Any examples of Greeks using 'meta' that way? I keep hearing that for a long time it only connected to 'physical' with reference to cataloguing of Aristotle's books? — bongo fury

“The term was invented by the 1st-century BCE head of Aristotle‘s Peripatetic school, Andronicus of Rhodes. Andronicus edited and arranged Aristotle’s works, giving the name Metaphysics (τα μετα τα φυσικα βιβλια), literally “the books beyond the physics,” perhaps the books to be read after reading Aristotle’s books on nature, which he called the Physics. The Greek for nature is physis, so metaphysical is also “beyond the natural.”

Aristotle never used the term metaphysics. For Plato, Aristotle’s master, the realm of abstract ideas was more “real” than that of physical. i.e., material or concrete, objects, because ideas can be more permanent (the Being of Parmenides), whereas material objects are constantly changing (the Becoming of Heraclitus).“

The question was how, why or when did 'speculative' enter the lexicon. Interesting though to see it joined to 'dialectics'. Is/was that common? Examples please. If so then perhaps your theory, that 'speculative' meant 'fanciful' in relation to Hegel's historicising, gets some traction. — bongo fury

Hegel regarded his dialectical method or “speculative mode of cognition” (PR §10) as the hallmark of his philosophy.

From Brittanica:

The Hegelian system, in which German idealism reached its fulfillment, claimed to provide a unitary solution to all of the problems of philosophy. It held that the speculative point of view, which transcends all particular and separate perspectives, must grasp the one truth, bringing back to its proper centre all of the problems of logic, of metaphysics (or the nature of Being), and of the philosophies of nature, law, history, and culture (artistic, religious, and philosophical). According to Hegel, this attitude is more than a formal method that remains extraneous to its own content; rather, it represents the actual development of the Absolute—of the all-embracing totality of reality—considered “as Subject and not merely as Substance” (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this positing—expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the factual elements of life and culture—and finally regains itself, through the negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.

Such a dialectical scheme (immediateness–alienation–negation of the negation) accomplished the self-resolution of the aforementioned problem areas—of logic, of metaphysics, and so on. This panoramic system thus had the merit of engaging philosophy in the consideration of all of the problems of history and culture, none of which could any longer be deemed foreign to its competence. At the same time, however, the system deprived all of the implicated elements and problems of their autonomy and particular authenticity, reducing them to symbolic manifestations of the one process, that of the Absolute Spirit’s quest for and conquest of its own self. Moreover, such a speculative mediation between opposites, when directed to the more impending problems of the time, such as those of religion and politics, led ultimately to the evasion of the most urgent and imperious ideological demands and was hardly able to escape the charge of ambiguity and opportunism.”

For your argument to work, God's omniscience must go out the window but if that, you would be arguing against not God but something else entirely, an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, non-omniscient being - that's not God. — TheMadFool

Liberal theology has come along way since the formulation of God as omniscient( see process theology, open theism).

the point was that a certain type of metaphysics underwrite science, which you seem to agree with. — Olivier5

Galilean and Newtonian physics can be argued to be consistent with the rationalist metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza. The hypothetico-deductive method proposed by Bacon in this period was a philosophy a scientific method that arose out of rationalism.
The idealistic metaphysics ushered in by Kant and Hegel
has been suggested as a grounding for Relativity and quantum physics. The philosophy of science that is embraced by modern physics is typically that of Popper, who was an adherent of Kantian idealism. Postmodern metaphysics ( or anti-metaphysics) has its parallel in the philosophy of science of Kuhn and Feyerabend, which critiques the Kantian and Popperian model.
So you see we have at least three distinct metaphysical eras ( and we could divide them up into many more) that accompanies the history of science from the 1600’s to today.

The ‘meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’ (nature).
— Joshs

If that's an is, and not an ought to be, then... is, since when? — bongo fury

Since the Greeks?

His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence.
— Joshs

Don't understand. — bongo fury

Speculative dialectics deservedly got a bad rep when philosophers decided they no longer needed to bother studying actual contingent circumstances of human life in its sociological, political and anthropological aspects. Instead, they could apply a one- size -fits -all Hegelian scheme of dialectical stages onto whatever aspect of human history they wanted to focus on, revealing its supposed necessity and inevitability. This is why it was important for Marx to ground the dialectic in material circumstances.

That all sounds very liberal and pleasant, but what process goes into "establishing agreement not only about basic definitions... but also about basic beliefs"? And what if such agreement cannot be found? What if the other person's position remains obscure? What if the difference of commonality is exactly what is significant?

Sometimes folk are what we in the trade call wrong — Banno

Lyotard’s distinction between a litigation and a differend. may be relevant here:

“ A differend is a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement. Lyotard distinguishes the victim from the plaintiff. The later is the wronged party in a litigation; the former, the wronged party in a differend. In a litigation, the plaintiff’s wrong can be presented. In a differend, the victim’s wrong cannot be presented. A victim, for Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong.

