I'm noting the existence and deep and pervasive roots of the notion in western philosophy, and perhaps if I am lamenting anything, it's that it is still incredibly pervasive. — Reformed Nihilist

Maybe. But there are plenty of places , not only in philosophy but in the sciences themselves , where the notion of certainty is no longer taken so seriously , like postmodern quantum theory , and ecological biology.

While I think I agree with the statements you made, I don't see how they answer the question. — Reformed Nihilist

I dont think the central question is why philosophers have desired certainty, but how , in their quest to make sens out of a chaotic world, the notion of certainty appeared to them as something attainable. So the primary goal was never certainty but predictability, and for a period of philosophical history the concept of certainty made sense. as a way to achieve this goal. The rapid and profound successes of the natural sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries , which were based on a mathematical logic which presupposed the certainty of a cognizing subject, reinforced and encouraged the idea of rational
certainty.

It just seems to me that you can't end up where Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Foucault did (that's an odd triplet), never mind Descartes or Kant, if the presumption that there is a bedrock of certainty somewhere to be discovered isn't part of where you started. Get me? — Reformed Nihilist

But the critique of bedrock certainty began a long time ago, and philosophers like Heidegger were already onto a critique of what came after( for instance , Derrida’s deconstructions of Heidegger and Foucault).

Put differently, they are interested in more than negative critique, in what we can’t do or shouldn’t believe, but are offering positive ideas in their own right, ways of seeing the world in intimate relationships al terms unavailable to those philosophies of certainty. What philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are doing is showing us a more intricate order hidden within the order of ‘certainty’ that older philosophies offered.

Then where does the fascination with certainty come from? — Reformed Nihilist

The fascination with certainty comes from the nature of fascination itself. Or more precisely, from
the nature of desire. Our way of being is anticipatory. The meaning we see in things comes in part from what we project forward into them with our expectations. So the desire for certainty arises out of of the fact that we are anticipatory beings. We are sense-making.

A long look at the history of philosophy shows a commonly recurring theme. It shows the attempt to create/discover some fundamental bedrock of certainty upon which we can build a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom — Reformed Nihilist

I wouldnt say that Wittgenstein was looking for first “principles”, but rather that thinking which gives a unity to experience. The same is true of Heidegger, Nietzsche and the phenomenologists The search for certainty you have been talking about is the certainty of a particular structural content, and after Hegel that ideal was abandoned for the most part. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and those who came after took a different approach.

There is a way of grounding experience without making recourse to a particular content , a particular truth. The ground can instead be self-reflexive It can have change, transformation, temporality built into its very premises. It can focus on self-similarity , relationality and harmoniousness rather than perfect identity. It can show that integration and differentiation, sameness and otherness go hand in hand.

I said earlier tha behaviors are goal-directed, not natural selection. NS is the means by which goal-directed behaviors come to exist in organisms. So instincts and habits (behaviors) are goal-directed. — Harry Hindu

One could add that the normative , goal-oriented nature of self-organizing systems is itself an aspect of evolution.

As Evan Thompson points out:

“Darwin's Newtonian framework, in which design arises from natural selection conceived of as an external force, does not address the endogenous self-organization of the organism. This aspect of development and evolution, rooted in the organism's autonomy, had to be rediscovered in modern biology, with tools the Darwinian tradition did not provide.”

Given that what natural selection has to work with is already constrained by the normatively determined ecological functioning of the organism-environment interaction, one could say that evolution is normatively constrained.

This is interesting in that it seems to posit that all qualities must be sense qualities. So energy, mass, movement, persistence, chang — Janus

As long as we keep in mind that such ‘physicalistic’ entities are subjectively constructed as senses themselves.

