Why do you want to do the rational or right thing? Don't you have reasons?
— Harry Hindu
Yes, of course. That's why, when I do something for those reasons, there is no compulsion, no restriction of freedom - except in the sense of opportunities voluntarily foregone — Ludwig V

Are you familiar with the work of nerobiologist Robert Sapolsky? He presents a kind of extreme version of determinism. For him, our reasons are conditioned so tightly by past experience and biological shapings ( hormonal, genetic, physiological) that there is barely any room for to r addition of novelty. I agree with his claim that seeing ourselves determined in this reductive way by our past leads to more ethical, compassionate behavior toward those who commit acts of violence and other anti-social behaviors than religiously based notions of feee will, which tend to embrace harsh, retributive forms of justice. My problem with Sapolski’s determinism is that it isn’t deterministic enough.

The power of a determinism is in the power of science to predict and explain events that would otherwise be experienced as ordered, chaotic and arbitrary. Sapolski’s determination substitutes the arbitrariness of reductive mechanism for the even more arbitrary notion of divine will, which makes its way into traditional ideas of individual free will. But he relies on models of simple causation, and as a result human metering is treated like a machine with parts that have pre-assigned functions. What is lacking is the concept of reciprocal, relational determinism, which puts the organism in dynamic touch with its environment on the basis of its moment to moment functioning. In this way of thinking, our present actions are still the result of a determined history, but they don’t simply regurgitate pre-assigned properties.

Because Dennett’s quote references organic molecules, and Varela’s references ‘simple agents’. If ‘simple agents’ are e.g. cellular, then they’re already at a different ontological level to organic molecules. Dennett’s model is strictly reductionist with solely bottom-up causality. As soon as you take emergence into account, and the top-down causality associated with strong emergence (in Vervaeke’s terms), then it’s already radically different to the ‘flat ontology’ of reductionism (the thrust of the first 20 minutes of the Vervaeke keynote I listed to today.) — Wayfarer

I think you’re on the right track in thinking Dennett’s approach too reductive. But it’s important to appreciate that his model of cognition stands as a critique of symbol-manipulating logical models of which use the serial computer as a metaphor. In its time, parallel distributed connectionism, which Dennett embraced, was considered an important step beyond Cartesian descriptions of mental processes. Connectionism doesn’t claim to reduce directly to the molecule-physical level.

Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing, the sort of thing we should try for more of.

Such progress invites the prospect of a parallel development in psychology. First we will answer the question "What do all believers-that-p have in common?" the first way, the "conceptual" way, and then see if we can go on to "reduce" the theory that emerges in our first answer to something else—neurophysiology most likely. Many theorists seem to take it for granted that some such reduction is both possible and desirable, and perhaps even inevitable, even while recent critics of reductionism, such as Putnam and Fodor, have warned us of the excesses of "classical" reductionist creeds. No one today hopes to conduct the psychology of the future in the vocabulary of the neurophysiologist, let alone that of the physicist, and principled ways of relaxing the classical "rules" of reduction have been pro-posed. The issue, then, is what kind of theoretical bonds can we expect—or ought we to hope—to find uniting psychological claims about beliefs, desires, and so forth with the claims of neurophysiologists, biologists, and other physical scientists?

We are going to have to talk about the ephemeral, swift, curious, metaphorical features of consciousness.

Many people say: "Some day, but not yet. This enterprise is all just premature." And others say: "Leave it to the philosophers (and look what a mess they make of it)." I want to suggest that it is not premature, that in fact there is no alternative but to start looking as hard as we can at consciousness first. If we don't look at consciousness and get clear about what the destination is, and instead try to work our way up by just thinking about how the brain is put together, we won't know where we are trying to get to from where we are and we will be hopelessly lost. This is commonly referred to as the defense of the top-down strategy, and in looking at Jaynes's book again this morning I find that in his introduction he has one of the clearest and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach that I have ever come across:

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never—not ever—from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the stop, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. (Jaynes, 1976, p. 18)

Would you say Thompson's view is compatible with a post-modern understanding of 'reality'. Do you think Thompson's views are in any way limited or 'skewed' by his Lindisfarne Association upbringing — Tom Storm

Thompson has worked closely with another enactivist, Shaun Gallagher, who has published pieces such as Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics, so I think he would be comfortable with the label. When Thompson discusses his childhood, he has as many critical as positive things to say about the varieties of spirituality he was exposed to. I think he came away with the idea that there was something of value which was worth pursing further , but he did so with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism. I think even to this day he doesn’t have anything like a fully thought-out stance on spirituality.

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' (and which is perfectly consistent with his role as 'evangelical atheist'.)
…through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, Dennett concludes:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
— From Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, quoted by Steve Talbott on 'The Illusion of Randomness' — Wayfarer

How does the above quote differ from this by Varela?

"...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"

And how does Varela goal of naturalizing Husserlian phenomenology differ from a materialism?

It is our general contention indeed... that phenomenological descriptions of any kind can only be naturalized, in the sense of being integrated into the general framework of natural sciences, if they can be mathematized.”

Let me share how I think it differs from Dennett. Varela and Thompson have no interest in abandoning naturalism and the Darwinian framework that explains the genesis of organisms and human cognition. But they realized that the implications of insights coming from Eastern meditative traditions, phenomenology and cognitive science required a re-definition of the meaning of the natural, the material and even the dynamics of evolution. This is not such a radical move, given that the concept of materialism has undergone many transformations over the centuries. The crucial way in which Varela and other enactivists have rethought materialism is by making the relations between elements more reflexive and reciprocal. Rather than thinking materiality in terms of the relations among pre-assigned causal properties of elements of a system, the properties of the elements depend on the dynamics of the system as a whole as they feed back to affect and change the nature of the elements. The irreducible unit of a dynamical system is the assembly as an agential , ‘subjective’ whole. This makes possible the understanding of the organization of living systems and consciousness as more functionally integral and normatively motivated, and integrates organism and environment more fully, than via the reductive, atomized materialism of Dennett.