This disempowerment can occur in several ways: it may quite literally be a silencing; the victim may be threatened into silence or in some other way disallowed to speak. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the discourse of the rule of judgement. The victim may not be believed, may be thought to be mad, or not be understood. The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim’s wrong cannot be translated into its terms; the wrong may not be presentable as a wrong.”

Science, as posted by 180 Proof, is metaphysics that works (generally). I agree with that, while of course others may disagree. — Olivier5

Except that science doesn’t have a single definition , it is a historical development with a changing understanding of itself, undergirded by a changing metaphysical outlook.
So the question isn’t whether science works , but how the way it purportedly works changes along with changing metaphysical frameworks. The notion that science simply ‘works’ itself presupposes a particular metaphysics of science, one that is now undergoing transformation.

I'd have thought that metaphysics starts from the assumption that all the physics is settled, so there are no speculations to deal with. — bongo fury

The ‘ meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’( nature ).
It need make no claims for a particular content of science being settled or unsettled.
As far as it’s speculative role, this term began fashionable after Hegel. His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural
and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence. Thus it was speculative rather than empirical.

It strikes me that metaphysics, though it may purport to explain (or question) why science or other things "work", doesn't "work" itself. Merely to claim that other things like science or religion "work" provides no support for metaphysics, though. — Ciceronianus

Metaphysics is really no more than one pole of an abstract-concrete continuum that runs through all modes of thought and culture. Within science intself there is more and less applied thinking , more and less
theoretical and meta-theoretical. Metaphysics as it is practiced in particular by continental philosophers is just their attempt to achieve an ‘ultra-meta’ perspective. If you think getting too theoretical muddies the waters you can always climb down from the perch and immerse yourself in the details.

Understanding the person you are trying to get to do what you want doesn't dissolve the conflict or lead to immediate cooperation, but it may prove a useful tool in getting them to do what you want. — Ennui Elucidator

How many of the interpersonal conflicts, large and small, that we all experience on an almost daily basis, have to do with not being able to get others to do what we want , and how many of them have to do with our not being able to fathom why the other person will not do what we want? Put differently , I am suggesting that the depth of our anger, disappointment , anxiety , guilt and other negative affective responses to the behavior of others we are dealing with, is in direct proportion to the breakdown in trust and mutual understanding we perceive with them. A ‘conflict’ with someone who thwarts our preference due to reasons we fully understand and can empathize with is not really a conflict at all. It’s more of a minor strategic challenge: how do we incentivize their actions or negotiate a compromise suitable to us both?

But this sort of situation plays only the most minor role in the daily drama of living. What keeps us awake at night is the loved one, friend or acquaintance who inexplicably disappointed us , angered us , rejected us , severed our bond of trust with them , caused us to doubt our own worth.

These are the conflicts caused by a breakdown in understanding. And these are what account for the kinds of conflicts that take place among larger social
groups, and that lead to wars and persecutions. The problem with axioms of discourse is that they have already been implicitly violated by the time the conflict is perceived. Ethically meaningful interpersonal conflicts are only possible in the first place as the breakdown of tacit pre-existing axioms of shared understandings.

if poetry contains an authentic metaphysics, how can it be evidenced?" — Gus Lamarch

If poetry contains a metaphysics , then do prose literature, visual art, music ,scientific and political
discourse also contain their own authentic metaphysics? If not, then what is it about poetry that distinguishes it from all other modes of creative expression?

Isnt it the case that it is the particular CONTENT conveyed by any of the innumerable modes of cultural expression within an era ( including poetry) that manifests a mataphysics? For instance , if one were to delimit a cultural history of poetry in the West, would one not be able to correlate the changes in the way poets considered their craft over the centuries with changes in metaphysical outlook? Doesn’t classical Greek poetry reflect a different metaphysical thinking than the poetry of the Renaissance or the Modern or postmodern eras?

I think the the tools you describe are useful and can work if people come together in good faith. — Tom Storm

Hermeneuticists like John Caputo and Richard Rorty call this working together in good faith toward a fusion of horizons of understanding the ‘conversation of mankind’. It has been critiqued by postmodernists like Derrida and Lyotard , who point out that in many cases the two parties are not operating with the same senses of meaning , and there is no meta-understanding that can arrived at, no perfect agreement, through an effort of ‘good faith’ What is needed in these cases is respect for the disagreement rather than pursuit of fusion.

