↪wonderer1 Yea maybe my word choice wasn't the best. I guess I think emotions provide the motivation for thinking, but I suppose a thinking process can work just fine once it gets going without further emotional input — Brendan Golledge

You sure about that? Is the sense of why and how something matters to us ever absent from a task? Is there ever such a thing as an absence of mood? Heidegger would say no. He refers to such concepts as affect, feeling, emotion and mood as attunements:

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

a mechanistic component cannot be inherently interpreted in terms of a semantic component. If you look at a brain performing a plus task, our description of 'plus' is not interpretable in terms of our description of how neurons are actually performing the task.

Neurons are precisely what is performing a plus tasks for you. The biology and dynamics of neurons account for everything about your ability to do a plus task.

Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from. — Apustimelogist

In principle it is true that physics grounds all ‘higher’ scales of natural phenomena , but in practice it is not true that that a mechanistic account based on efficient, linear causality describes the neural processes underlying conceptual thought. There is no such thing as an inherently mechanistic component, only an account which explains the functions of a component in mechanistic terms. This is a useful account for describing phenomena in the service of accomplishing certain kinds of scientific and technological tasks, but is inadequate for others. Looking at the neural activity at the level of detail of chemical reactions will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.
— Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences". — apokrisis

How does Peirce understand the relation between model and what is to be modeled? Would he agree with the following from Rouse?

Models should be thought of as simulacra rather than representations. The crucial difference is that representation too often denotes a semantic content that intervenes between knowers and the world, whereas simulacra are just more things in the world, with a multiplicity of relations to other things. What makes them models, with an in­tentional relation to what they model, is their being taken up in practices, ongoing patterns of normatively accountable use.

The recognition of models as simulacra extends the interconnection of meaning and power beyond the immediate relation between speakers and their interpreters. To see why this is so, consider a question sometimes asked rhetorically about meaning: how could merely representing things differently possibly have a causal influence on them? A similar question about simulacra cannot have the same rhetorical effect: simulacra are transformations of the world, and more significantly, they transform the available possibilities for human action. They do so both by materially enabling some activities and obstructing others, and also by changing the situation such that some possible actions or roles lose their point, while others acquire new significance.

your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted. — apokrisis

Rouse follows Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger in dissolving the basis of Cartesian doubt. Descartes’s understanding of the basis of skepticism, the gap between the perceiving subject and the perceived world, is based on unexamined presuppositions concerning the nature of subjectivity and objectivity which produce this gap (and this doubt) in the first place. We always stand within one social framework or another of practices of meaning, and the concept of doubt simply doesn’t arise at the level of the framework as a whole. It is only within the structure of a particular contingent framework (language game, paradigm, form of life, constructed niche) that we can doubt particular facts and talk of truth and falsity.A language game provides us with the presuppositions that make doubt or validation intelligible. When we move from one language game to another, it is not a question of doubting or invalidating the previous game, but of entering into a new world. What constitutes reliable or unreliable belief is only determinable within each game, but does not apply to transitions between them. Did Kuhn say that Newtonian physics was replaced by modern physics because the former was an unreliable form of belief, or because, while both were reliable in their own way, the latter solved a greater number of puzzles?

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me — apokrisis

I’m perfectly comfortable agreeing with Foucault and Deleuze that the subject is an effect produced by social processes of subjectification, and that points of view are only intelligible within larger shared practices of meaning.

A point of view is an abstract of possible observers and ideal observers; it isn't about actual human beings. History, literature, and some approaches to language are about actual human beings, not abstract concepts. Linguistics is another interesting case that straddles the divide. (Is philosophy included here? Depends on what you mean by philosophy. Much philosophy presupposes an abstract observer, but Wittgenstein, of course, challenged that.) — Ludwig V

Don’t forget Nietzsche here.

“Physicists believe in a “true world” in their own fashion…. But they are in error. The atom they posit is inferred according to the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness—and it is therefore itself a subjective fiction. … And in any case they left something out of the constellation without knowing it: precisely this necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every center of force—and not only man—construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force— They forgot to include this perspective-setting force in “true being”—in school language: the subject.”(The Will to Power)

…and Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche:

“The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say, reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a "numerical and mensural scale" (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888)

“Through the characterization of value as a point-of-view there results the one consideration that is for Nietzsche's concept of value essential : as a point-of-view, value is posited at any given time by a seeing and for a seeing. This seeing is of such a kind that it sees inasmuch as it has seen, and that it has seen inasmuch as it has set before itself and thus posited what is sighted, as a particular something. It is only through this positing which is a representing that the point that is necessary for directing the gaze toward something, and that in this way guides the path of sight, becomes the aim in view-i.e., becomes that which matters in all seeing and in all action guided by sight…All being whatever is a putting forward or setting forth.

