From George Kelly, 1962:

“A good deal is said these days about being oneself. It is supposed to be healthy to be oneself. While it is a little hard for me to understand how one could be anything else, I suppose what is meant is that one should not strive to become anything other than what he is. This strikes me as a very dull way of living; in fact, I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are. Well, I'm not so sure we would all be better off – perhaps it would be more accurate to say life would be a lot more interesting.

There is another meaning that might be attached to this admonition to be oneself; that one should not try to disguise himself. I suspect this comes nearer to what psychologists mean when they urge people to be themselves. It is presumed that the person who faces the world barefaced is more spontaneous, that he expresses himself more fully, and that he has a better chance of developing all his resources if he assumes no disguises.

But this doctrine of psychological nakedness in human affairs, so much talked about today and which allows the self neither make-up nor costume, leaves very little to the imagination. Nor does it invite one to be venturesome.

What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders what he really is – whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. It may be helpful at this point to ask ourselves a question about children at Halloween. Is the little youngster who comes to your door on the night of October 30th, all dressed up in his costume and behind a mask, piping "trick or treat, trick or treat" – is that youngster disguising himself or is he revealing himself? Is he failing to be spontaneous? Is he not being himself?”

So you agree with me that an emotion needs to be processed in order for us to interpret and define an "upset" under a specific feeling ? — Nickolasgaspar

I would put it this way. Rather than assuming an unformed pattern of sensations ( negative or positive) arising out of core physiological bodily maintenance processes that only later undergoes higher perceptual processing and is turned into a feeling through our interpretation of it, emotion , affect and feeling are indissociable aspects of an integral organizational feature of cognitive-affective systems. That is to say, the cognitive system is normatively driven toward goal-directed aims. Affectivity arises out of that integral process. Experience is always relevant and significant to us moment to moment in relation to our goals , and feeling always accompanies that experience as the expression of the particular ways in which the world is significant to us.

what makes us believe that we have that conversation any differently with ourselves than we would with someone else? — Antony Nickles

I agree with you completely. I just wanted to make sure you thought about it this way.

I do not "know" my own pain, I feel it/I express it (there is no space for knowledge between pain and its expression). — Antony Nickles

What does Witt make of the various ways feelings are experienced? We can imagine a feeling, remember a feeling, experience a vague sensation that is ambiguous and sets us off on trying to differentiate whether it is a tickle, pain or pleasure sensation. We may even be confused as to whether we are having a perception or a feeling. When I say to my self after some exploration , ‘Ah, that really was pain rather than tickle’, or when I correct an initial impression and say. to myself ‘I only imagined that pain’, what have I done? It seems in all cases of having a feeling , we are not dealing with something immediate but a mediated event , and therefore languaged in a certain respect.

emotions need a narrative, a theory to become and be understood as feelings. — Nickolasgaspar

I am disputing the idea that an emotion prior to an interpretive construal is a coherent notion.

Predictive processing approaches are quite popular these days. What I think is most valuable in them is their understanding of feeling in terms of prediction of events."
-I don't really understand what that means. Are you talking from a Psychiatric perspective? — Nickolasgaspar

Are you familiar with Lisa Barrett’s work on affect and emotion? This is what I’m mainly drawing from.

-Well that a scientific description that describes the evolution of an organic stimuli from an affect to a full blown concept that offers meaning to a thinking agent who acts on meaning.
So not only it hold ups its an essential framework in the role of emotions in the content of our conscious states — Nickolasgaspar

I am comparing one scientific framework (representational, computational realism) with another (embodied enactivism). Both offer theories of affect, feeling and emotion, but the enactivist approach rejects representationalism and predictive processing’s arbitrary separation of brain from body and body from environment.

Predictive processing approaches are quite popular these days. What I think is most valuable in them is their understanding of feeling in terms of prediction of events.Howver, I don’t think the claim to distinguish between emotion, affect and feeling in terms of distinct functional systems will hold up. They are all instead inseparably interconnected.