Often in a negotiation (shuttle diplomacy style), you can get two parties to agree on what to do for profoundly different reasons. — Ennui Elucidator

It sounds like perhaps you have a background in the law.
If money is at the center of a dispute, or things money can buy, then this kind of negotiation can work. But in most emotionally fraught conflicts, it is contrasting worldviews that are at the center, in which case separation-violence and insight constitute the opposing poles of action.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.
— Joshs
How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory. — Michael Zwingli

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712318772778

What I have in mind is the truly hard question of philosophy, which is not consciousness (though indirectly, one can claim this) but presence. — Constance

One might call this the ‘metaphysics of presence’, after Heidegger and Derrida. Indeed, if one begins with presence , then one finds oneself ‘before’ language , becuase presence, as self-presence, auto-affection, self-identity, must be before language since it precedes relation. The trick is to think before presence Then language reappears , not as that which takes place between presences , but as prior to presence.

The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism. — Michael Zwingli

Your references are a bit out of date. The most sophisticated current models of memory dont make use of a computer storage metaphor anymore. Those were all the rage 40 years ago. Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.

But the world is brimful with relations that don't require us to be noticing them, or even involve us at all, in order to exist.

The codes and patterns that are intrinsic to nature that you assert in the second passage quoted above are the intrinsic relational properties of the world, which nonetheless do not need us to create, or even mediate, their existence it would seem. — Joshs

Yea, this is the realist conclusion of semiologists. And their patron saint, Charles Peirce, found it necessary to ground all this subject-independence in a Divine origin.

At any rate, realist semiology asks why it should be necessary to attach all phenomena to the subject in order to arrive at a perfectly satisfactory account of the way things are. Postmodern philosophers respond that if we examine closely what it is we are doing when we posit a world independent of us , and a history that can be extracted independently of our present , we will find that the idea of subject-independent phenomena is no longer useful, interesting or even coherent.

Specifically , they claim that when we imagine or theorize about the oldest and simplest forms of existence , those most distant in time from the appearance of human beings, we are not only making use of the latest cultural
understanding to model this subject-independence, but there isn’t a single aspect of our natural history model that isn’t completely beholden to the current framework that defines its terms. The reason for this is that the basis of any inquiry into what ‘is’ or what ‘was’ is a pragmatic affair. What ‘is’ only has sense for us in relation to our aims, goals and purposes. When we ask what exists we are always asking what we can do with a thing. Being and use are not separate issues, they are the same issue.

Now, what if one acknowledges this and still wants to maintain that there is and was a subject independent world? It becomes a powerless notion, because unlike the Kantian thing in itself , the postmodernist ‘outside world’ doesn’t unidirectionally shape our representations of it. They argue that history must be distinguished from historicism. Historicism assumes we can retrieve intact previous eras of human or natural history in order to study them. But the actual historical nature of our experiencing of the world precludes such a duplication of what was. Instead , historical study is always revision and reinterpretation. To return to the most archaic past is always to move into a new future.

Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You? — Banno

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. But how the world does this is dependent on what I project forward. The world responses precisely, but in different ways, to different formulations.


Reciprocal dependence between self as world is not the same thing as a noumenal reality. The latter seems to imply a relation of one-way correspondence between representing subject and subject-independent world.

if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument. — Banno

I prefer to word it this way: reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world.

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena). — Amalac

Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by positing a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism.

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions. — Banno

I dont know if this will help. It lays out the anti-noumenal phenomenological argument, claiming that it gives us a more robust realism than the Kantian or neo-Kantian alternatives.


‘As Husserl points out in the lecture course Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme from 1915, nothing might seem more natural than to say that the objects I am aware of are outside my consciousness. When my experiences – be they perceptions or other kinds of intentional acts – present me with objects, one must ask how this could happen, and the answer seems straightforward: By means of some representational mediation. The objects of which I am conscious are outside my consciousness, but inside my consciousness, I find representations (pictures and signs) of these objects, and it is these internal objects that enable me to be conscious of the external ones. However, as Husserl then continues, such a theory is completely nonsensical. It conceives of consciousness as a box containing representations that resemble external objects, but it forgets to ask how we are supposed to know that the (mis)representations are in fact (mis)representations of external objects:

The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones etc. For such a picture observing ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal picture, and so on ad infinitum (Husserl 2003: 106

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl’s anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn’t merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (Husserl 1982: 111).

This claim is one that resounds throughout Husserl’s oeuvre. As he, years later, would write in Cartesianische Meditationen, it is absurd to conceive of consciousness
and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially
interdependent and united (Husserl 1960: 84). Husserl’s idealism is not a reductive idealism. Husserl is not a phenomenalist that seeks to reduce the world to a complex of sensations. His opponent is not the dualist, but the objectivist, who claims that reality is absolute in the sense of being radically mind­independent. To deny the latter, to deny that the “universe of true being” lies “outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence” (Husserl 1960: 84), is not to say that reality literally exists in the mind, or that it is an intramental construction, but that reality is essentially manifestable, and therefore in principle available and accessible to consciousness.”

