The aim is not to stop change but to move through change more aggressively, consistently , to embrace the new fluidly. — Joshs

For what reason? — Tom Storm

To stay one step ahead of the bill collector. Who says philosophy isn’t practical?

Also , because I’m assuming it is the human condition that we find ourselves always already in motion. The world around us will never be the same from one moment to the next. If we cannot find ways, channels of construing this flow such that it makes recognizable sense to us in its endless new variations , then our experience will be one of stagnation. stuckness , constriction of possibilities , withdrawal and depression.
So my referring to aggressive experiential change is another way of conveying the idea of richly intimate change, for instance in flow experiences. If the balance of novelty and familiarity is too skewed in the direction of novelty, then in fact one cannot change , because one cannot even fully absorb what one is encountering. A fog of chaotic , confused incidentals doesn’t amount to much substantive experience at all.

Vagueness is defined as that to which the principle on non-contradiction fails to apply (as generality is that to which the laws of the excluded middle fails to apply). — apokrisis

I’ve been reading Salthe and enjoyed seeing his use of the concept of vagueness in the context of bypassing the law of non-contradiction. I also. prices he is comfortable embracing the label postmodernist , finds phenomenology and the enactivist work of Maturana and Varela valuable.

For there to be the definite things of a definite figure AND its definite ground - a state of developed thirdness - there must have been the vagueness out of which such a coupled or dialectical distinction arose. A concrete void awaiting its events can’t be taken for granted. That is atomism — apokrisis

I think the key word here is AND. One way we can begin a world is with states that are what they are in themselves , and then build from these inherences via relations with other states or inherences. So we begin with a static ‘is’ and add an ‘and’. The ‘and’ is necessary to give us change and movement because the ‘is’ doesnt in itself manifest change.

Another way to begin a world is by putting change and transition before self-inhering state. But this doesn’t simply mean moving the ‘and’ to the primary position.
By change I don’t mean the displacement in space and time of an object, but qualitative change, the transit from one qualitative to another. It might seem to be the case that one would need to stipulate the states
that this transit puts itself between, but the idea here is that there is no such thing as a state. If I draw a line, you can say that it marks a boundary between two
states. But you could instead say that states are derived and secondary, that the change from a before to an after is not added on but primary. Transit IS what the ‘is’ ’ refers to. If we look at it this way, then we don’t need to add an ‘and’ , a relation, dialectic , distinction to an ‘is’ because the ‘is’ is already this transit.

This means seeing the figure/ground relation not as two objects or states or inherences that exist in themselves first and then produce a distinction, dialectic, relation. Rather , the figure is a modification of the ensemble. There was never an ensemble before
the figure. The ensemble only appears as the transition takes place , the coming to the fore of a new figure against a transformed ground.

This alternative likely won’t sound appealing , but I think it captures a trend encompassing a host of philosophical disciplines privileging difference , transit and displacement as primary over inhering state. Of course, this can be traced back to the interest of Hegel and Peirce in articulating a philosophy of becoming.

unity" "concordance"! Listen to yourself! These are quantifiers! Worth is qualifying. Meaning is qualification. Language is its intimation. We resort to quantifiers because because reason is reductive. The only way to reach the synthetic term is the exhaustion of analysis. — Gary M Washburn

These are only quantifiers if they refer to a quantifiable quality , something with an aspect that can be counted and measured. But in the hands of phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty , and Nietzsche, intimacy of relation from one moment to the next is not subject to measurement and quantification.
If an event is like a previous one , if they share a dimension of similarity , than by implication they also differ from one another. This is how experience can continue in a thematic direction as continuing to be the same differently. One could even say that the entire world as it is experienced is reinvented from scratch as a new quality every moment, that I am reinvented from
scratch every moment , that my history is reinvented from
scratch every moment , and yet maintain that to experience is to recognize , on the basis of similarity and difference, the new in relation to the old. Absolute qualitative difference is no no experience at all.

It is precisely through our effort to be consistent that all terms change — Gary M Washburn

Terms are always changing.That is the precondition for Husserlian intentionality , Heidegger’s Dasein , Derrida’s difference and Nietzsche’s value systems. The aim is not to stop change but to move through change more aggressively, consistently , to embrace the new fluidly. As heidegger puts it, authentic being is directed toward one’s ownmost possibilities of being. Derrida celebrates
the multiplication of differences. Absolute , unassimilable novelty isnt change at all, but stagnation, just as is quantifiable change.

