Comments

  • Cognitive bias: tool for critical thinking or ego trap?
    ↪Tom Storm
    What we have a great deal
    of difficulty doing is recognizing that a fact only makes the sense it does within a particular account, and people from different backgrounds and histories use different accounts to interpret facts.
    — Joshs

    Totally agree. But are there not also some dishonest people involved, who do know different to what they profess?     — Tom Storm

    We generally lie when we think our real motives and justifications will not be understood the way we mean them, in their full context , or when we believe the ideas we are operating from will not be properly understood. In these cases our dishonestly is not the root of the problem. It is only a symptom of , and our attempt to ameliorate the effects of, a prior breakdown in mutual understanding.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Number2018
    Any apparent presence, full givenness, or definite meaning has become impossible. How can this project become "a way of understanding the basis of all methods"? — Number2018

    In the same way that deconstruction reveals the basis of all idealisms and empiricisms in the movement of differance.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪180 Proof
    Why would anyone care what a Nazi believes defines "human being"? :shade: — 180 Proof

    Heidegger got his model of animal functioning from Jakob von Uexküll, a pioneer in biosemiotics.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪Xtrix
    I take the view that the defining characteristic is language. At least that appears the most obvious, in that non-human primates and other animals don't have it.

    I think Heidegger et al. would disagree with this. In his view, human being is an openness, or a "clearing." I'm sympathetic to this view as well.     — Xtrix

    Heidegger’s questionable take on the difference between Dasein and animals:

    “The specific manner in which man is we shall call comportment and the specific manner in which the animal is we shall call behaviour.

    An animal can only behave but can never apprehend something as something-which is not to deny that the animal sees or even perceives. Yet in a fundamental sense the animal does not have perception.”

    “Now if something resembling a surrounding environment is open for the animal and its behaviour, we must now ask whether it is possible to clarify this any further. Instinctual and subservient capability for ... , the totality of its self-absorbed capability, is an interrelated drivenness of the instinctual drives which encircles the animal. It does so in such a way that it is precisely this encirclement which makes possible the behaviour in which the animal is related to other things.

    But these encircling rings belonging to the animals, within which their contextual behaviour and instinctual activity moves, are not simply laid down alongside or in between one another but rather intersect with one another. The wood worm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in turn within the ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this woodpecker finds itself in all this within the ring encircling the squirrel which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized by an enormous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly imagine, but in all of this it is still fundamentally different from the manifestness of beings as encountered in the world -forming Dasein of man.”
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus


    Here’s a snippet from his early 20’s:

    As for madness, Jackie sometimes felt he was on the verge of succumbing to it as he started his second year in khâgne. Discipline in the boarding school weighed on him even more heavily than it had the previous year. The cold, the lack of hygiene, the horrible food, and the absence of any privacy had become intolerable. Some evenings he fell into a crying jag and was unable to work or even talk to his friends. Only his ever-more intense friendship with Michel Monory enabled him to keep going. Working together in the thurne de musique – Michel had special permission to keep the key to it –, they wrote sketches for short stories and poems that they nervously submitted to each other. But as the weeks went by, Jackie complained more and more of a ‘malady’ as serious as it was ill defined. He was constantly on the edge of a nervous collapse: he suffered from insomnia, loss of appetite, and frequent nausea. In December 1950, Derrida’s morale had sunk to a new low. For reasons that remain unclear, he did not go back home for the Christmas vacation, but remained alone in Paris – probably at the home of his uncle, since the boarding school was closed. In prey to a vague attack of melancholia, he moped around far from his friends. In a letter to Michel, the beginning of which has unfortunately been lost, Jackie tried to explain his confused feelings. For some time, he had felt as if he were going around ‘in regions too difficult, if not to explore, at least to show even to one’s dearest friend’. The lack of any letter from Michel for several days did not help matters. More depressed than ever, Jackie may have contemplated suicide.”

