I just wanted to add this:

So snow is white. Why do I care? In what context of concerns and goals does this become a topic of interest to me? Wittgenstein tried to show how we end up in confusion by trying to pretend that ‘S is P’ makes any sense outside of a specific context of wider motivated engagement with others. This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts.

The left side is about a proposition, the right side is about how things are. — Banno

↪Banno Isn't this like the correspondence theory of truth? More suited to matters which can be resolved empirically? — Tom Storm

↪Tom Storm It works for any sentence, empirical or otherwise. — Banno

This is about correspondence, even if it consists of correspondence within a discursive community rather than between that community and things-in-themselves. In order for it to be correspondence, the referents that are being compared have to ‘sit still’ long enough to be compared. We have to be able to trust that what we are referring back to in a comparison has a sense that continues to remain what it was for the sake of the comparison. Entities to be shuffled, arranged and rearranged are required to have persisting identity during all this calculative coordinating .

I bring this up because I want to contrast it with what may appear to you as a strange way of thinking, what Andrew4Handel might call ‘extreme philosophy’. This strange way of thinking is common to poststructuralism, phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein, and it consists of the following analysis of propositional statements such as ‘snow is white Iff snow is white’, or, more generally, ‘on the left of the truth sentence is a sentence being talked about, on the right is a sentence being used’

According to this analysis, to be talked about is already to be used. S is P is usage.In stating S is P, we are seeing S as P. What that means is that the ‘is' connecting S with P is not a neutral relational copula between two pre-existing things, it is a transformative action altering in one gesture both the S and the P. The ‘as' enacts a crossing of past and present such that both are already affected and changed by the other in this context of dealing with something. When we take something as something, we have already projected out from a prior context of relevance such as to render what is presenting itself to us as familiar and recognizable in some fashion. But in this act of disclosure, we only have this context of relevance by modifying it, that is , by USING it in a new way.
This is how we understand ‘snow is white’. And it is also how we understand the move from ‘snow is white’ to the conditional IFF. This conditional, like the ‘is’ in S is P, is not a neutral , external relational connector specifying conditions of truth between two pre-existing sentences. It transforms the sense of meaning of the first sentence (snow is white) as it is used in the context of the second sentence, while the second sentence, in being used in the context of the first, constructs a fresh sense of meaning for itself .
So what one has in this logical construction is not an external combining, comparing , shuffling and coordinating of extant symbolic meanings , but a continually self-transforming construction of sense. Every step of the process involves producing new sense and relevance rather than taking extant persisting symbolic forms and shuffling them around to discover truth or falsity of their relations. Propositional statements aim to stay a step ahead of ineffability by capturing anything sayable within a formal logic of use. But the very formality of the logic, with its presuppositions of extant, persisting symbolic meanings ,neutral , external connectors (is , iff) and activities of shuffling and coordination achieves its triumph over ineffability at the expense of meaninglessness.

. It's been a long time since I did drugs, to be sure, it's a fine way to be shown the arbitrariness of the world...Reality doesn't care what drugs you take.
— Banno

Or perhaps it shows that perception’s role is to adaptively guide behavior rather than to veridically recover ‘reality’.

I see a continuity from what we say to what we do and what is not said but shown. It's the place where stating the rule is replaced by enacting it, and where saying what the picture is of is replaced by showing it. That continuity means that we can always say more, but enough is said when the task is done. Hence the term "ineffable" is inappropriate. — Banno

A bit different emphasis from Gendlin’s phenomenological dictum that:

“We think more than we can say, we feel more than we can think, we live more than we can feel, and there is much else besides.”

But I don’t see these as incompatible.

no matter what the position people seem to hold, as soon as they leave the keyboard or the class room, they mostly enter the quotidian world of realism, cause and effect, common sense, and ordinary moral agreements. — Tom Storm

I must have the wrong map, then.