Have you looked at Husserl’s notion of intentionality? He begins from a notion of the present as ‘thick’ or ‘specious’. This time consciousness underlies all of our experiences. The present is not a punctual now but a triad consisting of the just elapsed past ( called retention) , the immediate present and a protentional aspect anticipating into the future. The retentional aspect is not the same thing as a memory. It is more like a lingering of the just past as a slightly faded ‘present’ alongside the fresh present. Without this notion of a retentional phase of the now , it would be impossible to explain how we are able to enjoy a temporallly extended event like a melody. If perceived time is just puctual ‘nows’ one after the other. , the temporally unfolding context of a melody or book or movie or conversation would be lost.

Intention is the act whereby we experience the present. We intend a present event by expecting into it via protention. The protention is a kind of empty anticipation which is ‘fulfilled’ by what actually occurs into our intending. This fulfillment can be relatively ( but never perfectly) complete, or our anticipation can be disappointed by what actually happens. Even in disappointment what we expereince is never a complete surprise.. Protention makes even the most unexpected, disappointing event familiar and recognizable
to us to some extent. Also note that, since fulfillment is never perfect , what occurs into an intention is always novel in some fashion , in some aspect.
So every intention is teleologically oriented , every intention is both a prediction and a fulfillment , in the same act and same moment. And every intention produces novelty and the unexpected at least in some smalll measure.
The other feature of intentionality is that the world always appears to us in modes of givenness. The intentional object could be an imagining , a remembrance, a perception or the experience of an social value, depending on whether we are imagining, perceiving , remembering or valuing the object. So how the ‘same’ world appears to us shifts depending on our mode of intending.

I hope this helps.

this simply elides the dependence between reason and experience. Pretending it all happens by some ineffable means, so long as we make no effort to understand it, doesn't make it invulnerable to inquiry. T — Gary M Washburn

There is more than one way to understand reason and rationality, as Husserl showed. The motive force behind his phenomenology is the striving for fulfillment of unity. Intentionality mnaifests this at all levels of constitution via associative synthesis , which is based on the linking of the new with the past on the basis of similarity, concordance, commonality , harmony. This is how reason manifests itself in his model.

it's not what you think you are, but what you know you do not deserve to be that determines the worth of your ideas. — Gary M Washburn

I would say it is the usefulness of your ideas in making sense of new events concoedanrly with previous expectations that determines the worth of your ideas.

My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia. — apokrisis

Either you are misreading phenomenology( especially Merleau-Ponty) or you have an unusual definition of ineffable qualia. A direct quote from him to buttress your claim , along with a clear definition of ineffable qualia , might help me to decide which of the two it is. If you’re going to tell me you don’t need to bother with a quote because you already know all you need to about phenomenology, I’ll take that as a failure to provide any evidence.

As far as the meaning of ineffable qualia, I take the target of Dennett’s critique in Quining qualia’ to be a good exemplification of the sense of the term for proponents of qualia like Strawson. I don’t think Dennett would have the slightest problem with Merlea-Ponty’s approach in this regard. The last thing his model of perception is doing is glorifying qualia.

Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it?
— Joshs

Why are you already trying to invert some judgement of which pole is right, which wrong? It would be evidence of progress if you instead became sensitive to every instance when you want to launch out like that. — apokrisis

Let’s not worry about which is right and which is wrong. I’m simply trying to determine how Peirce’s model
of the relation between whole and part differs from
that of the Gestaltists. They certainly are not identical.

So it is the physics that is “organic” in being self organising dissipative structure. And then life and mind are a system of informational switches that inserts a top-down hierarchy of regulation into the mix.

The global whole has to constrain local possiblity so that it is the “right kind of stuff” for then re-constructing that whole. Each has to evolve together in a mutualism that results in the synergy of a good fit.


But then exponentially, the division grows in scale so that the local and global have their clearly different cogent moments. On the local scale, you have the material fabric of rate dependent interactions - secondness. Then on the global scale you have the generalised laws or constraints - the rate independent information - that regulates these material degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

Does this mean that the ‘parts’ of the whole ( local
possibility ) can be understood or defined outside of their role within the whole, or would such a separation count as an artificial abstraction?

So Firstness is where it starts. But Firstness is already promising its own sharply divided future. To be the kind of tychic fluctuation which could develop, it must already have proposed the essential epistemic cut between figure and ground as a Gestalist would rightly say, or local and global as a hierarchy theorist would want to put it. — apokrisis

I’m confused about Firstness. I thought that Peirce describes it as without relation , as a pure in-itself , inherence, identity. Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty based his model on the gestalt For him the irreducible basis of the world is the figure/ground ensemble , and the figure has no identity, sense or essence apart from its role with respect to the ground.