Suppose the law of identity intends to specify that that which appears, or stands out, or else is, cannot at that very juncture be anything else but itself. In so conceiving, there is no comparison involved in any instantiation of the law of identity—because there is no multiplicity involved in givens addressed. The tree I see (A) is the tree I see (A)—this without any multiplicity in the “tree that I see” that then facilitates comparison. Reflection, then, would only occur in thoughts intending to formulate this universal principle of thought—if not also ontology—into something communicable, such as “A=A”. — javra

Can such a principle even be communicated from myself to myself without reflection? And if not, then before reflection do we have a principle or law, or just a contingent experience of momentary sense? In other words, think about the difference between experiencing an event right now and thinking of this event as a law or principle. These are two different kinds of experiences. Making the first into the second (specifying it as a principle or law) requires a secondary act of thought. If the law or principle isnt in the actual experience of an object, it has a different purpose or use.

Also, becoming to me connotates teleology: This becomes that, such that “that into which this becomes” is the Aristotelian final cause of the becoming; the process of becoming moves toward its end. Within such perspective, “that into which this becomes” will not of itself be a becoming—such as can be claimed of that which is becoming—but will instead ontically be (here entailing being, which is self-identical at any given juncture) on account of its either relative or absolute finality. — javra

“That into which this becomes”. If the ‘this’ and the ‘that’
are conceived as separate beings, moments or states, then we have a split between beings and becoming. But for Husserl and Heidegger there is no such split. The ‘this’ and the ‘that’ are the subject and objective poles of a single occurrence of becoming, not two separate moments or states.

, if the final cause (as being) is requisite for the becoming, then it will not be the case that becoming is prior to being. — javra

The objective pole of the occurrence of becoming isnt a cause, because it is as much determined by the subjective pole as the subjective pole is defined by the objective pole.

the idea of being as encapsulated in its most ideal and exact form in A=A is an abstraction derived from a pragmatic act of reflective comparison
— Joshs

You see how that subjectivizes and relativises the idea of reason. Reason becomes a product of an evolved brain, with no inherent reality beyond adaptive utility. — Wayfarer

Only if one is a Darwinian naturalist , which neither I, Wittgenstein, Husserl nor Heidegger are. Relevance and pragmatic use for us mean something quite different from the instrumentality of adaptive utility, which is defined relative to pre-existing objective structures. For Husserl, ‘relevance’ has a platonic foundation in the synthetic associative structure of temporal acts of consciousness. Unity, identity and number all arise out of syntheses of sense based on likenesses and similarities.

“I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. — Wayfarer

I applaud your desire to locate a platonic ground of reason. That’s why I’m attracted to phenomenology. But instead of tracing the basis of reason to mathematical logic and then stopping there , they dig deeper. Husserl shows us how grasping the concept of number requires a constructive genesis.

In Philosophy of Arithmetic(1891), Husserl described a method for understanding the constitution of a multiplicity or plurality composed of independent parts, which he dubbed ‘collective combination'.

“Collective combination plays a highly significant role in our mental life as a whole. Every complex phenomenon which presupposes parts that are separately and specifically noticed, every higher mental and emotional activity, requires, in order to be able to arise at all, collective combinations of partial phenomena. There could never even be a representation of one of the more simple relations (e.g., identity, similarity, etc.) if a unitary interest and, simultaneously with it, an act of noticing did not pick out the terms of the relation and hold them together as unified. This 'psychical' relation is, thus, an indispensable psychological precondition of every relation and combination whatsoever.”(p.78)

In any such whole the parts are united in a specific manner. Fundamental to the genesis of almost all totalities is that its parts initially appear as a temporal succession.

“Succession in time constitutes an insuppressible psychological precondition for the formation of by far the most number concepts and concrete multiplicities - and practically all of the more complicated concepts in general.”(Phil of Arithmetic, p.29) “Almost all representations of multiplicities - and, in any case, all representations of numbers - are results of processes, are wholes originated gradually out of their elements. Insofar as this is so, each element bears in itself a different temporal determination.”(p.33) “Temporal succession forms the only common element in all cases of multiplicity, which therefore must constitute the foundation for the abstraction of that concept.”(p.30)

While the first step of constitution of a multiplicity is the awareness of the temporal succession of parts, each of which we are made aware of as elements “separately and specifically noticed” , the collective combination itself only emerges from a secondary act of consciousness. This higher order constituting sense changes what was originally a temporal succession into a simultaneity by ‘bringing' back ‘ the previous parts via reflecting on them in memory. Husserl says that a combination of objects is similar to the continuity of a tone. In both cases, a temporal succession is perceived through reflection as a simultaneity.