Some of the most complex kinds of adult human interaction are in large part built upon them: perception and infant/child imprinting on caregivers (and the characteristics of such). We don't learn to perceive and we don't learn that we need to become attached to specific caregivers as young children (and, thereby, to their system of values which we tend to grow up with as individual humans). — javra

I don’t see why we need the assumption of such a pre-wired imprinting to explain the huge variety of adult social relations. All that’s needed is the assumption of humans as sense making creatures. Without. imprinting, how would social relations be different?

There have been some recent attempts to divide their points of view, but I personally find them unconvincing. — sime

There are certainly some significant differences between Quine and Wittgenstein , such as their divergent views on the continuity of philosophy and science.

. From our innate ability to engage in basic perception (e.g. of a basic behavior) to our innate imprinting on caregivers (e.g. of a complex instinctive behavior), innate activities in humans still play an important part of our behavior as a species. — javra

Are you arguing that pre-wired innate structures play a central role in the most complex kinds of adult human interactions? Could you give examples of this?

Can these alternative accounts reasonably explain why humans which were not exposed to language in their preadolescent years cannot learn to speak grammatically correct language? — javra

There are a lot of capacities that we learn much more effectively in early childhood than in adulthood, such as a foreign accent and perceptual skills. . This would seem to be more a matter of the neural plasticity of a young brain rather than the effect of innate structures.

Language formation occurs as the result of a priori rules hard wired into our DNA. I — Hanover

There are plenty of approaches within psycholinguistics that offer alternatives to this Chomskyesque view of language. Embodied and enactivist models embrace the later Wittgenstein while rejecting innatist and representationalist theoreis of language.

which is worst, false wisdom, false knowledge, or false information? — Ioannis Kritikos

uninformative OP’s

I'm not sure the prisonors in the concentration camps in nazi Germany agreed. The showers they had to take wasn't a real stimulation of personal growth or changing worldview. — Thunderballs

Victor Frankl might have agreed. Some of the central
insights of his existential therapy were gleaned during his concentration camp experience. The notes
for Wittgenstein’s tractatus were written while he was a soldier on the front lines in W War I.

Any and all experiences, no matter how horrendous , are opportunities for personal growth and wisdom. That’s because time does t reverse itself.

It's a well known "fact": economy needs growth. But what's the thought behind t — Thunderballs

What is it we are talking about when we speak of the needs of an economy, and how should we define growth?
Ostensibly, an economy is a proxy for individuals. So what do i docudals need in an economic sense? The need what goods and services provide value to them, including basics like food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Of course, people need other items of value , only some of which can be monetized or directly measured in terms of the standard measures of economic activity. Others, like satisfying relationships , may not be directly measured i. economic terms but nevertheless may be inseparable from economic phenomena.

But let’s say that indices of economic growth are a rise a s i axcueqte way of measuring what we’re really after, which is growth in personal satisfaction.

Many would argue that there is no correlation between
personal happiness and economic growth, and certainly none between the historical evolution of technology and happiness. Romantics would claim that those living simpler economies from the past ( tribal, agricultural) may in fact have led happier lives.

Let me offer a restricted definition of personal growth here and the. relate it to economic growth. This notion of personal growth is about the development of sense-making. According to this way of thinking, all forms of human creativity ( scientific, philosophical , political, arts and music ) undergo historical development in tandem , as aspects of larger worldviews that replace older ones and are overthrown by newer ones.

Even though this is no linear progress , I will call it personal growth. I’m fact , I suggest that it is the most important variable over longer periods of time on which personal growth depends. The question now is what is the connection between economic growth and the evolution of worldviews. I think it’s tru that there can be no evolution of worldviews without technological innovation, but but technological growth doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it implies , and has no priority over , growth in all other aspects of culture.

Some believe that reversals of economic growth automatically imply stagnation or reversal of cultural development , but since the development of worldviews is knowledge-based, can there ever be a reversal in knowledge? Have any large cultures in recent history forgotten the knowledge they were based on, or failed to undergo further cultural development? Certainly some
cultures seem to transform themselves
more rapidly that others, but isn’t there continuous transmission and transformation going on in even the most seemingly stagnant cultures?