I have tried to show that God-Spirit is never alone, was co-created alongside of human. I have tried to say identity is socially negotiated by insight of QM. I have placed the self-and-other dialogue at the core of reality. The gist of my premise, that IAM speak forestalls the isolation of solipsism, abhors a vacuum. Where have I said or suggested the creation is static? — ucarr

If God was “co-created alongside of human”, what accounts for the dualistic split between the natural( the human as a physical and biological entity) and the spiritual? These two realms seem to be interacting from across an unbridgeable divide. What makes scientific naturalism ‘isolated and solipsistic’ if not as
one pole of a nature-spirit dialectic? In other words , don’t we first have to assume your nature-spirit co-creation , and then by subtracting away God arrive at a solipsistic physical nature? Don’t we eliminate the problem by not starting from the dualism of nature and god? That is , if all there is is the natural , by comparison to what can we call it ‘isolated’? I agree that the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is the product of a certain approach to naturalism, but there are ways of dissolving it through a modification of the understanding of naturalism. Your way leaves the dualism intact, leaving the interior of both nature and spirit as solipsisms even as they superficially interact. Kant made human conceptualization and empirical nature inseparably co-dependent, and yet Kantianism is accused of a solipsistic conception of subjectivity.

Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates. — Constance

I would add that he didn't think the very concept of truth was particularly useful, even as warranted assertion, and on this point he differed from Dewey and James , as well as Davidson and Putnam.

I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics. — Constance

He liked the fact that Derrida critiqued the metaphysics
of presence, substituting playful irony.

whatever is ineffable in human experience, propositonally considered, "drops out of the conversation", but may be the subject of poetry and the other arts. The ineffable, as such, may drop out of the philosophical conversation, but the fact that there is the ineffable need not: it may, on the contrary, be considered to be of the greatest philosophical significance (but obviously not on a conception of philosophy as narrow as AP or OLP). — Janus

What do you think of the idea that the ineffable used to be thought of in terms of a hidden substance , a thing -in-itself, the noumenon that stands on the other side of a divide between our representations and the essences buried within external nature as well as in the interiority of our own subjectivity? And more recently the ineffable , rather than pointing to a hidden substance, is associated with the unconscious of thought , the fact that the origins of our values are not transparent to us, and neither is language transparent to itself. In other words, the ineffable is irreducible difference , displacement and becoming rather than interiority, essence, ipseity, pure self-reflexivity.

The universe cannot create herself except through the mysterious dialogue of self and other. — ucarr

Atheism, though faithful, in the absence of physicalism explaining existence, has no idea where it comes from. — ucarr

This is the dilemma that both modern religious and scientific thinking has created for itself. It has managed to extricate itself from static mechanistic and rationalist models in order to embrace a perspective of holism, historical transformation, organicism, dialogical relationality and interdependence. And yet it still insists on deriving this dynamism, interconnectedness and historical becoming from a ground which is anything but dynamic. Why does change have to ‘ come from’ something unchanging , some dead first cause, either nothingness or a God who creates axioms? Isn’t such a creator the essence of solitude and isolation? Why not let time and history stand on their own, without having to nail them down to a beginning?

↪Ludwig V There is a section in Neurocomputational Perspective where Paul Churchland speculates that, if we could develop a deep enough theoretical understanding of the mechanics of brain, we would be capable of having direct experiences of those processes, the sensation of neural events. The ultimate embedding of belief I guess you could say. — Pantagruel

This is where phenomenology can be helpful.

“…it is phenomenologically absurd, as Heidegger once pointed out, “to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else
of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself (Heidegger 1985: 86).

For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity.”

I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.

…how do epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world? — Constance

Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world.