“For the apprehension of each one of the colligated contents there is required a distinct psychical act. Grasping them together then requires a new act, which obviously includes those distinct acts, and thus forms a psychical act of second order.”(p.77) “It is essential that the partial representations united in the representation of the multiplicity or number be present in our consciousness simultaneously [in an act of reflection].”(p.33)

This series of constructive acts forms the basis out of which the concept of number is constituted.
It is not the mathematical itself which is platonically original, but the intentional structure of associative synthesis.

the point is that the expression '=' or 'is', strictly speaking is only completely accurate in the case of A=A. In other arithmetical expressions, the "=" sign denotes an exactness which is never the case for empirical objects. Mathematical statements have an exactitude which is never truly characteristic of the sense-able realm. Statements about the empirical world are always approximations, because the objects of empirical analysis always consist of an admixture of being and becoming. The reason that 'the law of identity' is being dismissed as a trivial tautology is because this is not seen. — Wayfarer

The law of identity is being critiqued because of a change in the way certain approaches to philosophy think of ‘being’ thanks to the work of Nietzsche , Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists.
Their claim is that rather than a dualism between being and becoming, becoming is prior to being. Put differently, the idea of being as encapsulated in its most ideal and exact form in A=A is an abstraction derived from a pragmatic act of reflective comparison. Use is prior to , and makes possible all thought of being as self-identity. Empiricism is no longer seen as representation , approximation or adequation but instead as production. Exactitude is measured by relevance rather than by the pure stasis of identity.

“ the ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Math­ematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it.”(Being and Time)

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with them? — Daemon

I’m disagreeing that we have to assume blindsight is unconscious.

our minds and those of other animals are the right places to look for what I call mental fossils. If we explore the mindscape and carry out a dig, I'm 99% certain we'll find dinosaur minds buried under layers of thoughts deposited over aeons of mental evolution. — Agent Smith

If you’re looking for living fossils, I’d start with the Republicans.

↪NOS4A2 Can you perceive visually through your entire body? — Daemon

Information from your visual receptors connects areas of visual processing in the brain with those of other sensory modalities(vestibular system, cerebellum, somatosensory cortex) in numerous ways. In addition, visual information is sent to the hypothalamus and pineal gland, regulating circadian rhythms though hormonal release to various areas of the body. So one could argue that, via feedback from the body , one is able to ‘perceive’ what originally enters the visual receptors.

Cognitive theorists conclude from clinical examples of blindsight that consciousness is only a part of what goes on in the brain, and that consciousness is not needed for behavior. To argue that blindsightedness is not an example of unconscious processing (experience occuring in parallel with, but independent of conscious awareness) requires a new and different sensitivity to content of experience, and to the understanding of awareness. If there is no 'feeling of seeing' in blindsightedness, as is claimed, then there is feeling of a different sort, a quality of meaning that is overlooked by contemporary approaches to cognition and affect because of its subtlety.

Phenomena such as blindsightedness evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need, of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in blindsightedness. One has before one a task involving an intention to see, which implies the involvement of a certain concept of vision that the perceiver expects to encounter. If the claim for blindsightedness were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in seeing than one normally expects of a visual situation, (for instance, if one expects contrast, color, perspective, one gets instead a vague or incipient meaning that is not recognizable as seeing even though it in fact is normally part of all visual experiences), then I would be in agreement.

If, however, the claim is that whatever meaning or information is prompting the blindsighted behavior is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called blindsight is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously,
intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Blindsightedness is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced.

Blindsight involves a barely discernable shift of sense in an ongoing experience of regularity. There would be not only blindsight, but deaf-hearing, numb-tactility and non-conceptual conceptuality. The test consciousness of a thing:'Can one see that thing emerging from a field of perceived sameness?' is wrongheaded because it doesn't recognize that the field of supposed sameness is already a movement of changing meanings. The conscious-unconscious binary should be re-configured as a spectrum of meaningfulness.

