The only thing I "fail" to internalize is a particular popular notion of gender/sex. I don't give it the kind of prominence and importance as many people do. — baker

Please indulge me and tell me what you know of embodied, enactive approaches within cognitive psychology and how they differ from earlier models.

As I said , I don’t think this is simply about there are gender-connected constellations of behavior. The larger issue concerns what it is we are born with when our parents fist. price how our personalities differ from each other, how one has a temper and the other is shy. If you were to simply deny gender-related claims but support the idea that personality traits give us global styles of perception that are robust, then I would say your thinking and mine weren’t far apart.But my guess is you want to deny any connection between personality and cognitive style, because when it comes down to it, gender is a personality style.

It's convenient to conceive of a person's identity as somehow a given, a neurological, physiological given. Because this way, we feel justified to like or dislike the person; we feel that our persistent liking or disliking of someone is justified.
Conceiving of a person's identity as somehow a given feeds our general craving for externalization and our reticence to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and desires. — baker

I think your failure to understand psychological gender in terms of a perceptual-affective style that we are born with comes from a larger inability to understand cognition in embodied terms , as attuned by an affective , valuative background , a pre-given global possibility space which contributes the particular relevance that experience has for us. You seem to think of behavior in atomistic, reductionist behavioral terms. This reminds me of Skinner’s attempts to explain language learning via stimulus response theory. What you’re missing is a ‘transformational grammar’ of personality. Your way of understanding behavior reduces it to disconnected conditionings and prevents you from achieving a truly intimate empathy with others. People arent stimulus response machines or Cartesian rationalizers. They are embodied sense forming pattern seekers, and gender is one factor in how we stylistically organize those patterns.

If you go in this direction, then the hinge says something about the attitude of the subject rather than saying something about the world (something objective). Therefore it could not be a basic presupposition or proposition forming a foundation for knowledge about the world, objective knowledge. It would be a type of psychological principle only. — Metaphysician Undercover

Unless you hold with Heidegger and Wittgenstein that any such separation between subjective attitude and objectivity is incoherent. It is the hinge that makes the world objectively intelligible in the first place.

The 'hinge proposition', as an objective fact about the world, would be "human beings have blood". The "hinge commitment" would be 'I have faith that my belief that human beings have blood is true'. The latter is not what Wittgenstein is saying, because attitudes, even strong ones like faith can be doubted, whereas Wittgenstein is talking about something we cannot doubt. Therefore it is the former, something we believe to be an objective fact about the world, not a subjective attitude toward a proposition, like a commitment. — Metaphysician Undercover

“One’s hinge certainty, in normal circumstances, that one has hands would not be the least bit affected by the recognition that one has no rational basis for the truth of this proposition. This reflects the fact that, for Wittgenstein, such commitments are not rooted in ratiocination at all. Indeed, this is manifest in how we acquire our hinges. We are not explicitly taught them, but rather ‘swallow them down’ (OC, §143) with everything that we are explicitly taught, as part of the worldview that is thereby acquired. No-one teaches you that you have hands, for example; you are rather taught to do things with your hands, which presupposes their existence.”

despite Banno's cherry picking to make Wittgenstein appear to be intelligible, Banno doesn't even seem to understand what it means to have a changing proposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

How could a proposition which changes over time (therefore necessarily ambiguous) have a truth value? — Metaphysician Undercover

“On the one hand, hinge commitments are completely unresponsive to rational considerations, in the sense that they are commitments that we would retain, and be no less certain of, even if we became aware of the fact that we have no rational basis for their truth. In
particular, our continued certainty in them would be manifest in our actions, so that even if we might claim to doubt them, this ‘doubt’ would be in an important sense fake. On the other hand, however, hinge commitments clearly can change over time, and change in ways that seem to be at least superficially rational. Indeed, the very same proposition can be at one time a hinge commitment and another time an ordinary belief, where this change seems to involve a rational response to changed circumstances.”

My conception of ethics is predicated on the human consciousness being the sole source in the known universe of all concept generation currently extant, as the result of the processes of the evolved human brain, which produces said consciousness. — Garrett Travers

Sounds impressive, but you left out the part about how human consciousness is capable of having direct contact with true reality through scientific investigation. That is a faith masquerading as a truth.

