I mean something much more basic: there is nothing that is free of logic, simply because to have an idea at all, fact or fiction, is to have this within the framework of logic. For example, "Oh, my offense is rank" is, among other things, an affirmation, a logical category. — Constance

I’m wondering if you are familiar with the ways in which Husserl and Heidegger, respectively, burrowed within the grammar of formal logic to expose it as a derived abstraction of more fundamental constituting performances ? For instance, are you aware of how Husserl, in Formal and Transcendenral Logic, took Frege and Russell’s starting point in the propositional
copula and traced it back to a developmental sequence of constituting intentions?

“ “Since Aristotle, it has been held as certain that the basic schema of judgment is the copulative judgment, which is reducible to the basic form S is P. Every judgment having another composition, e.g., the form of a verbal proposition, can, according to this interpretation, be transformed without alteration of its logical sense into the form of the copulative bond; for example, “The man walks” is logically equivalent to “The man is walking”.

And Heidegger derives S is P from the hermeneutic ‘as’ structure, showing where we went astray in following Aristotle.

“If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the
“ hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.”

I suspect that your search for a primordial ground for caring and value is linked to the way you distinguish logic and value. Examining how Husserl and Heidegger deconstruct formal logic may clarify things.

In our social and cognitive environment, we instantaneously take part in various intensive apparatuses whose principles of organization and processes evade our control and recognition. Varela defines a machine as "the set of inter-relations of its components independent of the components themselves." 'A higher level of phenomena' is constituted by a relational machinic complex, effectuated before and alongside intentionality, discursive, and subject-object relations. — Number2018

John Protevi writes: “Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

Of course , it’s not just Deleuze who lets us go
above and below the subject. Embodied, enactive approaches in cognitive psychology have similar aims.
Shaun Gallagher says “…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

The problem I have with these attempts to naturalize phenomenology is that they lose what I see as the most radical aspect of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty:

Deleuze provides a reciprocally causal account that has many features in common with those of the embodied community. But within his formal account any difference of degree, any quantitative repetition, any numeration qualitatively changes the sense of what counts at every quantitative repetition.

Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.

“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive”

“The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement.”(Deleuze 1987, p.8)

“If there exists a primitive "geometry" (a proto-geometry), it is an operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is "roundness," but no circle, "alignments," but no straight line, etc.” (ibid, p.212)

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8)

an impression or memory of a phenomenal experience is still similar in kind to that experience. As opposed to when we attempt to translate that experience into words, where its phenomenal character is destroyed. — hypericin

Keep in mind that the original, immediate experience of a ‘now’ content , being itself an intentional synthesis of past , present and future, is not the exposure to an external objective datum , but a sense conditioned by my expectations. The moment we refer back to that original experience through reflection, we are intending a new sense, thus changing the phenomenal character of the original phenomenon. In this respect, reflection is like relating to another through language.

“... the immediate "I" performs an accomplishment through which it constitutes a variational mode of itself as existing (in the mode of having passed). Starting from this we can trace how the immediate "I," flowingly-statically present, constitutes itself in self-temporalization as enduring through “Its" pasts. In the same way, the immediate "I," already enduring in the enduring primordial sphere, constitutes in itself another as other...Thus, in me, "another I" achieves ontic validity as co-present [kompräsent] with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a "sense" perception.”(Crisis, p.185)

Also you misunderstand phenomenology, since it doesn't deal with the ineffable, but with what can be told about personal experience..The observations, analyses and syntheses of phenomenologists do not purport to be empirically testable (obviously) but offer you something only if they speak to your own experience — Janus

Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically.

This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. So self-reflection is as imperfect as communication with others. The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data.

In short, the content-in-itself of the contingent , relative, ineffable ‘now’ is not useful or meaningful via its role in the formal , communicable aspects of experience .

We can give a lot of definitions of fairness but are we ready to apply it? — javi2541997

I’m not talking about definitions. I’m talking about application. Are you, or Mishima, arguing that people who claim be using their faith or spirituality as a guide to navigating actual day to day situations are lying to themselves or fooling themselves? Is your argument that people are hypocrites and dont practice what they profess?