Well put. I'd go further than "culturally constructed nature." Some of our reality is constructed based on biological, genetic, neurological, and instinctive factors, e.g. the structure of our nervous and sensory systems. We are born human with a human nature. — T Clark

Yes indeed. Kant laid the groundwork for psychologists to begin paying attention to our ‘embodied’ ways of relating to the world.

all of this is based on our paradigmatic example of a person - a human being, with all the complex legal and moral questions that follow. What else could it be based on? The question is about how far that paradigm can be extended to similar cases, what kinds of similarity are required and how far and under what circumstances extension can go…we are agreed - aren't we? - that there is a real need to separate attribution of beliefs (and hence knowledge?) from articulation of beliefs in language, whether externally, by saying something or internally, by saying something to oneself.

In that case, surely we need to think of explanations of (rational) action as a structure to be completed, rather than a process, whether internal or external. The pratical syllogism is the only paradigm we have for this, so perhaps our question turns into an exploration of that. — Ludwig V

Let me try a hypothesis that links opinion about human-animals differences back to models of embedded beliefs. You mentioned rationality and the syllogism in connection to belief. Many approaches in psychology and philosophy take the propositional statement as their starting point for the understanding of judgement , interpretation , belief and value. I identify with those writers who critique this assumption. Their argument is basically this. Propositions of the form ‘S is P’ and their derivatives indicate that something is or is not the case, that a statement about the world is true or false. This leaves out the fact that when we relate two events we are not just determining what is or is not the case. We are at the same time determining ‘how’ they are the case. Interpretation of events reveals how things seem to us, how they are relevant , how they matter to us, what their significance is in relation to our immediate contextual goals and purposes, how enticing they are.

Even the seemingly most cut and dry statements of truth or falsity show up an aspect of the world in a new way for us, so that it is never simply a matter of something’s being the case or not. Propositional logic is thus not at all the starting point for human belief, it is a narrowly conceived , abstract derivative of basic human interpretive , intentional activity. A much better model of the fundamental ground of cognition and belief is perception. In perceiving anything in our environment, we blend expectations drawn from memory with what is actually in front of us , and synthesize out of that pairing of recollection and anticipation an interpretation of what we are experiencing. Put differently, we believe we are seeing a chair as a result of this mesh of memory, anticipation and actual sensation. Thus all perception involves belief. Not of the propositional form ‘S is P’, but of the hermeneutic form ‘S AS P’. We see something as something, which means we don’t simply regurgitate a copy of something from memory and compare back and forth between this self-same thing and another self-same thing to see if there is a match(truth or falsity). We build our computers to do this computational trick .

We are not computers. Contra Chomsky, we are not computational, representational rationalists. Seeing something as something is recognizing that thing. Recognition is a creative act , not a representational comparison. To recognize a thing is to see it as both familiar and novel in some freshly relevant way. Belief is thus fecund rather than calculative. It is also affective. Things matter to us in affectively valuative ways.
Enactivist psychologists will tell us that we get this way of organizing perceptual interpretation not from an act of God or evolution blessing humans with some unique capacity not available to other animals , but to the basis feature of all living organisms as autopoietic self-organizing systems as functionally unified sense-makers.

Living systems are normatively goal-oriented, and in this sense the are affective and value-forming. They form their own environmental niche and guide and determine the ‘rightness’ of their functioning in their world in accordance with how the feedback from their constructed niche accords or fails to accord with their aims. Thus , all living systems have ‘beliefs’ in that they are purposive in relation to their niche, anticipating forward into their world and adjusting those ‘beliefs’ in relation to feedback from it.

Of course this is along way from human language, but how necessary is language to belief? If belief is a perceptual phenomenon, present in newborns prior to language-learning, then what does language add to belief? I have been arguing that since we are not computers, and belief is not a matter of abstract symbol manipulation like the early cognitive scientists thought , and many on this forum still believe, what language does is allow us to synthesis sources of information from many modalities into words. Animals are also synthesizing many modalities. When a hungry cat hears the can opener, the sound is a form of language that activates the memory of the sight and smell of the food that is in the can, as well as anticipation of the actions of the pet owner that will bring the can of food into the cat’s dish. So a whole sequence of sensations and actions are evoked by the one simple sound of the can opener. It acts as a proto-language. But it will not occur to the cat to reproduce the sound, to share it with others. Why not?

