This aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, found in the Tractatus, hence predating Heidegger, does continue in the Investigations. The Tractatus concerns itself with setting out the relation between logic and language, and is quite explicit in separating what can be stated from what cannot, without denigration. Hence,

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. — Banno

But the relation between logic and language is rethought between Tractatus and P.I.

As Ray Monk says “ In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had said that philosophical problems arise because the logic of our language is misunderstood. His attempted solution was to produce a correct account of the logic of our language. But when this collapsed, he began to see things completely differently, to question whether there is something that could be called the logic of our language. Indeed, he now takes his own earlier work as a perfect example of how philosophers are misled. For notice that what he says above about 'the craving for general- ity' applies to the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as much as to any other philosopher. When, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to analyse 'the general form of the proposition', he had fallen victim to the 'tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term', thinking that there must be a single form that was common to all propositions.”

“Some Remarks on Logical Form' is interesting as a record of how and why the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of logical form.”

There are folk who suppose that there can be an answer to this question, as if we could step outside of logic in order to examine it logically.

It's trite to say that the attempt results in nonsense. Indeed, saying nothing might be the correct response, the way forward.

Think I got that from the Tractates. — Banno

You’ll have better luck with Philosophical Investigations.
Here’s you’ll find Witt reiterating Heidegger’s point that logic, as a grammatical construction, is a frame of sense, and the sense of language is in its contextual use.


114. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are."——That is the kind of propo­sition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is
merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
115. A. picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

The question is this:
What kind of pre-schemarized understanding of the world must be already in place in order for propositional logic to work as a description of empirical reality?

The connection between the logical and the actual is, on the one hand, unsurprising, evolution should have equipped us with a sense of "how things work," but on the other hand is one of the 'deeper' findings in the physical sciences from my perspective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure that it goes much deeper than a set of presuppositions concerning the object that became crystallized as the basis the inseparable relation between logic, mathematics and modern science with Galileo and Descartes. The ‘ actual’ has been pre-figured such that it conveniently lends itself
to the language of logical
formalism.

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, a constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”(Heidegger 2010)

Heidegger explains that the fundamentally undiscussed ontological foundations of empirical science since Descartes are based on his formulation of objective presence.

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.
Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)

Is anyone else reminded of Wittgenstein's later work here? Popper does not take the route of treating sense-data at the absolute which can falsify theories. Instead he talks of decisions. In his Logic, he uses the metaphor of a jury. I think he's trying to jump over the quicksand between language and the world apart from language. This 'swampy' element is something like 'common sense.' I imagine, for instance, everything that goes into a making a legitimate measurement, including one that falsifies a theory. Wittgenstein's discussion of the standard meter comes to mind. Popper admits or tolerates a dimness at the base of critical rationalism.

Thoughts? — jas0n

I dont see Popper as compatible with the later Wittgenstein. Popper’s notion of falsification depends on certain assumptions concerning the invariance of method that Wittgenstein challenged. Many Wittgenstein scholars see his work as consistent with , and inspiring such figures as Kuhn and Feyerabend.

It seems to me that Kantianish idealisms are parasitic upon the 'manifest image' of common sense. The notion of sense organs and a nervous system is part of this manifest image. When a thinker like Kant tries to throw space into the bucket of the manufactured or dream-like, he forgets that it's only our typical pre-critical experience of bodies in space with their sense organs that makes a 'processed sense-experience' vision of the world plausible in the first place. — jas0n

I think that’s Zahavi’s point in the article you’re quoting from.

“ For Husserl, there are, in short, not two ontologically different objects, the appearing (intra-mental) object and the physical (extra-mental) object. Rather, there is only one appearing (extra-mental) object that carries categorically distinct but compatible sensuous and theoretical determinations. This is also why the findings of science and everyday experience, the scientific image and the manifest image, do not have to contradict each other. They can both be true according to their own standards. More generally speaking, the difference between the world of perception and world of science is not a difference between the world for us and the world in itself (falling in the province of phenomenology and science, respectively). It is a difference between two ways in which the world appears.”

Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings. — apokrisis

My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations of anger contexts. I surmise the view of biosemiotics is in close proximity to Prinz’s.

“Let us say that I have been hurt and disappointed by someone I care deeply about, and as a result
I become angry with them. What form might this anger take? If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm.

Jesse Prinz’s neo-sentimentalist model of emotion occupies a transitional position situated between moral realism and a full-bodied moral relativism. He divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity, supporting an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism t the same time that he claims to maintain a relativistic stance on moral values.
Prinz’s dualist division of knowledge and value, subjectivism and objectivism is incoherent from a Postmodern perspective. Empirical investigation gets its sense and orientation from affectively attuned value systems, which means that in judging an empirical result on the basis of factual correctness, one is making a relativistic moral evaluation. Empirical models are aspects of moral worldviews.

Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter.

In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos
is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. “ In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or
suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.…our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within
traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”( Gergen)

Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms" — apokrisis

And yet I do think there is a remnant of that Cartesianism lurking in the treatment of affectivity , both on the part of embodied enactivtists like Thompson, and predictive coding types like Barrett. All that’s left of the old inner subject is somatic sensation , the bare registry of positive and negative valence within the body. How pain-pleasure contributes to the organization of motivational relevance and mattering is a complex function of many intertwined aspects of the organism in its total functioning, and yet there remains what for me is an unsatisfying immanence or intrinsicality associated with feeling , as much as it has been embedded within irreducible webs of somatic-cognitive-environmental interactions.

orgasmic experience does not manifest the threefold structure of experienced time, nor does it settle in the temporal order of our practical lives. It dislocates the experiencing subject temporarily and seems to raise her above time or press her underneath its surface.

In this respect, orgasm parallels fainting, loss of consciousness, dreamless sleep and, ultimately, also death. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I dont think Merleau-Ponty would agree with Heinemaa. In Phenomecology of Perceptual, where he mentions orgasm, it is in the context of a discussion about a man with a brain injury involving movement which affects his libido. MP’s conclusion is that sexual pleasure is connected to a global body scheme connecting movement and perception. Rather than organism being out of time , I think he would say the opposite. The more intricately intereconnected the events one construes, the richer and more continuous one’s experience of the flow of time.

That the substance that the universe is composed of is essentially consciousness?
— Watchmaker

That's what I think, yes. Not all panpsychists think that though. — bert1

I think the notion that apokrisis and I take issue with, in different ways, is the depiction of consciousness as a substance or property. What makes this problematic is that it is the tendency to reduce phenomena to physical substance that led to the hard problem to
begin with. If all you have is hammer , then everything looks like a nail, and if your only metaphysics is monistic naturalism, then everything looks like a substance.
But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity.

What's that quote from? — Ciceronianus

It’s from ‘On the Genealogy of Moraity’

I don't think this constitutes wondering that there are things in the world, which seems more along the lines of "wondering why there is something rather than nothing." That's what my questions addressed, for what they're worth. — Ciceronianus

Well, in of support your observation, Heidegger uses your wording rather than Yalom’s.

“For by nature, my friend, man's mind dwells in philosophy” (Plato, Phaedrus, 279a). So long as man exists, philosophizing of some sort occurs. Philosophy — what we call philosophy — is metaphysics getting under way, in which philosophy comes to itself and to its explicit tasks. Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?( Heidegger, What is Metaphysics)

Grand iconoclastic ideas are useless if we trip up on simple fallacies in logic. — Cuthbert

I think that when we find ourselves in a realm of concern where ‘simple fallacies of logic’ have become important to us, we are so far removed from any relevant and significant form of philosophizing that we have in essence substituted calculating for thinking.

we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.
— ZzzoneiroCosm

Why, and when, would we wonder that things are in the world? What else would be "in the world"? — Ciceronianus

Heidegger believes that we dont simply experience a world, each of us produces a world. For each of us, all of the particular objects and events that we experience are interwoven as a totality of relevant relations. When we recognize an object as something , it is already familiar
to us at some level in its belonging to our larger pragmatic dealings with the world. From time to time , these overarching schemes by which we interpret our world undergo transformation. We re-frame the frame. When we do this , we wonder anew at the world, because now we look at all its particulars with fresh eyes. This is how science evolves, through such gestalt shifts in outlook.