This new materialism, as it has been called in some quarters, doesn’t restrict its notion of agency and subjectivity to living things with cognitive systems , but applies equally to the physical world independent of any interaction with sentient creatures. Materiality is fundamentally agential in that it produces elements from within assemblages that are inherently perpsectival , from within which matter ‘matters’ in a particular way.

The kind of spirituality that Varela and Thompson derive from this model rests on what is immanent to dependent co-arising. Is this so terribly far removed from Dennett’s delighting in our developing ability to care about a world whose meaning is produced by, as Varela put it,

“..lots of simple agents having simple properties that are brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"?

And don’t Vervaeke’s machinic technologies of relevance realization inhabit an intermediary position between Varela and Dennett?

“…manipulating Relevance Realization affords self-transcendence and wisdom and insight precisely because
Relevance Realization is the ability to make the connections that are at the core of meaning, those connections that are quintessentially being threatened by the Meaning crisis. That would mean if we get an understanding of the machinery of this (Synoptic Integration Construct of RR), we would have a way of generating new psycho-technologies, re-designing, reappropriating older psycho-technologies and coordinating them systematically in order to regenerate, [be] regenerative of these fraying connections. Relegitimate and afford the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence, connectedness to ourselves and to each other and to the world.

Dennett's materialism would be categorised as a form of nihilism, according to the Brahmajala Sutta, 'the Net of Views', which meticulously documents the 64 (magic number!) varieties of eternalist and nihilist views. It is the first and longest text of the Pali suttas. — Wayfarer

I recently listened to a series of youtube videos by Verveake. He references Dennett in some of them, always positively. Honestly, comparing Vervaeke’s and Dennett’s understanding of cognitive science, I can’t find a lot of daylight between them. One might wonder, if Vervaeke derives his spiritual views from his understanding of the science, and his and Dennett’s empirical perspectives overlap substantially, how did they come to such sharply different conclusions concerning religion and spirituality? My answer is that I don’t think they did. What Dennett always attacked was a traditional form of religious belief, and Vervaeke is also critical of a personified deity. If we look closely at what exactly his faith consists of, it depends heavily on what he calls relevance realization, which is his answer to what he believes is a meaning crisis in today’s culture. I happen to think the meaning crisis pertains more to his personal journey than to a culture-wide phenomenon, and that his proselytizing on this topic has certain cult-like tendencies about it, but that’s a bit off-topic.

To back up a few steps, Vervaeke considers what is unique about humans to be our ability to determine what is relevant, what matters in an incoming flow of information relative to our situational context. What’s important to understanding the basis of his notion of meaning , and spirituality, is that meaning relevance is not determined solely on the basis of our needs and goals, but must also be grounded in the real. He is not a direct realist, but believes that reality is relational, and not disclosable in some final fashion. There will always be more layers to unearth, and yet he believes firmly in fundamental empirical truths, as inaccessible as they may be. We can see the importance for him of truth in his scientific work, which is centered around research attempting to show that we allow video games and advertisements to deceive us concerning what is real. Self-deception plays an important role in his thinking.

His spiritual perspective relies on two aspects of his scientific work, meaning as relevant relationality and as grounded in underlying truths. He is no relativist , because he is convinced that the sense of belongingness we all need so much is worthless unless it is anchored in a firm ground which provides us with a guiding empirical and moral compass. I think Dennett believed the same thing about the dual importance of relational interdependency in cognitive processes and grounding in the real , but being the pragmatic Yankee that he was, he shied away from a language that had the taint of religion.

If you haven’t seen Vervaeke’s interview of Evan Thompson, I recommend it. I think it shows how a difference in interpretation of enactivism and 4EA cognition leads to different approaches to the spiritual. Even though Vervaeke claimed that his own work was strongly influenced by Varela, I dont think either Varela and Thompson buy into Vervaeke’s realism, and Thompson’s subtle distancing from Vervaeke in the interview reflects this. Thompson derives from his empirical work a reverence for the mystical, a sense of wonder an awe towards the world. This wonder doesn’t require a belief in a real grounding for what exists, if the real is understood in Vervaeke’s sense of that which is beyond deception. Thompson’s focus is on what creatively emerges rather than on what is connected to a pre-existing foundation.

Yes, and this is particularly true in the case where one is distancing themselves from philosophy. One could raise the question without leaving the philosophical frame, but it seems clear that that is not what is happening here. This would be the difference between the question, "What is it that we are doing as philosophers?" and the question, "What is it that those philosophers are doing?" — Leontiskos

I agree that Wittgenstein presumes to step outside of philosophy, as he characterizes it, in order to critique it. But what if he had instead claimed that a desire for certainty was made possible by the emergence of the very conception of certainty as a peculiarly modern philosophical invention, a development which formed the basis of the modern sciences? In this case he would be making neither a psychological claim, nor a metaphysical claim (desire for certainty somehow being a universal a priori, as Heidegger claimed that falling prey to the world is an a priori), but rather an assertion concerning a movement within history of philosophy.

certain hinge beliefs ground all of our systems, and these hinge beliefs tend not to change or change very little over time. Again, examples include: "There are other minds," "There are objects," "We have hands," and "The Earth has existed for a long time, etc." These hinges should be in a group of their own because they tend to be the most solid and beyond the reach of any reasonable doubt. They seem to be core hinges. — Sam26

In one sense , it shouldn’t matter that certain hinge beliefs change slowly, because they do change. The river bank changes much more slowly that the flow of the river, but over long enough periods of time it can be seen to change as continuously as the river. The sense of every hinge proposition you mentioned (“There are other minds," "There are objects," "We have hands," and "The Earth has existed for a long time”) has already been put into question by writers like Husserl and Heidegger. To be clear, they are not claiming that these are false assumptions, but that their assumed intelligibility can be shown to be confused from the vantage of a different starting point.