There is substantial limitation to a cat’s memory when it comes to contextually synthesizing in a much more global and complex way a whole range of information that allows humans to share events through language.
So memory is the limiting factor for animals when it comes to language, not some ‘rational’ or ‘propositional’ capability. There are humans with brain injuries which prevent them from holding items in memory long enough to do the ‘S is P’ calculative thing , but they still have language thanks to an overarching ability to remember complex associations.

In sum, in its most basic form, what we call belief is not logical symbol manipulation but the purposive , normative, goal-oriented anticipatory character of perceptual interpretation, which animals share with us. The higher , more abstract forms of belief we achieve through language is unavailable to other. animals due to sever memory limitations. They care about their world and make their way through it on the basis of more temporally constricted , immediate contextual beliefs. They plan, decide and disambiguate within more narrow parameters of time and space.

Some here think only humans are clever enough to figure out what to do with a syllogism. I follow those psychologists and philosophers who think we should take a cue from other animals and be clever enough to get rid of the syllogism as the paradigm of ‘rational belief’.

“For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief. In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind.”(Anthony Chemero)

If there were people claiming that animals don't feel pain, I'd love to hear it. Seems ridiculous. — Mikie

How soon we forget.

“The idea that animals might not experience pain or suffering as humans do traces back at least to the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, who argued that animals lack consciousness.[14][15][16] Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain, and veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were simply taught to ignore animal pain.[17] In his interactions with scientists and other veterinarians, Bernard Rollin was regularly asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" grounds for claiming that they feel pain.” ( Wikipedia)

But I'd be happily proven wrong if there's a shred of evidence suggesting other animals have language. They communicate, of course, but they don't have language. There's been a lot of research on that as well, with primates. They simply cannot acquire it, no matter how it's tried….we're left as the only species on earth with the capacity for language. — Mikie

Apparently they can acquire it, but only with aggressive interaction with humans, and only if begun at a very young age.

“Elisabeth Lloyd (2004) shows that the fortuitous success of the bonobo Kanzi in acquiring a rudimentary linguistic capacity has changed the terms in which these issues should be addressed (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor 1998). Kanzi inadvertently participated in experiments on language acquisition because his mother was a research subject, and he was too young to be separated from her. While his mother struggled with the experimental protocol, Kanzi did much better despite not being initially targeted for instruction. Eventually, Kanzi acquired not only a substantial vocabulary of symbols but also the ability to produce novel, intelligible syntactic recombinations. The experimenters plausibly characterized his eventual linguistic capacities as in some respects comparable to those of a thirty-month-old normal human child. The interpretation of these data is controversial, but I follow Lloyd in her insistence that Kanzi's achievement shows that the neurological capacity for linguistic understanding is homologous between humans and bonobos and probably extends further to common ancestors.”(Joseph Rouse)

I don't see animals as having concepts either. Again I feel most of this is anthropomorphism. — Mikie

And insisting on an irreparable gap between human capacities and those of other animals could be deemed a classic form of anthropocentrism. How many claimed distinctions between anthropos and other animals have fallen by the wayside in recent years? Only humans use tools, only humans have emotions or can feel pain, or can empathize, only humans have cognitive capacities and can calculate. We didn’t even accord such capacities to the young of our own species.
Infants were nothing but a blooming, buzzing confusion.

I predict that eventually we will come to see that the cognitive differences between us and other higher species is more a matter of degree than of kind.