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

And that something else is given by the subject, who, immersed in space and time, apprehends the phenomena, but never the things in themselves (the so-called "noumena").

From this perspective, the so-called "problem of knowledge", which has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years, disappears in one fell swoop. And not only does it disappear, it is revealed as nonsense.

Indeed, it is impossible for a human being to think in non-human terms, from a pre- or super-human perspective, thus valuing the “primal objectivity” of a world: value-neutral, ahistorical, timeless, and also, making a judgment on how that ontological condition prior to one's own existence is.

There is still a problem for the Kantian view. And that’s the gulf between the roel of the subject and the thing in itself. How can we be in the world if there is an uncrossable chasm between our representations of the world ( the phenomena ) and the noumenal aspect of reality?
Phenomenological philosophy proposed to solve this dualist problem by arguing that there is no noumenal reality. The world as it appears to a subject is all there is, there is nothing hidden behind phenomena. Because it is no longer necessary to assume internal representations or models of a separate outside , it is also not necessary to assume a formal logic as our primary means of access to a world. This removes the issue of whether human ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic to us and not shared by other animals. All living, self-organizing systems function according to the same general normatively oriented principles.

If I grab one of those ducks that are in a row and squeeze, I shall likely discover that ducks aren't always gentle and cute. It will bite and kick and quack up a storm. On the other hand, if I try to grab the row that they're putatively in, well, do you see a problem there? — tim wood

I think we have a problem with more than ‘rowness’ if we’re trying to determine the contribution of the subject to the experience of what we want to call the object. For instance, you said we discover features of the duck by bodily interacting with it. We reach out and squeeze. We then receive all kinds of feedback from the duck, such as tactile( we feel it bite and kick) , kinesthetic( we feel it’s resistance against our grasp), auditory ( we hear it quack), and we see all these behaviors. Perceptual psychologists will tell you that the data we actually receive from the world is very minimal. We fill in the rest based on expectations gained from prior experiences. In fact, our expectations and the data from the outside are so inextricably intertwined that it becomes impossible to separate out what is the subjective contribution and what is the objective contribution to our experience of the duck.

Once we remove from from the picture all of the background knowledge we bring to our experience of the ‘duck’ , all that is left is a constantly changing flow
of meaningless data. If I draw a Chinese linguistic form , someone who reads Chinese will
recognize it as a particular word concept. I would see it as an abstract series of shapes. A snake might see it as separated lines and curves. Which is the ‘real’ object? It depends on who is interacting with it. When we expereince a thing , whether it’s a neutrino or a duck, we are interacting with it in complex ways.

But what if we try and imagine the object independently of our interaction with it? Can’t we just disassemble the patterned complexity that we see ( construct) as the object into its components? But if the object for us , as a result of our constructive activity imposed on it , is nothing but this complex of relations, do the components exist in themselves pure and unrelaronal? Physics seems to be coming to the realization that there are no intrinsic and non-relational properties in the world. To be an entity is to be changing in some way i. relation to something else. This would seem to place the basis of pattern , in the form of irreducible relationality and transformation, at the heart of the so-called outside world. It may turn out to be the case that relational pattern , rather than intrinsic content , IS the basis of objective reality.

When you compare the hardware and the software of a computer, I’m sure you note
that the hardware is the ‘physical’ basis of it and the software is the ‘patterned’ implementation of the hardware. Would you want to argue that the software is somehow less real or secondary with respect to the hardware? But you wouldnt deny that the software allows us to make real changes in our brains and in the world. Furthermore , there is no way to reduce
e software language to a hardware language of physical causality without losing what is essential to the software description. But if software language is only secondary and derivative , there should be a way to convey all of the meaning of the software language via a hardware description.

This has led semiologists to conclude that codes and patterns are intrinsic to nature ( genetic code) , not just to minds.

the idea is projected onto and then supposed to originate in the thing or things. — tim wood

Define ‘thing’ without using a notion of pattern or relation.

You have been working on a thoroughgoing and comprehensive philosophy, with your concept of information as its centerpiece. The most important and relevant implications of a metaphilosophy have to do with the most complex phenomena in the world. And those most complex phenomena are none other than human interactions , our passions, drives and intellectual processes and goals, how the individual contributes to their culture and how that culture
shapes the individual politically , morally , creatively, and how language is to be understood. Of course, you want to locate the irreducible basis for your model in order to give it precision and clarity. You’ve attempted to accomplish this by embracing a kind of quasi-physics vocabulary. The problem with this is that it may run the risk of being dismissed by physicists who don’t see it as either empirically valid or philosophically coherent.
They may be wrong , but I think what you’re aiming for will be much between comprehended by others of you put more emphasis on the human behavioral implications of your theory ( emotion, intersubjective relations , cognition and perception , psychopathology, language , ethics).