This is a particularly significant question because in the era of climate change , there is widespread anticipation
of slowdown in worldwide economic growth.

My claim is that transom is ok and transformation of cultural knowledge does not require economic growth as measured in standard ways. As long as the means remains to transmit extant knowledge , there will be growth of knowledge, because the first presupposes the second. This implies that even in the most stressed economic conditions personal growth will continue as a consequence of the continued change in worldviews.

Enjoy

I definitely would have a problem with this reading of Wittgenstein. — Sam26

This is the ‘postmodern’ reading that authors like Cavell, Cora Diamond and James Conant endorse. Also , Baker, who along with Peter Hacker, produced a series of works on Wittgenstein in the 1980’s which have been taken as authoritative by many academics( and seems to be consistent with your perspective), rejected his earlier Hacker-Baker position by the 1990’s in favor of one consonant with the above writers. This is not to say that one position is right and the other wrong, but that there is a lively ongoing debate.

My understanding of Wittgenstein's grammar is that grammar sets out the rules governing the moves we make in language. — Sam26

I don’t know if you were following the thread below:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11479/bedrock-rules-the-mathematical-and-the-ordinary-cavell-kripke-on-wittgenstein

It looks like you’re taking the position of Luke, Hacker and Baker on what Wittgenstein means by grammar and rules. Antony and i were, in different ways , arguing for a different reading of Wittgenstein, in which rules and grammar only have existence in radically contextual, situational and personal situations.

Metaphysics Is really just psychology.
And psychology is verbal and emotional language expression.
However,I'm a Linguistic realist,which means our language is a direct reality and we experience objects directly. None of this kantian nonsense. — Ambrosia

Who do you get your ideas about philosophy and psychology from? Who do you read?

To resolve the deeper question takes a much larger conception than that provided by ‘plain language’ philosophy because it has to deal with metaphysics - which is just the subject that plain language philosophy presumes to reject.

See for an example this critique of Lawrence Krauss’ book ‘A Universe from Nothing’, by Neil Ormerod, an academic theologian, in particular the section on Bernard Lonergan’s analysis of the nature of judgement.
3h — Wayfarer

I read that critique as a rejection of naive realism in favor of Kantianism. I’m not sure what this has to do with ordinary language philosophy. If you’re looking for a metaphysics compatible with ordinary language philosophy you’ll find it in Nietzsche and phenomenology

I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth.
— Joshs

Whaaaat? You mean how deep you can stick it in? — Philofile

It’s possible that’s what Foucault meant.

It seems that what you are talking about is extending the common meanings of the public language by working imaginatively with possible associations. Poets do it all the time.That is a different matter than creating a wholly novel private language from scratch I would say. — Janus

Isnt this the question of whether there is anything new under the sun, or at least now we are to understand the idea of novelty? If we present a 5 year old child, or a dog, with ‘e=mc2’ , how do we talk about the distance between what they perceive in the image and what those of us familiar with the physics perceive in it? gould we say that , relative to the dog and the 5 year , we are extending the meanings they are encountering by a certain amount? One might want to counter that extending the meaning of a concept is different than extending a language within which concepts are articulated. But I guess my point is that, in theory we should be able to extend the meanings of the words of a language to the point where we can no more call these common than we can my experience of e=mc2 versus a dog or 5 year old.

If two people are understanding the senses of the words of a ‘common’ language in significantly different ways , even if they are able to engage with each other at some level with it, why call the language ‘common’? Why not say there are two somewhat similar languages being used? If I understand the sense of a word in one way and you understand it in a slightly different way, are you and we sharing a common sense , or two distinctly different but related senses? Isnt this true for every aspect of a ‘common’ language that each of us participate in?
We know that new languages evolve from
old ones gradually. But don’t they do this one person at a time? Don’t each of us , whenever we use our ‘common’ language , in some minuscule way already speak our own variant? I could take this even further and suggest that every time I use my language I am reinventing it in some slight way, and thus every moment I am using a different language.