I understand "no self" - perhaps more accurately no-self - as the self "under bare poles." That is, not any sort of negation of self, but instead the self itself. This implies elemental, fundamental, primordial, original, even maybe primitive — tim wood

Let’s take the no-self as Varela and Thompson understand it within the framework of enactive cognitive science:

…the word self is a convenient way of referring to a series of mental and bodily events and formations, that have a degree of causal coherence and integrity through time. And the capitalized Self does exemplify our sense that hidden in these transitory formations is a real, unchanging essence that is the source of our identity and that we must protect. But this latter conviction may be unfounded and can actually be harmful. If there were a solid, really existing self hidden in or behind the aggregates, its unchangeableness would prevent any experience from occurring; its static nature would make the constant arising and subsiding of experience come to a screeching halt.

…cognition and experience do not appear to have a truly existing self, and the habitual belief in such an ego-self, the continual grasping to such a self, is the basis of the origin and continuation of human suffering and habitual patterns. In our culture, science has contributed to the awakening of this sense of the lack of a fixed self but has only described it from afar. Science has shown us that a fixed self is not necessary for mind but has not provided any way of dealing with the basic fact that this no-longer-needed self is precisely the ego-self that everyone clings to and holds most dear. By remaining at the level of description, has yet to awaken to the idea that the experience of mind, not merely without some impersonal, hypothetical, and theoretically constructed self but without ego-self, can be profoundly transformative.(Embodied Mind)

Anyway, I'm logging out for a while, posting here has become too much of a habit, and it profiteth nothing. I need to develop some other interests — Wayfarer

Hope you dont log out too soon. Im fascinated by Vervaeke’s quest to marry spirituality and cognitive science. As you know, Varela and Thomson have also gone down this road. I’m working on a paper comparing enactivism and poststructuralism, particularly when it comes to ethics.
Just last month, Shaun Gallagher gave a talk (posted on youtube) answering the question as to whether enactivsm has anything to say about ethics. His answer was that if we embrace forms of enactivism that follow Dreyfus’s notion of unreflective skilled coping, then we end up with a form of phronesis as ‘cleverness’, but with no orientation toward the Good.

Gallagher offers that Varela’s incorporation of buddhist themes of mindfulness gives enactivism a way to make skilled coping about more than cleverness. We can see it instead as directed by an ethical knowhow that achieves a benevolent posture through the giving up of egoistic habits of grasping. The awareness of the no self within the self leads to a compassionate stance toward others. This seems to be where spirituality comes into play for Varela and Thompson, and it illustrates how the progress of a science can come around to affirming what the spiritual disciplines knew. The science of enactivism can support a spirituality not only on the basis of its alignment with buddhism but also with certain strands of phenomenology. God is a core element of the phenomenologies of Scheler, Stein, Vattimo, Marion and Henry, and something like God lurks within Levinas’s thinking.

I know that Thompson has struggled to locate himself with respect to various spiritual communities since his upbringing in the midst of the Lindesfarne commune. As you may know , he wrote a book called ‘Why I Am Not a Buddhist’. He seems to be wanting to find a path of spirituality that doesn’t end up as a doctrine or a foundationalism . I can’t help but feel that, while he and Vervaeke share so much in common in terms of philosophical and psychological theory, he would find Varveake’s form of spiritual anchoring to be too essentializing. Part of the difference between them at be that Vervaeke seems to be more of a realist when it comes to cognitive science than Thompson is, and scientific realism may be a better fit for the kind of religiosity that Verveake is pursuing than enactivist relativism.

Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.

Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible. — fdrake

I acknowledge that pp models have moved in the direction
of ecological embodiment, and that enactivism itself is a big tent that overlaps with pp at certain junctures (Andy Clark and Daniel Hutto are examples of this).It is actually a small group of enactivists that I am interested in (Shaun Gallagher, Thomas Fuchs, Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson, Ezekiel De Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, Matthew Ratcliffe). Their brand of enactivism draws strongly from
Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and hermeneutics. I don’t know to what extent Barrett’s work is representative of pp, but if her model of emotions is the best that pp can come up with, it falls far short of what Ratcliffe has achieved, and exemplifies the extent to which pp hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than Barrett’s approach recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.

There was something that struck me about Barrett’s youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples, the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the person’s interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states.

In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isn’t that pp doesn’t have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question.

Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time
reciprocal causality. When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of
suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how one’s reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how one’s legs seem primed to race one’s body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients one’s inclinations to relate to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client's aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud's id-ego-superego psychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.

You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that. — fdrake

The ‘how' of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system's autonomy. I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here:

“ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.
Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. — Srap Tasmaner

You’re relying on a particular neuro-cognitive approach , predictive processing, to ground your understanding of such social processes as logic, reason and belief. According to that model, we are indeed not privy to the ‘subpersonal’ processes which underlie conscious behaviors like rational argumentation. But a different approach, neurophenomenology, arising out of the enactivist tradition, while agreeing with predictive processing that there is no homuncular self to be found among all of the bits of interacting brain elements, produces a more functionally integral picture of how neural assemblies are formed and interact within the brain. It doesn’t separate an internal realm of representational, computational processing from an outside world but sees brain, body and world as mutually enacted through sensory motor coupling. This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about.

Wittgenstein himself warns in the preface that PI isn't a very good book and not the book he intended to write — sime

Wittgenstein’s standards for himself were so high that he refused to publish any work in his lifetime except the Tractatus. There is a tendency among those who struggle to understand his ideas to attribute the disarray in Wittgenstein scholarship to the supposed incompleteness of the work. But I believe that even if Wittgenstein had been thrilled with PI and declared it to be exactly as he intended to write it , this would make no difference to the disagreement in the field of Wittgenstein interpreters. Every great philosopher produces camps of readers fighting tooth and nail against each other’s interpretations of the master. The so-called ‘gatekeeping’ associated with Wittgenstein scholars is far from unique to him. Just look at the battles within Nietzsche (Leiter vs Deleuze) or Heidegger (Sheehan vs Capobianco) scholarship. If Heidegger is correct, perhaps none of today’s readers fully understand Wittgenstein.