    And at age 29:

    “The more the months went by, the less did Derrida attempt to conceal his disenchantment. Genette was pleased to have set up ‘a nice little team’ with him but realized that his former fellow student considered the post as a second best. Derrida brooded over his failure to get the Sorbonne job as if he were being persecuted. Initially, his malaise expressed itself in a period of hypochondria. Every day, he discovered new and alarming symptoms. He feared cancer or some other deadly illness, and the various doctors whom he consulted did not manage to allay his anxieties. During the third term, his depression became evident – his ‘big depression’, he later called it, since he would never experience one so serious. When Derrida arrived in Le Mans, he was unwilling to confess the depth of his disappointment. And all at once, he collapsed under his despair. He had suffered for years before passing the exam to Normale Sup, then the agrégation. He had put up with twenty-seven months of military service, waiting for the day when life would finally open up before him. All this effort, just to end up here, standing in front of pupils who did not understand what he was telling them, with colleagues who could talk about nothing but holidays and sport! All this, to wear himself out preparing his lessons and marking boring schoolwork! For months, he had not managed to work on anything personal. He no longer felt up to staying in touch with his closest friends. In conditions like this, how would he ever manage to finish off a thesis?
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus
    ↪Joshs Right, I don't deny that others find him philosophically interesting, and perhaps if I put the requisite effort in I might discover more there than I thought. It just doesn't seem likely to me at this stage, but I do allow for a change of attitude — Janus

    I’m reading his biography right now, and I’m starting to think that his extremely neurotic and depressive personality entered into his writing in the form of endless asides, apologies, digressions and ass coverings , and this is a large part of what makes it so tortuous to read him. Compare his style to early Heidegger, who on the one hand shares many ideas with Derrida and is difficult for many to read, but so much more straightforwardly methodical and systematic in Being and Time than anything that Derrida has ever written.
  • The Space of Reasons
    ↪Janus
    As 'rational' people, we ought to regard the warranted claims of others and justify our own.
    — igjugarjuk

    But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, For me, philosophy is a matter of ideas and insights, not warranted or justifiable claims and propositions.     — Janus
    :up:
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus
    I think reading Derrida can be enjoyed if it is read as a species of arcane literature. where it is his imaginative gymnastics that are being admired, but I don't take it seriously as philosophy. — Janus

    Just be careful not to universalize your sentiments. It’s fine that FOR YOU he is only enjoyable as arcane literature, and YOU can’t take him seriously as philosophy, but there are many scholars inside and outside of philosophy who consider his work to be a prime example of substantive and serious philosophy. I am one of them.
  • The Space of Reasons
    ↪igjugarjuk
    If I say that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, then I'm committed to the claim that I saw an animal on the sidewalk last night. That's a fairly stable rule — igjugarjuk

    But what of the ‘sense’ of this rule? There is never just what is the case, a propositional truth structure. There is a way in which it is the case , a way in which it is relevant to me right now at this very moment, a commitment to a certain comportment toward the utterance. Where is the ‘how’ of this ‘what’? Are they being kept artificially separate from each other? Why did I say I saw the cat, what made it important to me to communicate this and what response am I looking for? These questions are not separate from the fact of the matter, they define the sense of this fact. I can repeat the statement that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, and each repetition may offer a whole new sense, a new emphasis , a new intention, a new kind of commitment, all bound up within the ‘same’ claim.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪180 Proof


    ↪Moliere Derrida's goal/s with "deconstruction" is one thing, the implications and applicability of what he proposes are quite another thing; and it's the self-refuting nature of the latter – in effect, reducing 'all' truth-making discourses to 'nothing but' tendentious rhetoric – which many critics like me take issue with. A semiotic sleight-of-mind perfomative contradiction confidence trick "that opens up space for"...??? — 180 Proof

    The term ‘self-refuting’ tips me off to the root of the issue here, which is less about Derrida in particular than about every one of the numerous philosophical discourses thar have appeared over the past 100 year which take their leave from Nietzsche’s
    critique of truth.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson
    Seems to me standard physics. — Jackson

    yes, it is standard physics , but it ignores the fact that these images that forms sequence are. or neural bits of data, they appear to us and qualitatively differing unfoldings. Hume is consistent with a standard physical account of the measurement of motion. Phenomenological and postmodern accounts are not, because they see not just quantitative shifts from
    image to image but qualitative. Bergson was among the first to recognize this with his concept of lived duration.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson


    Right, an act of the imagination as a "fiction." — Jackson

    I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other.So what about this particular series of images allows me this fiction? Also, is it true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?