If there were no reality, you'd not have been able to send such a message to me, which simply verifies that the only reality to speak of is the one we occupy. — Garrett Travers

Yes, and each of us occupies our own perspective
on that reality. To claim that there is one true reality that we can attain through empirical reason, above and beyond our perspectival access to the world, is confusing an assumption with an absolute truth. It relies on faith , and in its lack of insight into itself as a faith, it is more naive than any theology.

That's because the rationalist account of things doesn't make room for such drivel. Thus, they've had to give an inordinate amount of ground, because they cannot take us in intellectual combat on the subject. — Garrett Travers

The rationalist account of things is absolutely dependent in its core on such drivel. Your ‘reality-based’ ethics sees the Good in , what did you call it, “ a self-evident, self-emergent, productive, law abiding, patternized, immutable plain of existence.” That is precisely what nature-centered theologies argue. Your deity is the ideality of the rational, what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal. You substituted a perfect Reason for Christ, but the salvation is just as devout.

Objective reality is a recognition of a self-evident, self-emergent, productive, law abiding, patternized, immutable plain of existence. Not an assumption. It can and does exist without the assumption of God. The only way for one to rationally come to the conclusion of a super ordinate plane of existence, is by assuming a super ordinate force beyond nature — Garrett Travers

There are supernatural gods and then there are pantheistic gods. The Enlightenment moved toward the rejection of supernatural deities, but left intact the notion of the Good in nature. Other than the fact that you don’t use the word ‘God’ , your model of rationality and ethics is indistinguishable from a host of such post-supernatural accounts of God that have emerged since Descartes and up till Schopenhauer, Marx and Nietzsche. In fact, your philosophy is much closer to traditional theology than the hyper-liberal, heretical theologies of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Caputo.

The driving force behind contemporary theology isnt the super ordinate, but the truth of the ethical Good. Your thinking is very much within that tradition.

Wittgenstein's notion of "hinge proposition" is really useless. All propositions are "hinges"; "hinge" describes the use of a proposition. Some propositions just have a bigger weight hanging on them than others do. As time passes, and they hang around for a while, more and more stuff gets hung on them. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hinge describes implicit presupposition. If one can call this is a use, it is a different use than rational belief.Duncan Pritchard suggests that hinge commitment is a more appropriate way to understand what Wittgenstein is getting at than hinge proposition.

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/64250343/OnHingeEpistemology.pdf?1598171534=&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B+filename%3DON_HINGE_EPISTEMOLOGY.pdf&Expires=1644692999&Signature=GuP306rI9Aba0nTuE1~Z-UY92YpEAQbZUnpsDNSuKd-tppGY7G9oShqkfIOz2L3m2dyuBWO3A6T71tWpVY4DD0w7smC-03k2xD4Y2nL2l8ln3xPMHlBtzABGSLFOiGNXOSwOei60hA4uHz19nGuVDUyaQRW9hoBpVOeKLPiiwftEEcGweBVd~2DrYV5Cg3nAuM6xpXrExXlBf6t9g4Gjss231M-712-cMznhGKl5udfYAMSAZYdufzDl~KepH2UjHWsLD18etT0M9iVSouvciPigVPWRPxyhRCWXWoSeaQeBcpS256iguBiy-rSJuxhEqPl-zTP2C5jQbOh47QeEHA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA


I think a comparison with Heidegger’s notion of a frame of interpretation may be instructive here. Heidegger defines propositional logic and statement of belief in terms the ‘as’ structure of seeing something as something.

“...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc. These 'as what', in light of which one interprets the surrounding world as well as the concern that is immersed in it, are not usually newly discovered by Dasein. As being-together-with-others, Dasein grows up in and into this fixed interpretedness. The interpretative undertaking has a firm fore-conception. At the same time, it fixes the point of view from which those things that fall within the fore-conception are, as it were, targeted. The possible lines of 'sight' remain within circumscribed limits. Interpretation has its fore-sight. The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.”
(Heidegger, Concept of Time)

That's a rational progression of events, predicated on inductive data gathering. Again, hinge propositions are rationally developed, and rationally changed. — Garrett Travers

Your model of rationality seems to revolve around the notion that you can peel data and evidence apart from
the theoretical edifice that makes sense of them. But Kuhn’s argument is that what constitutes evidence and data is dependent on the larger framework of interpretation. For someone without a background in modern or Newtonian physics, what constitutes
data for the later will be utterly invisible to them. Data for a stimulus-response psychologist is different than data for a cognitive theorist.