“…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz.”

Even when a significant body of published writing is available from a philosopher , many prefer their sloppy unpublished scribblings. Heidegger recommended we ignore Nietzsche’s published writing in favor of his unpublished notes. Many consider Merleau-Ponty’s greatest work to be his unpublished , unedited and incomplete Visible and Invisible.

I do sense the fact that many of the ‘analyticals’ are really pretty rigid in their concentration on ‘language games’ and the like and they often use the famous last words of the Tractatus to stifle discussion of what I consider significant philosophical questions. But, you know, c’est la vie. One moves on to another thread — Wayfarer

None of the supporters of Wittgenstein’s later work I follow would be comfortable with the label of analytic philosopher. The ones whose work I resonate with ( Cavell, Rorty, Rouse, Lyotard) incorporate language games into thinking which tends to be hostile toward analytic concerns. And they also tend to either dismiss or reinterpret those words from the Tractatus on the basis of what they see as his radically different later approach.

Wittgenstein provides himself with no way to account for the knowing subject along with their intentions and locutions. Language becomes a fact, a given, which must be parsed according to "common use" and cannot be parsed vis-a-vis the intentions of individual subjects — Leontiskos

I don’t know if this would be helpful to you, but let’s compare two approaches to intentionality and language within cognitive psychology, Cogntivism and 4EA (embodied, embedded, extended and affective). The latter is also referred to as enactivism. One of the founders of enactivism described cognitivism as:

…the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation. In some ways cognitivism is the strongest statement yet of the representational view of the mind inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. Indeed, Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, goes so far as to say that the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.

There are more recent adumbrarions of cogntivism that move away from the idea of the mind as mirror of nature, but they retain the idea of cognition and language as something that takes place inside of a brain via representational , symbolic processing. Enactivism rejects this inside-outside representational model in favor of an approach that draws from pragmatists like James and Dewey, hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who was also a child psychologist and wrote much on the psychology of perception. What enactivism learned from these thinkers is that mind, body and world are not separable
entities, but are inextricable aspects of an ecological
system that is based on dynamic sensory-motor coupling between the organism and its environment.

When we perceive a feature of our environment, we are not producing an internal representation of an outside, we are enacting a mode of interaction with our world oriented toward normative goals and purposes shaped on the basis of previous interactions. Perceptually, we construct the meaning of what our world ‘is’ on the basis of what we intend to do with it. These normative expectations and intentions are not just subjectively but equally intersubjectively formed. Language use, like perceptual and cognitive processes, is not just ‘in the head’,not the product of Chomsky-like grammatical modules, but emerges and has its meaning refreshed through actual contexts of social engagement. Enactivists are not denying that there is a certain autonomy to individual cognitive functioning, but it is never a compete autonomy. Enactivists like Shaun Gallagher incorporate notions of the good from Aristotelian phronesis in revealing the ethical nature of social interaction, such as in striking a balance between the needs of individual autonomy and group autonomy in concrete situations.

What enactivists find valuable about Wittgenstein is his recognition that linguistic meaning and intentionality cannot be fully understood via models that begin from the idea thatmentation is a matter of rational representation of a world performed inside a brain.

To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective,
— Joshs

Did you just reciprocal co-constitution Wittgenstein scholarship? — fdrake

Was this an attempt to parody pomo? I’ll be back a bit later with my parody of your parody. For now, I’ll just suggest that an effective parody requires that one has first mastered the material one is parodying.

If one takes your approach, no person is speaking for themselves in response to the text but are parroting "so and so's" who speak for others. That means I am not speaking for myself but advancing someone else's view.

So, the humility you are asking from me is a keeping of a gate. And you have shopped out the work to a contractor. — Paine

You are not a solipsistic island dropped into the midst of society. Whether you know it or not, your reading of Wittgenstein will have enough overlaps and resonances with a particular community of Wittgenstein scholars that it will be useful to say , as shorthand, that you identify with the new Wittgensteinians or the old Wittgensteinians, with the therapeutic approach or the non-therapeutic approach, with the Oxford reading or the American reading. This doesn’t mean you think in lock step with any particular reading of Wittgenstein. To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective, Whether one feels in tune with it or in opposition to it, one is in both cases tied to it. Explicitly communicating this awareness when discussing philosophical ideas is not the same thing as advancing someone else’s view, but giving others a better sense of where you’re coming from.

I imagine that I can demonstrate that your objection to the quotes from my sources is the result of your opposition to a therapeutic reading of Witt. Whether or not that is the case, instead of wasting time telling me that so and so is misunderstanding him, let’s reveal the difference in underlying metaphysical commitments that separate your reading from mine. Once we locate the general region of scholarship that situates your approach, and differentiates it from mine, we can get into the nitty gritty of your thinking in its uniqueness. I think an approach to reading a philosopher that respects the value of what different communities of thinkers say about him is more productive, and less prone to the risk of gatekeeping, than one that is mainly interested in determining what is the ‘correct’ view of him , while ignoring the way any reading is ensconced within a community of practices.

Of course I prefer my approach, and you prefer yours , but there will never be just one Wittgenstein.

↪Joshs
This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is. — Paine

I have a feeling a quote from any of my favorite interpreters of Wittgenstien will likely deemed by you as a ‘mischaracterization’ of his views. Ironic term to use in a thread on ‘gatekeeping’. Don’t you think a more humble stance to take toward a thinker who has spawned communities of readers with sharply divergent views of what he meant might be to simply say that you prefer so and so’s reading of him to my sources?