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  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson
    I see a ball rolling down the hill. This is actually a sequence of discrete, digital, images. Some see it as continuous movement, thus a "fiction of a continued existence" (T I.4.2.36). — Jackson

    What ties together this sequence of discrete images in my mind such that , for the sake of convenience, I can idealize it as a continuous movement? After all, I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other. Also, it is true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne — hwyl

    I’m a firm believer in two things:
    1) Constructive alternativism:

    There are an infinite number of ways we can organize our understanding of our world. We discover that some work better than others , but not because they conform to some independent way thing ‘really are’ out there.

    2) Over time , by repeatedly trying on differently frameworks of understanding, we will be able to construct systems that allow the social and other events of the world to appear to us in more and more intricately interconnected and harmonious ways. This is not our conforming to the way things ‘really, really’ are in the sense of having to adapt ourselves to some undeniable set of facts.
    If ‘reason, logic and empiricism’ mean such conformity of reason to an arbitrary content , then that is a dangerous way of thinking that ends up blaming others for our failure to recognize the prison that ‘reason’ can create when it doesn’t recognize its dependence on a subjective worldview. Calling scientific worldviews ‘subjective’ doesn’t mean we can’t attain that ultimate harmonious understanding of each other. On the contrary, recognizing the intricate interplay between subjective interpretation and the world is the only effective avenue to that goal.

    In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
    either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson
    How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.
    — Joshs

    Convention.     — Jackson

    Can you give some examples?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    No glue. What gave Kant hysterics. — Jackson

    How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪hwyl
    . But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power. — hwyl

    FWIW, most of the political rants you hear about accusing some entity or other of wielding their power and privilege is not postmodern but Marxist or neo-Marxist. Postmodernists like Foucault dont see groups as having or holding onto power. That is a modernist notion, and the insufferable finger-pointing moralisms go along with this kind of thinking. The postmodern philosophers are not moralists. For them power is not a thing , not anything we can posses. It is more like the differential elements of a value system that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson
    For Hume, there is no necessity to association. Objects and events do not have continuity. — Jackson

    The question is , how do things become associated ? What is the ‘glue’ that binds them?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Jackson
    Please explain what that intimate relationship is and why traditional philosophies do not have that. — Jackson

    Think about Hume’s model of associative synthesis. Correct me if I’m wrong , but like the behavioral
    models in psychology that borrowed from it, it determines the conditions under which two events become associated with each in our mind in terms of temporal and spatial contiguity , etc. These are external criteria of association. Husserl offered instead an intentional model
    of associative synthesis, which is internalistic.

    “The old concepts of association and of laws of associ­ation, though they too have usually been related to the coheren­cies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.

    It is phenome­nologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche".”(Husserl)
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪hwyl
    A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity. — hwyl

    The more solid, substantial and permanent you make your irreducible contents, the more polarizing and violent becomes the relations between these contents. This is fine for people who believe in good and evil or a correspondence theory of truth. Their moral thinking is this violent and polarizing sort, moral and empirical truth as the forcing of conformity to an arbitrary content.

    But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation.
  • The Space of Reasons
    The 'not even temporarily' point is hard to make sense of. If you are only saying that it's all just fiction or mirage, I guess that's fine, but so is fiction and mirage. I don't think one can plausibly deny though that we are animals in the world together using sounds and marks to arrange our affairs. — igjugarjuk

    What I mean by ‘not even temporarily’ is that only the actual interchange , in that moment, establishes the actual norm as what it is. The norm is a pragmatic action ,not a concept. This is no mirage, it is the only contact with the real. Every new moment is a new action and interaction and contests a previous instantiation of a norm. Dont let a norm be a thing that exists first and then changes, like a moving object. Let the act BE the norm.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns. — igjugarjuk

    As I’m sure you will agree, there are central ethical implications to how we understand the relation between identity and difference. Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world.

    What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
    point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique.
  • The Space of Reasons
    ↪igjugarjuk

    Any reductions of conceptual norms to something deeper and "more real" will depend on those same norms for their authority.