I didn't say it wasn't a praxis but not practical enough (at least in my own view) and that's why the metaphor of Mishima is excellent: it is a formidable building which lacks of a toliet. — javi2541997

I’m not sure you’re understanding the purpose of a metaphysical stance. Do you think that when someone develops a spiritual or religious faith, and proceeds to live their life guided this faith , that this ethical and social guidance isn't considered extremely practical and useful to them, perhaps the most practical of all modes of experiencing life? Do you have overarching principles that guide your life, and do you think they come
into play in practical situations of dealing with others? Do those principles inform your sense of how to approach concepts like honor, loyalty, friendship, fairness and justice?

↪180 Proof That's right, it is part of our nature and progress. We have two essential aspects: praxis and metaphysics — javi2541997

Why is metaphysics not also a praxis? What makes something a praxis and why do we value praxis? Is it that we associate praxis with use, with practicality? And what is useful is what is relevant, significant and meaningful to us? What motivates lemons to develop a. metaphysics? Do you think Kant’s ideas were considers useful , relevant and meaningful to him? Is the praxis-metaphysics binary really a spectrum from the more practical to the more abstract , from the particular to the general?

If this is the case, then how do we understand the contrast between how humans and other animals live?
Doesn’t our living language mean that compares to no -linguistic animals, we lack direct and immediate practical engagement with our world? After all, most of our engagements are less and less about using things in a simple perceptual way and more and more about virtual, conceptually-mediated living. Our objects are value objects like chairs and computers and cars, which are abstract concepts. Why do we prefer to live this more abstract , ‘metaphysical’ way than in a simpler, less-concept-mediated style? Is this because concepts being f the site into the present, and integrate and unify what would otherwise appear as dispute and disconnected elements? And isnt this precisely what metaphysics does for us? If we have the choice between knowing an aspect of our lives better, more integratively, rather than more ‘practically’ , do t we always prefer to know things better , more deeply, more richly?

So far I have only been talking about metaphysics as something certain philosophers write about. But there is also metaphysics as the implicit worldviews within which all of us organize our thinking. From this vantage, al even our most ‘practical actions are informed and guided by an implicit metaphysical worldview, and one could say the same for animals.

But science is useful. Phenomenology is philosophically unproductive and useless. — Heracloitus

As a phenomenological philosopher, I have a hard time finding this comment useful. Neither would contributors to journals like Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Based on Deleuze's text 'Desire and Pleasure,' it is not difficult to oppose Deleuze and Foucault's ontologies. Yet, in 'Foucault,' Deleuze entirely changed his position — Number2018

In ‘Deleuze, a Split with Foucault’, Mathias Schönher argues that in ‘Foucault’, Deleuze is trying to be generous to his old friend without really altering his critique from 1977:

“Whereas in "Desire and Pleasure" Deleuze ends his confrontation with Foucault's position in aporia, after Foucault's death he indicates an alternative, declaring that Foucault's books analyse a variety of historical situations and invent their own specific means to this end. However, this takes into account only half of Foucault's work, as Deleuze points out most clearly in "What is a dispositif?," a lecture from 1988: "Out of a sense of rigor, to avoid confusing things and trusting in his readers, he does not formulate the other half." Foucault formulated the other half "explicitly [only] in the interviews."

The alternative Deleuze exhibits here thus appears to consist of presuming an unwritten doctrine. In actuality, such a presumption would probably have been unthinkable for him, regardless of whether Foucault had really given such great importance to his interviews. As far as Deleuze is concerned, after all, the unwritten half of Foucault's work must be that which opens up access to the fundamental interplay of forces.

What Deleuze considers Foucault to have left out of his books is none other than philosophy, which, with its creative thinking, turns against the historical situation by setting out the starting points for the transformation of our society and our experience. To Deleuze, the alternative to the problems with which he is confronted by Foucault's thought can be none other than to presume that his own philosophy represents the outline of that plane that Foucault also viewed as having laid the foundations for the field on which the network of power was constituted, and to which Foucault attested in interviews.”