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?
— Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk — fdrake

The ordinariness or commonness of the words contained in Wittgenstein’s later work isn’t to be determined by seeing how often they have been used by the wider culture, but in how Wittgenstein employs them to connect with and carry forward what is immediately relevant to the reader. It is these concerns that are common, and where the meaning of language finds purchase.

I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds. — Paine

I think Lee Braver has a point when he characterizes this quote by Wittgenstein as:

branding the problems of philosophy simply foreign to mundane life.Their very existence is due to this separation, to the disorienting extrapolation from our usual sense of a term to situations where no proper usage has been settled A philosopher theorizing is a bit like a dog trying to fetch a snowball thrown into a snow­bank, looking up quizzically when no amount of digging unearths it. The great philosophical debates represent, for Wittgenstein, divergent applica­tions of pictures that have been carried far beyond their legitimate role.

↪Joshs
I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I don’t know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we don’t know enough Wittgenstein…just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is. — schopenhauer1

Le me tactful suggest you have a chip on your shoulder and it’s causing you to blame the messenger rather than your difficulty in deciphering the message. You have the advantage here. 90% of the contributors to this forum do not ally themselves with postmodern , poststructuralist or deconstructive philosophy, and I’m including within those groups the later Wittgenstein, at least as people like Antony and myself read him. Let me make it clear: when I talk about deciphering the message, I dont mean agreeing with it, swallowing the koolaid, joining the cult. I mean having the capability of summarizing its content effectively so that one understands what one is disagreeing with. I dont agree entirely with Antony’s take on Wittgenstein , and I am critical of many aspects of Wittgenstein’s ideas, but I have no problem in thinking from within the world that Antony spins out so as to have lively engagements with him. Some others who have engaged with him remain outsiders to that world and resent him for it. To them, he is indeed an ‘elite gatekeeper’.

What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?

Is it that Wittgenstein tends to bring out these personality-types that like to gatekeep when discussing on a forum setting?

Is Wittgenstein liable to group-think whereby the only way one can read Wittgenstein is an adherent who must use ONLY a BETTER interpretation of Wittgenstein to refute Wittgenstein — schopenhauer1

I would like to use a specific example to clarify what gatekeeping means to you( forgive me, Antony).
I consider Antony Nickles’ discussions of Wittgenstein’s ideas on this forum to be some of the most rigorous and informative contributions to this site, not only because it jibes with my understanding of Witt, but because he is able to bring Witt’s way of looking at the whole ( as seen by Antony) alive by careful use of the author’s vocabulary. I have noticed the frustration and exasperation of many of Antony’s interlocutors as they try and fail to make their way into that world that Antony is painting, and I can’t help but suspect that a few of them blame Antony’s ‘elitism’ for their being shut out of that world. I’m curious as to whether you consider Antony’s approach as a type of gatekeeping.

Heidegger tells a long story about how the concerns of philosophy were corrupted by some elements of its practice. He wrote (and lectured) at length upon how Nietzsche was the last practitioner of the mistake.

There are a lot of other points of contrast and conflict between their views but let me start with simply observing that Wittgenstein has negative interest in the romance and nostalgia expressed thereby — Paine

Rorty’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s peculiar use of the word philosophy may go some way toward appreciating the basis of his lack of interest in its history.

The more one reflects on the relation between Wittgenstein's technical use of “philosophy” and its everyday use, the more he appears to have redefined “philosophy” to mean “all those bad things I feel tempted to do” Such persuasive redefinitions of “philosophy” are characteristic of the attempt to step back from philosophy as a continuing conversation and to see that conversation against a stable, ahistorical background. Knowledge of that background, it is thought, will permit one to criticize the conversation itself, rather than joining in it.

The transcendental turn and the linguistic turn were both taken by people who thought that disputes among philosophers might fruitfully be viewed from an Archimedean point outside the controversies these phi-losophers conduct. The idea, in both cases, was that we should step back from the controversy and show that the clash of theories is possible only because both sets of theorists missed something that was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Once we give up on the project of “stepping back”, we will think of the strange ways in which philosophers talk not as needing to be elucidated out of existence, but as suggestions for talking differently, on all fours with suggestions made by scientists and poets. A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization. Knowledgeable about the dead ends down which we have gone in the past, they are anxious that future generations should fare better. If we see philosophy in this historicist way, we shall have to give up on the idea that there is a special relation between something called “language” and something else called “philosophy.”

Particularly, in PI Wittgenstein is equivocal about use defining meaning in all cases. "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ — though not for all— this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Philosophical Investigations 43, emphasis mine). — Count Timothy von Icarus

There’s more than one way to translate this quote, and Anscombe’s may not be the best way.

“If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation, includ­ing Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words” (Wittgenstein)

Philosophical problems do not arise in ordinary life precisely because there we use language rather than stopping to study it. Besides Wittgen­stein’s qualification (“for a large class of cases—though not for all”), G. E. M. rendering of the oft-quoted section 43 of the Investigations dis­torts his sentence by translating erklären as “define” rather than “explain” or “clarify.” Although a word’s meaning cannot be simply equated with its use, which would be the kind of debatable theory Wittgenstein says he isn’t proposing, we can only investigate its meaning from how it is used and what it is used for, just as we can only understand chess by watching it being played rather than staring at the queen under a microscope.(Lee Braver)

the opposition to ontology in Derrida and Foucault on the grounds that it limits freedom, or Deleuze's suggestion that this can be bypassed via the recognition of ontology as "creative" relies on particular modern assumptions about freedom and the relation of knowledge to freedom.