But how do we shift from the everyday mode to the ontological mode?
— ZzzoneiroCosm

Why would anyone want to do that? To learn what, to know what, for what purpose? — Ciceronianus

Because this allows us to question our presuppositions that often imprison us.

we can't reduce out accounts of reality to phenomenology as our first person point of view - our semiotic Umwelt - is the least general "view of reality" possible. And we are seeking the maximally general view as the ground under our ontology. — apokrisis

What does general mean here? How does the general
escape or transcend the first personal? Keep in mind the referential out of consciousness doesn’t reduce to some reified idealist notion of mind or first personal at the expense of the ‘general’, but simply a
radical situatedness. It is neither a preferencing of the subjective over the general and invariant or the other way around , but a system of mutual constraints .

Bitbol says questions about consciousness are not just referential, they are radically self-referential.

“As any reasoning, a reasoning about consciousness involves a conscious experience ; aknowledging the validity of a personal reasoning, or even of a mechanical inference performed by a Turing machine, is still a conscious experience. A reasoning bearing on consciousness is included in what is reasoned about. So, when consciousness is presented as an object of reasoning, this can only be in a fake sense.

In fact, as soon as we embark on anything like discourse,
reasoning, or scientific research about consciousness, we are driven away from mere aknowledgment of what is lived now, and thereby away from the central topic of the inquiry. So much so that recovering contact with it becomes difficult, and that, from then on, we tend to value more the abstract product of arguments than their
experienced source.

In the science of consciousness, one should neither try to absorb the subjective into a previously defined objective domain, nor objectivize somehow the subjective, nor give the subjective any kind of supremacy over the objective. One should rather go back to the experiential realm from which the very dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity arises, and then establish within it a system of mutual constraints. In actual fact, mutual constraints are enforced between first person statements of phenomenal contents, and third person descriptions of those phenomenal invariants that are established by the collectively elaborated neurosciences.

If science is extended so as to include a “ dance ” of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts (Varela, 1998, p. 42) ; if nature is made of views and situated experiences as well as of their manifold invariants; and if, accordingly, naturalizing consciousness means including its disciplined contents within a strongly interconnected network of objects and experiences, then any problem has disappeared.”

phenomenology that actually examines the structure of experience would not seek to ground itself in the sharp and personal sense of the immediate. It already has to turn towards the subconscious and automatic to find that which is more general. And it is already thus becoming more receptive to standard neuro-reductionism - as an account based on the methodological naturalism which is all about explaining the particular from the better vantage point of the general. — apokrisis

But the sharp and personal sense of the immediate is also involved in the modeling of the subpersonal, the pre-reflective, the unconscious and the automatic; in other words, the general that is placed as outside of the situated awareness of the personal is itself a product of that situated awareness.

first and third person view are the dualised aspects of the model itself. Neither "exist" outside that. — apokrisis

I suspect that semiotic models and Bitbol are not that far apart here. Neither wants to reify either subjectivity or the invariant products of empirical objectivity at the expense of their mutual entanglement.

I think the difference lies in how much ground is being ceded to formal grounding assumptions underlying both the first and third personal dimensions as they are articulated via the ‘code-based’ think of semiotics. There needs to be a way to close the gap between semiotics and Wittgensteinian contextual pragmatics, which is closer to Varela and Bitbol than to Peirce.