These gaps in mutual understanding sound like they are almost insurmountable. Are there ways you recommend we manage gaps such as these, or perhaps some essay about this you can direct me to? — Tom Storm

Funny you should mention it. In this essay I summarize the recent history of approaches to blame , anger and ethics in philosophy( free will blame, modernist blame skepticism, postmodern blame, Heideggerian blame) , and offer my alternative to blameful justice:

https://www.academia.edu/87763398/Beyond_Blame_and_Anger_New_Directions_for_Philosophy

https://youtu.be/1ycD55Zp634

My approach is consistent with my reading of psychologist George Kelly:

https://www.academia.edu/44497152/Personal_Construct_Theory_as_Radically_Temporal_Phenomenology_George_Kelly_s_Challenge_to_Embodied_Intersubjectivity

...it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose.
— Joshs

Are you so sure you know how I privately suppose it to be public? How could you? — Banno

I know that I will have to adjust my expectations of your responses to the dialogue with me in ways that will differ from others responses. My adjustments will eventually reveal a pattern to your differences from others. Through these progressive adjustments of my expectations, what I will eventually ‘know’ of how you suppose something like the public to be will not be a matter of my reading your mind but of my making sense of your unique pattern of responses to me relative to the pattens of others. My ‘knowing’ you is a situated, perspectival unfolding of anticipative engagement, an I-thou interplay of guesses and corrections evolving into a patterned rhythm.

You place a red object in front of it and on its screen it will report what color the object is. The machine goes on working fine but one day it reports that the object is red when no object was placed in front of it. Do we want to say the machine seems to experience red? Or would it better to say it is broken and needs to be fixed? What about human making such a claim of experiencing red when there is no red object? Does the human seem to have the experience or is just broken? — Richard B

Why not just specify the various ways in which objects are given to us in conscious experience, such as dreaming , imagining , perceiving , remembering? These are all modes of experiencing. My imagining or recalling a red color is not an ‘actual’ experience of red , but it is still a kind of experience. What all these modes have in common is an object emerging via a temporal structure, as a present ‘now’ linking a context of memory and expectation. A machine doesn’t have conscious temporally structured experience.

That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other.
— Joshs

Reasonable. How does this play out for us in terms of building 'community' or a shared moral framework? Surely there is some sense in which this must be almost impossible — Tom Storm

The feeling of mutual understanding varies quite widely depending of how superficial the shared activity is. Driving in traffic we normally co-ordinate our actions with respect to other drivers without any problem. We don’t have to know anything about their intentions outside of the general and generic indicators that act as cues for successfully driving on the road with other vehicles. The same is true for engaging in team sports or dancing with a partner. With these activities there seems to be a purely public exchange of signs and a melding of individuals into a group psychology. But in social interchange that involves a much more complex and specific set of ideas, such a politics , religion, philosophy or intimate personal engagement, we are constantly reminded that we are dealing with an other, that our expectations of their response to our communications frequently have to be adjusted , that there will be aspects of the relationship that will have to be less intimate than others, due to gaps in mutual understanding that will never be filled in.

...I've no clear idea what to do with this. While superficially addressing my criticism, it instead goes off in a new direction. Again, why not suppose that the first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative? — Banno

Give me an example of a public narrative and I’ll
try to show how it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose.

This should not be a surprise. They ask us to retreat into our inner private sanctum with the hope of emerging with all sorts of revelations to be shared. But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations. — Richard B

On the other hand, concepts like “inner private sanctum” and “public realm” leave me with more of a feeling of puzzlement than do phenomenological concepts , which question the coherence of the former distinctions.

Why not think instead that the supposed first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative...? A hang over from Descartes' misguided attempt to find an epistemic foundation. The supposed first person vantage depends on there being a public discourse. — Banno

You’re confusing Descartes’ self-enclosed subjectivity with a phenomenological self-world interaction. There is no Cartesian subject for Husserl. His ‘ego’ is merely a zero point of activity without any pre-assigned content. First personal vantage is not the vantage from a metaphysical soul, but the site of continual synthetic activity reinventing the nature , meaning and sense of the self in every intentional act. If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other.

The epoché is not a falsifiable notion, so it could not be in conflict with any empirical evidence. The epoché is more like a prayer. — Banno

Or one could say the epoche is more like Quine’s fact/value complicity or Kuhn’s incommensurability idea, a non-falsifiable notion not in conflict with any empirical evidence.