I consider scientism as standing for the notion that science can answer for every conceivable thing asked of it, which is false, from the point of view that science can only answer for that which is asked of it empirically conceived. From that, it follows, first, that science may very well be the only true method for obtaining knowledge about the nature of things, and second, the nature of things is not the only knowledge possible for humans to obtain. — Mww

The other definition of scientism deals with the assumption that the world which provides us with the source of our empirical evidence of truth is not already caught up in a hermeneutic circle. That is , scientism fails
to recognize that the ‘ evidence from nature’ which forms our truths belongs to a culturally constructed nature which we can never get beneath or beyond. In chasing truth we are chasing our own tail. In its progress, science moves farther and farther away from some original nature rather than closer to it. This doesnt mean that science isn’t extremely useful, just that truth as pragmatic usefulness is not about knowledge of the “true nature of things”, or even knowledge at all so much as practical ways of interacting with a world.

speculative metaphysics, even when treated as a logically grounded science, as in pure mathematics, has no empirical proofs. And without strict empirical proofs, itself a euphemism for indubitable fact, it cannot be said such speculations are indeed the case, hence are fictions, albeit logically justified. — Mww

One definition of scientism is treating science as if it were the only true method to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things,or, as Wiki says, “ the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.”

Some have embraced scientism as a positive term. Personally, I consider a strict empirical proof as a fiction which just happens to have a large intersubjective community backing it. But then, I support Nietzsche’s view that “the world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (Will to Power.)

Your "actual input" is a misleading notion. One's neural network, starting at one's retina, constantly and actively re-works the signal it receives in order to construct the sense of green and brown. The "idea of tree" is constructed much later in the neural net, perhaps involving the areas of the brain that handle language. Our resident Neuroscientist, Isaac, might be able to explain with greater clarity — Banno

Here’s an enactivist perspective:

…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.
From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This
activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow (Engel, Fries, and Singer 2001; Varela et al. 2001).

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint,
we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”(Evan Thompson, Mind in Life)

I don't consider animals as having beliefs, tacit or otherwise. I think that's an anthropomorphic projection — Mikie

The. you’re going to have to clarify what you mean by belief. Many psychologists and philosophers argue that neither humans nor animals pursue goals on the basis of belief if belief is defined in a formal way as propositional knowledge of the form S is P, that is , statements of truth or falsity. On the other hand, both humans and other animals are guided by conceptual understanding in which expectations are formed that can be validated or invalidated. The difference between human and animal conceptualization is that ours is linguistically mediated, which frees us from the confines of the immediate situation.

The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even actions which seem far-removed from enculturation can ultimately be traced back to beliefs and values instilled in one over time, even if long forgotten or completely unconscious. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.
— Joshs

Indeed that is popular. The point being? — Mikie

The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even apparently belief-based actions which seem far removed from our biology can ultimately be traced back to values instilled in one as a result of evolutionarily adaptive affective feelings, even if completely unconscious.

I like this much better than the "popular view". Can you suggest anything I could read to learn more about it? — Ludwig V

Anything by Matthew Ratcliffe or Evan Thompson, especially the latter’s ‘Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind’.

The way you phrased this ('It is popular these days...') suggests you take issue with the view. I have no dog in this fight but is there a better account? — Tom Storm

Phenomenologically-informed enactivist psychology preserves the emphasis on affectively-based values in organizing and situating cognitive appraisals and beliefs.But it avoids the biological essentialism of inherited affect modules and programs.

“… emotions are said to be enabled by genetically endowed, hard-wired neural modules, the existence of which can, at least in principle, be associated with selection pressures flowing from the survival or reproductive advantages produced by the action potentials and states of preparedness these capacities bestowed: to fight off predators (anger), manage changes in social status (sadness), prepare for something unexpected (surprise), cement a social bond (happiness),
avoid something toxic (disgust) or retreat from something dangerous (fear).”

In contrast to this account of affect and cognition , enactivism believes that :

“Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)

“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation’.”

This extends down to bodily reactions to stimuli. One looks at a corpse and instantaneously reacts with fear. If examined from one point of view, this reaction is conditioned by the environment -- namely, the milieu -- and at bottom is nothing more than an embedded belief that corpses are to be feared, or that they are aversive objects, because death is considered bad. It is not truly instantaneous at all -- there are judgments and interpretations being made despite appearing as natural reflexes. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.. The corpse is deemed aversive fundamentally not due to a belief but an inherited affective response, and the socially constructed beliefs are overlayed onto this biological ground. According to this approach, values
are subjective and relative because they don’t originate from propositional beliefs, which can be judged as correct or incorrect.