Were ontology indeed something we "discover," more than something we create, then a move to dispense with it or to assume we have more creative control over it than we do can't empower a freedom defined by actuality. Knowledge is crucial to actuality. Plotinus uses Oedipus as an example of this. Oedipus is in a way a model of freedom, a king, competent, wise, disciplined, etc. And yet he kills his father, the very thing he had spent his entire life trying to avoid, and so in a crucial way a truth that lays outside the compass of what he can fathom obviously makes him unfree. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The opposition between discovery and creation, knowledge and freedom, is deconstructed in Derrida and Heidegger such that, rather than giving preference to one over the other, they reveal these gestures as co-implied in all actions.
For instance, for Heidegger we always already find ourselves in the midst of a world, and in this sense our world is alway pre-understood by us, recognizable and familiar in some fashion. We know how to make our way around our world in a pragmatic sense. But this world
that we already comport ourselves toward in an understanding way is continually changing itself as a whole in subtle ways, so that the ways in which it is understood, made familiar and recognizable, change along with a changing world. It his means that the world we actually live in is neither unfathomable to us nor under the willful
control of previously learned knowledge.

Aquinas does not take up considerations that are identical to Locke, Berkley, or Hume, but the chain of reasoning is quite similar — Count Timothy von Icarus

It wouldn’t occur to you as a useful project to link together the Enlightenmment philosophies of figures like Descartes and Locke with ways of thinking informing the music, art, literature, poetry, sciences and political theory of that era, and then to do the same with Aquinas and the cultural modalities of his era? If we take Rembrandt vs Giotto as an example, do you not see taking place in the historical gap between the two a substantial innovation in construing what makes the human human, an innovation that mirrors the move from the medieval to the modern period in philosophical, scientific and literary modes of thought? Or are thinkers and artists just little islands of rationality and personal feeling only indirectly plugged into larger social conventions and practices?

Aquinas pretty much constructs Locke's arguments re primary/secondary qualities and Berkeley's arguments re there being "nothing but," ideas. He just rejects both of these. Solipsism, subjectivist epistemic nihilism (and a version of it in fideism) , extreme relativism (Protagoras' "man is the measure of all things) were going concerns going back to the pre-Socrartics. The medievals were aware of these, they just rejected them by in large — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t have the reverence for philosophical predecessors that you do. I view the thought of individuals as inextricably bound to an intersubjectively formed system of thought , a cultural episteme or worldview that ties multiple thinkers together, despite their differences. These cultural worldviews( classical, medieval, modern, postmodern) succeed each other neither logically nor arbitrarily, but make it impossible to resurrect the past without already reinterpreting it from one’s own cultural vantage. Did a neo-Aristotelian thinker from the 13th century like Aquinas leap beyond his era’s epistemic limits such as to enable him to grasp and reject what Locke and Berkeley were up to? Call me a skeptic, especially since it is hard to imagine in what way their concepts would even be intelligible without first passing through Descartes, unless you want to argue that Aquinas also knew what Descartes would be up to.

Generally speaking, the classical/scholastic view would be that God is both "inside" and "outside" the system
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Transcendent yet immanent. Something the 'new atheists' could never comprehend — Wayfarer

Deleuze’s philosophy is transcendent yet immanent in a way that draws upon but goes beyond the modern philosophical resources that underlie the subject-object thinking of the new atheists. By contrast, the classical/scholastic tradition hadnt yet arrived at a notion of subjective consciousness, and as a result, had nothing like the modern concept of the object. Therefore, the notion of the subject-dependent nature of objective experience would be utterly alien to them. By contrast, if the new atheists have trouble comprehending the classical/ scholastic orientation, it is only because they fail to recognize how their own approaches rely on transformations of those earlier ways of thinking.
The modern subject-object scheme the new atheists embrace creates the transcendental out of the resources of the empirical.

I read it all, and while I think it fairly clearly conveys what the common sense view is, it then declares itself to not be that, and what it is (the last paragraph) kind of lost me. I could not, from that, summarize what Husserl is trying to get at — noAxioms

Can you say some more in simple terms about what this might be? Do you mean that time is also an aspect of consciousness and therefore located in our cognitive apparatus (but that may be closer to Kant?). — Tom Storm

Maybe this from Dan Zahavi will help:

What is time? In daily life time is spoken of in a variety of ways. The universe is said to have existed for many billions of years. In geology one can say that the Permian period, the most recent period of the Paleozoic period, lasted around 41 million years. One can also speak of the medieval age; one can refer to the German occupation of Denmark which began on April 9, 1940; and one can announce that the train will leave in twenty-two min-utes. In other words, in daily life it is taken for granted that there is a dat-able, measurable, historical, and cosmic time. Husserl's analysis, however, is not primarily concerned with these forms of time, though by no means is he denying that one can speak of an objective time.

Rather he claims that it is philosophically unacceptable simply to assume that time possesses such an objective status. The phenomenologically pertinent question is how time can appear with such a validity, that is, how it is constituted with such a validity: In order to begin this analysis, it is, however, necessary to perform an epoche. We will have to suspend our naive beliefs regarding the existence and nature of objective time, and, instead, take our point of departure in the type of time we are directly acquainted with. We have to turn to experienced or lived time.

The central question is: How can I experience such objects as melodies? Husserls fundamental claim is that our experience of a temporal object (as well as our experience of change and succession) would be impossible if our consciousness were only conscious of that which is given in a punctual now, and if the stream of consciousness consequently consisted in a series of isolated now-points, like a line of pearls. If this were the case, were we only able to experience that which is given right now, we would, in fact, be unable to experience anything with a temporal extension, that is, anything that endured. This is obviously not the case, so consequently we are forced to acknowledge that our consciousness, one way or the other, can encompass more than that which is given right now. We can be co-conscious of that which has just been, and that which is just about to occur.

However, the crucial question still remains, how can we be conscious of that which is no longer or not yet present to our consciousness? According to Brentano, it is our imagination that enables us to tran-scend the punctual now. We perceive that which occurs right now, and imagine that which is no longer or which has not yet occurred. Husserl, however, rejects this proposal since he considers it to imply a counterintuitive claim: We cannot perceive objects with temporal extension, we can only imagine them. Thus, Brentanos theory seems unable to account for the fact that we are apparently able to hear, and not simply imagine, a piece of music or an entire conversation.