What benefit is derived from endorsing societal anger and outrage? On the other hand, it seems reasonable to me that the negative consequences for an action should be proportional to the responsibility of a person for the results of their actions. You and I would probably agree that the drunk guy is more responsible for the accident than the other driver, so their punishment should be more severe. — T Clark

This quote from Jesse Prinz comes to mind. He is among those who defend the value of righteous anger against writers like Martha Nussbaum who has written that anger is an irrational , backward-looking emotion that encourages only revenge and retribution rather than productive action.

“…we have strictures against killing innocent people; and we have strictures prescribing equal opportunity. These principles are grounded in reason and subject to rational debate. . But justice also requires passion. We don’t coolly tabulate inequities—we feel outraged or indignant when they are discovered. Such angry feelings are essential; without anger, we would not be motivated to act....Rage can misdirect us when it comes unyoked from good reasoning, but together they are a potent pair. Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward.”

Wittgenstein is an analytic philosopher. H — Banno

I would agree with Putnam, Cavell and Rorty, among others, that the later Wittgenstein is no longer an analytic philosopher.

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language... — Banno

Unless of course the public narrative is a derivative of the first personal vantage, the intersubjectively objective a constitutive accomplishment of subjectivities. I agree that setting out an experience exactly as experienced cannot be the goal of the epoche , if one expects to determine and preserve a specific content of meaning. If , however , one uses the epoche to uncover an irreducible structural invariant of experiencing, then this method is invaluable.
Isaac’s argument concerns the relation between conscious narratives of experience and the subpersonal processes which empirical research discovers. The epoche isnt in conflict with the results of neuroscience, since it doesn’t make any claims concerning specific contents of conscious experience or subpersonal mental events. Rather, its claims pertain to the formal condition of possibility underlying both conscious narratives of experience and empirical accounts of subpersonal neurological events.

In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'? By the way, Deleuze entirely changed his position and reformulated the disagreement with Foucault in 'Foucault'. — Number2018

Deleuze’s concept of desire avoids the problem of resistance that Foucault had to deal with. Rather than starting from symbolic structures of power that must be resisted, Deleuze begins from change, becoming and resistance.

As Dan Smith writes:

“If resistance becomes a question in Foucault, it is because he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articu­lable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power, even if resistance is primary in relation to power. It is Foucault’s starting point in constituted knowledges that leads him to pose the problem of resistance.

Deleuze’s ontology, by contrast, operates in an almost exactly inverse manner. Put crudely, if one begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic – one must look for a break or rupture in the status quo to account for change. Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events. For Deleuze, what is primary in any social formation are its lines of flight, its movements of deterritorialization, which are already movements of resistance. “Far from lying outside the social field or emerging from it,” Deleuze writes, “lines of flight constitute its rhizome or cartog­raphy.” Resistance, in a sense, is built into Deleuze’s ontology, and for this reason, the conceptual problem he faces wound up being quite different from Foucault’s.”

This irreducible gesture of difference has proximities to Derridean differance, as Derrida noted:

“Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience – so unsettling – of a proximity or a near total affinity in the “theses” – if one may say this – through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, “gesture,” “strategy,” “manner”: of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the “theses” (but the word doesn’t fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this “generation.” I never felt the slightest “objection” arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus…”

Foucault distinguished between the order of powers to affect and to be affected and the order of knowledge as heterogeneous but immanent to each other. "Between technics of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have their specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference" — Number2018

I think Deleuze was closer to Derrida’s approach to the relation between strategies of power than he was to Foucault’s. Deleuze was not happy with Foucault’s understanding of systems of power as motivating and constituting. Desiring assemblages can be differentiated from each other, but not in the way that Foucault presumes power systems to do.