Whenever we set sail on the sea of consciousness, differences in definitions are often the reefs on which our arguments run aground — T Clark

Then perhaps we must let it run aground. Beside, I think I’m getting seasick.

I think I was clear in my previous post that emotions are involved in all aspects of our cognitive life. At the same time, it is true that every mammal that has ever existed has had emotions. Emotions were a part of animal cognition long before anything we would call consciousness had evolved. — T Clark

I happen to believe that the functionally unified, normative, goal-oriented organization of living systems is what consciousness is in its most primordial sense, so what distinguishes humans and higher animals from simpler ones isn’t an all-or-nothing capacity of consciousness, but a matter of degree. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio assert that there can be no consciousness without emotion. It has also been suggested that there can be no emotion without consciousness, that unconscious affect is a non-sequitor.

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight — apokrisis

The chair certainly produces predictable constraints and affordances in response to our engagement with it, but the meaning of ‘chair’, that is, what those constraints and affordances entail, are the result of neither of a practice-independent reality impinging itself on us anor world-independent conception forcing itself on the world. Rather, the pragmatic use defines the sense of the reality of the chair, and as our practical engagements transform themselves in tandem with the world that they shape, the meaning of a pragmatic use context, and the empirical and theoretic concepts built from it, changes its sense. Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.

t. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole. — apokrisis

We are already intimately and actively embedded within a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. Truth and falsity relate to the relative amenability of aspects within those intelligible patterns of engagement. We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions.

Emotions developed early in our species evolutionary history and parts of the brain involved in emotions are located in more "primitive" areas, i.e. in the pre-cortex. In that context, what does "values are the root of our emotional experience" even mean? To over-simplify, the emotions were there first. They are part of the foundation of our thinking and were there long before consciousness — T Clark

It sounds like you’re getting your idea of the primacy of emotion in evolutionary history from this model:

The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for
basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so­-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most suc­cessful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best­seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows. “Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Fin­lay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.(How Emotions are Made, Lisa Barrett)

The above account suggests instead that affect, cognition and consciousness developed in tandem. The defining feature of living systems is their normative organization, the fact that they are purpose-driven to maintain their form of life in changing circumstances. This doesnt mean that amoebas have values in the same way that humans do, but that affectivity and sense-making work together to produce goal-oriented directionality.

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism. — apokrisis

i certainly agree that the way that we characterize the genesis and nature of human reason and logical understanding serves as a model for our understanding of the world. If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, then this will define our understanding of the world. But how would
the universe look to us, and how would we approach the structure of its reasonableness, if we adopted a post-sovereign epistemology?

What, then, does a post-sovereign epistemology have to say about the legitimation of knowledge? The crucial point is not that there is no legitimacy, but rather that questions about legitimation are on the same "level" as any other epistemic conflict, and are part of a struggle for truth. In the circulation of contested, heterogeneous knowledges, disputes about legitimacy, and the criteria for legitimacy, are part and parcel of the dynamics of that circulation. Understanding knowledge as "a strategical situation" rather than as a definitive outcome places epistemological reflection in the midst of ongoing struggles to legitimate (and delegitimate) various skills, practices, and assertions. Recognizing that the boundaries of science (or of knowledge) are what is being contested, epistemology is within those contested boundaries.

But even an idealist becomes a naive realist when he leaves the house to go to work. That's paraphrasing Simon Blackburn. Which comes back to my take on all this. None of it much matters since the world we inhabit can't be denied in practice and for the most part it makes no difference to how we live if we believe that all is an illusion. — Tom Storm

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, said:

To put it simply, it is not what the past has done to a man that counts so much as it is what the man does with his past. The psychotherapist can scarcely fail to be amazed at how differently two of his clients may make use of what has happened to them. If he is alert he will be aware of wide differences in the way they make use of him too. Men are not so much shaped by events as they are shaped by the meaning they ascribe to such noises. This is not to say that one is perfectly free to ignore what is going on. He is not. But man is always free to re-construe that which he may not deny.

