It also explains why Popper managed to understand so much on his own, and open the way to Kuhn in the process. — Olivier5

What Popper specifically did not understand was the idea behind the paradigm, that worldviews, scientific and otherwise, function as integrated gestalts, and when a gestalt shift takes place, no amount of plain speaking will produce comprehension if the person has not achieved this shift in worldview.
Popper denied that change in theoretical ideas takes place this way because he remained wedded to a correspondence view of truth.

So, it's better to follow Popper's advice:

If you can't say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you c — Amalac

That explains why Popper never understood Kuhn.

No he’s not.
— Joshs

Unh hunh. Is too.
3h — T Clark

Tell you what. You give me a list of who you consider to be leading suspects for unreadable philosophy , and I will summarize, simplify, and link their work to social scientists who have embraced them. Since your beef isn’t with empirical writing but only philosophy , you will presumably have no problem correctly interpreting the empirical ideas of these scientists. My expectation is that you will have trouble doing precisely that. Becuase the problem isn’t so much with the style of writing of philosophers, it’s with the content. It’s essentially the same content in the hands of the scientists who embrace them, just expressed in amore conventionalized language. This may give the illusion of readability, but that’s deceptive.

He only demands that people explain these ideas the way a physicist or a biologist could explain some aspects of what they work on in simple terms. Here's an article he wrote about postmodernism: — Manuel

What makes an idea ‘simple’? The fact that you understand it? Isn’t that circular? If someone tries
their best to simply their philosophy and you still don’t understand it then the onus is on them? Where is the recognition of the possibility that the concepts behind the language are the problem, that they are beyond one’s comprehension?

You are much, much, much too kind to and understanding of most philosophers. — T Clark

No he’s not. Possibly you give up too easily and end up blaming the writer for your own conceptual struggles? Actually , we can blame Anglo-American culture for not preparing us to make our way through Continental philosophy. I had to do it on my own and it was an enormous struggle for me. I was suspicious of it ,and thought it inferior to empirical writing. Took me quite a while to change my mind.

Contrast with this the case of Kant: some of his ideas are quite hard to understand, but when you ask kantians or philosophers who are more or less knowledgeable about his works to explain them, they usually can give a more or less satisfactory explanation of them in simpler terms. The same cannot be said about many postmodernists.

So, it's better to follow Popper's advice:

If you can't say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can — Amalac

This is silly. Of course one can simplify Kant for today’s laymen. The man wrote 200 years ago. His ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream by now. Even the business community teaches ideas influenced by him. Try going back 200 years and simplifying him for the average person of the late 1700’s. He would have appeared as incoherent as Derrida does to many today.

I don’t find the writing style of Heidegger or any number of other contemporary philosophers to be unnecessarily opaque. The problem is that they were ahead of their time, and the developed a vocabulary that only makes sense if one has already arrived at that future world. If you’re going g to compare philosophy and science , then recognize how often it happens that a new philosophical work is dismissed and ignored for decades by academics who blame the author’s style rather than their own limitations.
Then suddenly the philosopher is rediscovered by a new generation of scientists who are ready to absorb what the philosopher was saying. This is happening now with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. A new generation of thinkers in cognitive science have embraced their views on perception and affectivity(don’t look for Chomsky in this group. He is considered hopelessly out of date ) . You won’t find them bemoaning the inadequacy of the writing style of these philosophers. Why? Because they actually understand them.

We have every reason to believe that because it is the best explanation for a shared world; in fact it is the only explanation apart from some form of idealism; some notion that all minds are somehow conjoined or that there is a universal mind we all partake in.. — Janus

Here are alternatives from those who reject idealism. Maybe you can agree with the gist of their arguments.

From Evan Thompson:

“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 (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), 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. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. The upshot of this line of thought with respect to the hard problem is that this problem should not be made the foundational problem for consciousness studies. The problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and consciousness?' because, to use the language of yet another philosophical tradition, that of Madhyamika Buddhism (Wallace, this volume), natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable (svalaksana); they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations' of intersubjective experience.” (Empathy and Consciousness)

From Dan Zahavi and Hilary Putnam:

Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception?

Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33).