No. Facts do not change. Our perception of them may grow clearer, our understanding of how they fit together may render them less cold, but our concerns and practices shape nothing but our immediate environment, and our expectations are as often dashed as are fulfilled — Vera Mont

“ Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30).

How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, sciencecaptures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that sciencesimply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes” ( Zahavi)

“…the success of science cannot be anything but a puz­zle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts."
“So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathemati-cal objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.”
“…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of the world and the basis of ethics.
— Joshs

I agree with much of this. But the general response will likely be 'no one says that the truth has to be appealing.' — Tom Storm

Ah, but appeal IS a central element of what we call truth, especially in the sciences. An important value in choosing one theory over another is aesthetic appeal. The facts have no coherence outside of their relation to our pragmatic goals and purposes. We convince ourselves that we conform our empirical models to the cold, hard facts of the world, but those cold , hard facts are constantly shaped and reshaped by our evolving concerns, expectations and practices. The same goes
for our gods.

the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms
— Joshs

Indeed. Care to say more about why? — Tom Storm

At some point , we will no longer have need of a hypothesis that locks us into an arbitrary view of the world ( I’m speaking both of religion and the view of science as ‘truths that dont care about our feelings’. God and objective realism are tied together, not opposites ).

I would say I am an agnostic atheist. Similarly, I don't know if Bigfoot exists, but I am not convinced it does. The time to believe it is when there is good evidence. — Tom Storm

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of traits and the basis of ethics. Everyone here ( that includes Dennett, Dawkins et al. They wish they could believe ) whose atheism or agnosticism is tied to ‘evidence’ is a closet -believer until they can get to the point where they find the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms, when they no longer wish they could believe.

In the end, Outlander learned that technology was not something to be feared or dismissed. It was a powerful and transformative force that could bring people together and help them to understand each other in new and meaningful ways. And thanks to his friendship with Mandy, he was able to see the world in a whole new light. — ChatGPT

Someone should option the movie rights. Ryan Reynolds could play Outlander.

You’re still stuck in the Kantian-Popperian tradition of science as objective falsification., knowledge opposing itself to power and facts opposing values.
— Joshs

Not even close. — Vera Mont

Second guess: You’re still stuck in in the Marxist-structuralist tradition of scientific realism. Better?
Give me a hint.

The claims are a stratagem of power structures - all power structures, whether they are labelled as a religion, a political party or a corporation.
Objective reality isn't lost; none of them are looking for it; on the contrary, they're hiding it under layers and layers of "claim".(That's why faith healers are not like medical healers. — Vera Mont

‘Objective’ vs ‘subjective’, ‘faith’ vs ‘reason’, ‘power’ vs ‘knowledge’. Have you read no Kuhn, Feyerabend, Latour, Foucault, Rorty, Rouse, Nietzsche, Varela? It’s like the past 60 years of philosophizing about science doesn’t exist for you. You’re still stuck in the Kantian-Popperian tradition of science as objective falsification., knowledge opposing itself to power and facts opposing values.

↪Joshs It's always concerning when we appear to be in agreement. — Banno

I must be slipping.

I take it you are a believer in New Theology?

The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The cart and horse are not the same; the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse — Janus

Sensorimotor theories of perception indicate that action is essential to perception in general. Seeing or hearing is the interacting with an object, a form of active, anticipatory doing rather than merely a passive taking in. As far as perception of color is concerned, preliminary studies show that saccadic eye movements may be involved in color discrimination.