What do you make of Bitbol’s attempt to dissolve the hard problem? He’s following Varela here.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

It has been said that panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness. — Watchmaker

Panpsychism doesn’t solve the hard problem, it reifies it by installing the dualism within each bit of objective reality.
Here’s a way to really solve ( or dissolve) the Hard Problem:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

I actually think it's safe to say that most philosophers think too much. — SatmBopd

On the contrary, I think it’s safe to say most people think too little.

but he doesn't explain--he doesn't argue, which is what the philosophers I've read do. — Ciceronianus

My favorite passages of Nietzsche are not his aphorisms but paragraphs like the one below, which is as complex a philosophical explanation or argument as any I have come across by a philosopher. And there are many, many other passages like this throughout his writings that add up to a consistent philosophical thesis.

“Now another word on the origin and purpose of punishment – two problems which are separate, or ought to be: unfortunately people usually throw them together. How have the moral genealogists reacted so far in this matter? Naively, as is their wont –: they highlight some ‘purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innocently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and – have finished. But ‘purpose in law' is the last thing we should apply to the history of the emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn
overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection. To speak plainly: even the partial reduction in usefulness, decay and degeneration, loss of meaning [Sinn] and functional purpose, in short death, make up the conditions of true progressus: always appearing, as it does, in the form of the will and way to greater power and always emerging victorious at the cost of countless smaller forces. The amount of ‘progress' can actually be measured according to how much has had to be sacrificed to it; man's sacrifice en bloc to the prosperity of one single stronger species of man – that would be progress . . . – I lay stress on this major point of historical method, especially as it runs counter to just that prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens.”

what if God cares about ALL creation equally: the man AND the cancer cell, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 AND the shift of tectonic plates, the comet AND the dinosaurs. With that view, the problem of evil evaporates; we're just not that special. — Art48

It seems to me the problem of evil just gets democratized to include the whole cosmos instead
of just being confined to inter-human affairs. Wouldnt it be better to jettison the whole unctuous concept of
evil?

I don't think Frantic Freddie was a philosopher… Someone who did not think as much as emote. — Ciceronianus

Guess I’ll have to burn all the papers I wrote about his philosophy. Where were you when I needed you? We’ll have to keep in close touch from now on. Could you draw up a list of all the other non-philosophers I can stop studying?

it's time to time to thank our philosophers in time and welcome a new dawn in Philosophia. — EugeneW

Do you have any candidates in mind who you think are contributing to this new dawn? I don’t know of any living philosophers who are offering anything significantly beyond what writers like James and Nietzsche produced over 130 years ago.

My first inclination has been to investigate Schopenhauer, Geothe, and more about antiquity. But those are just influences of Nietzsche, so like, my "wider reading" is still just currently going back to the same sentiments and investigations associated with Nietzsche. — SatmBopd

Not necessarily. My reading of your interpretation of Nietzsche is that you see him within the existentialist camp rather as a postmodernist. According to a postmodernist reading Nietzsche isnt searching for the best value system. On the contrary , hei is against this kind of thinking about values. There is no better or worse value system for Nietzsche. What he advocates is the endless movement from one value system
to the next , without ending up at any final
ideal system.
I think you might find Marx , Sartre, Kierkegaard , Schelling and William James beneficial.

before voting, i would appreciate if i knew what exactly you mean by "mythical"
we might not be on the same page — I love Chom-choms

I’ve known some women to produce mythical orgasms, but that was before they worked out their relationship issues.

depression is an adaptation to traumatic experiences. This is actually in line with physical illnesses to a large extent, in the sense that symptoms are very often adaptations to pathogens - coughing, raised temperature, and so on. — unenlightened

Is depression like the body’s immune response to an invader, designed to protect the organism but also capable of damaging the organism?


I know there are some approaches which claim that depression is adaptive ,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/

but I disagree. I argue instead that depression is not an ‘adaptation’ to trauma. It is the interpretive experience of the repercussions of the trauma itself. It is not a response to injury, it is the injury itself. It is the opposite of an adaptation. I am not taking the dsm view of depression as a pathology WITHIN the brain , but rather as a crisis triggered by one’s situation as one interprets it.