I understand Husserl as understanding the transcending of the material world by act as intention, as beyond the totality of it's parts because of it's nature as a acting (verb). — Gregory

I think you’ve got it backwards. It’s the material
world that transcends our intending acts. Material nature for Husserl is an abstraction, an idealization that we never actually fulfill completely in our experiences of it. We never see complete spatial objects , but only a flowing continuum of partial perspectives. We hypothesize that self-identical objects exist. That is, with every néw perspectival view , we intend the ‘object’ as a self-identical unity. But we never actually see this perfect identity, so the object ‘transcends’ what we actually experience.

The fact of the matter is there is no validity in experience and there is no truth in logic. We cannot validly derive anything from experience without appealing to the rational, and logical extensions are only valid or invalid, there is no truth in logic. — Gary M Washburn

It’s certainly the case that there is no validity to experience if by validity we mean formal logical validity. But there can be a pragmatic validity or pragmatic rationality , which simply amounts to discovering that subsequent events are inferentially compatible with our prior anticipations . Our expectations have then been validated, but not in a formal logical sense.

Best quit while you are ahead. The whole left vs right nonsense is a sorry level of analysis. — apokrisis

It may be a sorry level of analysis , but it is a reality of today’s academic culture, for better or worse . I’m sure you remember Alan Sokal. Like Salthe , he was a proud supporter of socialist causes , but sensed that the academic environment was dividing itself into two incompatible camps. His ‘hoax’ was an attempt to discredit one of those two camps. All he accomplished in the end was to deepen the divide.

Have you read Peirce on firstness, secondness and thirdness and understood how it is an irreducibly complex nested hierarchy?

Firstness doesn't even exist - or defines the limit of existence in being naked fluctuation or vagueness. But unbounded fluctuation produces the secondness of two things having some relation. Then the generality of such a connection develops into a regular habit as soon there is a context, an environment, that is formed simply by virtue of having a flurry of things all relating, and that making up the world. — apokrisis

I’ve begun to read about the three levels. Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it? That is , rather than the whole preceding and determining the parts , here the part, in the guise of firstness, is the origin of what comes after , by contributing an irreducible content ( vagueness , fluctuation) which then defines the nature of the relation that secondness manifests. And finally , the regular habit of an environment is generated from these interrelationalities as thirdness. Do I have this right ?

The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. The proper view is the one that can speak of the two as complementary aspects of the one whole - the one biosemiotic modelling relation — apokrisis

The triadic systems thinker can recognise the dichotomy or dialectical relation that is the source of the monist's dualised confusion and so sidestep that trap. — apokrisis

If the informational view and the dynamical view
are complementary aspects of a whole, how does Peirce’s triad relate to this dialectic? How does the three become two?

Let’s dig into Barrett’s text:
— Joshs

I'd rather not. It seems like another dumbed down version of affect - a story I've already deconstructed into its biological and cultural spheres with the aid of better sources. — apokrisis

Would you be able to suggest a link to your favorite source for a thoroughgoing account of affect? I really want to zoom in on a text you can endorse, so I can get a stable textual basis for discussion.

You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars.
— Joshs

Are you giving me fair warning of being cancelled? I need to fear your mounting of a woke witch-hunt? :rofl:

Just look at how passive aggressive your little sally there was. All the things I have done to myself by my own poor choices. I cannot blame anyone else for the beating I am about to be doled out.

Pathetic. — apokrisis

Now be nice. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded. I’m not sure why I mentioned it , except that I’m
curious as to what impact the ‘science critics’ of the postmodern left have had on you professionally or personally , if any. Are they a source of amusement, annoyance or worse? I wonder, because I don’t see them going away any time soon. In fact, they seem to be becoming more entrenched in academia. I may identify with certain overarching arguments that are made from their perspective, but I don’t approve of cancel
culture or the general bullying , condemnatory attitude associated with the more strident factions of wokism.

some of the least conservative theoretical biologists and semioticians like Stan Salthe - — apokrisis

Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie.

The distinction as I see it is between language as the corespondence between a symbol system and a pre-existing source of information , and language as a way of channeling and organizing a changing stream of meanings.

You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.

How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.