We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

What's an event? Does it involve objects? 'Transformation' implies some thing that is transformed, maintaining its identity in some sense. As another poster has mentioned, this kind of point threatens to 'deconstruct itself,' which is not necessarily a bad thing. — hanaH

I think the key issue here isn’t materiality or objectness but relative stability. The question is, how does a position like Heidegger’s, which claims to deconstruct the self-identical object , achieve stability of meaning? The answer is that an event doesn’t occur into a vacuum , but into an exquisitely organized referential totality. That is precisely what an event is, a way that this totality of relevance changes itself moment to moment. So there is a tremendously intricate and intimate overall coherence from one event to the next. Each event is a subtle variation on an ongoing theme, and it’s very appearance shifts the sense of this theme without rending its pragmatic consistency. This relation between a referential background and new events allows one to say that the world can continue to be the same differently, as an ongoing style.

This is the paradox of this kind of model. On the one hand , it is more radically and immediately transformational than models
positing empirical objects. On the other hand it avoids
the arbitrariness of objective causality. There is a radical
belongingness of one moment to the next that is missing from causal approaches. We tend to assume that it is only by nailing down objects as self-identical that we achieve the possibility of order and stability in our models of the world. And this was true in comparison with pre-modern thinking. But it isn’t self-identically that gives us the order we crave , it’s the extent to which such assumptions facilitate our ability to discern real-time among such entities. The assumption
of self-identicality actually limits the possibilities of relationality that we can find in the world.

He viewed the psyche as a community of selves and a multiplicity of conflicting drives.
— Joshs

Evidence? Where did you get that from. Not refuting it just curious as I've not read all of his stuff. — I like sushi

There’s a good section about the self in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s article about Nietzsche.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

“…the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon:… Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on “the soul” without immediately losing it. But the way is now open for new versions and refinements of the soul hypothesis, [including] “mortal soul”, “soul as subjective multiplicity”, and “soul as social structure of the drives and affects”… (BGE 12)

Imagine that every moment of time things changed. Yeah, you reply, I already get that. So what? What does this have to do with mathematics? No, I mean, not that some aspect of a thing changes, but that everything about the world shifts in some subtle fashion every moment, so that there is no remainder, nothing left behind to compare to what changes , nothing that allows us to say, this change happens against such and such a backdrop of stability. What if we all are dropped into a subtly new world every moment? This is the basis of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thinking. Theirs is a radically temporal , radically pragmatic orientation. Every event is a carrying forward and a transformation of a prior world of referential relations. if you start with such a premise , and take a look at the modern empirical notion of objects as presently occurring entities with duration it should strike you that at some point someone decided to ‘pretend’ that this constantly flowing, changing pragmatic unfolding of world froze itself into ‘objects’ with duration and extension.

If there were no "physical organism-independent basis for this commonality" then what would explain the commonality? A universal mind? — Janus

The basis for this commonality is a reciprocal causality operating between organism and environment . Since other organisms belong to each organism’s environment , there is a complex web of interaction taking place at every level, between the mind and body , between body and environment , and between organisms in a wider environment. All of these levels are nested within one other. The result is that each individual has their own perspective on a world that they share with others. The difference between this enactivist model and physicalism is that the latter creates commonality by correspondence with a presumed already existent reality. The former, however , see the real world not as pre-existing and independent of sense-making organisms , but as a co-produced continual development pragmatically inseparable from an organism’s goals and needs. To ask if a thing exists in the world is to ask how it is pragmatically relevant to my ongoing direction of functioning, how it is useful to me. These are not separate questions but the same question.

What?

If what you are saying is that there must be something to count before one counts, then... well, sure, but I don't see the relevance. — Banno

One must make certain assumptions about this something: namely that it stays put as what it is, that it is res extensia, that it has duration. But nothing in the world stays put as what it is. Moment to moment it transforms itself ever so subtly. Self-identicality is an illusion of sorts. This is my point, as stated differently by Husserl and Heidegger:

For Husserl, extension, duration and magnitude are all implied by the idealizing thinking of self-identical objects. The ideal geometry of a line made possible the empirical intuitions pertaining to various characteristics of number.


“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 , its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. Purely mathematical thinking is related to possible objects which are thought determinately through ideal-"exact" mathematical (limit-) concepts, e.g., spatial shapes of natural objects which, as experienced, stand in a vague way under shape-concepts and [thus] have their
shape-determinations; but it is of the nature of these experiential data that one can and by rights must posit, beneath the identical object which exhibits itself in harmonious experience as existing, an ideally identical object which is ideal in all its determinations; all [its]
determinations are exact —that is, whatever [instances] fall under their generality are equal—and this equality excludes inequality; or, what is the same thing, an exact determination, in belonging to an object, excludes the possibility that this determination not belong to the
same object.”