We take the stand that there are always some alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world. No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography.

there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. ‘Thinking animals’ is also a contentious claim, as what ‘thinking’ implies, and whether animals are capable of it, is vaguely defined and probably untestable. — Wayfarer

Positivist approaches in psychology were based on the same assumptions concerning human behavior, which is why they excluded ‘unobservable and untestable’ concepts like emotion and cognition from their models. Fortunately, things have changed significantly with respect to what is considered empirically testable for both humans and other animals.

I believe values (what we care about) are the root of our emotional experience, and our emotions drive what things we think about, and what we think about drives what we do. So, studying the self is really the same as studying values. And that's really the same as morality. And this is also what religion is concerned with.
— Brendan Golledge

I disagree with just about everything in this paragraph. — T Clark

The paragraph does seem to be consonant with recent thinking on the relation between affectivity, cognition and values. For instance, enactivist approaches to cognitive psychology insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it,

“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”

“...affect binds us to things, making them relevant and ‘lighting up' aspects of the world in such a way as to call forth actions and thoughts. Without the world-structuring orientation that they provide, we are disoriented, cut off from the world, which no longer solicits thoughts and actions and is consequently devoid of value. In effect, [William] James is saying that our very sense of reality is constituted by world-orienting feelings that bind us to things...The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of ‘mere' affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance.” (Matthew Ratcliffe)

Perhaps this is a problem with considering a monastic life to be conducive to developing psychological insight? Considered from a neuroscientific perspective, a monastic life could be considered to be starving one's brain of the input that comes with interacting with diverse people in diverse situations. It doesn't seem to me like a monastic life would be very conducive to developing robust intuitons regarding human psychology — wonderer1

I suspect the lion’s share of those intuitions are formed by early adulthood , which may explain why philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were able to generate profound psychological insights while living essentially monastic lives.

His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes.
— Joshs

That’s still just epistemology — apokrisis

And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy:

…both orthodox and liberal naturalisms impose on their conceptions of the sciences what I have elsewhere characterized as an epistemolog­ically-based first philosophy. The challenge to familiar meta-philosophical
naturalisms does not concern their intramural disputes
over whether the sciences provide a conceptually unified
or comprehensive image of the (structure of the) natural
world or instead provide a partial and multi-leveled con­ceptual patchwork at multiple scales, ontological levels, or disciplinary orientations. The question is instead whether the sciences aim for or produce a consistent representation of the natural world at all.

But Rouse’s concern here appears epistemological whereas I was talking ontological commitments. Rouse wants to place the scientific image within some wider pluralistic space of materialistic images. I am instead asking about the best possible version of that scientific image. What would it be like to bring our scattered scientific understandings of the world into one coherent image of natural being? — apokrisis

Th epistemological for Rouse is secondary to the ontology of agential materiality, what he calls ‘intra-action’. This ontology erases the boundary separating nature from culture, the manifest image of thought from the scientific image of nature. His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes.

The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
That's brilliant. Would you care to share the reference? Then I could quote it too. — Ludwig V

It’s from Is Internal Realism a Philosophy of Scheme and Content?

https://evanthompson.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/j-1467-9973-1991-tb00717-x.pdf

So as a metaphysics, neither matter nor form appear very “real” in any substantial sense. Reality seems derealised in a way that neither naturalists nor theists would think about things — apokrisis

Not all naturalist thinking is limited in this way. Joseph Rouse’s radical naturalism is one example of alternative paths that are being taken by new materialists.

https://www.academia.edu/38199897/Liberal_or_Radical_Naturalism

Thanks for the quote. It comes from Rouse's paper 'Kierkegaard on Truth' - pp13-14 of the downloadable pdf. Here: https://www.academia.edu/30917243/Kierkegaard_on_Truth — Amity

Thank you for adding the link. It’s a fascinating paper.

Wouldn't that be circular?
Most people who are not dualists accept that there is a physical <insert your preferred term> of abstract reasoning, music, laughter &c. To deny that seems inevitably lead to dualism — Ludwig V

Most people would use the word physical here, and then add their preferred term. Many non-dualist philosophers, however, would insert their preferred term in place of ‘physical’ in order not to perpetuate a dualism implied by physicalism.