What is a row? Answer: nothing in itself, but that you make it so. — tim wood

What I’m wondering, specifically, is how you are defining what takes place at the ‘mental’ end of the subject-world encounter and how you would talk about what takes place outside of the mental. You mentioned row and pattern. What exactly is it about these entities that make makes them mental , and what does that imply about what constitutes the substance or content of the non-mental? For instance , is what a row and a pattern have in common the fact they they are abstract relational concepts? Are all causal relations also purely mental? What about temporal sequences? Is time a mental construct not existing in the world , as many physicists believe?

Out there, nothing repeats. — tim wood

What does the ‘out there’ do? Are you following the Kantian line which argues that pattern, logic, time and space are all mental processes? Is your argument metaphysical or empirical?!

Information is not representation but the interaction of one representation with that of another representation. — Pop

I do like your emphasis on interaction as being primary. But if the interaction that constitutes information is between two representations, what are the original presentations being re-presented?

...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought.
— Joshs

His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word. — Banno

I haven’t read Anscombe and Searle on this, but the phenomenologically informed enactivist work I follow wouldn’t accept that the one direction ever proceeds independently of the other. Here perceptual processes may be instructive. When I perceive a visual pattern as something , I recognize it. Re-cognition implies two
dynamics at once. From subject to world, there is expectation derived from previous experience of what I am likely looking at. This expectation is as much intersubjectively shaped as it is subjective. The other side of the coin is the direction from world to anticipating subject. My expectations concerning what I am seeing do not univocally determine the sense for me of the phenomenon. The world contributes a novel factor that makes recognition and representation always a contextually new sense of what is being recognized.

But in politics we change the world to fit the word. — Banno

Or one could say we interpret the world according to our subjectively and intersubjectively formed expectations. But that is not limited to ‘politics’ unless you want to expand olp rica to include perception and cognition generally.

Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed. — Banno

If we agree on the things you mention, it is likely because we abstract these particulars from our understanding of their role in the playing of the game called chess by based what matters to us about it. The game is a temporal unfolding guided by rules of procedure, an agreed upon way of going on, with an agreed upon goal. When one recognizes the pieces and board as belonging to chess , one is implicitly drawing upon this background knowledge of the unfolding activity called chess. In other words , the details get their relevant sense from their relation to the larger purpose of the game as one interprets it. If I do not recognize castling, that belief forms part of the superordinate scheme that frames my sense of the details. When we begin the game, having tacitly ‘agreed’ on the pieces, board , etc, my background belief about castling is already operative in my recognition of the pieces and other subordinate details. But since this belief retains only an implicit role in our activity until the point where it becomes explcit, when I say ‘hey, you can’t do that!’, it doesn’t initially affect our agreement.

This is what I mean about agreements at a superficial level masking deeper discrepancies in outlook.

One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done. — Banno

I think the issue comes down to how integrated the pieces of our knowledge are in relation to overarching pragmatic purposes and goals. Davidson seems to allow for a compartmentalization and independence in components of cognitive and language schematics that the enactivists reject.

If our interpretations and understandings are all of equal worth then there is no reason to move from our prejudices and preconceptions. — Banno

Would you apply this same ‘radical relativism’ critique to postmodernists like Nietzsche , Focucault and Derrida?

If
It's a recipe for arch-conservatism. Watch how the rejection of rationality is appropriated by Trumpists and other right extremes. — Banno

I think Trumpists and other right wing extremists are arch-rationalists. That is , they embrace late medieval and early enlightenment forms of rationality.

If Science has a grain; moving in one direction is easier than the other. That might be a result of the expression of science being explicit. — Banno

Dialectical logic? God , the good , and other transcendent ends depend on the stability of the preferred choice. (better and better, more and more , closer and closer , richer and richer). But if preference and desire , in science as in other endeavors, is not directed toward anything but alterity , then the ‘good’ progress loses its stable sense.

And yet we can discuss Newtonian physics, despite having some grasp of modern physics.

If incommensurable means that we use different standards of judgement, then you may have a point; but if it means something like untranslatable, there will be odd consequences. — Banno

We can discuss and write about any period in cultural history, or our personal biographies, for that matter. And those who come after us can do the same. In each case , a reinterpreting of history occurs. There is no historical memory without revision. So useful translation happens, but it does not bring back a preserved past. It would be like trying to authentically recreate period music.

Are you taking about deductive sense or a different kind of sense?

Kuhn is talking about change from one historical
movement to the next in the arts.

“We might argue all day whether or not the particular artist or poet or philosopher would feel the present state of art or poetry or philosophy to be an advance or a
retrogression from the days when he himself was a creative spirit. There would be no unanimity among us; and more significant still, no agreement between the majority view which might prevail and that which would have prevailed fifty years ago. (Conant 1957, p. 34)

But, to Kuhn’s point, do you see the enterprise of natural science as a cumulative development ?