    One criticism might be that the priority of conceptual norms is tautological and uninteresting. One retort is that maybe it's only obvious use to pointing out the absurdity in various extreme metaphysical theses that forget their dependence on an interpersonal framework of giving and asking for reasons.     — igjugarjuk

    I could be wrong , but it seems you’re not comfortable in making the leap from neo-Kantianism to a phenomenologically-informed enactivism. You want to hold onto the idea of a self-subsisting (even if only temporarily) content internal not just to conceptual norms but to empirical materiality. These irreducibly inhering contents constrain and influence experience normatively , both in terms of the (temporary) intransigence of materiality and of the manifest image, the space of reasons.

    What Rouse and the enactivists are saying is that the world speaks back to , interrogates and modifies our space of reasons in every interaction with others and the world. This is what Wittgenstein means by the sense of words being person-specific and context-specific, that the meaning of a word is only in its actual use right NOW, in THIS context of interaction. There are no norms, no manifest image, no space of reasons that just sit there (even temporarily) protected from active, living, changing temporal context.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    what is discursive practice? Is it rational ? Is it a group activity? It's hard to see how one monkey body can make a nonviolently binding claim on other monkey body without discursive norms that hold each monkey accountable for assertions as to the way things are. If there are proper ways to use concepts, we have norms, which are hard to make sense of without individuals subject to them before witnesses. Once we are doing philosophy, it's 'too late' to question the framework, for such questioning is part of the game. "Let me prove to you that the responsible and autonomous self is ontologically secondary." — igjugarjuk

    Im reminded of two opposing reading of the later Wittgenstein. The first has been put forth by Pete Hacker, along with Gordon Baker , who later jumped ship and embraced the second reading. Also in this first camp are many of the Oxford school Wittgensteinians(, Malcolm, Ryle, Strawson and Mounce).

    Among adherents of the second reading are Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben.

    The first reading is I think broadly consistent with your indirect realism, in that it wants to protect the idea of a material or formal substrate that to some extent can protect itself from contextual change such as to be able to exert a specific influence on the present context from a position in memory, history or the world at least partially independent of the immediate context of the now.

    As Phil Hutchinson argues against Hacker:

    “ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non occasion-sensitive) reference points?”

    “The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪igjugarjuk

    m
    We are at the level of Hamlet, characters who are playwrights, experiencing ourselves on a stage, accountable for our words and deeds, as potentially and ideally responsible and autonomous selves among other such selves. — igjugarjuk

    Unless of course the responsible and autonomous self is just an effect of discursive practices within a community.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪hwyl
    I doubt if much can ever be smensibly said, so we should probably stay quiet about it, wovon man nicht sprechen kan etc. — hwyl

    Oh, but I think a lot has sensibly been said by recent philosophy about a concept of history that is neither Cartesian nor Kantian.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    But can we move from this to insisting that there was nothing here before we were able to talk about it ? Surely my mother was here before I was, and surely early lifeforms, not yet intelligent, preceded our own appearance as a species...as a condition of its possibility, making it harder to deny. — igjugarjuk

    It isnt simply a matter of pointing out that everything has a history. As you know , for Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger we are nothing but history. But there is an important distinction between history as they understand it and what they call historicism. The former understands history as a genealogy. The latter subordinates history to a scheme , whether dialectic or empirical causation within some form
    of realism or another. Heidegger and Derrida point out that not only a pre-human history , but the history of what I ate for breakfast yesterday, is not behind us but ahead of us as a reinterpretation of ‘what was’, generated by current concerns.

    It sounds like you want to use the history of a thing in a causative way within a realist paradigm. Such does not realize the normative assumptions that secretly guide its notion of history.
  • Cognitive bias: tool for critical thinking or ego trap?
    ↪Bylaw
    All we need to do is see if people with certain political beliefs actually do not notice counterevidence. This doesn't mean they are wrong to think the Iraq was wrong or abortions are ok. Both sides of any issue can be shown to literally not notice things that go against their beliefs.