“ In this sphere of magnitudes, and initially of spatial magnitudes—first of all in classes of privileged cases (straight lines, limited plane figures, and the corresponding cases of spatial magnitudes), first of all in the empirical intuition that magnitudes divide into equal parts and are composed again of equal parts—or of aggregates of like elements which decompose into
partial aggregates and can be expanded into new aggregates through the addition of elements or
of aggregates of such elements—in this sphere, there arose the "exact" comparisons of magnitudes which led back to the comparison of numbers. Upon the vague "greater," "smaller," "more," 'less," and the vague "equal" one could determinately superimpose the exact "so much" greater or less, or "how many times" greater or less, and the exact "equal."
Every such exact consideration presupposed the possibility of stipulating an equality which excluded the greater and the smaller and of stipulating units of magnitude which were strictly substitutable for one another, were identical as magnitudes, i.e., which stood under an identical concept or essence of magnitude.”

“Thus it was possible to conceive of processes converging idealiter through which an absolute
equal could be constructed ideally as the limit of the constant approach to equality, provided that one member [of the system] was thought of as absolutely fixed, as absolutely identical with itself in magnitude. In this exact thinking with ideas one operated with ideal concepts of the unchanging, of rest, of lack of qualitative change, with ideal concepts of equality and of the
general (magnitude, shape) that gives absolute equalities in any number of ideally unchanged and thus qualitatively identical instances; every change was constructed out of phases which were looked upon as momentary, exact, and unchanging, having exact magnitudes, etc.”

Husserl and Heidegger share a focus on Galileo as originator of modern mathematical science based on an idealization of geometric spatio-temporality as objective bodies in causal interaction. Heidegger traces the origin of empirical science to the concept of enduring substance.

“Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense. This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his
ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”

counting is something we do, not something we discover.

Its a way of talking about stuff. The way of talking is made up. The stuff isn't. — Banno

But there must first be a peculiar way of thinking about stuff before it makes sense to calculate and measure. We must assume stuff is objectively self -persistent in some fashion. It would make no sense to ‘count’ some variable aspect unless that aspect belonged to something that did not vary during the counting. So even the ‘stuff’ rendered as identically self-persisting is made up (an idealization)

It beats me why people want to deny that there is a physical environment that we share with others, as well as with other kinds of physical entities, who perceive pretty much the same persistent features of the environment as we do. — Janus

One can agree that in very general terms higher animals perceive pretty much the same persistent features of the environment as we do without having to then conclude that there is such a thing as a ‘physical’, organism -independent basis for this commonality. Analytic philosophers fou sit necessary to jettison the ‘myth of the given’ , the idea that we directly perceive the stuff of the world unmediated by our own schemes . Phenomology didn’t deny that we perceive an ‘out there’. They only denied that the ‘out there’ come packages as physical stuff. Enactivists say that each organism co-creates its environment in relation to its needs , goals and aims as an ongoing environmental
process. So each specie’s world is in some sens u inquest to its own functional goals.

When I throw the ball for my dog he can obviously see the ball, he tracks it as it flies through the air and usually manages to be within a meter or two of it when it hits the ground. — Janus

I haven’t read up on this , but if your dog watches you attach something to the side of an object he can’t directly see, will he know that there is another side of the object and look for it there? Will he discern the general
direction and distance of the ball from watching the arc and force of your throw? Research says yes, dogs are capable of object permanence, and cats may also have this ability, but not generally lower animals. Whether he has these skills or not, my point is that it is these and many many other kinds of correlations that determine the very meaning of ‘object’ for an animal. Of course, in many ways a dog is quite close to a human in intelligence , but some differences are obvious.Most Human facial expressions are meaningless to a dog , as is a pointing feature. Now, these are admittedly meanings are are much more sophisticated than those involved in recognizing and tracking objects. But I think you will find all kinds of subtle and not so subtle differences between rabbits and birds and snakes and fish in terms of how ‘objectness’ functions for them.