How do you react to Rorty’ observation?

“Most of Kuhn’s readers were prepared to admit that there were areas of culture—e.g., art and politics—in which vocabularies, discourses, Foucaultian epistémés replaced one another, and to grant that, in these areas, there was no overarching metavocabulary into which every such vocabulary might be translated. But the suggestion that this was true of the natural sciences as well was found offensive. Critics of Kuhn such as Scheffler and Newton-Smith thought of Kuhn as casting doubt on “the rationality of science.” They sympathized with Lakatos’ description of Kuhn as having reduced science to “mob psychology.”
(Rorty 1991, p. 47)

Certain experiments could be said to be an artform, such as using sophisticated devices to see detect the wave function collapse. — Manuel

I don’t think that’s what Feyerabend intended with his linkage of science and science. I think it was closer to Kuhn’s purpose in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , which was to change the image of science by bringing it closer to the image of art.

“The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development –
neither could have reached its present state without its past – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct.
Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso.
In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them.

The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn disagrees with this cumulate e model of science:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (Kuhn M2, p. 7)19

Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

I’m hoping that Antony will weigh in at some point. I’m reluctant to get myself any deeper into it in the meantime.

But what if the supposed objective ‘fact’ of ability on which the effect is based is nothing but an abstracted average derived from the real individual variability in self-assessment?
— Joshs

This is baloney. I was an engineer for 30 years. Before that, I was a cabinetmaker for 10. I knew who was good at what they did and who was not. It's not hard to tell. — T Clark

Yes, but I thought the point of Dunning Kruger was eaxh person’s assessment of their own capabilities, not your assenssmanr of their capabilities. And for that matter , how has your assessment of others skills been shaped by your own skill development? Before you learnt engineering or cabinetry , how might your judgement of others talents in those arenas differed? Would you disagree with the idea that how much you know influences your opinion on others’ abilities?
And it gets more complicated than that, doesn’t it. There are different facets to any skill set. Some emphasize some facets more than others( efficiency, style, speed,thoroughness). There is also the question of determining WHY someone’s product doesn’t measure up? Are they lacking the skill set or are there other factors involved? If one is trying to avoid firing an employee it is useful to recognize these. factors.

And what about ability in theoretical realms like philosophy and basic science?

Every writer imagining themselves to be an original
thinker considers their work groundbreaking and ahead of its time. Is there an ‘ objective ‘ way to determine the validity of their claims?

According to Wiki,
“ The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.”

The ‘effect’ presupposes an objective determination of ‘ability’, against which a person’s subjective bias is measured. But what if the supposed objective ‘fact’ of ability on which the effect is based is nothing but an abstracted average derived from the real individual variability in self-assessment? In such a case, the determination of subjective bias is itself a bias based on an illusory notion of objectivity.

Few know how to control themselves consistently, no, which is why success is an anomaly rather than the norm. — Yohan

I don’t think the issue is self-control, but the control
of events. That is , difficultly in the pragmatic anticipating of the events of life. This isn’t the result of a failure of ‘objectivity’ or mindless habit , but of the fact that the world around us is constantly changing , and try as we may, it is a challenge to adapt ourselves consistently to the unpredictability that is thrown our way, to find ways to perceive order and regularity in the flow of changing events.

Why do you think this supports Antony’s reading rather than mine? — Luke

I understood you to be agreeing with the Oxford approach and that of Hacker and Baker, which argues that Wittgenstein is offering a definition of meaning as use. By locating a specific grammatical nexus associated with its use, we have defined a meaning.
Hutchinson is instead saying that Witt is. or offering a definition of meaning at all. Instead, he is saying that ‘meaning’ in all its guises ( like definition) is a hopelessly confused idea.

Wittgenstein defines meaning in terms of use as an alternative to the commonplace picture that meaning is a mental act. You are questioning how use is not a mental act? If use is a mental act, and if 'meaning is use' as W says, then meaning must also be a mental act. This would defeat the purpose of Witt's definition of meaning in terms of use — Luke

I think maybe the disagreement here is recapitulating an ongoing one in academic circles between those philosophers who assimilate Witt’s notion of pragmatic use to that of American pragmatists like Peirce and James( Hacker and Baker) and those who argue that his idea of use stands as an implicit critique of their notions of meaning.

In the passage below , P. Hutchinson provides a reading of Witt on the relation between meaning and use that appears to support Antony’s interpretation.

“While many have been tempted to see the phrasing of this remark as a combination of Wittgenstein’s dispensable stylistic ‘tics’ and a definition of meaning, which therefore demands that the reader identify and remove the superfluous clauses and hedging strategies in order to extract the thesis (‘Meaning is use’),
we have argued something like the opposite. Wittgenstein is deliberately cautious in his wording precisely to guard against reading him as advancing the claim or the thesis that meaning is use.