There is no empirical object apart from
some account or other , no fact of the matter independent of a value system.

“…interpretationism provides a penetrating critique of objectivism that is worth pursuing in some detail. To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.

The Wittgensteinian approach being adopted by researchers in psychology is irrelevant, especially when you provide nothing to review from the field. — Garrett Travers

You should probably familiarize yourself with those arguments, since they are becoming more and more
prevalent.

Hinge propositions are an argument for rationality, although unintentionally so. I recommend Daniel Dennett on the subject of consciousness, relevant to this discussion as a start. Real paradigm shifter, that one. — Garrett Travers

Dennett is a good example of someone who has been strongly influenced by Wittgenstein. I dont think his view of rationality is what you think it is. Certainly it isnt compatible with your direct realism.

I request that you not insult me again for having standards that are superior to Wittgenstein's make-believe ones. — Garrett Travers

I’m not trying to insult you , just get you to realize that dismissing out of hand the ideas of a thinker like Wittgenstein as ‘mystical’ and ‘out of touch with reality’ shows not just a complete lack of familiarity with his work but a poor grasp of where cognitive psychology and cognitivr neuroscience is heading.

I see also that the paper I sent, which thoroughly disassembles this odd idea of hinge propositions being "unapproachable," has not been addressed. Care to have a look? — Garrett Travers

I took a look at Siegel’s argument. I love how he tries to critique Popper by holding onto the ideas that a critical rationalism can be self-reflexive. Anyone familiar
with the era from Descartes through Leibnitz won’t have any trouble with Siegel’s assertions. But his approach to the rational simply doesnt grasp how it is that the rational is embedded with a frame of interpretation that gets turned on its head when paradigms shift. You can’t turn that gestalt shift into a rational formula. There is no meta-position from which to do so.

Think of an empirical theory as being like one of those optical illusions where you can either see the young woman or the old woman but not both at the same time. A gestalt shift is required to make one or the other appear. Now think of the individual facts comprising the body of an empirical theory as akin to the points within the picture. Notice that as one shifts from the old woman to the young woman, the role that all of the features of the picture play change their meaning. What was a line in one image becomes something else in the other image.

In the same way, when a paradigm undergoes a gestalt shift , all of the subordinate facts it contains change their meaning in the new paradigm. The choice of which paradigm to pick becomes one of aesthetic and pragmatic preference rather than ‘rationality’ since each paradigm is describing different facts. That doesn’t mean a kind of progress isn’t possible , just that this progress is a linear accumulation of knowledge.

Also, remember that Wittgenstein was a mystic and was not really in touch with reality. Logic and language is exactly the place anti-materialists like to hide to try to justify their views in non-reality — Garrett Travers

You’ll have to do better than that. Plenty of researchers within psychology and related sciences have adopted a Wittgensteinian approach, including the idea of hinge propositions, or, as I have argued, the related concept of paradigms. I appreciate that you’re wedded to a 300 year old framework of rationality, but others have moved beyond it. Of course, you could continue your philosophy career at the Claremont Institute. They’ll
love your ideas there.

From the cognoscenti to the skid row bum, and all points in-between, people are the same.
So why not talk to everybody, if you have something to say? Doing that successfully, however, entails being interesting, as in being entertaining — ucarr

It also entails that everybody has the same capacity to grasp the essential content of the ideas. They don’t. We live in different worlds. Put differently, we interpret ideas
in accordance with a larger worldview that each of us carry around with us. A given culture consists of many worldviews that often don’t understand each other, as our politically polarized times demonstrates. If a philosopher or writer or scientist offers an idea that we cannot assimilate within our worldview we will reject or misinterpret that idea, or it may simply be invisible to us.
It does t matter how many ways you try and package the content of a given philosophy. You could translate it into poetry, have it delivered by a stand-up
comedian or by corporate-style bullet point presentation. The central problem won’t be the delivery or language or style, but the readiness of the recipient to assimilate it into their worldview.