I think a distinction should be made between types of beliefs. The beliefs you're using as examples here are context-dependent and directly related to the world around us. What I'm trying to get at is fundamental belief, the beliefs that are the foundation of how each of us perceives and experiences the world. These are often not apparent to us (maybe more apparent to those of us who post on philosophy forums, true). They're beliefs about the self. — Noble Dust

I’m not sure that such a distinction between self and world can be made. Heidegger would argue that the self is projected back to itself from its world. That the self projects itself does not mean that this self exists first and then projects itself or not, but that the self constitutes itself in projecting itself from the world. And Kierkegaard said that the truth or falsity of an aspect of the world is subservient to how it matters to us. Kierkegaard perspective on objective truth may thus conflict in some measure with and .

… what of truth attained rather than truth pursued? We are accustomed to taking the uncontroversial as the paradigm of truth. Kierkegaard has argued that such analyses sacrifice significance in the vain pursuit of certainty. Truth, he suggests, fundamentally concerns the uncertain and how it matters to us. The truth of what no one would care to dispute seriously(where what counts as "serious" reflects an interpretation of our shared situation) is derivative from this. Weaker versions of this approach are taken by those philosophers who argue that the decision to accept a research program provides the context within which other claims can be evaluated, and, more generally, by epistemological holists, according to whom we accept a claim only on the basis of previously accepted claims. But they usually have not taken Kierkegaard's further step: this prior acceptance must be a decision about what matters to us, in our lives and in our research. Present-day "rationalists" fear that truth will then be left to be decided by unconstrained choice.

Two responses can be made to this. Kierkegaard does not confuse our ability to devote our lives to one task with the ability which we do not possess, to insure that we succeed at that task. "Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible. " Realist philosophers of science have argued that what is thus finitely possible or impossible depends upon how the world is, independent of our desires, commitments, and actions. Kierkegaard has responded that it is only in the light of our transcendence into the world that the world is in one way or another. To describe the world is already to select those features worth describing; such a selection presupposes an interest with respect to which the selection can be made. Without an interest, which for Kierkegaard requires a commitment, nothing could manifest itself as true (or false).

Our commitments do not determine how the world is, but they allow it to show itself as significant in one way or another. Even for the world to show itself as an obstacle presupposes an approach which it resists. Even what commitments we can intelligibly make, and what concerns with which we can approach the world, are constrained by the situation in which we find ourselves. A situation is not an "objective" state of the world, nor just an unfounded belief about how the world is. Our being situated challenges the alleged separation between subject and world. A situation is a configuration of possibilities through which both subject and world can acquire meaning through the subject's involvement and the world's "response." It is the outcome of a history of such involvements and responses.

Our involvement is vulnerable, precisely because we must commit ourselves to it before it can show us new aspects of the world; but what it shows may confound it. And even that is open to interpretation. Kierkegaard's aim was to substitute for a truth which is, but remains unattainable for us, a truth which happens in time and thereby enters our lives. We have moved from his view of a truth which happens individually to the truth(s) of a generation and a society. Truth then belongs to an historical situation and may change. But this does not make the truth arbitrary. Nor is this historical situation insulated from others before it or around it. Our situation resulted from past involvements and is changed by our encounters with others for whom truth shows itself differently. Such a conception of truth may not satisfy those for whom eternity must be the hallmark of truth. But, as Kierkegaard reminds us, such a truth is nevertheless the highest truth attainable for an existing individual. (Joseph Rouse)

:up: Your quote exhales an aroma resembling wisdom — ucarr

My deodorant must be wearing off.

I don't need to know neuroscience to have the common sense to not take at face value a research paper (which isn't made for laymen) from 2011 with 2 citations and 1 no-name researcher. — Lionino

They call it common sense for a reason. It relies for its validity on normative conventions, which are a mixed blessing. They allow for social cohesion at the expensive of the intelligibility of novel insights, especially in less conventionally oriented fields like philosophy. Sometimes what is needed is uncommon sense. As Heidegger wrote “ …a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises.”

If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules? — Ludwig V

The translation of physical processes into the language of human intersubjectivity may be made easier if we start by asking ourselves what we are doing when we posit conceptions of the physical and the mechanistic and attempt to found indeterminate intersubjective discursivity on these.