Now, historically, there have been two paths proposed by those who have rightly resisted what we might call the ‘theoretical selective reading’ of this passage—the reading that seeks to overcome the clauses and modal
operators so as to distil out a theory of meaning. The first of these alternatives has it that Wittgenstein identifies or essentially-connects the meaning of a word with its use. He does so so as to draw attention to the ‘grammatical
nexus’ between the use of a word and the meaning of a word, such that if one asks for the meaning of a word one is generally satisfied with an account of the word’s use. This approach, therefore, reads the phrase “the meaning of a word is its use in language” as a ‘grammatical remark’, rather than a hypothetical remark or expression of a philosophical theory. This one might
call for shorthand the Oxford reading, as it emerges in the work of Kenny and Hacker, and is defended today by their students.

Talking of the essence of Wittgenstein’s account of meaning is rendered redundant when one observes that nowhere does Wittgenstein offer an account of meaning. Much less does he “argue” (Mounce again) for something being considered the “essence” (Mounce) of meaning.

How then might one (more successfully) read PI 43? Well, we recommend one reads it as something akin to a prophylactic: it is offered by Wittgenstein as something that might help you when faced with an otherwise
vexing philosophical question. Consider the following:
I have suggested substituting for ‘meaning of a word’ ‘use of a word’, because use of a word comprises a large part of what is meant by ‘the meaning of a word’…
I also suggest examining the correlate expression ‘explanation of meaning’. … it is less difficult to describe what we call ‘explanation of meaning’ than to explain ‘meaning’. The meaning of a word is explained by describing its use.

Witt:
It is a queer thing that, considering language as a game, the use of a word is internal to the game whereas its meaning seems to point to something outside the game. What seems to be indicated is that ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ are not equatable. But this is misleading. (AWL 48 Emboldened emphasis is ours.

In a similar vein, note also:



“An answer to the question: ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ would be: ‘The meaning is simply what is explained in the explanation of the meaning’. This answer makes good sense. For we are less
tempted to consider the words ‘explanation of the meaning’ with a bias than the word ‘meaning’ by itself. Common sense does not run away from us as easily when looking at the words ‘explanation of the
meaning’ as at the sight of the word ‘meaning’. We remember more easily how we actually use it.” (VoW p. 161. Emboldened emphasis ours)

We suggest that it is an error to read Wittgenstein as offering an “argument” for (any kind of theory whatsoever of) meaning, or (further) to be saying anything regarding the putative essence of meaning. In these two passages
we find Wittgenstein writing that he suggests substituting for “meaning of a word” “use of a word”. He repeatedly writes “we” and “for us”: “we ask…”, “what we call…”; thus he indexes these locutions, these questions and
conceptions, to ‘us’ and ‘we’, i.e. those who adhere to his conception of philosophy, ‘our method’ (cf. DS in VoW p.69). He writes of the meaning of a phrase being “characterised by us” (BB p. 65) as the use made of the phrase.

These locutions fall well short of those which one might honestly characterise as indicating identity claims, regarding meaning and use. The emboldened text in the three quotes (immediately above) should indicate that throughout his discussions of meaning Wittgenstein is very specifically talking about, and very specifically suggesting, a way of going on which will help one avoid confusion. There is something distinctly pragmatic about this - but it is not so in the way Mounce wishes to argue regarding Peirce’s theory of the sign. To bring this out, we need to first consider another quote from Wittgenstein:

The meaning of a phrase for us is characterised by the use we make of it. The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expression. Therefore, the phrase “I think I mean something by it”, or “I’m sure I mean something by it”, which we so often hear in philosophical discussions to justify the use of an expression is for us no justification at all. We ask: “What do you mean?”, i.e., “How do you use this expression?” If someone taught me the word “bench” and said that he sometimes or always put a stroke over it…and that this meant something to him, I should say: “I don’t know what sort of idea you associate with this stroke, but it doesn’t interest me unless you show me that there is a use for the stroke in the kind of calculus in which you wish to use the word ‘bench’”.—I want to play chess, and a man gives the white king a paper crown, leaving the use of the piece unaltered, but telling me that the crown has a meaning to him in the game, which he can’t express by rules. I say: “as long as it doesn’t alter the use of the piece, it hasn’t what I call meaning”. (BB p. 6)

I don't see much rejection of the key thing that interests me here - a rejection of the primacy being given to a homuncular self, the first person point of view, the ego that grounds the rationalising after all preconceptions have been stripped away.