The ‘everybody’ you talk about is a fiction. It can take hundreds of years for segments of a given culture to grasp the ideas of a certain era of philosophy. Conservative America is a long way from understanding post-Hegelian thought, which is already 200 years old, and you can’t blame it on the messenger.

I've witnessed female cats fight ferociously over territory. — baker

The question isn’t whether there are individual
differences in personality. It is whether, a robust gender-correlated difference can be extracted , above and beyond these individual differences that you cite. Study after study shows such robust gender-related differences in many different mammals. We already know of the link between testosterone and aggression.

I've had cats for almost forty years, males and females, intact and sterilized, but I wouldn't ascribe the differences in behavior to their biological sex. — baker

(I know a family that has had German shepherds for years, males and females. All their dogs were the same, regardless of age, size, and sex. All the same aggressiveness and superiority, just like their owners.) — baker

Maybe you’re not very observant.

“From the data included in this review, it appears that males tend to be more aggressive and bolder than females, whereas a lower level of intraspecific sociability in males was reported. Females seem more inclined to interspecific social interactions with humans in tasks that require cooperative skills, whereas males appear more likely to interspecific social play. Studies of spatial skills underlined a higher flexibility in resorting to a particular navigation strategy in males in an outdoor environment; however, females appear to be better at spatial learning tasks in restricted areas. Lateralization studies seem to support the view that males are preferentially left-pawed and females are preferentially right-pawed; however, some studies have failed to replicate these results. Reports on visual focusing rank females as superior in focus on specific social and physical stimuli. In olfactory monitoring activity, only male dogs are able to discriminate kin.”

https://www.pedigree.com/getting-a-new-dog/getting-an-adult-dog/male-female-dogs-personality-differences#

https://www.thewildest.com/dog-behavior/what-are-differences-between-male-and-female-dogs

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6162565/

So stand up and let's do this. Assuming you're right handed, put a crumpled up piece of paper in your right hand — Hanover

You’re missing the point. Im not denying that with enough training I could learn to ‘throw like a boy’. The point is that my natural tendency to throw the ball like a girl is related to my natural
tendency to walk in a feminine way, to speak in a way that has feminine characteristics, to have a bodily posture and comportment that tends in the same direction. I could add hundreds of particular behavioral
tendencies to this. What they all have in common is that they are all generated by a primary perceptual-affective neural style that manifests along a masculine-feminine spectrum. A gender-related style of perceptual processing is a fundamental component of , but not the entire basis of, the execution of such things as throwing a ball.

This is why female dogs have recognizably different behavioral styles than male dogs.

Also, in my native language, an idiomatic phrase like "you throw like a girl" doesn't exist. — baker

Is baseball a popular sport in your country?

I don't see that as "feminine", but as physically clumsy, perhaps even a neurological problem or otherwise poor eye-body coordination. A problem that is not limited to either sex — baker

Not a neurological problem, and not clumsiness. Rather, a perceptual-affective style that differs along a masculine-feminine spectrum. That is, the issue isn’t with the arm, the stance, the coordination. It is with a primordial level of perceptual processing. That is why such a wide range of behaviors ( speech pronunciation, posture, walk, throwing, general bodily comportment, response to stimuli) all are involved and tied together as gender-associated via primordial perceptual-affective style which one is born with.

To understand this is to understand why we recognize a different behavioral style in male vs female dogs and cats.

Girls throw like girls because no one ever taught them to step with the opposite leg as the throwing arm. — Hanover

I’m a gay male. Plenty of men tried to teach me to throw like a guy. I spent hours trying to teach myself. I was desperate to get rid of such ‘feminine’ traits but it worked out about as well as that John Wayne scene from La Cage Aux Folles.

Psychological gender is a cluster of traits, but which traits in particular those are for which gender varies from culture to culture, from setting to setting. The same trait can sometimes be considered male, other times, female, or childish.
1m — baker

Let’s take as an example traits within modern Western societies, such as a boy growing up with a constellation of behaviors he has no control over and which causes other boys to label him a sissy. Let’s say he would list these behaviors as including speaking with a lisp, walking and throwing a ball like a girl, playing with dolls instead of toy soldiers and guns. Let’s say he also is attracted exclusively to other males and connects this attraction. with the other behaviors which he regards as feminine. Let’s say further that he does a bit of neurophysiological research and suspects that the constellation of ‘feminine’ behaviors that he was apparently born with are not random or independent of each other but instead are all the result of a kind of brain ‘wiring’ that determines psychological gender (masculine vs feminine behavior and sexual attraction).
This shouldn’t be too controversial since we commonly accept that male and female dogs and cats show recognizable gender-connected behavioral differences.

