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.

Do you think your emotions determine what is true? — wonderer1

It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. Do I think such a mechanism determines what is true? No.
Conservatives like to say that facts don't care about our feelings. I think the arbiter of empirical validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world. Rather, empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment.

Does what you say change the fact that stealing (which may have various definitions) is generally considered wrong across cultures? (And I am not saying all cultures, or all people in all cultures and I'm not talking about situational exemptions, etc)

How do you understand morality? — Tom Storm

The challenge here is to use a morally neutral term in place of ‘stealing’ and then attach a judgement of wrongfulness to it. Obviously , if we simply described stealing as seeing an object and walking away with it, we dont have enough of a context to make a moral judgement. We want to know why the person took it, what they were thinking, if they assumed the object belonged to someone else, if they also assumed that other person didnt have a right to the object. At some point , a non-neutral concept must be inserted into the description of an action to make it moral or not. How do I understand such moral concepts? A very simple definition might go like this:

Traditional morality comes into play when the intention behind the actions of a person runs afoul of previously established expectations and trust between that person and others. That person knowingly disappoints a standard of conduct for no good reason.

So, when you read the word 'same' you hear it as 'different'? Is that possible without some notion of 'same' that maintains the distinction between 'same' and 'similar'? — Fooloso4

As you know, ‘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.

And that doesn't get you to a transcendent vantage point. When phenomenology pretends to become ontology, it's language on holiday. — frank

Rather than transcendence or correctness, such a method can bring us to an awareness of what appears to remain invariant throughout the changes in experience. If through this process we repeatedly discover that all specific contents are relative and contingent, then what remains invariant may be empty formal structures such as the synthetic relation between past, present and future. At the same time, such an awareness doesn’t render conventional views of empiricism, objective truth and faith in a same world for everyone as incorrect. It simply allows us to enrich such concepts by revealing a basis for them that they are not explicitly aware of. In other words, by dropping the focus on truth as correct match between subject and world in favor of truth as the invariant features of our constructions of experience, we enrich concepts like material reality with the dimensions of self-reflexivity and interactive reciprocity.

Morality doesn't vary all that much across cultures - not stealing, killing or causing suffering within communities of concern are the classic themes. — Tom Storm

Notice the circularity in moral proscriptives like these.
Stealing is defined at taking that which isn’t ‘rightfully’ yours. It’s not just killing but ‘murder’, or ‘wrongful killing’ that we disdain. It is not just causing suffering but intentionally willing the suffering of others that we disapprove of. These descriptions are just redefinitions of immorality as willful disregard of what is right. They come down to saying that wrongful behavior is a failure to do what is right. Looked at through this vapid lens , it’s no wonder morality doesn’t vary all that much across cultures.

But this doesn't go beyond the realm of speculation. Notice that you're giving an account of the nature of reality, but you don't have the transcendent vantage point implied by the narrative — frank

It’s a phenomenological analysis based on what actually appears to me, using the method of the epoche, or bracketing, of presuppositions concerning the empirically factual world. From a naive vantage, I see empirical objects existing in the same world as others,but from a more rigorous vantage, after having bracketed what is contingent and relative in my experience of the world, what remains for me are synthesizing processes that correlate never-repeating elements of experience based on patterns of perceived similarities.

It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do. — Janus

Why aren’t you talking about relevant meanings? Is there such a thing as a neutral meaning, divorced from relevance? This is crucial to understanding how we construct sense and language. Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time centers around the fact that how things matter to us is not separable from what they are in themselves. Extracting a neutral fact of the matter is “an artificially worked up act.”

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure…
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)

“The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood before hand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves.“ (Being and Time)

Is there a fact of the matter as to whether Derrida's work is "highly rigorous philosophy"? If he is, then you should be able to explain in clear language just what he is saying in that passage you quoted. — Janus

Is there a fact of the matter about anything? I can explain Derrida in clear language but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it. Clarity follows conceptual apprehension rather than preceding it. Look, if you tell me you dont get Derrida because his style of writing is too aleatory or digressive or whatnot, I can respect that. I also think his style is too aleatory and digressive, and that he has less to say than Heidegger. But at least add a qualifier if you’re going to claim he is just a sophist with nothing substantive to say, something like ‘I worry that his work may be not more than sophistry’.