What do you mean? That the earth is sometimes flat, is always flat, is not flat, is flat if you "think" it is and not if you don't? It seems that according to you, whether the earth is flat depends on who is talking. Yes? No? — tim wood

I’m making two points. First, as you know , at one time many believed the earth was flat , that all species descended directly from predecessors , that the Sun revolved around the earth. There are a multitude of competing theories floating around today in science(particularly the social sciences) and philosophy. Eventually , certain of them may become more widely accepted than others.
But I argue that the failure of individuals to embrace the current consensus is not a form of irrationality. Shifting one’s perspective is not simply a matter of being presented with evidence. It requires a gestalt shift and that can take time.

My second point is that many conflicts involving blame are like the above , where it is not a master of the other being irrational, but instead their being in the thrawl of a way of thinking that you have moved beyond , but don’t understand why they can’t see things your way. So you assume they are being stubborn, lazy, irrational. Instead, they simply haven’t made the ‘shift’ that you have.

It's not all about that. It's just a small part of us (or animals). — Philofile

alrighty then

There are different sense-makings. One(wo)man's sense is the other's non-sense. — Philofile

Another’s sense will never be my nonsense if I understand what I described above about the organization of cognitive systems. I may not be able to grasp its internal logic, so I could joke that it’s ‘nonsense
to me’, but I am still recognizing it as ordered.

My original post was about the basis of blame, accusation and hostility. I argued that such an attitude requires that I reject the idea that there is an internal order behind the behavior of the other I accuse. I will not need to blame if I recognize that the other is operating out of a moral worldview , even if I don’t quite understand its details at the moment.

point? Are you saying people aim at the same moral end? — Tom Storm

Yes, the moral end for all of us is anticipation of all possible events in as parsimonious , multidimensional and replicative a way as possible. Social life happens to be the richest source of new events , so making sense of others and establishing the most intimate possible relations of understanding with others is presupposed.

how do you locate this continuum of rationality in the context of intersubjectivity and the potential shared interests of society/groups? — Tom Storm

I like George Kelly's Sociality Corollary, which states
that ‘to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person”. This spells out the organizational implications of a being-with-others defined and validated by the intimate assimilative processes of replicative anticipation.

We don’t just belong whole-hog to larger linguistic groups and cultures, we have to be able to make sense of their ways from within our own axes of understanding.

One (wo)man's reason is the other's madness or stupidity. Same for rationality. Irrationality can be reasonable. Ratio can be unreasonable. Rationality merely means that you can give reasons. Which can be stupid for some and sane for others. — Philofile

That sounds like a notion of the rational which reduces it to an arbitrary set of relationships with no thematic or
implicative consistency. If this is the only way we can explain ‘rationality’, then what you say about it is true.

But in sense-making creatures like ourselves , reason is guided by normative cogntive-affective aims. We aim to anticipate events in as orderly a fashion as possible. Our ‘reasons’ are our best predictions about events. We only view others’ reasons as irrational when we fail to recognize the nature of sense-making. We don’t necessarily have to be able to translate the others system of anticipations into terms that we can understand, we only have to recognize in principle that this is how cognizing beings organize experience.

The way that the concept of stupidity is being used in this thread is not that of lacking an aptitude , knowledge or skill. That’s why there has been no mention here of the stupidity of children or animals. No, stupidity is being used as a moral accusation , a judgement of blame against whoever we deem deserving of the label.
We are angry at, disgusted with , condemning toward the ‘stupid’ one because we believe they knew or should have known better than to do or act or think the way they did. As Time Wood put it , “a person who without reason retreats from reason to some unreasonable position and maintains that position by recourse to irrationality against reason.”

That’s the essence of moral blame , our judgement that the other knew better and succumbed to a base or
irrational’ motive.