I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around — apokrisis

Have you ready any Husserl? There is a lot of him in here.
Husserl told us that to get to the ‘things themselves’ we have to bracket what we already know about the world, by performing a ‘reduction’ to the most primordial
sphere. So that includes bracketing off the awareness of ourselves as a human self in distinction to other humans. It includes the recognition of objects in our surround as intersubjectively determined empirical objects. It even includes eliminating any notion of object as an enduring spatial identity with properties. Att first there are only phenomena , not yet a ‘world’ in any sense, and certainly not an ‘external’ world. So what is left after all of these levels of constitution have been stripped off? There is no ‘I’, there is only a zero point of activity. This zero point is the intersection of retention , presencing and protention. It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. I suppose this could be called a pre-self self or a proto -self , in that there is awareness of continuity and familiarity of a sort.

Next, one can imagine how an unpatterned flow of phenomena first begins to show regularities and correlations in the sense data that unfold. Even before there is any construction of ‘my body’ as a psychophysical unity of organs of sensing and kineshtesia, of controlled movement, there is the constituting of spatial objects as identities out of reguglaties in the unfolding of sensations. But without correlating one’s own deliberate movements in a regular and predictive fashion with the changes in sensation and perspective of the ‘object’ that occur in synch with it, there still will not be an ‘object’ as an identity. But is this developing process of constituting an experiencing of the ‘real’ natural objects of the world? We can’t say that, because these are ongoing, tentiave hypothesies of what will happen next , and things can always happen to disappoint. So the ‘real’ world is always contingent and relative, a changing product of our constitutive acts. As far as a separation of subject and object , the aim of experiencing isnt to create separatism , but to ascertain harmonious unities and similarities in a constantly changing stream of sensations.

Primordially, there is no subject-object split, only a past-present-future differentiation. Subject and external
world as separate sides of a divide are higher order constituted products.
So if there is a dialectical grounding in phenomenology , the subjective protending , anticipative striving and the objective ‘now’ which occurs into this protending would be it. But notice we’re still along way away from natural empirical objects , much less natural laws , or formal symbol systems.

It seems obvious that speech involves representations, although maybe not as primitive — frank

Have you ever gotten into it with the Wittgensteinians on here about his critique of the idea of language as representation? If you look up some of the threads, especially those begun by Antony Nickles , you’ll get a good taste of the issue.

I don't want to promote Wittengenstein, but didn't he make a valid "beetle in a box" argument about such private languages? — apokrisis

I’m curious. Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science?

I am forced to talk in these kinds of cartoon accounts to the extent you wouldn't be able to follow a neurocognitive account in terms of dopaminergic influences on working memory, or the critical role played by the nucleus accumbens in the switching of the brain from a smooth endogenous focus to an abrupt state of alert or surprisal - the classic reorientation response. The aha! that is either then further interpreted as a nasty shock or as a pleasant surprise. — apokrisis

I may surprise you . I have a background in biology and neuroscience. But I have a request. I’ve been reading Pattee and am prepared to go through his texts closely before I render any off the cuff judgements about him. I ask the same of you. You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. I can be prone to some of the same liberties but I don’t like arguing that way. My Continental philosophy background draws me to close and careful readings of original texts.

It is not your fault that we aren't speaking at that level. It is simply a fact here. — apokrisis

You should speak at that level. That’s the whole point here. That’s the world as you see it , and I need the full
flavor of it.

My argument would be that pleasure and pain are already socially-constructed concepts. They place the discussion squarely in a space of phenomenological accounts, and so bypass my more nuanced efforts to separate the neurobiology from the social constructs.

Are pleasure and pain just "feelings" - qualia? Or are they brains responding in a generalised and coherent fashion to the bare fact of having a state of prediction - a state of ignoring - interrupted by some form of unexpected surprise.


So there are not going to be pain and pleasure producing modules in the brain - centres for the production of Cartesian qualia. That expectation is the patent product of a culture soaked in the representational dualism of Cartesian metaphysics. — apokrisis

Yes and no.

Let’s dig into Barrett’s text:



“ Your affect is always some combination of valence and arousal, repre­sented by one point on the affective circumplex. When you sit quietly, your affect is at a central point of “neutral valence, neutral arousal” on the circum­plex. If you’re having fun at a lively party, your affect might be in the “pleas­ant, high arousal” quadrant. If the party turns boring, your affect might be
“unpleasant, low arousal.”