Heidegger read plenty of Aristotle, but came to conclusions remarkably similar to Wittgenstein.


“ The principle of contradiction and the principle of identity are presupposed to be self-evident, with no questions asked about whether they are actually ultimate.”

It's the law of identity. I can't see how temporarility is intrinsic to it or even connected with it ( — Wayfarer

The proposition A=A only makes sense as a reflection. The second A is being compared to the first in one’s mind and determined to be identical. Reflection is a temporal process, and Heidegger’s argument is that reflection changes what it turns back to by changing the context.

Wittgenstein, AC Grayling tells us, read almost no philosophy at all
— Tom Storm

Sorry for dropping in on a thread I haven't read but...

Where does AC Grayling say this ?
He is wrong but that doesn't surprise me — Amity

From Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein:

“…what Ryle says about Wittgenstein's attitude towards reading the great works of the past is perfectly true. 'As little philosophy as I have read', Wittgenstein wrote, 'I have certainly not read too little, rather too much. I see that whenever I read a philosophical book: it doesn't improve my thoughts at all, it makes them worse.' This attitude would never have been tolerated at Oxford, where respect for things past is in general much stronger than at Cambridge, and where a training in philosophy is inseparable from a reading of the great works in the subject. It is almost inconceivable that a man who claimed proudly never to have read a word of Aristotle would have been given any tutorial responsibilities at all at Oxford, let alone be allowed to preside over the affairs of the department.”

I think it's fundamental to philosophy generally. It's the law of identity. I can't see how temporarility is intrinsic to it or even connected with it (although will acknowledge that my own attitude has been deeply influenced by my understanding of Kant). — Wayfarer

216. "A thing is identical with itself."—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.( Wittgenstein, PI)

thinking* is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally. — Lloyd Gerson Platonism v Naturalism

We see particulars ( objective aspect) under accounts (formal aspect) , but are not these accounts subjective rather than objective? And are the accounts not themselves contingent and changeable?

That A=A is not dependent on your or my mind, or on your or my assent. But it can nevertheless only be grasped by a rational intelligence. That is why I favour the form of objective idealism which says there are real ideas that are not dependent on our minds, but which can only be grasped by a mind. — Wayfarer

Is that a Kantian notion? Isnt A=A the concept of ideal self-identity, the infinite repeatability of the same? If so, isn’t the category of temporality intrinsic to it?

Reading The Embodied Mind. I'll get back to you when I have something to say. BTW, thanks for Varela, Thompson and Rosch. — Astrophel

Good choice. That’s the bible of embodied cognition.

there are anthropocentric and evolutionary features that the philosophical investigations on this topic have not focused on much: — Doru B

I agree with the linked article that perceptual processes are the place to look for the basis of mathematical reasoning, but rather than ‘innate’ I’d suggest instead they perceptual processes are constructive, forming mathematical concepts as metaphors arising from embodied perceptual interactions with the world.

Any links regarding this? How is a process REconstructive without access to the original construction? — Harry Hindu

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325338682_Reconceiving_representation-hungry_cognition_an_ecological-enactive_proposal/fulltext/5b06bbbda6fdcc8c25236705/Reconceiving-representation-hungry-cognition-an-ecological-enactive-proposal.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=Bl1E3jxcYWRHIITqvgsTmQnmAC399k-pE1htXeiQc1A9vPCLYB5oX8brlZr79My7iIkUU9B7prpoWO7C55pm-g.F6rCwA95kvyQu8tR-r1HLonWMCFye1xth34ubi-gbPcBjBUP6oigbgNPTPlWdB7_Bj5VDuzOyNES3BCwv8SEAw.95WbrQ2tQ-V4sV2HSAI2euKn5WjqEVKYNLh3hs1fNazI-sgHcXH5ozkdIXNSMKWF85zLthZXrin3dDkX6O0Blg&_sg%5B1%5D=Apcpaln1xB46Ama9Ej_QuKH20lWQHIBn9okkyL2AShvXPWWmnK6UUkWVBBnH2FQgFjlRYD8y3k1KBcINCrQbUKV5_1Bzp6zwcfif5Q6Rlz7R.F6rCwA95kvyQu8tR-r1HLonWMCFye1xth34ubi-gbPcBjBUP6oigbgNPTPlWdB7_Bj5VDuzOyNES3BCwv8SEAw.95WbrQ2tQ-V4sV2HSAI2euKn5WjqEVKYNLh3hs1fNazI-sgHcXH5ozkdIXNSMKWF85zLthZXrin3dDkX6O0Blg&_iepl=

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

subjectivity is objectivity undeciphered. — Agent Smith

I tend to think it’s the other way around.