    I can see things like this in myself in relation to 'things that happened' and how I viewed them then and notice that I didn't not look at things/hypocrisies/evidence that I would have found hard to face. I protected myself from guilt or shame.     — Bylaw

    My point about the relation between negative emotions like guilt and shame , and the breakdown of predictive sense-making, is that guilt, shame and anger all have to do with situations that surprise, violate and thus invalidate schemes of understanding the world that we counted on to effectively predict events.Since these emotions are expressions or byproducts of a partial breakdown in the effectiveness of our schemes of understanding events and people, it is not the guilt, shame or anger that we need to protect ourselves from, it is ideas and behaviors of others that we cannot make sense of. We withdraw from people who alarm, disturb or confuse us with ideas that don’t make sense to us, and that as a consequence we may feel are harmful or immoral.
    It is not that we simply ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs, as if a part of ourselves recognizes and fully understands the opposing belief, we form a negative emotion and then decide to protect ourself from this emotion by ignoring the belief. We never get to this stage of recognition and comprehension. A belief is part of a larger system of mutually consistent ideas. It is impossible to incorporate, or even to fully recognize as meaningful, ideas of someone else that are incompatible with that system. Such ideas simply don’t make sense to us, seem incoherent or illogical , or may be mostly invisible. It’s not that we are pretending they don’t make sense, they really dont make sense. This isnt a matter of fooling ourselves or hiding something from ourselves that has already been absorbed. We have no peg, no proper structure to hang it on, and so it simply isn’t assimilated. This selectiveness of perception is a necessary feature of sense making.

    In today’s polarized political climate, we spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing our opponents. We say they refuse to accept reality, create fake news, are brainwashed, succumb to shady motives, ignore what they don’t want to hear. What we have a great deal
    of difficulty doing is recognizing that a fact only makes the sense it does within a particular account, and people from different backgrounds and histories use different accounts to interpret facts.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    My own take is that we can grant that the world as humanly experience is naturally dependent upon the experiencing human. But I don't see how we can leap from this truism to a denial of the world's independent existence, even if I admit that it's difficult indeed to articulate exact 'how' it is supposed to exist in this sense. — igjugarjuk

    The question is what it is we are doing when we produce science, philosophy and other forms of understanding. For Rouse , enactivist cognitive science , the phenomenologists and postmodern philosophers, discursive practices of science are not about securing epistemological knowledge but of producing forms of interaction with the world. We ‘know’ the world by changing it, reconstructing it not only with our theories but materially. And this changed world speaks back to us, allowing further transformations of our practices, that then reciprocally reshapes our world. This leaves behind the idea of ‘independence’ in favor of constraints and affordances that feedback from the interventions that our empirical inquiries enact in our world. This is why Rouse likens scientific inquiry to niche construction. Just as organisms enact their own niche via their normative functioning , the niche they produce speaks back and shapes the organism’s goals and patterns of functioning.

    As inquirers , we have no use for what is ‘independent’ of our schemes. Extremely slow and simple processes of interacting elements in an ancient universe show a great deal of independence from each other, but such is the stuff of useless , meaningless arbitrariness until it is reconfigured by human construction as a pattern of meaning of relevantly interrelated parts. One could think of this progressive sloughing off of material independence and arbitrariness in terms of Hegel’s dialectical world coming to know itself through its own becoming. Or one could ditch the dialectical idealism and just keep the becoming, as Nietzsche did. In that case this is the fate of independent material reality:

    “Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well?

    We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?”
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪igjugarjuk


    Granted 100% that there is no 'truly' enduring self (and that one cannot step into the same river twice), I'd make the opposite point and say that making unequal things equal is automatic and properly presupposed. So one can step into the same river twice, because 'river' organizes or captures a flux — igjugarjuk

    If you haven’t read him, you might enjoy Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of a real spatial object.
    The real object is never completely fulfilled. It is a concatenation of memory , actual appearance and anticipation that changes slightly moment to moment. So the object is an idealization, a kind of faith in a total unity that is never fully achieved.