He could then hypothesize that such biological determinants can interact with culture to produce changing definitions of the masculine and the feminine.

So where does trans fit in here? I think the idea that one must change one’s body to fit one’s psychological gender is only necessary in a culture which
believes that behavior should match genitalia according to rigid norms. In a society which has no such belief , one is free to recognize that body sex and psychological gender are inextricably intertwined such that it becomes incoherent to claim that one was born in the wrong body.

What do you suppose “choose reality”’ refers to? Just the issues that are highlighted of aggression toward women by men deliberately masquerading as females? Or do you suppose this includes a denial of the idea that psychological gender doesn’t necessarily match biological sex?

Therefore there is no objective reality, or truth, to any statement of "X is a hinge proposition". Such a judgement is always, necessarily, a subjective judgement because what makes something a hinge proposition or not, is the attitude of the subject who makes that judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is there an objective reality or truth to what falls within the purview of a hinge proposition? Is there an objective reality or truth to the facts that are defined with a Kuhnian paradigm, a feature of the thing being looked at?

Are you claiming that we can understand a hinge proposition better by looking at Kuhn's paradigms? It seems to me that compounds the problem of interpreting one thinker by introducing the problem of interpreting another. — Fooloso4

Well, one would have to be familiar enough with the work of both thinkers in order to confidently make, or follow,
such comparisons. But I do think that the concept of scientific change as aesthetic rather than one of falsifiability that Kuhn offers is useful for understanding Wittgenstein’s idea of hinge propositions.

If we consider the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe it seems to me that the geocentric system was false. — Fooloso4

Not according to Kuhn, whose model of paradigm shifts was purportedly strongly influenced by Wittgenstein.

Within "our system" at that time, it was not doubted that no one has ever been on the moon. Today we doubt that proposition. We regard it as false. — Fooloso4

But that is a claim within a system. It is the claim
that can be true or false, not the system. Within a changed system, the claim becomes false. It is like Kuhnian paradigm shifts. Paradigms are not themselves true or false, only the particular facts they make intelligible.

337: “One cannot make experiments if there are not some things that one does not doubt. But that does not mean that one takes certain presuppositions on trust. When I write a letter and post it, I take it for granted that it will arrive - I expect this.”

343. “But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason
we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.”

Once one decides to question an assumption it changes its sense from being a hinge proposition to something directly investigated, and thus no longer an assumption.

I think it is also a mistake to think that hinges can be neither true nor false. We do not generally question whether they are true or false. If we did they would not function as hinges, but it is possible to be wrong. We do not ordinarily question the ground beneath our feet, we simply stand and walk, but what is ordinary is not what is beyond being true or false. — Fooloso4

Isn’t the hinge proposition the condition of possibility for determinations of truth and falsity? That is, something is true or false relative to a more encompassing
framework that is take for granted. In order for a hinge proposition to be found true or false it would no longer function as a hinge proposition. It would have a different sense.

You could try Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology(ooo).
https://youtu.be/cR1A4ILPmjE

The domain of existence is apprehendable by the human, using only induction to guide him, let alone logic, experimentation, independent observation, with the entire history of science and innovation predicated upon it to demostrate it. — Garrett Travers