Philosophy (in the past at least, and it seems for some now) cherished certainty and perfection. Philosophers sought immutable truth, beauty and goodness. They treated the "real world" and ordinary day-to-day life as imperfect and consequently inferior, unhelpful in seeking the absolute. — Ciceronianus

That’s also what scientists like Galileo and Newton , artists and poets prior to the Romantic era, and political theorists thought. That’s what the Enlightenment was about, an idea of rationality as making possible the perfection of empirical and social knowledge. Philosophical eras are reactions against previous thinking. Enlightenment rationalism was a rejection of medieval scholasticism and its anti-empirical bent. So relative to what came before it , Cartesianism was hardly a dismissing of the
real world’. On the contrary, it inaugurated an era of questioning of inherited assumptions about reality.

As is always the case, philosophers in the post-Enlightenment era have led the way in rejecting the ideals of perfection, the absolute and certainty. So your critique of philosophy is really only the critique of the philosophy of a certain era, and along with it every other field of cultural endeavor of that era. Its fault was that it didn’t go far enough in rejecting Medieval platonism.

First, calling something physical, material, is, in itself, simply vacuous. When scientists and everyday talk refer to some material object, it is just a general term that has no content at all because it is not a particular thing and hence has no properties, so it has no predicative possibilities — Astrophel

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology.

Husserl characterizes the physical, material thing in terms of a particular stratum of intentional constitution:

Now once the" sense-thing" is itself constituted, and so is, founded with it, the real-causal thing at the level of genuine experience, sense experience, then a new constitution of a higher level results in regard to the relativity of this "thing" with respect to the Corporeality constituted in a similar fashion. It is this relativity which demands the constitution of a physicalistic thing manifesting itself in the intuitively given thing. But in this
relativity the geometrical determinations and the specifically "sensuous qualities" play quite different roles (both taken, in their own constitutive sphere, as "themselves, " as optimal). The geometrical determinations pertain to the physicalistic Object
itself; what is geometrical belongs to physicalistic nature in itself. But this is not true of the sensuous qualities, which thoroughly belong in the sphere of the appearances of nature.

“ "Physicalistic nature," to which we have now advanced,
presents itself in the following way in accord with our
expositions: the thing itself in itself consists of a continuously or discretely filled space in states of motion, states which are called energy forms. That which fills space lends itself to certain groups of differential equations and corresponds to certain fundamental laws of physics. But there are no sense qualities here. And that means there are no qualities here whatever. For
the quality of what fills space is sense quality.”(Ideas II)

I don't think the 'container' analogy is really a good way of understanding memory.
— Janus
Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information?

Thinking of memory as consisting in traces or patterns. like marks left in the sand, seems more apt to me.
— Janus
You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory. — Harry Hindu

First generation cognitive science used the metaphor of computer to model the mind as an input output device that processes , represents and stores data. That metaphor has been replaced by the biological notion of self-organizing system. Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process.

Descartes never felt any doubt he had hands — Ciceronianus

You’re wrong. Descartes had reason to doubt he had hands. I imagine if you were to ask him point blank what odds he would give that he had no hands he would say something like 1/10th of 1% or less, probably much less. That is not certainty of having hands, that is exceedingly strong confidence of having hands. The point isnt the percentage of doubt. It is that there is no way to exclude at least a smidgeon of doubt, due to the possibility that one’s faculties of cognitive judgement have been deranged. That is a vital and important point to make about where cognitive certainty and doubt come from, especially when it is contrasted with what he claimed one can be indubitably, 100% certain about in cognition.