It is loss of capability, loss of competence, loss of self-esteem, loss of meaning and relevance, loss of coherence. When one suffers a head injury and has difficulty with memory and concentration, these symptoms are not adaptations to the head trauma, they define the meaning the head trauma itself. Just as avoidance of over-stimulating situations is a
coping adaptation to the head injury, adaptations benefit one in dealing with the losses that depression represents. For instance , withdrawing from social situations is an adaptation that protects one from being exposed to painful reminders of one’s loss of competence, and situations which may even deepen the feelings of worthlessness.

Depression isnt a mechanism, it is a way of meaningfully appraising our loss of self-confidence.

If we start by arguing that depression is adaptive, then we may as well also say that failure, confusion. illness , injury and all other psychological and physical responses to our environment are adaptations. But not every response of an organism to its environment is an adaption. Organisms can fail to adapt and fail to thrive. A prolonged severe depressive state is one such failure to thrive. Just because we recover from a depression or an injury doesn’t makes these adaptive. We may not recover from the injury or the depression.


One has to ask what is the baseline normative functioning of the psychological system at a given point, and whether the system’s reaction to a change in its world maintains and enhances that normative functioning( adaptation ) or reduces it ( non-adaptive).

I don't think most ontological claims are possible to vet empircally, so they can't be scientific. That said, science often informs our ontology and sometimes ontologies do make claims that science may be able to support or undermine.

With that in mind, parts of any ontology can be scientific. For example, the rise of information based ontologies comes from insights in quantum mechanics and the physics of how information is stored, particularly in black holes — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue instead that all scientific results are elements of theories , theories at elements of paradigms or scientific worldviews , and scientific worldviews are regional ontologies. so an empirical result only makes sense as an element in a relational totality that functions as a gestalt framework. A science can undermine its own claims in a minor way ( falsification) by remaining within a particular ontology(paradigm, worldview) or by replacing one paradigm with another , in which case there is a gestalt shift in the overall worldview , which is not merely a falsification, since the old and the new ontologies are not strictly commensurable.

This process is no different than how philosophy evolves., except for the fact that the methods of science tend to be more conventional and generic than those of philosophical inquiry. The methods of science don’t allow it to ‘progress’ any more effectively or quickly that philosophy.

Both make their bones by positing novel wild claims. — Real Gone Cat

These aren’t wild claims. It’s just good old fashioned neo-Kantianism.

“That which through the medium of our senses is actually perceived by the sensorium, is indeed merely a property or change of condition of our nerves; but the imagination and reason are ready to interpret the modifications in the state of the nerves produced by external influences as properties of the external bodies themselves (Müller 1842: 1059).

Helmholtz accepted this reasoning, and likewise argued that since the information about the external object is transformed beyond recognition on its way through the nervous system, what we end up perceiving is strictly speaking the internal effect rather than the external cause:

The result of [scientific] examination, as at present understood, is that the organs of sense do indeed give us information about external effects produced on them, but convey those effects to our consciousness in a totally different form, so that the character of a sensuous perception depends not so much on the properties of the object perceived as on those of the organ by which we receive the information (Helmholtz 1995: 13).

I would interpret the sensation only as a sign of the object's effect. To the nature of a sign belongs only the property that for the same object the same sign will always be given. Moreover, no type of similarity is necessary between it and its object, just as little as that between the spoken word and the object that we designate thereby (Helmholtz )

I have never seen how moving from ontological identity to ontological difference independent of a concept of identity fixes the problem of the identity of indiscernibles. It seems to me that it "solves" the problem by denying it exists.