Rationality of course needs a substrate on which to operate, and that’s where causality comes into play. Rationality allows us to figure out how things fit together in causative patterns. Prior to Kant , a good example of a nice , rational causative scheme would have been a clock or a car engine. In these devices , individuals parts works together in a specific way to create a functioning machine. The parts retain their identity outside of their role in the workings of the device. After Kant the focus shifted to the idea of machine as a gestalt whole, wherein each part only has its identity in relation to its contribution to the larger whole. So Kant’s subjectivism contributes a relationality to causation that sees connections where previous objective causal models saw only independent parts arbitrarily combined in causal sequences.
One could say we have here two kinds of rationality. The pre-Kantian rationality accepts arbitrary concatenations of parts as the exemplar of reason. The post-Kantian approach looks for gestalt pattern everywhere. In terms of ethics , the pre-Kantian ethicist sees narrow islands of rational ethical conduct surrounded by a sea of irrationality , psychopathology, emotionality, malevolence and evil. The individual will is declared sovereign because it is the only thing that can be counted on to be understandable and predicable, a machine we know well because it belongs to us. We can’t be in a position to endorse other beings the way we endorse ourselves because we know so little about others, they are unpredictable and potentially irrational. And even when we see them as rational, they will be operating according to a rationality which, like a car engine, has its own arbitrary causative sequence of working parts. So we have no choice to use our own will as sovereign basis of ethics.

Arendt contrasts this with a notion of freedom as satisfying one's goals, achieving what one is capable of, — Banno

Not just satisfying goals but inventing new goals, and not just achieving what one is capable of but going beyond what one thought one was capable of.



“… action occurs in two different stages; its first stage is a beginning by which something new comes into the world.The Greek word apxav which covers beginning, leading, ruling, that is, the outstanding qualities of the free man, bears witness to an experience in which being free and the capacity to begin something new coincided.”

A good way of conceptualizing what Ethics, Morality, and Virtue are, is to compare it with like-framework. Ethics is to behavior what Science is to inductive observation. Morality is to behavior what the Scientific Method (s) is to inductive observation. Virtue is to behavior what proper analysis of data is to inductive observation. — Garrett Travers

If we are to depend on our rational faculty to guide our ethical decisions and understanding, what assures us that the truths we arrive at can be nailed down as factual? This is of course the problem of skepticism that occupied philosophers like Hume and Kant. Kant’s solution led him to his categorical imperative and moral ‘duty’. I assume you reject his approach , as did Rand. I could be wrong but I suspect that the whole course of 20th and 21at century ethical theory devolves upon Kantian ethics , even as many approaches submit him to critique. Most contemporary philosophers share Kant’s subjectivism, or what Grants Hartman calls ‘correlationism’ , the belief that real objects in the world can only be understood in their empirical scientific truth relative to our subjective schemes and categories of understanding. This means. that science can never have direct access to truths about the world, but only approximate and falsify. In other words, for post-Kantian thought a certain degree of relativism is built into rationality.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t your notion of rational thought, like Rand’s, give us such direct access to empirical truth that Kant rejected? Descartes believed we had such direct access to truth, mediated by the direct connection between the pineal gland of the brain and Divine guidance that equips our brains with the faculty to recognize truth in the causal relations we discover in the world. But you are an Atheist so it sounds like you believe that we have that faculty but it is not given to us by God.

I've been scouring the SEP for evidence that shoes have free will — ZzzoneiroCosm

At least they have soul.

This provides for another genetic up-smartening of society, although the pace is substantially slowed. — god must be atheist

Over the past 5,000 years, cultural evolution has produced astonishing changes in human understanding, changes which occur with an ever accelerating tempo. One could imagine this knowledge growth as manifesting itself physiologically in terms of an increasing complexity of neural connectivity. Let’s call this the brain’s software updating itself. Now let’s assume that all this was accomplished on the basis of brain ‘ hardware’ that has remained essentially unchanged over all that period of cultural progress. We don’t have to assume this, but there is no reason not to. The point is, whatever changes in hardware (I.Q), either for better or worse, may have occurred over the past 5,000 in humanity as a whole, or between individuals, would have to be seen as utterly insignificant in their effects as compared to the powers of cultural transmission , our ‘software updates’.

I should also mention that scientists may have no idea what they’re really measuring. For instance, what does speed of calculation mean? Computers are much faster than we are at calculation , but does this make them smarter? Autistic savants can perform amazing calculative and mnemonic feats, but is this because they are smarter or because they are not distracted by higher order abstract processes? Perhaps ancient humans could perform certain tasks faster than modern humans for the same reason.

What makes your smartphone smart? Is it how fast it’s processor is, or how much content and how many apps it has? Is a 70 year old Kant less intelligent than a 20 year old because his memory and mental speed are less impressive?