The whole edifice of the psychology of blame would crumble if the angry accuser were ever to come
to a realization that there’s is no such thing as irrationality, there are only different forms of rationality, and the blameful finger-pointer is unable to extricate themselves from their own worldview, or even recognize their rationality as a just one of a potentially infinite range of worldviews, each of which aims at the same moral end , but via an often profoundly different construal of empirical circumstance. So they have no choice but to see the one who violates their expectations as morally culpable , irrational, stupid. The irony here is that it would be the accuser who is being stupid here, but I would have to use that word in this context according to its innocent , non-moralistic sense. They don’t want to have to accuse anyone, but they lack the insight into how others think to avoid succumbing to hostility.

Are there deep philosophical problems? Is it a good metaphor, or is there one you find more useful? — Srap Tasmaner

The concept of depth is a no-no to the postmodern ethos. Why is this? Because depth tends to be associated with exactly the kinds of metaphysical meta narratives that this thread is accumulating.

I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth. Philosophy needn’t concern itself with ultimate truths that we are chained to like some giant leaden anchor. Instead, thinking should be about nothing more substantial than being in time and the intimate way that experience changes moment to moment.

My understanding of the PLA is that it would seem to be impossible to construct an idiosyncratic language of my own without translating it into the (public) language I have learned in order to know what my novel words refer to. This is all the more true of non-ostensive words, but is also true of ostensive words it seems to me. — Janus

That’s how I read it too. But I want to quibble with it.
Let’s say that I produce a new philosophy with new concepts. If I write it in English , then it is filled with commonly understood , simple nouns , verbs and adjectives. But the core of the thesis is set of terms that I am trying to introduce to others ( or perhaps I only intend the writing for me to read). I may begin with what I assume are familiar, conventional ways that others are likely to approach the interpretation of my ideas , and then attempt to shift their thinking in a different direction.

But I can very well fail to do this. In such a case , my readers may complain that my terms are incoherent , or they will equally likely say they understand them perfectly well , by which they mean that they are misreading them in the old conventional way.

So have I created a private or a public language? It is public in the sense that the grammatical
structure is conventional ( subject-predicate etc). But this not need be so. I could transform the grammar, as Heidegger does with the word ‘is’. The point is that what I write will be recognizable to others in some form, at some level. At r very least , others will know that I am trying to communicate something. But is this all that is required for a language to be considered public? Isn’t it true that I must be able to translate my idiosyncratic language into the conventional language to understand myself? But how exactly do I understand myself as I go through a long process of transforming my thinking? Is my starting point a ‘public’ language? Is my point of reference a way of understanding words that is common to a community that uses them? Certainly if my aim is to communicate with others, then my assumption is that my word will be understood at some level. But what if I also know that I will not be understood well , because my use of words invokes senses that I find others dont share. It is a poor fit.

I may not initially feel this way about my relation to others via language , but as I progress in my ideas, I find that while I begin by translating my new concepts into what I perceive as public or conventional language, eventually in y writing I am no longer referring back to that public sphere but instead to my own writing of an earlier stage in my progress. In other words, my ‘public’ becomes my own past, and the further and further away from others’ thinking I get in my theorizing , the more and more irrelevant that initial ‘public’ becomes for me. Wittgenstein said if a lion could talk we wouldn’t understand him. That is true of original philosophic work also.

Don't forget that it's parents (or the like, and usually many others) who teach baby to talk in the first place. The boy in the bubble doesn't need excuses, justifications, seductions, outright lies. I don't deny that after years of immersion with others that then a body could wander off into the woods to talk to itself in new and terrible ways. — Zugzwang

I should mention that my approach to language and intersubjectivity is what I call ‘radically temporal’. Other philosophers I’ve found who ground experience in a radical notion of temporality include Heidegger, Derrida and Eugene Gendlin. Striking features of their work include the abandonment of the distinction between affect, cognition-intention and will, and their assertion that everything we ‘absorb from our participation in language and culture has a peculiar ‘ownness’ about it , such that an ongoing thematic self-consistency characterizes all our engenders with others.
From this vantage , what is is interesting about the fact that a baby must first learn language from its social world before it can talk to itself is the nature of the way what it learns is organized with respect to its history.