    “The consciousness of its [the object’s] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

    The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process,
    does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)

    “ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)
  • Cognitive bias: tool for critical thinking or ego trap?
    ↪Bylaw
    It sounds like you are arguing that there is a cognitive bias in the research that has concluded there is cognitive bias. If humans who are trying to be objective and have systematic protocols still manage to have a cognitive bias, don't you think this supports the idea in general that many people have a cognitive bias? Further do you really doubt that people adjust their memories to avoid certain feelings and conclusions (about themselves and others)? Sure, objective research can have hidden biases and specific conclusions about cognitive bias may be faulty, but I encounter cognitive bias in myself and others all the time. What gets noticed and what doesn't depending on group identity or ego self-protection. If cognitive bias was a crime, there is clear motive and access. — Bylaw

    We don’t observe the world directly but through a personal framework of constructs that form a functional
    unity. Each of us is thus ‘biased’ with respect to the perspectives of others. We each live in slightly different worlds. When we reach consensus on facts of situations or the working of the mind , this consensus doesn’t eliminate the perspectival nature of our outlooks. Consensus and normative agreement on scientific fact is an averaging of all of our personal biases , not their elimination. The ‘objective’ fact is a view that no one in particular actually holds, we all hold our own variation on that template.

    When we accuse someone of cognitive bias, we are pointing out that their view deviates from
    the consensus of the larger group. This doesn’t tell us the view of the majority is more ‘correct’ than that of the deviant. They cannot be said to be in closer touch with ‘true’ reality. The fundamental arbiter of validity of a viewpoint is to what extent it is consistent with one’s own understanding, not whether it measures up to some third person external criterion of truth.

    Our negative emotions tell us when an aspect of the world no longer makes sense to us, when our personal anticipations of events fails to match up with what actually ensues( from our own personal perspective). We can block painful emotions , but this is generally a matter of not being able to articulate those feelings of chaos. We repress and avoid what we can’t make sense of, but this doesn’t eliminate the crisis, it only constricts our engagement with the world to what we can handle.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    OK but the concept of alteration depends on the endurance of the same. — igjugarjuk

    What about the idea that the same endures by continuing to be itself differently? From this vantage, it is endurance of the same which depends on alteration. I would say that this is the essence of deconstruction. If by endure , you mean an empirical notion of duration as persisting self-identity over time, this was critiqued by Bergson, Husserl , Deleuze and Heidegger in different ways.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    And I appreciate your even tone and good manners. — igjugarjuk

    bitch.

    ( thought I’d keep you off guard)
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    His affection for writing was probably connected to its partial or temporary escape from time. — igjugarjuk

    But no, monseiur, writing IS time. ( you know, the repetition that alters )
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪igjugarjuk
    But I can't help thinking my irreverent style of paraphrase might offer something that yours doesn't, maybe because of the fidelity of your approach (which can be just as hard to decipher as the original text.) — igjugarjuk

    Your writing is a lot more entertaining than mine. ( that’s a compliment)
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Jackson
    Okay. And what does that have to do with method? — Jackson

    A method is a way of proceeding in the world , a way of organizing particular meanings according to a larger scheme or totality of relevance. In that sense , method cannot be separated from value system, of which it forms a subspecies.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Jackson
    What is the "basis of all methods?" — Jackson

    The structure of temporality is the basis of all methods , in that it throws us into a world that is already intelligible to us in some way. This familiarity with the world is the basis of method.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Moliere


    ↪Olivier5 I'm honestly at a stage where I cannot tell if deconstruction is algorithmic or not, though I do see it as a method. In the same way that analysis is a method, though not algorithmic (you can begin an analysis anywhere, and an analysis relies upon the interpretive machinery being brought to the material, which varies depending on the analyzer) — Moliere

    Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is not a method but a way of understanding the basis of all methods. And it not an algorithm but a way of understanding how all algorithms deconstruct themselves.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪igjugarjuk


    A man gets lost in the mountains and carves his name on some peak before he dies. A thousand years later his inscription is discovered for the first time. The world has a kind of memory it seems, some kind of 'wax' that holds a pattern in the absence of us and, presumably, all lifeforms. It doesn't matter so much to me whether the scientific image is equated with this metaphorical wax. I just think 'anti-materialists' have to explain the possibility of this lonely inscription. — igjugarjuk

    Isn’t this where Derrida comes in? That is, the concept of writing as the way that a mark that I produce survives me and my intent? It can be read after my death, but not without an alteration of my originally intended meaning.
    And even in writing to myself , the same alteration takes place:

    “Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)”

    So what is left of the sense of ‘materiality’ here?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Hello Human
    What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ? — Hello Human

    I think the position you’d be comfortable with is neo-Kantianism, It asserts that the facts of the world only come to us mediated by our interpretations , but nonetheless a world outside of consciousness does indeed exist.
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