This is the fatal flaw - the one Peircean semiotics fixes. By focusing on the primacy of the modelling relation, both the self and its world become a co-construction. The two emergent poles of the one dialectical process. — apokrisis

After having now read a number of papers discussing Peircean semiotics in the context of a range of approaches within philosophy and psychology here are my tentative thoughts:

In the wake of Hegel, Darwin and Marx, three distinct schools of thought arose to correct for the inadequacies of Kantianism. Peircean pragmaticist semiotics is a rationalist, progressivist model centering around his triadic logic. It finds general expression in Popper’s falsificationist philosophy science, in which ‘crisp’ truth is progressively attained as an asymptotic limit. One is allowed to talk about progress in attaining scientific truth through falsification only because the methods of scientific validation are presumed to sit still , to be resistant to cultural differences.

The second school is the pragmatism of Dewey, James and Mead, which , while sympathetic to Peirce’s approach , avoids the strict logic of his code-based semiotics in favor of an intersubjectively mediated empiricism. Some of the more conservative versions of enactivism , along with Putnam , endorse this perspective. The third school includes the later Wittgenstein , phenomenology, postmodern and postatructuralisms, radical enactivism
and hermeneutics. This diverse group
rejects representationalism, computationalism and rationality-based progressivism. Their notion of semiotics is not code or logic based but instead compatible with Wittgenstein’s language games as forms of
life. They reject the concept of language as ‘meaning’ , of truth as propositional belief, and critique empiricism and the myth of the given. They prefer the non-rational philosophy of science of Kuhn rather than Popper. Kuhn rejects the idea that methods of coming to agreement on what constitutes validating or invalidating evidence scientific remains fixed, and since it does not remain stable, the determination of empirical truth is more akin to a political than a rational process.

In my understanding, none of these schools begins from a homuncular self or ego. They are all at least as non-Cartesian in this respect as Peirce is. They would instead point out that there is more to Cartesianism that a Kantian self, that a dialectic or triadic rationalist logic perpetuates a different form of Cartesian dualism than that of the Kantian autonomous self. In this case the split is between the forming logic and contingent empirical content.


I suspect that the fatal flaw that Peircean semiotics fixes
is to be found in older cognitive models that are less prevalent these days in the wake of the affective , embodiment and ecological crazes in psychology.

Maybe phenomenology is rescuing itself by a new stress on enactivism or embodiment. But that seems to be just the incorporation of biosemiosis so far. It doesn't appear to involve the socially constructed aspect of mind and selfhood - our enactive embodiment in a shaping cultural environment.

That is the PoMo-Romanticism having its effect. The driving idea there is to reject global constraints on local freedoms. To be shaped is read as being anti-self, rather than the source of selfhood in the first place. — apokrisis

The issue for all three schools is what grounds the ordering that precedes any notion of the subjective and the objective, a self and a world. If the shaping is organized by a rationalist logic , whether dialectic or triadic, no matter how much effort you put into distancing your approach from the old Kantian and Cartesian ideas of subject and object, you end up re-introducing a dualism. This rationalizing , logicizing tendency is what every philosophical figure since Hegel has been obsessed with avoiding , starting with Schopenhauer and on through Kierkegaard , Nietzsche , Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. Peirce was not able to avoid it.


Enactivism is generally thought as shorthand for 4E: enactive, embodied, embedded , extended and affective. The system is not simply embodied in its biology, it is equally embedded in its physical-social environment and extended into that ecology via tools outside the strictly determined end of the body
that are nonetheless part of its functioning.

As I mentioned before, there is almost no debate these days within phenomenological-pomo-enactivist circles as to whether being shaped is the source of selfhood. The only debate is over whether to jettison the notion of the subject entirely in favor of a social system with no independently identifiable parts, or keep some minimal remnant of the old idea of subject. I don’t think you appreciate how much more radically interpersonally based some of these approaches are compared with Peirce’s quaint-by-comparison code-based model of the social. Have you read any Derrida, Foucault, Gergen or Deleuze? Do you think that the later Wittgenstein held onto a homuncular notion of self?

So you are not yet convincing me that phenomenology is anything more than a passing curiosity in the history of ideas. — apokrisis

Keep in mind that those involved with phenomenology see it as inextricably linked to Wittgensteinian pragmatics, post structuralism, deconstruction, Gibsonian ecological psychology and a host of related ideas. So if it is merely a curiosity , the same would have to be said of the larger tapestry of thinking in the social sciences that it is merely one element of. One would have to include the social activism on campuses which is feeding off of pomo currents. Of course, in one sense, all ideas are just passing curiosities. The question is whether the path of change today is leading the vanguard of psychological and philosophical thinking closer to Peirce or further away from him. They do seem to be moving further away from Schelling , Hegel and Marx, and closer to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault , Heidegger , Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.

Enactivism itself is of course a crucial corrective to Cartesian representationalism. But Peirce already founds everything in that kind of pragmatic embodiment. — apokrisis

Those in many branches of the social sciences choosing to bypass Peirce’s semiotic form of pragmatism feel that a pragmatics is severely constrained when it is grounded in rationalistist logic and a notion of truth as a ‘real’ which is progressively attainable.