“Which brings me to my primary difference from Michel at the moment. If I speak with Felix Guattari of desiring-assemblages, it's that I am not sure that micro-systems can be described in terms of power. For me, the desiring-assemblage marks the fact that desire is never a "natural" nor a "spontaneous" determination. Feudalism for example is an assemblage that puts into play new relations with animals (the horse), with the earth, with deterritorialisation (the battle of knights, the Crusade), with women (knightly love), etc. Completely mad assemblages, but always historically assignable. I would say for my part that desire circulates in this assemblage of heterogeneities, in this sort of "symbiosis": desire is but one with a given assemblage, a co-functioning. Of course a desiring-assemblage will include power systems (feudal powers for example), but they would have to be situated in relation to the different components of the assemblage. Following one axis, one can distinguish in the desiring-assemblage states of things and enunciations (which would be in agreement with the distinction between the two types of formation according to Michel). Following another axis, one can distinguish the territoritalities or re-territorialisations, and the movements of deterritorialisation which carry away an assemblage (for example all the movements which carry away the Church, knighthood, peasants). Systems of power would emerge everywhere that re-territorialisations are operating, even abstract ones. Systems of power would thus be a component of assemblages. But assemblages would also comprise points of deterritorialisation. In short, systems of power would neither motivate, nor constitute, but rather desiring-assemblages would swarm among the formations of power according to their dimensions.”( Desire & Pleasure,Gilles Deleuze.
trans. Melissa McMahon 1997)

it could be concluded that it is an objective truth that all conscious beings seek optimal freedom from conscious suffering - this despite complexities such as weighing short-term suffering against long-term suffering.

If objectively true that we all seek optimal freedom from suffering - what in western thought could be termed the search for optimal eudemonia - then that means which in fact best liberates us from suffering will be the objectively true goal relative to all conscious beings, irrespective of (or else, in manners independent of) one’s beliefs on the matter.

Since this objectively true goal would in principle satisfy that which all yearn for, it would then be an objective good - a good that so remains independently of individuals’ subjective fancies.

Since this good would be objectively real to one and all, a proposition regarding it could then be conformant to its reality and, thereby, true. — javra

This sounds like a version of the utilitarian claim that the pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain is the universal motivator of human behavior. John Dewey had a rebuttal to this notion, as explained by Putnam. Just substitute ‘avoidance of suffering’ for ‘pleasure’.

If “agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”

I think claims should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as some morals are definitely formed from emotional responses to experience, yet others are the result of careful thought. — ToothyMaw

Jonathan Haidt argues that our moral values are the product of inborn evolutionary adaptations. He lists the following 5 innate moral foundations:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation

These intuitions are the tail that wags the dog of the reasoned propositions that you are counting on to give us objectively true moral axioms. They are present in all of us but occur in proportions that vary from individual to individual. For instance , in Haidt’s model, conservatives may emphasize authority and loyalty over care and fairness.

How does he support the assertion that they cannot be propositional in addition to being pre-cognitive preferences? — ToothyMaw

I suppose they could be articulated propositionally. But in order for ‘rats are pests’ to be a proposition with a truth value it would have to be possible to ground it in an objective state of affairs. A common understanding of what makes a pest is a consensual understanding of the meaning of the word pest, but this is not the same thing as a consensual experience of the feelings of revulsion, disgust, etc that make rats a pest for some people and not others.

just because I hate rats because a rat bit me once doesn't mean that I cannot be empirically correct when I claim that rats are found to be, largely, annoying pests. — ToothyMaw

And if rats are found to be ideal pets within another culture is that culture empirically incorrect?

just because we draw on emotion to form our beliefs about right and wrong does not necessarily mean that moral realism is impossible. Moral sense theory is, however, definitely right, imo, about the fact that "moral facts and how one comes to be justified in believing them are necessarily bound up with human emotions." — ToothyMaw

Prinz argues that the basis of our moral values are not in fact propositional beliefs but pre-cognitive preferences.

So Deleuze, for example will take the modern object of schizophrenia and boil down its essence to the truest state of being individual. That can probably be reduced more — introbert

For Deleuze, all singularities are pre-individual. All singularities belong to multiplicities and cannot be understood outside of the assemblages to which they belong

Jesse Prinz argues that all moral values depend on emotional dispositions , and these are subjective and relative. Therefore, moral realism is impossible. He does, however, believe it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being.

What I'm suggesting is that all experience is post hoc. Everything we'd call an experience is made up after the mental events which that experience is attempting to explain.