I don't know if the notions of will and freedom here are outdated, I'd say they're just heavily influenced by determinism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you saying that Arendt’s own notion of freedom as action is deterministic, or that her representation of Enlightenment concepts of intellect and will that she is critiquing are deterministic?

I believe that to understand the issues being discussed in this thread, it is necessary to differentiate such habituated activities, often learnt as societal norms (including education and ways of thinking) , from activities which are truly motivated by internal forces. When we assume that the habit is what moves the will, we deny our freedom to break a habit — Metaphysician Undercover

Much of our behavior is ‘habituated’ in that our desires are expectations projected forward from previous experience. But this is as true of motivation by ‘internal forces’ as it is of allegedly rote habit. In both cases, an into oak action is involved which implies both past history( habit) and a novel, creative element. Whether i eat out of huger for for some other reason, as long as the act is conscious, it matters to me in some way and has some sense to it.

I think for Arendt the action exposes my ‘will’ to what is other and outside of my already formulated conceptions (my sovereignty).

will was the sum total of all indivudal human action and thought, the emergent expression of the content of the information the brain processes, integrates, values, and enacts, and all activities of the brain that contribute to that process. — Garrett Travers

This definition is informed by the assertions you made about the brain and the scientific understanding of the process as is presently understood, article above. It also dispenses with the mind-body dualism that has plagued this topic for centuries, — Garrett Travers

Cognitive science has gone through several evolutions. The first generation of cognitive theory I think is most compatible with your ideas about the relation between rationality, emotion and will. It thinks of mind as an input -output device that receives data, processes and stores it , and then outputs it as action. In this approach, affect is separate from and peripheral to the rational functions of cognition. More recently, embodied approaches view affect as not only inseparable from rationality , but what determines its sense and relevance. They abandon the idea of cognition as internal processing and representing of an outer world in favor of an integrated mind-body-world system. Volition is not fundamentally a calculative or logical process taking place within the brain but a matching process of interaction between person and environment.

modern cognitive neuroscience is out pacing this definition itself, by describing to us what the brain does. And what it does is complex maintenance of activity in the form of thought, emotion, and action (will) at all times, with the prefrontal cortex acting as the control center, and is connected to the entire neural, and emotional processing networks of the body. Meaning, the will (sum total of all individual human action) is never in a state of inactivity, outside of trauma induced inactivity. — Garrett Travers

The pre-frontal cortex has been described as a ‘control center’, the executor of actions, but this a misnomer. It receives inputs from the rest of the brain , the body and the environment and forms expectations and anticipations in order to interpret this input as something recognizable, but is at the same time affected and altered by these inputs. So its decisions are not purely pre-figured by its prior state, as if it already knew what it wanted to will. Rather , we FIND ourselves willing or deciding. The distinction here is that there is no purely logical connection between the desire or thought that occurs to us and the ‘us’ that exists just prior to what pops into our head. Just as you say, the brain is never in a state of inactivity. Its activity is continually transforming the basis of its actions and thinking. The rational basis on which its decisions are being made is shifting its ground in spite of itself. This is why to will is always in some respect to be surprised by what one wills. This I think comes close to what Arendt means when she says action precedes rational deliberation.

She also, again, makes many claims, among which is the impossibility of freedom to be defined, and the inherent contradictions in the concept of individual freedom, which are also assertions that simply do not make sense. For the reason I just explained, or have already explained with definitions and explanations that are consistent with the modern philosophical approach to freedom. — Garrett Travers

She defines freedom as action ,or praxis, which is prior both to reason- intellect and to the will. This notion is influenced by Hegelian dialectics. When she argues that freedom should not be equated with sovereignty of will she means that will should not be thought of in terms of a mastery. of ourselves. Action is the opposite of this. It represents a becoming and self-transformation , a new beginning. We are only free when we are surprised by what we will , rather than being masters over our thoughts.

“Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance
of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will although
it needs both for the execution of any particular goal but springs from some­thing altogether different which (following Montesquieu's famous analysis of forms of government) I shall call a principle.”

“…the manifestation of principles comes about only through action, they are manifest in the world as long
as the action lasts, but no longer. Such principles are honor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu
called virtue, or distinction or excellence the Greek det dpLcrrerW ("always strive to do your best and to be the best of all"), but also fear or distrust or hatred. Free­dom or its opposite appears in the world whenever such principles are actualized; the appearance
of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with the performing act. Men are free as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom as long
as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.”