More generally, how do sensorimotor analyses of perceptual ‘doing’ relate to public linguistic interaction? Certainly, the empirical concepts employed in the description of perceiving are shaped via a public doing. But can one also tease out a performativity associated with immediate perception that is not completely subsumed under the rubric of public language practices? Is sensorimotor perceptual ‘doing’ a kind of proto-linguistic activity, a kind of normatively oriented discourse subject to its own rules of error and correction, outside of public language?

A point related to Davidson's derangement of epitaphs, and Wittgenstein's argument for what we might call the inscrutability of rules; given any such definition one can purposefully undermine it. — Banno

And its undermining is the further spinning of new fibers of a thread, correct?

Can you give an example of two things that should be thought of as belonging to the same family, but which have nothing in common with each other? — Janus

Wittgenstein talked about this in P.I.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of Joshs and @Constance, too. More or less the same criticism by the homunculus applies to phenomenology. — Banno

Three phenomenologists offer three readings of sensation. You mentioned Heidegger’s subordination of sense to being-in-the -world:
(“Ini­tially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initialy hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the­-world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world."(Being and Time).

Then there’s Merleau-Ponty, who was critical
of what he interpreted as Husserl’s reliance on a ‘hyle’ of sensation, a primitive content.

It appeared to Merleau-Ponty that Husserl treated
the elements of a flowing multiplicity of hyletic data as positive essences, as objects separable from what conditions them via subjective history. Instead, he argued, “ There is no hylé, no sensation which is not in communication with other sensations or the sensations of other people. “(P. Of Perception, p.471). Perceptual essence “is not a positive element, not a quiddity; it is rather a divergence within the corporeal field of things. The unity of the thing is of a piece with the unity of the entire field; and this field is grasped not as a unity of parts but as a living ensemble. The living ensemble cannot be recomposed of essences in the sense of eide, since these are positives – significatory atoms or constants. Hence, [Husserl’s] eidetic method is in reality an idealistic variant of the constancy hypothesis [a point-by-point correspondence between a stimulus and the perception of it].”(Phenomenological Method in Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Gurwitsch, Ted Toadvine, p.200).

That leaves Husserl, the intended target of your critique of phenomenology. I happen not to believe that Husserl
started from qualia-like primitives of sensation. For him , as for Isaac, sensations are constructed out of contextual elements.

The alternative is thinking that I might suddenly choose an option which I don't think is best, that is what seems impossible to parse. The very act of 'deciding' is one of judging some option to be the best relative to my values, and my values must already be in place prior to that judgement, so the option which most aligns with them is already determined. — Isaac

The feeling of guilt reminds us that we frequently choose options that conflict with the way we see our values. In guilt, our falling away from another we care for could be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. One feels as if having fallen below the standards one has erected for themself. It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss.

what constitutes a move in the direction of greater valuation as opposed to the lesser (more true, more harmonious, more intelligible...) from where one started. If one starts with "this is how things seem to me" and then conducts any kind of 'investigation', one is implicitly affirming that the way things seem to one is lesser, by whatever measure, than the potential result of that investigation. Less true, less harmonious, less intelligible - whatever. — Isaac

Yes indeed. It would be impossible to have a world at all if we could not distinguish grouping and categories, if we could not talk about events that were more or less consistent with one group rather than another, that belonged or failed to belong to a category, system, pattern, scheme.

The battle-lines, if you want to call them that, between realists and relativists, modernists and postmodernists, is not over whether what I described above is possible, but what is the irreducible basis of the singular elements that particulate in gatherings and dispersions, integrations and differentiations? How do we understand the nature of causation and motivation most primordially?

So the very nature of an investigation has, at it's core, an acceptance that the way things currently seem to one is flawed in some way - in whatever measure you're using to judge the model you have.