That is, everything I assimilate from my world , either perceptually or in terms of formal
language, can only be understood by me via dimensions of similarity with respect to my current outlook. I own everything I learn in a way that makes it impossible or to claim that I simply ‘share’ the senses of words and concepts with others in my culture. Even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

Im going to borrow from a paper I wrote to elaborate here:

Rather than a retreat from a thoroughgoing notion of sociality, radically temporal approaches achieve a re-situating of the site of the social as a more originary and primordial grounding than that of the over-determined abstractions represented by discursive intersubjectivities. Those larger patterns of human belonging abstracted from local joint activity, which Merleau-Ponty's intercorporeal approach discerns in terms of cultural language practices, hide within themselves a more primary patterning. While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.”

Well, I’m sold. Where do I sign up?

You gotta use words when you talk to me, words you didn't define (if you define your own new jargon, it's in terms of the one we were thrown into.) — Zugzwang

I don’t define my own words de novo, but they are not simply introjected from a culture either. There is no such thing as culture as a monolithic structure , at any level , even at the level of a language game with two participants. Each word that is ‘shared’ between us is a different sense of the word for you than it is for me. It must be in order for there to be an ‘us’. I am already an other to myself when I talk or think to myself. The words I ‘use’ to think to myself come back to me in the instant I use them as if they came from another. I am changed in using my own words. You are a further other to my other that is myself.
Wittgenstein begins culture between you and me , but culture begins most primordially between me and myself, as I find myself always changed from moment to moment via temporality. The shifts in context ushered in by my temporally unfolding self-talk already move me through a multitude of language games , prior to my engagement with others.

Personally I find all this in implied/suggested by Wittgenstein. If meaning is outside, part of the world, then the 'internal monologue' is not longer either internal or a monologue in a strong sense. — Zugzwang

I find the resonances between Wittgenstein and phenomenology fascinating. I also find the differences important. For instance , Nietzsche’s influence
cured Heidegger of the temptation toward a religious moralism. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Wittgenstein, and I think this moralism is implied in his work.
It also seems to me that language games are vulnerable to Heidegger’s depiction of Das Man; this would be discourse as a flattened sharing rather than Heidegger’s account of authentic discourse as oriented toward one’s ownmost possibilities.

hidden variables can rescue determinism and even offer a way for God to interact with his creation. — DanLager

Do you think God interacts with his creation?

What work does "I know" do? — Ennui Elucidator

There is a shared context here of agreed access to remembered dreams. Their question “Why do you think you were dreaming “? almost certainly suggests to you that they also remember their dreams , or at least know when they have dreamt, and is questioning you on that basis. So your claim to ‘know’ implies your preparedness to share your method of ascertaining that knowledge with them , via recollection of a dream. Your claim to know anticipates his potential interest in probing your ability to demonstrate to them the reasons for your confidence that you were dreaming it.

My reaction to this, is that the word social, as you're using it, is not a normal use of the word. Social contexts require other people, we don't refer to the "I and myself," as something social. Besides what's the difference between the "I' and "myself," it seems to me you're describing the same person, viz., you. — Sam26

My understanding of self here comes from phenomenological philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty( also Derrida). For them self is not an entity, it is a constantly transforming interaction with world. They abandon the idea of outer and inner. The self is always outside of itself , coming back to itself from the world. To the extent that my use of social isn’t ‘normal’ it is not because it denies immediate expose use to an outside , an alterity , the foreign and the empirical, but because it is claiming such an exposure isnt restricted to interaction with other ‘persons’.

My question is whether or not these concepts are discovered or enforced, because they never really seem to cleanly translate — khaled

Are psychologists making models based on what they observe? Or are the models self fulfilling prophecies? Or a mix? And what does that say about the validity of the models and which we should use? — khaled

I think that all scientific theories are simultaneously inventions and discoveries. That is, they are responses to real influences from the empirical world , but that empirical world is already shaped for each of us by our prior ways of modeling it. So the relation between world and self is reciprocal. It produces constraints and affordances that correct , validate and invalidate our suppositions, but only within the bounds of the constraints that our existing body of knowledge imposes on the world.