This is where you lose me. I do not understand what you mean. That the LEM is not universally applicable, that it has a clear domain of applicability here but not there? If yes then ok, it's consistent with the above about propositions being true in certain contexts and not others.
3h — Olivier5

Yes, that’s pretty much what I mean. I think the issue here is that the later Wittgenstein seems to be wanting to radicalize the notion of context such that it no longer allows for categories of use. That is to say , he seems to want to make every situation , for every individual, it’s own context. In doing so , he rejects the coherence of rules, grammars, criteria as categories with any existence outside of particular situations and seen from
particular individual perspectives. So , in sum , if one understands context in a formal categorical sense, then the LEM is applicable in some contexts
and not in others. But if one equates context with absolute situational and perspectival contingency , then the LEM can no longer find the minimal categorical identity over time in the idea of context necessary for it to contribute anything useful.

material things are sensed, even animals find themselves in an environment comprised of material entities which, judging from their behavior, they must see much as we do (although obviously they don't conceive of them as material entities). — Janus

What animals ( and humans) ‘sense’ , once we have removed all the higher level constructions that make phenomena appear for us as self-persisting things in a geometric space-time, is a constantly changing, chaotic flux of impressions. Out of this steaming flux we discern regularities and correlations, not just in the changes happening in our environment, but in the relation between these changes and the movements of our body. An ‘object’ is the product of all these correlations and regularities. Most of what we see at any moment ina spatial object is provided by our own expectations based on previous experience with something similar. We mostly construct the object from memory and anticipation. So the idea of spatial objects is an idealization based on actual experience which is contingent and relative.
It is not a fact that objects persist in time , it is a presupposition, and one which is necessary in order for there to be naturalistic empirical science and mathematical calculation.

What kind of existence does a material object have? A material existence. What kind of existence does conceptual information have? A conceptual existence. This is all just a matter of words as I see it. — Janus

The interesting thing is that materiality is already ‘conceptual’ through and through in that the very notion of an empirical object is a complex perceptual construction , an idealization. Furthermore , it is this idealizing abstraction at the heart of our ideas of the spatial object that makes the mathematical
possible. They are parasitic on and presuppose each other.

And how would you write down Wittgenstein's proposal that we should happily welcome contradictions in mathematics, syntactically and semantically? What sort of axiom would that translate into, in your opinion? — Olivier5

I see Heidegger’s approach here as overlapping Wittgenstein’s. Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance.

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are:
board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the
context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the
as-character does not become explicit in the act.”

“What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more
precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something." In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together. If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a
theme of ontological interpretation."

What Heidegger is saying is that the sense of S is P is always framed and situated within a wider context. Things are the case or not the case within this wider sense-making space, which is context-sensitive. The bottom line is that the meaningful
sense of S is P is a moving target , and what the LEM does is delimit how much the sense of the meaning of the proposition can vary before it becomes incoherent. At that point we blame each other for misunderstanding the definitions.

Which empiricism generally resists, on the grounds that humans are born 'tabula rasa', a blank slate, on which ideas are inscribed by experience. — Wayfarer

Well, there’s metaphysical , or ‘naive’ realism , which tends to be linked with Enlightenment associationism, and then there’s representational realism , which is often associated with neo-Kantianism. The former was consistent with behavioristic approaches in psychology , while the latter is compatible with cognitive science. Embodied versions of cog sci reject tabula rasa in favor of a cognizing subject already pre-situated by virtue of both learned schemata and inborn predispositions. And yet it considers itself a fully naturalistic empiricism.

For Will, imo, he was considering it as the most important "natural" power we have as to change ourselves and break our spiritual limits.Becoming Ubermensch eventually. — dimosthenis9

But how do we change ourselves in such a way that we don’t end up simply regurgitating variations on old themes? We can’t simply deign to change ourselves in accord with our pre-existing purposes and goals. That was the old view of human progress, the movement along a pre-determined axis. But you’re not achieving real change and becoming until you learn to turn the frame on its head , to turn what seemed within the old scheme like evil into good and what seemed like good into evil. The Ubermensch performs gestalt shifts. He is not just another idealist toady aiming at ‘personal growth’.

Do you have a few thoughts on how you think he saw 'my will' working? — Tom Storm

Good question.

On the one hand, Nietzsche stressed the plural and differentiated nature of psychic drives. On the other hand , he seemed to suggest this multiplicity of drives could be harmonized by some overarching cognitive structure into a unified Will to Power. But I dont think that means the overman settles for a final value system. Rather, the overman’s mastery of the Will to Power, as I see it, amounts to channeling all the psyche’s competing drives into a endlessly open embrace of novelty, contradiction , diversity and becoming.