I like to quote Evan Thompson on this issue:

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

“I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favor of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

Metaphysical Imagination' - what do you think it is? How have you used it?
In the meantime, I found this: https://philarchive.org/archive/MCSMAE — Amity

The author of the paper you linked to writes

…justified belief aims at truth, not imaginative capacity, or understanding. If we focus too much on having justified beliefs, it is harder for us to suspend disbelief and try to inhabit views that we don’t believe.

Thinking of metaphysics this way as split off from empirical truth perpetuates a dualism between ideas and reality, the physical and the metaphysical. The philosophers I follow don’t treat the metaphysical as ‘imaginative capacity’, but as the plumbing undergirding the intelligibility of a true belief.

The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

I do like what you’re saying here, and I think it’s pointing in the same direction that I am inclined to go in reconciling philosophical and scientific images of the world. I would just add that a thoroughgoing reflexivity between word and world implies that cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures are themselves responsive to, and continuously shaped by, the social world that they are exposed to and intertwined with. We can’t use biological concepts as the court of last appeal and legitimation for grounding conceptual meaning when they are not split off from the social milieu.

I personally like Sokolowski's image here, that we should think of language (and our senses) as a lens we use to investigate the world. A lens is of course something you tend to look through not at. Hence, reason would ground the ability to translate between disparate conceptual schemes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the optical metaphor is a good way to illustrate the difference between a metaphysical realist and a deflationary reading of Wittgenstein. The former associates empirical truth with observation, a representational seeing which places the observer and the observed, perceiving and acting, on opposite sides of a gap. By contrast, I read Wittgenstein as doing away with the gap by replacing the notion of observation with practical engagement , performance or doing rather than seeing. As Rouse argues, “the sciences ofer not a single synchronic “image” of the world, but a temporally extended field of research opportunities, intelligible disagreements, outstanding problems, and the conceptual and practical capabilities that guide them. Scien­tifc understanding reaches out from, beyond, and partially against “what we take to be the case”…To ask how our representations can ever get a foothold in the world is to presume, erroneously, that one could ever make or understand representations without already having a foothold in the world. “

This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exist. It amounts to a demand that contingent being be wholly subsistent if it is to be being at all.

Or as if it must be the case that a truth cannot be truth unless it can expressed in a language spoken by nobody from nowhere — Count Timothy von Icarus

On the contrary, it is the assumption of world as corrective to contingent being that harbors unexamined presuppositions isolating language from world. As Rouse argues:

In saying that what is real is indepen­dent of what we do or say, the realist has a definite picture of the relations between our interpretations of the world and the world
itself. Our interpretations say something definite about the world, which sometimes matches the way the world is and sometimes does not. This is the case not just with our sentences, but with our actions: sometimes what I pick up and (try to) use as a hammer is a hammer, and sometimes it is not. This difference is what accounts for whether the nail goes in or not. Any correspondence or fit between our in­terpretations and their intended objects is therefore contingent.

The problem with this picture is that it takes as already determined both the way the world is and our understanding of how our in­terpretations take it to be. The realist of course recognizes that we do not know in advance how the world is. But once we have some definite interpretations of the world, we can use them as the basis for our actions, which in turn test the adequacy of our interpretations. If our actions fail to achieve their aims, something must be wrong with the interpretations they were based on. If our actions succeed, this success
of course does not entail that their underlying interpretations do accord with the reality they interpret. But if a wide variety of actions in differing circumstances generally succeed, the best explanation for their success is that those interpretations at least approximately ac­cord with the way those objects really are.

But where do we acquire our understanding of what cur various interpretations do say about the world and of what would count as success in our actions? The realist needs to give some account of understanding such that we can understand how our interpretations take the world to be independent of how the world actually is. Otherwise the alleged independence of object and interpretation can never get off the ground. Sentences and practices do not have ready-made meanings, nor do they acquire meaning by convention. (How could the parties involved understand what they were agreeing to?) They acquire meaning only in their performance or use.

The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics. It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules — Apustimelogist

Maybe you would agree that the brain idea must incorporate into its assumptions that natural scientific concepts such as functioning brain, neuron and physical law are not the product of human observation and representation of a world independent of our representations, but practices of interaction with others in the world. This does not mean that human linguistic practices are somehow ontologically prior to the biological history which gave rise to them, it means that we can’t legitimize biological facts on a different basis (empirical realism, instrumentalism) than we would the meaning products of language games. I think Wittgenstein would agree with Rouse’s critique of instrumentalism .