However, it does so in a way that makes me suspicious of begging the question. Sure, difference being ontologically more primitive than identity gets you out of the jam mentioned above by allowing you to point to the numerical difference of identical objects as ontologically basic, but it's always been unclear to me how this doesn't make prepositions about the traits of an object into mere brute facts. So in this sense, it's similar to the austere nominalism I was talking about before. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The numerical difference of identical objects is very far removed from the notion of difference that drives the work of authors like Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.

They don’t begin from identity and then add difference onto it. What is an identity? What is self-identicality? What is a logical proposition such as A=A? The concern of these writers is to show that what is assumed as an identity with attributes, traits and properties is o my so as an idealization.

Husserl wrote a book , Formal and Transcendental Logic, in which the starting point for writers like Frege and Russell , S is P, is the end product of a long and complex process of constitution. From their vantage, all that Husserl contributes was a pointless psychologistic analysis. But what he actually accomplished was the exposition of the hidden assumptions and conditions of possibility for the abstractions that Frege took as primordial . In other words , in order to have an adequate grasp of the nature of truth as it is asserted in propositions, one must recognize that the form of the proposition is a derived abstraction that takes for granted what is really at stake in determining the basis of assertions of truth.

Donald Hoffman too. It's kind of a mainstream cognitive science view now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This view is problematic for me because it still implies a split between inner and outer, subjective model vs Thing in itself, Descartes’ veil of appearance regurgitated. Phenomenology dispenses with this dualist residue.

“ For Husserl, the world that can appear to us – be it in perception, in our daily concerns or in our scientific analyses – is the only real world. To claim that there in addition to this world exists a world-behind-the-scene, which transcends every appearance, and every experiential and theoretical evidence, and to identify this world with true reality is, for Husserl, an empty and countersensical proposition.”(Dan Zahavi)

Physicalism is saying, "no, actually what you experience isn't the real deal. You essentially hallucinate a world..."
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? Who says we hallucinate a world? — Real Gone Cat

Andy Clark, for one:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination

Fish laid eggs well before there were chickens. — Banno

Did the fish lay the chicken? There oughta be a law.

There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence — Constance

There are also aspects that are clearly deterministically explicable , like the child who didn’t understand or the schizophrenic who heard voices telling them to kill. In P.F. Strawson’s famous paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’, he distinguishes between such obvious examples where ethical judgement doesn’t apply, and examples where what he calls our reactive emotional-valuative moral attitudes do apply. He concludes that we should listen to our reactive emotions that drive us toward retributive justice. My question for you is how you parse valuative emotions like anger. Nussbaum and Pereboom reject anger because they see it as aimed at payback, retribution and revenge, which are backward looking valuations.

Pereboom on the irrationality of anger:
“On the skeptical view, an expression of resentment or indignation will invoke doxastic irrationality when it is accompanied by the belief—as in my view it always is—that its target deserves in the basic sense to be its recipient.”
“In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”
“…when someone is mistreated in a relationship, there are other emotions available besides resentment and indignation—these emotions include “feeling disappointed, hurt or shocked about what the offender has done, moral concern for him, and moral sadness and sorrow generated by this concern when the harm done is serious”. Communicating such disappointment,
sadness, or concern can be quite effective in motivating avoidance of future misbehavour. In addition, communication of such alternatives to resentment and indignation “is not typically aggressive in the way that expression of anger can be, and will usually not have its intimidating effect” “ “moral sadness and sorrow—accompanied by a resolve for fairness and justice, or to
improve personal relationships—will serve societal and personal relationships as well as resentment and indignation does.”

Then there’s Jesse Prinz, who argues that moral
values are driven by emotions, and emotions are relative to individuals and communities. Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions.

Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.

Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, Śāriputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness, — Constance

They just think they’ve annihilated time. By trying to ground change in the stasis of emptiness, what they’ve actually done is reified it by not noticing that emptiness is a form of valuation. Nietzsche and Heidegger recognized that Emptiness and the nothing are pregnant. Not pure terms of absence but transition itself. Emptiness is a refusalof the past in the face of the future as not-yet articulated possibilities which is already upon one. Emptiness doesn’t precede time , it defines its structure.Emptiness for Heidegger is the moment of vision , rapture, astonishment, wonder, the uncanny.

Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game". — Constance

Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)?

As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness. — Constance

Are you just regurgitating Kant here?

In "Constructing quarks", a fascinating account of the history of the literal construction of the quarks is given. Weel, not exactly literally, but reality is seen as a moldable material. To be molded by experiment and ideas. — EugeneW

Sounds like my kind of book.

The mental and physical world are dependent on each other. Structures in the physical world engrave themselves in our brain and the brainstructures inform the physical world. — EugeneW

I find the newer thinking about the role and process of science to be more exciting. I dont find the idea of physical objects to be all that useful anymore for quantum physics, biology or psychology. It’s a relic of an older era.

So there is no merging, no intraontology, for this would imply the merging of two things, speaking roughly, when there are no two things. A fabricated metaphysics of two. Or: for there to be a synthesis, there has to be two identifiables on each side, but this cannot be shown, for neither side makes a appearance — Constance

Let’s be clear about the “two things” intraontology is talking about. It is the noetic and the noematic , the subjective and objective poles of experience. They are not separable, don’t appear individually and thus don’t form a synthesis or merger. But without these poles there could be no differential ,and without a differential there could be no time.

The perceived duality lies with a mistake, and the mistake is time. — Constance

Which philosophers are you getting this from? Marion? Henry?

Hypotheses are always about coherency. They are never proven true. One selects, according to some predefined criteria, the true best hypothesis. — Agent Smith

Is the following consistent with your understanding of coherence?

“…the real criteria of validation of scientific descrip­tions cannot be their correspondence with the process ‘in itself’, but another criterion that a recent current of the philosophy of scientific experimentation has termed ‘enlarged consistency’ or ‘performative consistency’.27 Performative consistency consists of an agreement
among (a) the theories, (b) the construction of devices and the under­standing of their functioning, (c) the theoretical guidance of measure­ments, and (d) the results (Pickering, 1995). More simply, performative consistency may be limited to an agreement between the perceptive interpretation of an image and the result of actions guided by perception. Let’s consider an example of this kind, discussed by Hacking (1983): the interpretation of images coming from a fluores­cent microscope (or X rays). Does one need to ascertain ‘correspon­dence’ of these interpreted images with ‘the real object itself’ in order to consider them as valid? Not at all. On the one hand the comparison of the image with ‘the object itself’ is impossible (at the very most can we compare several images coming from different types of micro­scopes). And on the other hand, the researcher can do completely without such a comparison in practice.

Instead of comparing, he con­tents himself with acting under the supposition that the image is cor­rect, and with insuring that the result of the action, controlled by a new image of the same microscope, is in conformity with what the initial image permitted him to foresee. In sum the criterion of validity of the image limits itself to an enlarged consistency between the image, the interventions that it makes possible to guide, and another image of the same type that highlights the consequences of these interventions.
Validation relies on a form of consistency and not on ‘correspon­dence’ (Shanon, 1984). True, when performative coherence has been reached and stabilized in some given scientific field, it is tempting to believe that this reveals a correspondence between a theory and its external object. Such a shortcut may help, as a provisional incentive to use the said theory as a guide for action. But it should not be endowed with any ontological significance.( Michel Bitbol)

when we speak of the world, we have revealed the way the world "shows itself"?
— Constance

We havent revealed the way it shows itself. But what is revealed gives you information. — EugeneW

Does science passively give knowledge and information about a world outside of the knower , or is it an activity that makes changes in the world and then gauges it’s predictions in terms of the responses of the world to its interventions? Isnt there a fundamental circularity in science? For instance, a theory is usually tested by
means of instruments described and interpreted by means of this very theory. Another level of circularity is that an ‘anomaly' (threatening to falsify the theory) can only be expressed in terms of this theory.
In other words truth as consistency rather than truth as correspondence?