You say you have no trouble understanding early Heidegger. Here’s your chance to prove it. Have you read Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger in ‘Heidegger and the Question?’ He lays out a clear series of points of disagreement with Heidegger, on Animality, questioning and oppositional thinking. These critical remarks have had quite an influence on Heidegger scholarship. Do they amount to just sophistry? Heidegger may have been the more original thinker, but I do think Derrida went beyond him. And since I think Heidegger was the greatest 20th century philosopher, that says a lot.

We do this sort of thing all the time, without problem. You read the same post I wrote. You are on the same forum as I am. You seem to think it problematic, and hence the scare quotes. But in doing that, you are presuposing the problem you think you are arguing for — Banno

When I hear the word ‘same’ I read it as ‘similar’. I find
Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the construction of empirical objects helpful here. According to Husserl, in my perceptual experience of the world, my empathetic connection with an intersubjective community in the form of apperception of alter egos leads to an ‘objective’ social space in which each individual believes himself to be living in the same world, in which his own perceptions are mere appearances of the identical things that everyone else experiences. But this sense of my own perception as mere appearance of what is factually the same for everyone is the appearance for me of what can never be actually identical. The ways in which I apperceptively fuse others perceptual contributions to the constitution of objects with my own perceptual adumbrations will always provide me with constituted appearances of things which are unique to my own construing, even as I calls these personally construed appearances a mere representation of the true world, identical for everyone.

“If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually
experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere
"representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Crisis Of European Sciences)

If we want to discover whether people see the same things and features of things all we have to do is ask. It is a commonplace fact that people do see the same things including relatively insignificant features of things, and this can easily be proven if they are asked to look closely and report what they see — Janus

Psychologists have tools for this , such as Rorschach tests. They reveal how striking different one person’s sense of the relevant meaning of a thing is from another person’s. Dont confuse conventional language, which is designed to hide these differences, from the differences themselves.

The postmodernist who best represents the obscurity I have in mind is Derrida; his idea of the endless deference of meaning I find unconvincing and his writing generally impenetrable on account of the ambiguity and arcane references. When his philosophy is boiled down to its central ideas, it seems neither groundbreaking nor insightful — Janus

Try Heidegger then.

“I believe that, indeed, as was said in the 1980 Cerisy conference, there is a point at which between what I am attempting and what Heidegger did, there is no difference in terms of content. One can very well retranslate the entirety-I'm speaking hypothetically here-one can retranslate the entirety of the thinking of the trace or of writing into the thinking of being. One can do this translation. At that point, only one difference will remain, which some may deem extrinsic, namely, a difference in style, tone, gesture, manner, pathos. But from the point of view of content, if it could be isolated, one can translate one into the other, and so reduce everything I'm doing to one paragraph in Heidegger's work... This gesture would consist, obviously, would presuppose the erasure of questions of tone, language, posture, gesture, as secondary questions. Ok. And of idiom! Of linguistic idiom, as well.. Which I, for one, would not be ready to do so easily…” (Derrida on Heidegger)

So, I would say " too obscure" rather than "too complex", and I doubt it is possible to formulate "a clear understanding", and even if it were I doubt it would be worth the effort, since it seems to be mostly sophistry. I — Janus

It’s not sophistry, it’s highly rigorous philosophy. I’m sorry you dont understand him but don’t blame the messenger for your failure to understand the message.

Well, no; they all looked at the same vase, but it looked different to each of them — Banno

Where do we have an example of ‘ same’ , of ‘identity’, to draw from in coming to that conclusion? What is the origin of this understanding of ‘sameness’?

If the subject were a still life with flowers, vases, glasses and fruit, for example, and the instruction to represent every item, I have no doubt that most people would do that, which shows that people see the same things. — Janus

Have you seen how 15th century Japanese, Chinese or Indian artists conveyed “photographic reality”? You might say they preferred not to render the world with photo realism, but then what about early Western art? Such inventions as perspective , unifying a scene via a single light source , the understanding of the interaction of color, human proportionality( not rendering children to look like miniature adults) were not incorporated in older periods of art. You might say that artists came to understand how to convey the ‘real world’ more accurately over time, whereas I’d say that their pictorial constructions of the world changed not by better approximating it but by shifting their worldview to accord with changing purposes.