So your dog's constituent neural activity is not an experience. — Isaac

And why are concepts like “mental event” and “constituent neural activity ” not themselves post hoc narratives? Because the only non post-hoc psychological events are third person empirical concepts? Instead of looking at experiences as attempts at explanation, why not see them as normatively anticipative patterns of performative interaction with a world? This eliminates the split between subjective experience and the ‘real’ outer world that your dualism between experiencing and neurological functions entails. Shifting our language from that of intentional narrative to third person neurological talk is then a move from one kind of experience to another. Tracing the evolution of one’s thinking from what you might be inclined to dub folk psychological to a scientific neurological account is not about replacing ‘post-hoc’ narrative with evidence-based fact. If anything it is the empirical account which is post-hoc in the sense that it is an elaboration and enrichment of the former. But neither is really post-hoc , since this would imply that our beliefs return from the world as it is, outside of and prior to our narrative about it. The distinction to be made is not between primary and secondary , more and less true knowledge about an external world , but the different ways in which our performative interactions with our world constructs niches that allow us to function anticipatively in the world we do-construct in the way that we do. Think of two different animals, both of which inhabits and functions within its own unique niche or ‘ world’. Let us say that one’s organism -environment niche is more complex and flexible that the other, giving it a more expansive repertoire of behaviors. If we can’t say that this more complex niche is a truer model of the way the world
really is, then we also can’t say that it is less ‘post-hoc’ than the simpler animal’s niche. Likewise, if a neurological account of psychological functioning constructs the world that it models in niche-like fashion, then the distinction between post-hoc experience and original event collapses.

My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed through direct and indirect social engagement,
— Joshs
Here, you consider a social engagement as an immanent cause of ‘my sense of my own identity’. How is that compatible with Derrida’s placing ‘what absolutely is not’ at the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being? — Number2018

First of all, it is important to remember that the ‘social’ here refers to the exposure to absolute alterity that temporal repetition implies. Such alterity can be the voice of another or one’s own outer or inner voice, the written words of another or my exposure to the perceptual features of my room. This is all discursive (textual) for Derrida.

Secondly, if what is ‘absolutely not’ is at the center of our temporality , then presence is equally so, within the same
moment.

“Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent.” These two inseparable poles( the formal and the empirical, presence and absence, form a hinge in which neither side dominates the other.

Shouldn’t we substitute Derrida’s interval of an absolute absence, for example, with Simondon’s notion of the transindividual? “The transindividual is the unity of two relations, a relation interior to the individual (defining its psyche) and a relation exterior to the individual (defining the collective), a relation of relations” (Combes, ‘Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual’, p 26). The interval, an abyss of what absolutely is not could be transformed into the relation between the two heterogenetic orders. It could become possible to avoid the epistemological aporia while saving Derrida’s exposure to the unendurable loss of meaning. — Number2018

What would allow two orders to be heterogeneous to each other, other than some structural unity or center within each , opposing one to the other? Doesn’t this invoke the problem of the condition of possibility of formal structures? We would have to recognize the heterogeneity that already inhabits an ‘order’ and keeps
it from being closed within itself and simply opposed to another order.

our use of language has no more autonomy than our socially situated organization of perception. — Number2018

The ‘autonomy’ I have in mind is not that of the repetition of self-identity. My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed through direct and indirect social engagement, in a manner which presupposes and is made possible by the self's ‘continuing to repeat itself “the same differently or otherwise”, as Derrida (1978) says. Derridean differance would be an "imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...(p.373)". The repetition of this very slight difference dividing self -identity from itself produces an ongoing singular self that returns to itself the same differently.