“But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection.”(Geneology of Morality)

What is "self"? Presumably, what (individual) "consciousness" identifies with, e.g., body, emotions, thoughts, etc.

But can consciousness be aware of itself beyond that? If yes, what is the object of that awareness? How could it be described or conceived? — Apollodorus

My favorite thinkers say self is not an entity , not a specific content , but a relation. We often use the word ‘self’ to talk about a unified multiplicity. We say a configuration is self-consistent or self-organized. We do t mean self here as a pure identity, but the way a process of change is consistent with ‘itself’ over time. Body, emotions, thoughts all belong to and at expressions of such an ongoing process of change.

irrespective of what other deem as 'good' or 'bad,' or 'right' or 'wrong' I should act as my will dictates and follow my path for my reasons not those imposed upon me by ideologies that possess people en masse.

I'm very fond of Nietzsche's views in this regard as they generally articulate a lot about how I view the world at large. — I like sushi

It gets complicated for Nietzsche when you try and parse what ‘my will’ refers to. Nietzsche rejects the r idea of a unitary self or thinking ‘I’. He viewed the psyche as a community of selves and a multiplicity of conflicting drives. He even broke up the act of willing into a a tension between a commanding and an obeying. This certainly isn’t the ‘self’ and the ‘will’ of an autonomous subjectivity.

I've read of some scientific papers recently that indicate that children have at least a preliminary understanding of number from a very young age. This leads to the hypothesis that a sense of number is inborn, instinctual, just as our ability to learn and use language is. — T Clark

The thing about notions like ‘inborn’ and ‘instinctual’ is that they don’t differentiate between whole hog pre-formed contents and a capacity to learn to construct in stages a complex activity. Language and number I think are good examples of phenomena that can be understood in either way. Chomsky and Fodor belong to the ‘whole hog innate content’ group, believing inborn semantic as well as syntactic contents.

The thing about number and calculation is that they are not one simple thing , but mean different things in different cultural eras. Even when we begin from an agreed upon definition of number , observing the performance of very young children doesn’t tell us how much perceptual constructive activity was necessary for that child to get to the point where concepts like object and multiplicity made sense for them.

In what sense do you mean "...reports don't match"? It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. Are you Alice (in wonderland)? — TheMadFool

No, he’s a perceiving organism. Most of what perceive doesn’t come directly fro the world but from our expectations. See Noe and O’Reagan’s work on visual
perception.

I love these illusions. But they have much less to do with geometry than they do with how we use our background knowledge of perspective to fill in shapes. Artists can figure out the ‘trick’ quicker than most of the rest of us. But then maybe that makes it a good illustration of mathematical
contradiction in Wittgenstein’s sense after all.

When you find out that your cellphone cannot cut the grass, does your cellphone become useless to you? — Olivier5

No, but my sense of its usefulness changes. Logical propositions have to do with things being the case or not. So they presuppose that the things we are passing judgement on just sit there being what there are indepdently of our judgements about them. This way of looking at logical propositions doesn’t recognize that before something can be the case or not, there has to be agreement on the sense of what it is to be a ‘case’. That is to say, words have an infinity of potential senses , and which sense is being generated is a function of the context of use. Logic can pretend that such constant subtle shifts in sense do not exist because they don’t often amount to enough of a disagreement to become noticeable. For most intents and purposes , we can assume that we are all on the same page when inquiring whether something is the case or not. But this is because the generality of logic was designed to mask these usually subtle interpersonal( and infra-personal)
differences. The law of excluded middle is thus a kind of useful fiction.

No models, nothign between "the cat is on the mat" being true and the cat 's being on the mat.

IS that right? — Banno

But then we have to wade into the messiness of ‘use’. The cat is on the mat is no less complicated than the sense of any particular word. How is it being used in a particular context? We’d have run through a potential infinity of such uses before we came upon that use in which the concept of ‘truth’ becomes relevant. But having done so , what can we conclude about the status of ‘truth’? Can we save some sense of it that doesn’t get sucked down into the relativity of use? Is ‘true’ just another thing we say in certain contexts for certain purposes?

We don’t have to drop the law of the excluded middle, it deconstructs itself.
— Joshs

Ridiculous — Olivier5

Did you read the Wittgenstein quote? Do you understand what he’s trying to say?