Does it also show that you shouldn't quote someone without quoting the "background material" as well, and then complain that the person you provided the quote to hasn't bothered to read the "background material"? — Ciceronianus

I think he never, really, thought that an Evil Demon was fooling him, or that he thought he had no hands, no eyes, or that he thought any of things he said he would assume didn't exist didn't, in fact, exist. — Ciceronianus

He didnt claim they didn’t exist, he hypthosized that they could possibly not exist, that he might possibly be deceived about their existence. Do you think this was an important idea for him to convey , an idea deserving of analysis within thousands of doctoral
dissertations written over the past few hundred years? Tell me how much stronger Descartes’ argument would have been had he eliminated reference to the ED ( must be getting old. I keep reading this as ‘erectile dysfunction’).

But I wonder what philosophers might say about our capacity to accomplish it. Can it be done to better or worse effect, for instance? I wonder how achievable it is not to attend to something and abstract away from it? — Tom Storm

Ok, here’s my take. You can’t abstract away from presuppositions without already having an alternative in mind. In other words, I believe that Husserl’s method of epoche came after he already discovered his more primordial grounding for philosophy. I also want to add that although in the face of it the epoche is a reducing, eliminating , setting aside of phenomena, in a more fundamental sense it is an enriching of experience. For instance, once we have performed the epoche on predicative logic and discover the pre-predicative strata of intentional constitution that predicational logic is built from, we are in a position to append these more originary processes to what we already knew about predicational logic. So the epoche gives us a richer understanding of the phenomena that we bracket not by eliminating them but by showing us what we were missing.

“If I abstained as I was free to do and as I did
and still abstain from every believing involved in or founded on sensuous experiencing, so that the being of the experienced world remains unaccepted by me, still this abstaining is what it is; and it exists, together with the whole stream of my experi­encing life. Moreover, this life is continually there for me. Con­tinually, in respect of a field of the present, it is given to consciousness perceptually, with the most originary originality, as it itself.

Meanwhile the world experienced in this reflectively grasped life goes on being for me (in a certain manner) "experienced" as before, and with just the content it has at any particular time. It goes on appearing, as it appeared before ; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world though that believing too is still there and grasped by my noticing regard.”

“ This- universal depriving of acceptance, this "inhibiting" or "putting out of play" of all positions taken toward the already­given Objective world and, in the first place, all existential positions (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being likely, probable, etc.), or, as it is also called, this "phenome­nological epochd" and "parenthesizing" of the Objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contra­ry we gain possession of something by it ; and what we (or, to
speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them.”

I often wonder with phenomenology is conducting epoché readily achievable? How feasible is it to pretend you don't know what you are looking at (bracketing and 'blocking off' all assumptions and biases) in order to see something on its own terms? — Tom Storm

I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it.

Is it that only logical connections between ideas reveal truth/sense/reality? — Agent Smith

What hasn’t been mentioned so far are
1)Phenomenological Intentionality. This is not a causal
logic but an entirely different way of looking at meaning creation.
)Wittgensteinian language games:
This, too, is not a causal logic.

The universe makes sense (logically).
Logically in the classical sense (categorical, sentential, predicate logic), the key premise being the law of noncontradiction (LNC) can't be violated!Why should the universe (1) make sense (2) to us? — Agent Smith

Because we stacked the deck, declaring that only what can be depicted in terms of predicate logic can be considered a real component of the uninverse.
So we can force the universe to make sense in formal logical and mathematical terms by tremendously restricting what qualifies as real to what can be logically predicated. Or we can expand our understanding g of ‘making sense’ in the direction of subjective processes of perception and intersubjective processes of language,

Do we need to claim that one or the other is the "true" perspective? Or should we not deploy whichever perspective is the more useful for the task at hand? — Janus

“useful for the task at hand.” In other words , relative to an ongoing activity of significance and context of relevance. Which presupposes a subjective background. There can no coherent notion of usefulness without such an assumption. At the same time, what is useful is determined by the present context of use, which implies an objective dimension. In sum, any notion of pragmatic use is inseparably subjective and objective. Whether we want to use one perspective over the other, in either case we are presupposing this pragmatic subjective-objective condition of possibility. That, in a nutshell, is phenomenology.