Husserls own alternative is to insist on the width of presence. Let us imagine that we are hearing a triad consisting of the tones C, D, and E. If we focus on the last part of this perception, the one that occurs when the tone E sounds, we do not find a consciousness that is exclusively conscious of the tone E, but a consciousness that is still conscious of the two former notes D and C. And not only that, we find a consciousness that still hears the first two notes (it neither imagines nor remembers them). This does not mean that there is no difference between our consciousness of the present tone E and our consciousness of the tones D and C. D and C are not simultaneous with E, but, on the contrary, we are experiencing a temporal succession. D and C are tones that have been and are perceived as past, for which reason we can actually experience the triad in its temporal duration, rather than simply as iso-lated tones that replace each other abruptly.l We can perceive temporal objects because consciousness is not caught in the now. We do not merely perceive the now-phase of the triad, but also its past and future phases.

By phenomenological I meant phenomenological philosophy
— Joshs
I looked up the SEP article on this, and I don't think I used the term incorrectly. It doesn't seem to presume any particular interpretation of mind. It says:
"In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality."
This is what I am talking about. The phenomenal experience of say a person does not vary depending on which interpretation of time is 'reality'. The experience is the same, and has to be, else there very much would be an empirical test to falsify some of them. — noAxioms

The definition you found refers to the ordinary conception of ‘phenomenological’. What I had in mind is a specific meaning of phenomenology unique to philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This IEP snippet may give you a sense of what I mean:

Husserl believed that every experience for intentional conscious has a temporal character or background. We experience spatial objects, both successive (e.g., a passing automobile) and stationary (e.g., a house), as temporal. We do not, on the other hand, experience all temporal objects (e.g., an imagined sequence or spoken sentence) as spatial. For the phenomenologist, even non-temporal objects (e.g., geometrical postulates) presuppose time because we experience their timeless character over time; for example, it takes time for me to count from one to five although these numbers themselves remain timeless, and it takes some a long time to understand and appreciate the force of timeless geometrical postulates.

To this point, common sense views of time may find Husserl agreeable. Such agreement ceases, however, for those who expect Husserl to proclaim that time resembles an indefinite series of nows (like seconds) passing from the future through the present into the past (as a river flows from the top of a mountain into a lake). This common sense conception of time understands the future as not-yet-now, the past as no-longer-now, and the present as what now-is, a thin, ephemeral slice of time. Such is the natural attitude’s view of time, the time of the world, of measurement, of clocks, calendars, science, management, calculation, cultural and anthropological history, etc. This common sense view is not the phenomenologist’s, who suspends all naïve presuppositions through the reduction.

Phenomenology’s fundamental methodological device, the “phenomenological reduction,” involves the philosopher’s bracketing of her natural belief about the world, much like in mathematics when we bracket questions about whether numbers are mind-independent objects. This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as uncritical, every-day, common sense assumptions.

the point I was making was simply that the very idea of a ‘vast univere’ in which we are a ‘mere blip’ is something that only rational sentient beings understand. Again the objective view relegates us to blip-hood in our own minds — Wayfarer

Have you read any of Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas’ work? I just finished an article in which he critiques Dreyfus and Spinoza’s distinction between deflationary and robust realism. They define the former as the kinds of everyday truths that are inseparable from our pragmatic, goal-oriented involvement with the world. The latter refer to scientific truths, which give us access to the things in themselves. I’m curious about your reaction to his take on the ’mind-dependence’ of the world.

“…the dependence of our ways on engagement with
things on us, and so on our existing practices, does not warrant any further inference to the claim either that the things that we encounter or with which we are engaged are dependent on us for their character or for the fact of their existence, or that our grasp of those things is only in terms of how they `appear’ rather than how they `are’ . To take an example I have used elsewhere, a map of some portion of space depends on a particular set of interests on the part of the mapmaker, and the likely user of the map, as well as on certain conventional forms of presentation, but this in no way impugns the capacity of the map to accurately `describe’ (and thereby to give access to) some portion of objective space.

The argument that Dreyfus and Spinosa attribute to the deflationary realist, and which they present as demonstrating the impossibility, from the everyday
perspective, of understanding things as they are `in themselves’ depends either on conflating the question of the independence of things with the independence of our means of access to things or else on treating the one as
implying the other. Moreover, the style of argument they advance is not new, but is similar to a style of argument that has commonly been used to argue for the mind-dependence of objects, and which typically depends on much the same assumptions. Idealists have sometimes argued that one could not conceive of objects as existing independently of the mind, since to conceive of an object as supposedly existing in this way is already for the object to be before the mind in the very fact of its being conceived. Yet that the conception of an object is dependent on the mind -as all conceptions are-implies nothing about the dependence on the mind of the object that is conceived.

The idealist simply conflates, as one might put it, the dependence of conception with the conception of dependence. Dreyfus and Spinosa do much the same-‘consequently they are led to suppose that there is no possibility of access to things `in themselves’ from within the framework of the everyday and that the defence of scientific realism must therefore depend on severing the scientific from our ordinary, everyday access to things. Yet as Davidson says of language, our practices `do not distort the truth about the world’ , instead they are precisely what make it possible to utter truths at all. That science can indeed give us an objective account of the world - an account of the world `as it is in itself’ -is possible only because, and not in spite, of our being already `given over’ to the world in our ordinary practice.” (The Fragility of Robust Realism: A Reply to Dreyfus and Spinosa)

What is missing is the phenomenological experience of time
— Joshs
The phenomenological experience of time is identical for every interpretation. That's why they're called interpretations. — noAxioms

By phenomenological I meant phenomenological
philosophy ( Husserl, Mwrleau-Ponty.) This does not mean mere introspection, but a method of
reflection on experience that brings out structures unavailable to empirical third person models.

None of the theories of time listed here get to the root of time from a philosophical standpoint. What is missing is the phenomenological experience of time , which involves a different notion of evidence than empirical naturalism makes use of.