↪Joshs what, in all that, renders up anti realism? Why are there no true statements? — Banno

Let me first comment on Lawson. I just read a chunk of his book, Closure, and my conclusion is that his approach fits comfortably into the New Materialist wing of realism, in spite of his claim to be anti-realist. Karen Barad gives a flavor for the nature of the opposition between this group and poststructuralist anti-realists like Foucault:

“Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the
extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.”

we know that we all (most of us) perceive the same things, at the same times in the same places, which suggests that there is something about the structures of the world that give rise to that situation. — Janus

Gather 10 people in a room, and include persons from all corners of that world and all eras of human history. Ask them to paint the ‘same ‘ vase of flowers as accurately as possible. Compare the results and try and find any aspect of their paintings which exactly match each other. The wide variety of differences shows us how we actually interact with each other on the basis of supposedly shared experience. You might argue that even while our interpretations of the flowers vary, the physical world is sending the same data into all our heads. But the same problem crops up when we inquire into our shared understanding of the nature of the empirical data, its scientific structure. 10 physicists making use of the same mathematical calculations based on the ‘same’ qualitative variables to prove the ‘same’ physical world for us all come up with varying pictures, which fortunately goes unnoticed in most mundane situations of applying empirical knowledge. It’s when we shift our social activities away from the highly abstractive and conventionalized vocabulary of mathematics or natural science to political and ethical domains of engagement that we discover the implications of our varying pictures.
On this terrain of opinion, assuming there is a same world ends up forcing us into a moralism of blame and culpability, based on the seeming failure of persons to believe correctly.
Polarized political communities, believing the other side is absorbing the same basic facts as they are from the same empirical world out there, has no recourse but to cast aspersions on the other side’s intentions. This results is accusations of deception, greed, evil intent, brainwashing, motivated stupidity.

↪Banno Lawson seems to think that the way we divide the world up is somehow arbitrary and entirely dependent on us. I think that kind of postmodern thinking is absurd.

In any case, since we all (or most of us) agree about how we do divide the world up (whatever the explanation for that might be) then of course there are truths relative to that common division. — Janus

I’m not familiar with Lawson but I am familiar with anti-realist positions ( Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Rorty). Do they believe the way we divide up the world is arbitrary and entirely dependent on us? Well, they believe that there are better and worse, more or less valid ways to carve up the world, but the arbiter of validity is itself a construction. Put differently, the world speaks back to us in the language in which we couch our questions, so truth is the product of a ceaseless conversation between personal and interpersonal construction , and events. Not a conversation between subjects and a recalcitrant, independent reality, but a reciprocation in which the subjective and the objective poles are inextricably responsive to, and mutually dependent on each other. We may agree about how we divide up the world within the bounds of a particular cultural episteme, but epistemes change historically, neither arbitrarily nor rationally, and with them our truths.

Principled thinking is not called into question. It is rerouted to self examination that asks what does "principled" even mean? It is desire, mood, yearning, "toward"; just as reason moves forward toward consummation, it moves forward toward affective consummation, and this is the aesthetic apprehension of metaphysics — Astrophel

Aren’t the affective and reason joined precisely where affective purpose, relevance and desire meet rational validation, recognition and intelligibility? This is the basis of enactivist models of sense-making, wherein the anticipatory goal-directed pragmatic functioning of an organism defines its rationality on the basis of consistency of events with its aims and desires. Reason as relevance.

If we take this to extremes than one would imagine two phenomena or things: on one side is that which is in constant flux, changing so fast that it barely even could be said to assume any state for any given amount of time, it changes at the fastest/maximum rate possible.

A curiosity here is that the speed of light is fixed. And yet it is tha fastest rate at which something can "change" location (velocity). Could this mean there's some strange union between that which remains constant and that which changes the most rapidly? — Benj96

That’s not a curiosity, it’s built into the presuppositions of empiricism that make change subservient to identify. When we posit quantitative changes within a qualitative domain which is assumed as fixed throughout the changes in its components ( such as temperature or motion) , we are not really grappling in a fundamental way with the relation between identity and difference, stasis and change.

True change is qualitative change, a change in the sense of meaning of the category or concept (motion, temperature, mass) that we are using as a basis of measurement. Al” other changes amount to just slot rattling within a static and unchanging substrate. We force these static categories onto a world which is continually qualitatively changing beneath our sight.