I think syntax is the basis of logic, mathematics & computation, and applied like scaffolding to "the things themselves", we re/de-construct "things" into testable, objective models of which the natural sciences consist. — 180 Proof

They are applied like scaffolding to objects ( ‘things’) that are held to be enduringly self-identical. Without this assumption of enduring objective presence there could be no formal logical or mathematical scaffolding.

“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities [Weisheiten], its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging.”(Husserl)

“…it is not primarily the dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines this ontology of the world (empirical science), rather this ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)

But is the self-identical object irreducible? It is for Frege, Peirce and Popper, all of whom are following Kant here, who defines objectivity in terms of the mathemetizable. But not for phenomenology , which shows the self-identical object to be the product of a process of intentional constitution. Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure.

“ The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)

I would not say that Wittgenstein is a phenomenologist or even close to a phenomenologist, and I don't think that "facts of reality" is problematic, nor is it problematic for Wittgenstein. — Sam26

There are those who disagree with you.

“…if we look at what Wittgenstein actually does in the Philosophical Investigations and in his many manuscripts on the philosophy of psychology, we will be presented with a perspective remarkably similar to that of the phenomenologists.First of all, one should note that Wittgenstein tries to re-describe subjectivity or the mind along basically the same lines as the phenomenologists”

(The problem of other minds: Wittgenstein’s Phenomenological perspective , SØREN OVERGAARD )

I may use a concept correctly within a particular language-game, but that doesn't mean that that meaning actually lines up with the facts of reality. — Sam26

Yeah, I think the concept of ‘facts of reality’ is highly problematic for both Wittgenstein and phenomenology.

Husserl criticized Bacon for his 'mathematization of nature' program (i.e. contra-Aristotlean 'quidditas') but not for hypothetical-ded — 180 Proof

Yes, you are right. Let me go back to your earlier question.

In what way is "apodictic certainty" applicable to any modern science? What does a (like Kant, unsound) 'transcendental' deduction of "the essential structure of consciousness" from "apodicity" have to do with hypothetico-deductive explanations of nature or history? — 180 Proof

The hypothetico-deductive method that Popper popularized belongs to the ‘crisis’ that Husserl talks about in the book , a move away from the apodoctic
grounding of Cartesian realism. Husserl wants to recover appdicticity , but not by returning to Descartes. What phenomenology claims to be certain is the formal structure of time consciousness on which intentionality is based. Husserl calls this a science , but it is not one of worldly facts, which will always be contingent and relative. Yet, it is what makes objectivity, logic and mathematics possible, and in this way is the condition of possibility of all empirical sciences.

↪Joshs How in the world did Wittgenstein do that? — Sam26

His later work is a form of phenomenology, which dissolves the hard problem by showing the incoherence nod splitting apart what things are ( the factual) from how
things matter( their valuative sense).

In your opinion, does Wittgenstein's strategy of semantic reduction (as you understand it) successfully solve or dissolve the hard-problem? (to recall his earlier logical behaviourism) — sime

I can’t help but think that in his alter work he did dissolve the hard problem.

Alright, I confess. All this time I've been seeking to undermine belief in God. — Ciceronianus

Sounds like a reasonable project to me.

I'm saying he didn't believe there was an Evil Demon, nor did he believe had no hands, eyes, etc. Do you think he believed in the Demon, and that he had no hands, or eyes and all else he said was entailed by the Demon's illusion? — Ciceronianus

Descartes believed in God , and what’s more, he believed in a god that placed the faculty of perfect reason in our heads, via the pineal gland. Now, if one can believe in a god with such powers, one must also entertain the possibility ( which is quite different than pretending, since we’re not talking about a fantasy, but about a scenario that in Descartes’ mind could not be ruled out) that such an all powerful Being could manipulate those faculties to deceive us. In fact, isnt the god’s very placement of faculties of perfect reason already a manipulation? Is what you’re
really trying to argue here that the belief in a god who tells us how to think must be considered ‘pretend’?