Semblances add to the interesting features of experience. — Bitter Crank

I would argue that semblances account for ALL of what we take as objective nature. Without the work of semblance there would be no natural world of recognizable objects, only a chaotic flux.

think such thought experiments show what the rationalists have argued for, namely, that objects induce in us the capacity to be affected in a certain manner. I — Manuel

They made a good starting point, but reified the issue in terms of objective causation. The phenomenologists made much ore headway here , which is why their analyses have been taken up in cognitive science.

Let’s take Reid’s example below.

if you are walking down a street and hear the sound of a horse pulling a wagon and then you turn around and look at it, the sound produced does not resemble the objects producing it. — Manuel

Phenomenology begins far back from
constituted objects like wagons , to the conditions of possibility of objects in general. Something as simple as spatial object is the product of a complex process of constitution beginning with constantly changing visual phenomena with no unity and then proceeds by our perceiving correlated patterns that we eventually idealize as ‘this object’. Along the way , we not only have to correlate input form sense modalities other than the visual, but more crucially, we have to link the movement of our body, eyes , head with changes in the perspective of the object. How will the object change when we move our head to the left, for instance. The final achievement of object recognition consists of a seamlessly fused concatenation of memory, anticipation and actual expereince. Most of what we see is not there in front of us but filled in by us. Resemblance plays a crucial
role all along the way here. What is closely similar becomes unified for us.

Hi there. Here’s a bunch of Gendlin quotes pertinent to the topic:

“ The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing
directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”

“ In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet
formed and happened.” (Response to Hatab, Lieberman, etc)

“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities. Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's
implying of behavior possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere
nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person.

Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social. The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information,
public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society.”

Wittgenstein and I both think that mathematical inconsistencies are meaningless. I think. Maybe. I think that's what the article said — T Clark

The liar's paradox, like all logical paradoxes, has a simple non paradoxical solution. It's only an apparent paradox. So of course it can't break bridges or lead to poorly conceived ones. — Olivier5

I don’t think the solution you have in mind has anything to do with what Wittgenstein was trying to illustrate here.

happily or even casually allowing contradictions in math is equivalent to dropping the law of the excluded middle from mathematical logic, with far reaching consequences. — Olivier5

We don’t have to drop the law of the excluded middle, it deconstructs itself.

“ In the decimal expansion of TT either the group "7777"
occurs, or it does not—there is no third possibility." That is to say:
"God sees—but we don't know." But what does that mean?—We use a picture; the picture of a visible series which one person sees the whole of and another not. The law of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So it really—and this is a truism—says nothing at all, but gives us a picture. And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how—but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied. Here saying "There is no third possibility" or "But there can't be a third possibility!"—expresses our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture: a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its solution, while all the time we feel that it is not so.”
(Philosophical Investigations 352)

It seems strange to say that we made up numbers like e or π. We don't know what the 10000000000000 trillion digit of e is, yet if we invented e shouldn't we know that? — Amalac

e and like are less numbers than they are recursive processes. We made up the process. To be more precise, all our mathematics is parasitic on our notion of the object, which is why modern mathematics emerged in tandem with the modern scientific notion of the empirical object. Empirical objects (not just perfect circles ) are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations. Such idealizations made mathematical calculation possible.

It's another example of people mistaking words for reality, the map for the territory. — T Clark

Except that Wittgenstein rejected the idea that words represent reality and maps represent territories.

What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn't need to understand rules to follow them — Richard B

And what Wittgenstein saw , and Turing and Dennett did not , was that the computer’s actions mean nothing without an interpreter.

One of the [to me] more interesting corners to root around in is back-tracking from the current set of beliefs of either side to constructing a coherent underlying philosophy — Torus34

I think this Atlantic piece does a pretty good job of identifiying the major ideologies involved:

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619012/

What strikes me as ironic is this would be the view my uneducated grandmother would hold. It's very commonsensy and relies on a very literal interpretation of experience. — Tom Storm

What a coincidence. I was just reading a review of a compilation of essays by Devitt, which concluded:

‘Putting Metaphysics First is a nicely written defence of (what Jerry Fodor might call) Granny’s philosophy.’

What an excellent paper. — StreetlightX

Do you have any significant problems with the following , or are you in general agreement with its sentiments?

‘[tokens] of the most commonsense, and scientific, physical types objectively exist independently
of the mental. Realism about ordinary objects is confirmed day by day in our experience . . . Given this strong case for Realism, we should give it up only in the face of powerful arguments against it and for an alternative. There are no such arguments.’