“…there is singularity but it does not collect itself, it "consists" in not collecting itself. Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a `style' “(Derrida 1995, p.354)

experiences are post hoc constructions, they're narratives we use to make what just happened in our brain more predictable (understandable in more colloquial terms). We weave together disparate, and often completely contradictory processes into one coherent narrative after the mental events themselves have already taken place and then 'prune' our connections to those process via the hippocampus to create a false memory of how things went down - one which eliminates all the contradictory and inexplicable stuff. — Isaac

I would argue that what we weave together is not disparate and completely contradictory bits but inferentially compatible ( but never identical) experience united on the basis of commonalities as well as differences. That’s what makes the narratives cohere. It is only when we shift our interest and focus in order to spin out an empirical third person narrative consisting of neuro-chemical bits and physical wavelengths that what we wove together now appears as disparate and completely contradictory. The contradiction is between two forms of language, two kinds of narratives, the phenomenological and the naturalistic, not between our perception of the ways things are and the way things REALLY are, as if our folk psychology ‘fools’ us into ‘false’ knowledge.

It’s interesting that you can apply this relativism to perception but not to the underlying empirical realist assumptions you ground it in , implied by terms like such as “false memory” , “what actually happens in the brain” and “wavelengths of light”. Why not be consistent and jettison the assumption that neurons and brains and wavelengths refer to something any more context and person-independent that the experience of color?

The salient point with regard to the topic, what cannot be said, remains the fact that we do talk about red. Hence red is not ineffable. The retort is something like, that we can talk about the colour red but not the sensation of red. This sits oddly in the mouths of those who also claim that the colour red is the name of a sensation. And it is wrong, since we do talk about the sensation of red. — Banno

I agree that there is no ineffable sensation of red in the guise of something like a qualia. I also agree that red only has meaning as something we talk about. But I argue that in order to understand perception as simultaneously private and public, rather than as one or the other, we have to recognize that in perceiving color or anything else, we must ‘talk’ to ourselves, and this is the essence of perception. Whatever we have learned about the meaning of words, objects and colors through prior interchange with others contributes to the background informing our self-speech, just as what we have learned about the perceptual world though solitary exploration of it does. When we are alone and deciding what colors to use in a painting we are creating, we draw from that previous merged public and private history with color, but then transform that history in applying it to the present task.

Perception doesn’t just draw from an archive of previous experience with words and perceptions, it always uses that knowledge in new ways. Just as the use of words between people is a language game, the use of prior knowledge about perception in new perceiving is a ‘perception’ game, a kind of language game that takes place in solitary situations. We ask ourselves ‘which’ sensations, and answer them to ourselves through such games which are neither strictly private nor public. They are private only in the sense that we renew the meaning of perceptual experience in every new context of engaging with the perceptual world, without the need to have another person there to respond to us.

They are public in that new perception forces us outside of the archive of previous perceptual meaning, interrogating and modifying our expectations. We are not just in our heads when we construct an experience of red, we are thrown into new situations with red which alters the meaning of past experience. If it is the discursive exposure to another in a use situation which is the requirement for answering the question “WHICH private sensation?” , then this requirement is already met in solitary perception, since to recognize any aspect of our environment is to use our previous experience with it via the transformation ( use) of expectation through my discursive exposure of my past with the fresh novelty of immediate context This is how perception functions by talking to itself. My self-speech is more than just a proxy, an already archived record of my history of discourse with other persons. Asking ourselves what we mean by red , in the context of the solitary perceptual ‘language’ game, is asking ourselves in a fresh way what is at stake and at issue in using a perceptual sense, and the answer comes from both the world of speaking communities we participate with and the solitary world of light and sound and touch.

What is the relationship between "the product of a complex constructive activity of perception" (redness), and the embodiment of language here? When I say 'red', my utterance
is virtually accompanied by a complex perpetual activity. Yet, at a more profound level, both saying and seeing are ultimately affected by my socio-cultural situation. — Number2018

We are affected by our sociopath-cultural situation as filtered and interpreted through our situated bodily organization of perception. The word red has as many senses as there are shared purposes and uses, but those purposes are always only partially shared, due to the fact that we are all situated differently within the ‘same’ culture. The meanings of words are negotiated , not introjected from culture to individual.

'll have to take your word for it. But as Isaac pointed out, there's more to red than "a complex constructive activity of perception". It's a social construct, and not private. — Banno

It is neither strictly private not strictly public. Language is embodied, which means perspectival. That is why language must allow for failures of shared intelligibility.