The distinction between the observable and the unobservable is a pragmatic one that has no ontological implications. Observation and observability should not play an important role in an account of science. Philosophers of science have traditionally thought of science as a system of representation, whose aim is to describe accurately a world that is indifferent to how it is represented. Observation was important because it provided the only link between the world as we represented it to be and the world itself. Only in sense experience does the world impinge upon us in a way that constrains the possibilities for representing it. Thus we have Quine’s claim as typical: “Whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence.” Things look considerably different from my perspective. The question is not how we get from a linguistic representation of the world to the world represented. We are already engaged with the world in practical activity, and the world simply is what we are involved with. The question of access to the world, to which the appeal to observation was a response, never arises.

I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be a metaphysical vision of truth, as opposed to one where: "all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ in our speech," or of truth being in a way dependent on hinge propositions for its existence — Count Timothy von Icarus

Heidegger’s notion of the truth of Being was a deconstruction of metaphysics, the positing of the mutual interdependence of word and world.

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

It's a common American (and I assume elsewhere) social trope/meme whatever you wish to call it that a teen with a car is "cool" or otherwise desirable to his peers versus someone who does not and has to walk or take a scooter. So it's about being in possession of the greatest item or object desirable to society, mostly for superficial reasons, but also supported by the factual beneficial and general status reasons that come with. Isn't it? — Outlander

Apparently times have changed.

https://theweek.com/tech/gen-z-cars-driving-less

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/05/teen-not-interested-in-driving-theyre-not-alone/

https://nypost.com/2024/05/26/lifestyle/gen-z-teens-largely-put-the-brakes-on-driving-signaling-seismic-shift-in-us-car-culture-study/

Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find useful has causes/explanations outside of social practices themselves. There is no need to divide the mind and world at all. The world is indeed sovereign, because minds are part of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I follow the thinking of the poststructuralists, of Nietzsche, and his heirs (Foucault , Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida). They dispute the claim that language is not social practice and expectation ‘all the way down’. But by social they do not mean the practices of a biological being called ‘human’. Their notion of the primacy of language and the social is pre-personal, pre-humanistic. It applies equally to all phenomena of ‘nature’ but requires a different understanding of materiality, one that is agential rather than reductively causal ( check out Karen Barad’s ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ or Joseph Rouse’s ‘Articulating the World’).

It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness. From whence usefulness? Usefulness is defined in terms of nature and then nature is defined in terms of expectations and usefulness. Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The criterion and meaning of being wrong can only be defined from within the very practices which define a certain sense of usefulness. When we abandon a particular set of social practices, a particular language game, we arrive at a new sense of usefulness , and with it new criteria of right and wrong. So we are wrong all the time, but what this means is not something that gets its justification from outside of the practices that determine the bounds of validation.

Presumably the evolution and individual development of each functioning brain depends on physics, chemistry, etc., and presumably no language games existed before individuals with brains, so the point stands that something sits prior to usefulness. Brains don't spring from the void uncaused, and what constitutes proper function for a human brain is dependent upon "how the world is." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Trying to ground language games in the sovereignty of empirical truth (how the world is) misunderstands the larger metaphysical implications of the concept of language games, reducing them to the human side of a mind-world divide and treating world as sovereign legitimator.

While the IEP has articles about every philosopher you might think of, there is none for Marx, while there is one for socialism — Lionino

And what are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, chopped liver?

But the ‘I’ , and with it the world it makes sense of, changes its meaning completely , but subtly, every moment. You are not the same you from moment to moment , so blaming whoever came before ‘you’ makes about as much sense as blaming the you of yesterday for your current woes. You have a chance to start over again with each tick of the clock, because it s a subtly different you and a subtly different world
— Joshs

And yet people feel they can't start again because they are on a loop. Habits seem to become compulsion. How do we work with this? — Tom Storm

Habits aren’t automatisms. They continually adjust themselves to changing circumstances. It isn’t habits that keep us from transforming ourselves but the lack of intelligibility of potential alternative ways of living. Even though it is the case that self and world are changing in subtle ways from moment to moment, we can’t move forward coherently without some resonance between the new and the old. There is such a thing as continuing to be the same differently. In fact, it only occurs to us to begin labeling our alway of life in negative terms as a habit , as boring, as being stuck in place, when it has already being to change. ways that are unrecognizable to us. We use words like stagnant and boring to refer to this incipient alienness that keeps us from moving forward.