In sum , our interoceptive sensations which regulate our body budget lead to predictions as to the cause of those sensations. The simplistic S-R model is replaced by an internally mediating one in which interpretation and prediction stand between sensation and behavior. Has the reinforcement component been removed? Not at all, it has simply been complexified. The arbitrary link between valence-arousal and behavior remains , but with a lot of intermediate variables added between the two polles of input and output. For instance:


“Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime. The judges experienced their interoceptive sensations not as hunger but as evidence for their parole decision. Immediately after lunch, the judges began granting paroles with their customary frequency.
When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your ex­perience of the world. The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades
performing clever experiments to better understand how people make de­cisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called a!ffective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are
created in part by our feelings. For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.”

Ratcliffe’s model also maintains the link between valence and behavior, but the difference with Barrett is that her predictive subsections of the brain are only loosely linked to eaxh other in reciprocal dependency , and only indirectly linked to the outside environment.

Instead, an embodied approach to neurocognitive architecture talks in terms of the basic rationality of coherent pragmatic action. We must start with some system of dialectically-framed definite choices - like the dichotomy of approach~avoid, or ignore~attend. And that general dichotomy we would expect to find distributed in a relevant way over the entirety of the brain's structure. It would be a dialectic that was hard-wired. — apokrisis

I thought that for Barrett approach-avoid was a function of predictions , not the interoceptive senses of the body budget.

The point here is not the detail, but the fact that neuroscience does in fact have stories about what is going on that is now incredibly detailed. These are what make talk about pleasure and pain - Cartesian qualia talk - so quaint and socially-situated. — apokrisis

Barrett uses the same language , and just like Ratcliffe , she is able to break this language down to physiological, interpretive and social aspects. Don’t preemptively holler Cartesian before you’ve seen how the common emotional terms are broken down.

Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. But as we know now , far from ignoring the elucidations of process contributed by S-R, cognitivism dug deeper, complicating Skinner’s model , and made it possible for you to complain about my using the terms ‘pleasure and pain reinforcement’.

Who is this "us" when it comes to the embodied brain? All there really is is some collection of interpretive habits with sufficient plasticity to keep learning from its errors of prediction. — apokrisis

What is this ‘habit’ that somehow resists
time, context and an outside , to maintain its structure? What are these rate-independent codes’ that transmit or reproduce without producing novelty and changing themselves in the process? What are these natural laws, these natural causal dynamics that martian their externality? Believe it or not , the ‘us’ is more complexly and deductively delineated in enactive accounts than in your own. Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other.

You've convinced me that people are right when they say phenomenology is Cartesian in spirit even when it starts dressing up in the clothing of physical embodiment. — apokrisis

What is Cartesianism? Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning.


You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. From the postmodern pole , your keeping as irreducible a vocabulary of dynamical natural law alongside a semiotics of sign-referent is a latter day form of Cartesianism.

stored info[/quote]

You are opposing the stored information of the cognitivist with the lived dynamics of the enactivist. But then there is the third option - the one supported by the neuroscience - where the coding is predictive.

Whatever is happening out there right now can only make sense because it is judged against a running state of expectation. We anticipated some future, and now something has surprised us. — apokrisis

Doesn’t the notion of a Markov blanket require a strict delineation between the entity doing the fitting and that which it is attempting to predict? That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? From this vantage it would be incoherent , would it not, to suggest that the fitter co-produces the very substrate that it is alleged to be matching itself to? One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery.

This is why Pattee makes the careful distinction of the epistemic cut - the division between rate independent information and rate-dependent dynamics - in living organisms.


The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. — apokrisis

Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa).

As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model.

The rough impression is that new form has to fit old form in order to be meaningful, If it does not then it is meaningless, and lost - this is similar to Shannon entropy. I think the concept of information is relevant to enactivism, and I can not see that anybody has explored it from this perspective specifically? Does enactivism have a definition of information? — Pop

The idea of ‘fitting’ is problematic for enactivism.

Let me introduce here what is considered one of the original texts of enacticism, The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch). In this book, information is linked to internal and external domains which connect with each other in terms of a fitting, matching or mapping relationship. If patterns act as controls, constraints, to effect changes in other entities or patterns such that they deserve the label ‘information’, then a sign and referent , subject and object, representer and represented are implied. But the terms of this relationship are what enactivism is critiquing. Specifically, the above thinking presupposes a gap or cut between the two sides, with each external to and independent of the other, so that their relation is arbitrary.



