.

Is this done by playing with language, by conceptional framing, or by looking the other way? :razz: — Tom Storm

Joseph Rouse argues:

“This account blocks both realism and anti-realism by showing how the contentfulness of scientific claims about the world is worked out as part of ongoing interaction with our developmental and selective environment. Scientific claims and the conditions for their intelligibility are part of that environment, and only acquire meaning and justification as part of our ongoing efforts to articulate that environment conceptually from within. There is no gap between how the world appears to us and how it “really” is for realists to overcome, or for anti-realists to remain safely on the side of those appearances. Scientific understanding instead develops hard-won, partial articulations of the world. Within those conceptually articulated domains we can differentiate locally between what our theories and models say about the world, and whether what they say is correct or in need of some form of revision. Both conceptual understanding and its assessment nevertheless presuppose the kind of access to the world that antirealists deny and realists seek to secure.
​In the wake of these arguments, we should stop asking the questions to which realism or anti-realism would pose answers. Unless they can develop an adequate critical response to these arguments, realists must abandon any commitment to philosophical naturalism. They would instead share with their anti-realist opponents the need to defend their conceptions of scientific understanding with the recognition that these conceptions conflict with what the sciences have to say about our own conceptual capacities