I am assuming this holds if you believe that we are on some kind of eternal cycle. And/or that death is not the end. But if there is a loop we pick up again, doesn't this suggest being is ongoing and consistent in some way? A ceaseless cycle of boredom and suffering. Are you hinting at a Nietzschean solution to recurrence — Tom Storm

The cycling is between modes of creativity, between phases of life where we know how to go on creatively and phases where we are stuck in place as a result of not knowing how to make sense of our circumstances.

Here in Chicago it is a constant battle between the forces of motocentrism and those advocating for pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Chicago has enough density and a good enough public transportation that one can get by without a car, but some neighborhoods are more pedestrian-friendly than others. Thefirst attempts at taking back the streets from the automobile occurred with the creation of urban malls in the 1970’s. Downtown’s State st was closed off to cars, but this proved disastrous in Chicago as well as many smaller communities who ‘mallified’ their main street. More recent attempts have been on a smaller scale, including the use of speed bumps, the narrowing of streets and the expansion of bike lanes. Also helpful have been multilevel parking structures in place of street level seas of asphalt, and the addition of planters, playgrounds and benches.
Here’s some other innovative ideas:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/superblocks-barcelona-cities-congestion/?itid=hp_mv-top-stories_opinions_p003_f001

Marx as well was a drunkard who had an illegitimate child with his maid, whom his best friend Engels had to take fatherhood of, his best friend who constantly had to give Marx money because he couldn't bother to support his own family. Not to speak of Marx's poems where he claims to have struck a deal with Satan — Lionino

Marx isn’t one of my favorite thinkers, but this just comes across as ad hominem gossip. I don’t quite see what Marx’s personal life has to do with his political philosophy. Unless you can connect the two maybe you should focus on his ideas.

However, given that the sky is blue, it is true to say that there is a fact of the matter that makes the statement "the sky is blue" true… our access to - no, better, our practices in - a world "outside" language does ground meaning. I think the game may be differently played in fields like mathematics and logic - though even there, there are facts that kick us in the face; we are not simply in control. IMO — Ludwig V

The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense, but why it matters to us and in what context it becomes an issue. Is it a declaration, an observation, a response to question? I dont believe that for Wittgenstein we ever have access to a world outside discursive practices, which is not the same thing as saying that our discursive practices are hermetically sealed within themselves and closed off to an outside. As Joseph Rouse remarks:

There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.“

Intuition explains nothing. Drill (learning what to do by repetition) is the explanation. That's the basis of practices. — Ludwig V

Do we learn what to do by repetition, and then just do it? Doesn’t the habit then become a picture we consult, albeit reflexively or unconsciously? At one point Wittgenstein described following a rule as a crossing of pictures. I think this captures what using a rule (or a word) consists in better than being trained in a habit that then dictates what we do. A crossing of pictures is not the consulting of an inner intuition, or an already structured habitual way of proceeding. It’s a creative invention that melds previous training and experience with novel circumstances to produce something new, not the repetition of a habit.

One is always playing a game that one did not and cannot choose. Accepting suffering is just the default because we have not killed ourselves — schopenhauer1

Who is this ‘one’? Schopenhauer made the mistake of thinking the ‘I’ who wills as a metaphysical subject. But the ‘I’ , and with it the world it makes sense of, changes its meaning completely , but subtly, every moment. You are not the same you from moment to moment , so blaming whoever came before ‘you’ makes about as much sense as blaming the you of yesterday for your current woes. You have a chance to start over again with each tick of the clock, because it s a subtly different you and a subtly different world. The question is what are you going to do with that opportunity? I happen to think that the concept of non-being is a metaphysical chimera, a notion of death as pure nothingness that we invented and used as either a source of threat or comfort. But it is a human-invented illusion which only exists when we summon it as a thought. And when we summon it, it is fraught with suffering because built into the concept is a reminder that we currently fail to achieve what it promises. Imagine killing yourself , only to pick up right where you left off, with all your sufferings, questions, imperfects, but without the memory of your past history. I think something lien that is closer to the case than the metaphysical notion of pure nothingness. Them d of peace you’re looking for in the metaphysics of pure nothingness can only be found by getting in tune with the continual flow of change. Transcendence of suffering is an active, dynamic achievement that must be continually repeated. It’s about discovering the unities, patterns, relations in the flow.