Isaac, here we have the illusion, encouraged by phenomenology, that there is a clear distinction to be had between red and the-sensation-of-red or the-experience-of-red. — Banno

It is not encouraged by the founder of modern phenomenology. Husserl, or his disciple, Merleau-Ponty. Husserl contributed in-depth analyses
concerning how redness is the product of a complex constructive activity of perception, rather than some irreducible primitive sensation.

I am sympathetic to this. What are your thoughts regarding the variations within a shared understanding? While it seems accurate to say that people have different understandings of red, do you consider those differences are sufficient to warrant being seen as incompatible. — Tom Storm

It really depends on the task. If I ask you to hand me the red towel, your responding correctly will give me no reason to wonder if you’re picturing the red color exactly the way I am. If I tell a painter to paint my kitchen red, it may not be a good idea to rely on their determination of what red looks like. It would be wiser for me to select a sample of the color I want first. Otherwise I may very well find their idea of red incompatible with mine.

I don't agree that there exists a 'sensation of red'. — Isaac

And neither does there exist a socially constructed notion of red that is completely shared within a language
community. It would at best be only partially shared, continually contested and redetermined , slightly differently for each participant, in each instantiation, relative to purposes, context and capacities.

What you're calling your 'experience of red' is a socially mediated construction. Therefore it is bound up with the language your culture uses and so can be reiterated in that language. — Isaac

Aren’t you forgetting the perspectival role of the body here? Our use of langauge is not divorced from our embodiment but presupposes it. Thus there needs to be room for unintelligibility in language, which shows up as situations where, for instance a blind person is marginalized from a sighted language community due to a gap in intelligibility.

the firm footing for science in transcendental subjectivity,
— Joshs

Transcendental consciousness is an absolute subjectivity that cannot be an object and. cannot be given reflectively. Because it can never be an object, one cannot say. anything about it or characterize it.

Ineffable :cool:

How many scientists have even heard or read of this? — jgill

You might want to check out Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe for a link between Husserlian phenomenology and contemporary perceptual science. A.I. and perceptual psychology are two domains where there is an increasing interest in phenomenology. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both contributed intricate and original analyses of the mechanisms of perception.

“Alva Noë is a modern-day empiricist. His book Action in Perception is chockablock with contemporary cognitive science; its preface and notes (not to mention general erudition) point to on-going collaboration with Evan Thompson, Kevin O’Regan, and Susan Hurley. Their research investigates the sensorimotor bases of consciousness, and Action in Perception is offered as its philosophical backdrop.”

States function through laws. Laws function through the threat and application of violence. — Tzeentch

The threat and application of violence is an inherent component of all human social interaction, simply because any action I choose will do unintended violence to someone else , and anything I believe to be right will be perceived as a violation of someone else’s standard of ethics. We have no choice but to shun those who behave in ways that violate our modes of thinking and acting. Whether we incarcerate them or physically separate
them from us, the principle is the same, even though there are vast differences in the degree of ‘humaneness’ with which we split ourselves or our group off from
others whose behavior we cannot abide.

Self declaredradical anarchists like David Graeber perpetuate a certain violence in demanding a wholesale denunciation and distancing from what they deem as structures of violence. The problem isn’t the existence of statist structures , but the rigidity of their formation and interpretation.
There are always ways of adding multiple forms
of discursive mediation , negotiation and collective
reinterpretation into legal and governmental structures , and this will happen as a consequence of evolving social
understanding.

Furthermore, in one of my references on philosophy, they indicated that Husserl, toward the end of his career, wrote that the dream of putting the sciences on firm foundations was over. Rather tragic end to one who began phenomenology to put all the sciences on secure footing. Talking about a dead end — Richard B

Could you send me that reference?You may be confusing Husserl’s critique of modern sciences as failing to ground themselves on the basis of traditional presuppositions of empiricism with his own transcendental grounding.

Husserl’s last published work was The Crisis of the European Sciences( 1936), completed two years before his death. It attacks Cartesian and Kantian-based explanations of the basis of scientific truth( which brought us logical positivism) as leading to a crisis of justification within the sciences , and reiterates and further elaborates the firm footing for science in transcendental subjectivity, the central idea of his life’s work. In sum, scientific truth is grounded on objective concepts formed within intersubjective communities, which are themselves the reciprocal interactions among subjective perspectives.