Are they really explaining behavior, or are the creating certain behavior in adherents? — khaled

More and more social scientists are coming to believe that knowledge is not the mind’s representation of an independent outside. Instead , to know something is to make a certain kind of change in it. New knowledge in physics implies new measuring tools, and those tools are inseparable from the new discoveries they make possible.
A psychological theory or therapy invites the adherent to try on a way of organizing events. Each approach organizes those events in different ways , some more pleasing , useful or clarifying than others. We will allow our behavior to be changed by an approach that is introduced to us if we find it is more advantageous to us in some way with respect to our current outlook. The mere fact of its being presented to us will not in and of itself force us to adopt it , any more than our exposure to a new political viewpoint or religious doctrine will automatically lead to our adopting it uncritically.

The bottom line is that different psychological systems are useful in different ways, which is why it is possible to incorporate more than one system, and many therapists do just that.

Examining the physical makeup of a brain will not yield results that contradict the biology, and you could always reduce the biology to the physics. But in psychology and philosophy, different models produce different, sometimes contradictory explanations. — khaled

You can’t reduce the biology to the physics without losing much of value of the biology. Both are useful but for different purposes. And there are conflicting accounts within physics and cosmology.

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others are justified in their knowledge of your pain, but you’re not. You don’t justify to yourself that you’re in pain. This is senseless. — Sam26

We could be feeling a vague , ambiguous sensation that at times seems like pain and at other times like a tickle or distraction. The context (bodily-cognitive-affective-social) determines what exactly it is we think we are feeling. And when we determine a sensation to be pain, we are not simply consulting an already extent fact, but construing a fresh variant , a new contextual use of ‘pain’. Wittgenstein is right that the pointing to a feeling and construing it as ‘pain’ is not the consulting of an inner domain. In making this argument , he always uses interpersonal situations as examples of the social , the language game. But the social begins even prior to the interpersonal understood this way. Between I and myself there is a social , an other that intervenes the moment I point to an experience. This sociality doesnt require the presence of other ‘persons’ to participate in the game. The game is already underfoot between ‘I’ and myself. It is not public in the sense of a between-person interaction , but neither is it private in the sense of an inner repository of referents.

Kant stands in relation to his predecessors as a complete and utter paradigm shift, as his successors did not stand to him — Mww

Do you mean to say that if we trace a history of philosophy, figure by figure , leading from the ancient Greeks to today, the only ‘paradigm shift’ to be found would be from Kant’s predecessors to him? I do agree that within the lineage of Western philosophy , certain figures achieved greater leaps of thought than others, but I certainly don’t think that what Kant accomplished in relation to what preceded him was any more profound that what Descartes achieved in relation to medieval thinkers( or Nietzsche or Heidegger, for that matter). He almost single-handedly launched us into the modern world.

Now, even granting that every recognized philosopher after Kant accepted this paradigm shift in general, didn’t prevent a few of them from attempting to expand on it, because there existed a feeling Kant didn’t complete some task or other with respect to it. — Mww

What would it look like to inaugurate a paradigm shift away from Kant?

Kant believed , along with his predecessors, that there was a world whose existence was independent of the subject , despite the fact that we only have access to that world via innate categories( even Berkeley’s idealism ends up supporting such a split). Nietzsche rejected the idea of a world independent of the subject’s valuations. He was among the first to upend the idea that scientific truth is correspondence between thought and an independent reality.
Whether you agree with this or not, would you say this constitutes a new paradigm?

Nietzsche also dumped Kant’s moral imperative , denying that there is any universal moral truth, only culturally contingent value systems ceaselessly changing. Is this not also a paradigm shift?

Why would you expect to see paradigm shifts in the sciences on a regular basis but not in philosophy? How could it be that a 240 year old philosophy could still be deemed the cutting edge of thinking in 2021 while in the past 240 years the sciences have experienced a multitude of major paradigm shifts?
Perhaps it’s because in order to understand what Kuhn meant by the term ‘paradigm shift’ one needs to move beyond a Kantian understanding of empirical and metaphysical truth