Heidegger’s point about science is that it is not equipped to question its own presuppositions, and that when it does so it is no longer doing science but philosophy.
— Joshs

:chin:

It comes across as straightforward to me that this applies to pretty much everything. X is not equipped to question the presuppositions of X, by questioning it you are doing something other (more basic) than X. It almost makes me think of Goedel — Lionino

You’re right that the place to question axioms is not within the axiomatic system itself. I think the issue has to do with how far one is prepared to go in one’s questioning of the origin of presuppositions, and the groundlessness of grounds. Goedel himself was not prepared to engage in a radical questioning of the basis of mathematical axioms, which is why he remained a Platonist. Similarly, a philosophy of science like that of Popper is not willing to radically put into question the assumption of universal norms of method in science.

The way I read "natural from moral" above is to infer you mean morality at least has its basis in nature (a lessening of the two are one, and inseparable). Ought is derived from is. And you cite Heidegger above. But I read H (assuming you depicted H precisely not loosely (as I might)) as implicitly saying not that the pursuit of any knowledge requires a natural framework, Laws of Nature, [to re-present?] or that the two are actually inseparable, but rather that there be convention on how some basic structures should be framed and settled upon as "true"; i.e., how to "construct" a universal framework for our further constructions, or pursuits — ENOAH

I meant that morality has its basis in the qualitative schemes we construct out of our interaction with our world. Within the realm of science, there has been a longstanding tendency to call these constructed schemes models of ‘nature’, as though our schemes were representations of some natural reality external to and independent of these schemes. In fact, Heidegger protests against not only the idea of a world independent of our models of it , but the very idea of a subjective or intersubjective scheme, model, narrative , theory that we impose on the world. He wanted to get away from a subject-object dualism entirely, and the accompanying assumption of a normativity or conventionalism within which we view each other and the world.

He claimed that we fall into such inauthentic conventionalism (Das Man, the ‘they’) when we fail to understand the underlying basis of experience in authentic Being, which is not a subject representing a world to itself, but a self continually changed by ‘coming back to itself’ from its world. And this world , for its part, changes reciprocally with self.

At any rate, whether we go with Heidegger’s attempt to abandon subject-object normative schemes and representations , or retain the idea that humans construct normative models from their interactions with a world, in both cases what ‘is’ is already organized on the basis of prior expectations and anticipations. Scientific as well as ethical facts are made intelligible on the basis of pre-existing assumptions. What ‘is’ is always an interpretation, biased in advance in one direction or another, relative to already in-place goals and purposes. Science can never be a neutral bystander in relation to ethical concerns because its determination of what factually ‘is’ is loaded with its own presuppositions about what ought to be, which is inextricably entangled with all other aspects of the culture in which those scientists live. The consensually arrived at ethical principles guiding the culture of an era do not exist in counterpoint to the scientific understanding produced in that era. Rather, they are variations of the same biases.

The role of moral structures can be seen most clearly not within a community closely united by shared understandings, but between communities divided by differing intelligibilities. The individual deemed in violation of one group’s moral norms has found themselves caught between two communities, just as is the case with scientific heretics. It is unfortunate that the very bonding around shared intelligibilities that forms a unified community inevitably leads to alienation from those outside of the community. It then becomes necessary to protect that community from foreign ideas and actions which threaten to introduce dangerous incoherence into the normative culture. Thus the need for moral codes and structures.

It should be mentioned that , like our scientific models, our ethical norms aren’t conventions in the sense of optional fashions that we put on or take off as reasonable members of a consensual community. These are deeply held commitments grounded in presuppositions that guide central aspects of our lives. When such presuppositions are brought into question , we risk the loss of our anchoring in the world , our ability to makes sense of it and our place in it. This is why wars are fought over ethical principles.

Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood, which implies an ethics
— Joshs

Is that really Heidegger's point? Because that seems to apply to much more than just science. — Lionino

Heidegger’s point about science is that it is not equipped to question its own presuppositions, and that when it does so it is no longer doing science but philosophy. One can liken this to Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science.

Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood.
— Joshs

Unsurprisingly, another horrible point from Heidegger that doesn't capture anything about hte scientific enterprise — AmadeusD

It’s pretty much the same point that Thomas Kuhn makes about science.

The point about appealing to evolutionary biology in support of an ethic is exactly an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.. Ethical norms typically involve evaluative judgments that cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world — Wayfarer

The problem isn’t with naturalism per se, but with a reductionistic, objectivist form of naturalism. Even an externalist like Dennett recognized that a freedom is built into biological processes that makes moral deliberation something that cannot be subsumed under any pre-determined scheme. As Dennett argued in his book, Freedom Evolves, the reason ethical norms cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world is that those facts themselves evolve. What one can take from evolutionary theory and apply to ethics is the notion of the radical contingency of normative schemes of action.

↪Shawn It’s also a version of the naturalistic fallacy. — Wayfarer

I think the fallacy is in thinking we can separate out the natural from the moral, the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’. Richard Polt, a supposed Heidegger expert, should know bettter, since it was precisely Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood, which implies an ethics. Furthermore , Heidegger would argue that Polt’s own formulation of ethics falls into what Heidegger calls machination, the technological thinking of enframing. Do humans prefer altruism over selfishness? Is one ethically better than the other? Or is this choice between Hobbes’ selfish beast and Rosseau’s altruistic innocent caught up in the same subjectivist humanism that spawned modern empirical naturalism?

Joshs: One may "aim at continuous development of insights into the perspectives of others unlike ourselves" in the absence of moral facts. — Philo Sofer

Absolutely, that’s what I meant. A morality without blame is precisely one which recognizes the relativity of perspective and strives for mutual insight rather than conformity to rules principles, assumptions about correctness of thought or action. I believe that actions by others that we judge as evil or immoral are by believed to be ethically righteous from their own perspective, and our task isn’t to convince the other that they are evil, but to find a way to bridge the difference between perspectives.