Once one has accepted that the ways things seem to one is potentially flawed, one cannot rationally, at the same time, use "but that's the way it seems to me" as a counter to any alternative model put forward. — Isaac

To the extent that one can say there is an ethical direction to postmodern thinking, it involves a preference for the coherent over the incoherent, the integrated over the fragmented, the intelligible
over the unintelligible. But this preference isn't over and above experiences of relative organization or disorganization. The two concepts , preference and integration, are synonymous. So saying that we investigate or aim toward or intend or desire is using a volunteeristic language to describe the fact that we find ourselves already thrown into situations, and our awareness of our ‘preferring’ is an after the fact observation. We find ourselves sense-making, and we talk about ourselves in terms of having a preference and an aim with respect to the way the contexts we are thrown into seem to us, and the way we would like them to seem to us.

. So in your case why not accept the reality of a god? Is your position beyond reason and more about an inability to believe? I am fascinated by forms of atheism which doesn’t rely on conventional arguments — Tom Storm

I begin with the philosophical and psychological
model that makes sense of my world, without at first worrying about how this thinking relates to the question of God. Then I examine the different ways in which ‘god’ can be used. For instance, there is God as a personality , a ‘self’ modeled on human selves. The. there is God as energy, or God as pantheistic totality of all existing things.
Concerning God as a self, if in my psychological
model, the self is a social construct, a continually changing phenomenon with no persisting identity , you can see how this fragments the idea of God as a self.
What about God as energy or pantheistic totality? Here what is at stake is the idea of an ethical grounding for the world. Not a personal self but a grounding of goodness. God is synonymous with the Good. But what if my psychological model puts into question the persisting identity of the meaning of the concept of goodness? If the meaning of goodness when it comes to human relations is relative to content and culture, then God as Goodness becomes just one concept that is relative to its use , which is constantly changing.
In sum , my atheism is not a matter of saying there is no god, but of saying there are as many meanings of that concept as there are selves within my body, or values within and between culture. So God can’t be used as a fundamental explanation or first cause. It is more of an effect of a process that philosophy can describe in other terms, such as Heidegger’s Beyng.

“As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

how do you suggest, Joshs, such "sacred" claims – usually extensions of the purported predicates of some so-called "god" – be evaluated, especially when they contradict publicly accessible facts and practices? — 180 Proof

Of course , the same ‘sacred scriptures’ , once they were canonically frozen into their eventual form as the 5 books of Moses and the New Testament, immediately became interpreted and reinterpreted over the course of the past 2 millennia in ways that prepared tor way for , and then paralleled, the progress of scientific thought. In the era of Philo and Augustine, Platonic readings were in vogue. By the time of Aquinas and Maimonides, Aristotelian interpretations predominated, which emphasized for the first time human rationality, setting the stage for the Renaissance. In Kierkegaard’s era , a Kantianized , Hegelianized Judeo-Christianity of subjective existentialist faith emerged alongside dialectical materialist science.

The point is, it is not the same sacred scriptures and the same God that each era comes to know , but instead a transformed, reinterpreted text and deity. So how does this evolution of faith square with the ‘publicly accessible facts and practices’. One has to appreciate that facts only exist with a systematic order of practices . One could call this organizing frame an empirical episteme. Furthermore , the reigning episteme of an era undergoes a historical evolution that not only parallels that of Judeo-Christianity, but encompasses religious belief, the sciences, the arts and political thought within a single encompassing frame. This is why there were no atheists among Enlightenment scientists. The publicly accessible facts and practices of the day were subsumed under the order of a divine rationalism.

Science does seem to have to take the position that reality makes sense, is coherent, has laws and responds to human reason. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, this is a good way to characterize the dawn of modern science in the era of Galileo and Newton. But there has to be more to it than this , doesn't there? Because Enlightenment scientists believed in God. I would argue that they had to. Their understanding of the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific rationality implied a divine source. Only when reason and ‘laws of nature’ became relativized after Darwin, Marx and Freud could atheism begin to make sense. In other words , sciences of pure reason( like 18th and 19th century physics) require a God. Sciences ( evolution, ethnology, quantum physics, psychoanalysis) which put reason’s command of itself into question unravel the coherence of God.