Teacher and pupil. Master and servant. Free will gone. How could he join a party condemning jews, while Hannah was jewish? And he was married! His Zeit and Dasein in the world seem pretty banal to me. The banality of evil. — Cornwell1

That analysis sounds pretty banal to me. What Heidegger would call ‘Das Man’, a nice pre-packaged normative moralism without any genuine accounting for particulars.

So, can you address the fallacy of ambiguity that accurately characterizes Arendt's argument? Here's a source on it that I already posted, just in case you need it: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Ambiguity-Fallacy — Garrett Travers

Can you address the usefulness and necessity of the genealogical method in philosophy?

“In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis…”(Wikipedia)

You really mean to say that pursuing one’s desires is an example of a lack of freedom? Where are you people generating these absurdities. — Garrett Travers

Blame it on Nietzsche:

“As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.”

“In every act of will there is a commandeering thought, – and we really should not believe this thought can be divorced from the “willing,” as if some will would then be left over! Third, the will is not just a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affect of the command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey: “I am free, ‘it' must obey”…

But now we notice the strangest thing about the will – about this multifarious thing that people have only one word for. On the one hand, we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one who obeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelings of compulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generally start right after the act of willing. On the other hand, however, we are in the habit of ignoring and deceiving ourselves about this duality by means of the synthetic concept of the “I.”

“All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out of many “souls”: from which a philosopher should claim the right to understand willing itself within the framework of morality: morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon of “life” arises.”

Rights do not require that you hear of them, nor understand anything of their history, but only that your sovereignty as an individual is recognized — Garrett Travers

The way I look at it, the value of the sovereignty and protection of freedom of the individual must grasped from a ‘selfish’ perspective. That is , we give such such protections to others because that’s the only way to assure them for ourselves. But I think this applies as well to the political atmosphere of our urban communities, in which support for government taxation and participation in aspects of life from environmental protectionand climate change mitigation to gun control to protection of alternate genders is done out of such ‘selfish’ motives. Why the willingness of over-educated urban and academic ( and increasingly , high tech corporate) America to sacrifice individual sovereignty when traditional small town America finds such public interference to be an intolerable breach of rights?
I think this gets back to what freedom and sovereignty are for. Yes , they are to protect and encourage individual pursuit of pleasure, hedonism, satisfaction.
I prefer to talk about these in terms of individual innovation and creativity. My theory is that 21at century academic and educated urban cultures are organizing themselves i. increasing complex ways. They are globally networked and interactive such as to promote continual innovation. I think the willingness for sacrifice of individual sovereignty is for the sake of a richer potential for individual expression of creativity. This would seem to be self-contradictory, but I think this rests on the idea that even as we have individuals desires and points of view, we have the capacity to influence each other in positive ways , ways which can be studied and organized into policy for social engineering. The left encourages publically structures social experimentation and manipulation. because they see person as a nodes in a giant feedback loop that has the potential to enrich all participants, not just as participants in a larger whole. but as individuals who can paradoxically express their individuality more and more fully through such means. Notice how social expression is hawked by advertisers to urban hipsters who support BLM , language policing and Critical Race theory.

I think the idea of social engineering is so profoundly threatening to traditional Americans because they simply don’t belief that human beings are able to understand each other well enough for such engineering to be anything but a disaster, or simply because they are for indicating freedom. Public projects whose inequivocal value is obvious to them they do support ( like the trans-continental railroad or the interstate highway system)

This objection comes up over and over again in conservative think tank writings I’ve followed over the years. They simply believe that it is hubris to think humans can mess around with God-given or natural human nature and make any sense of it, much less
turn it into social engineering policies. so best to leave it to its own devices , the invisible hand.

The accusation of selfishness leveled against the right from liberals I think misreads this skepticism and caution as a lack of caring.

But in order for there to be different cultures at all, there must be gaps between them, otherwise, they would all be one. — baker

Do you consider yourself and your circle of friends to be “all one” or do you recognize all kinds of wonderful
differences among you? Are your friends all of one gender, ethnicity, religion and country of origin? And yet you have transcended enough gaps in understanding to embrace them as friends.