“At first sight, contemporary cognitive science seems to offer a way out of the traditional philosophical
impasse [between solipsistic idealism and naive metaphysical realism]. Largely because of cognitive science, philosophical discussion has shifted from concern with a priori representations (representations that might provide some noncontingent foundation for our knowledge of the world) to concern with a posteriori representations (representations whose contents are ultimately derived from causal interactions with the environment). This naturalized conception of
representation does not invite the skeptical questions that motivate traditional epistemology. In fact, to shift one's concern to organism-environment relations in this way is largely to abandon the task of traditional a priori epistemology in favor of the naturalized projects of psychology and cognitive science. By taking up such a naturalized stance, cognitive science avoids the antinomies that lurk in transcendental or metaphysical realism, without embracing the solipsism or subjectivism that constantly threatens idealism. The cognitive scientist is thus able to remain a staunch realist about the empirical world while making the details of mind and cognition the subject of his investigations.

Cognitive science thus seems to provide a way of talking about representation without being burdened by
the traditional philosophical image of the mind as a mirror of nature. But this appearance is misleading.”


“… a crucial feature of this image [of naive realism] remains alive in contemporary cognitive science-the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation.”

“ Thus although everyone agrees that representation is a complex process, it is nonetheless conceived to be one of recovering or reconstructing extrinsic, independent environmental features. Thus in vision research, for example, one speaks of "recovering shape from shading" or "color from brightness." Here the latter features are considered to be extrinsic properties of the environment that provide the information needed to recover ''higher-order" properties of the visual scene, such as shape and color. The basic idea of a world with pregiven features remains.”

“…we have slowly drifted away from the idea of mind as an input-output device that processes information.
The role of the environment has quietly moved from being the preeminent reference point to receding more and more into the background, while the idea of mind as an emergent and autonomous network of relationships has gained a central place. It is time, then, to raise the question, What is it about such networks, if anything, that is representational?



“The answer that is usually given to this question is, of course, that these relationships must be seen as embodying or supporting representations of the environment. Notice, however, that if we claim that the function of these processes is to represent an independent environment, then we are committed to
construing these processes as belonging to the class of systems that are driven from the outside, that are defined in terms of external mechanisms of control (a heteronomous system). Thus we will consider information to be a prespecified quantity, one that exists
independently in the world and can act as the input to a cognitive system. This input provides the initial premises upon which the system computes a behavior-the output. But how are we to specify inputs and outputs for highly cooperative, self-organizing systems such as brains? There is, of course, a back-and-forth flow of energy, but where does information end and behavior begin?Marvin Minsky puts his finger on the problem, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:

“Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars. The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves-and this means we cannot separate such
processes from the products they produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we
cannot yet trust our commonsense judgement about such matters.”

What is remarkable about this passage is the absence of any notion of representation. Minsky does not say
that the principal activity of brains is to represent the external world; he says that it is to make continuous
self-modifications. What has happened to the notion of representation?

In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification. This change in stance does not express a mere philosophical preference; it reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The notion of operational closure is thus a way of specifying classes of processes that, in their very operation, turn back upon themselves to form autonomous networks. Such networks do not fall into the class of systems defined by external mechanisms of control (heteronomy) but rather into the class of systems defined by internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy). The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.

We wish to evoke the point that when we begin to take such a conception of mind seriously, we must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.”

“feelings” are an interaction of two varieties of information - biological and cultural. — apokrisis

Yes, but what kind of interaction? I’ve been presenting a model of affectivty that is only supported by five authors
that I know of, and they are drawing from a radicalized version of philosophical phenomenology , which is too far afield from your background to allow for a useful interchange, I’m afraid. So I’m going to dial it back to notch and attempt to contrast your model of affectivity with writes like Matthew Ratcliffe , who is well ensconced within the enactivist community. I think the differences between his theory of affect and those of the predictive processing group ( in particular Lisa Barrett) are pertinent to your approach to the interaction of the biological and the cultural.

Biology accounts for states of arousal that are functional in that they prepare us for actions that meet the demands of our world. Sociology accounts for how we must give reasons for our responses in a language that is socially accepted. — apokrisis

Are we never capable of giving reasons for our responses in a language that is not socially accepted?
Was the predictive processing account of affect , as a significant departure from the then conventionally accepted idea of emotion , socially accepted when it was first developed? Even with the predictive processing community , was there a progenitor who didn’t even have the luxury of an intellectual community to accept their ideas initially?

I offered the cartoon version of oxytocin. But one of the interesting things is how it is neuromodulator that looks designed to override the usual natural fear and anxiety of “being too close” to others. It allows intimacy to override keeping even your social conspecifics at a certain safe distance. — apokrisis

This sounds like a glorified version of S-R theory. Do reinforcements from discrete centers of ‘pleasure’ have the capability to shape our complex attributions this way? I know conventional
models of addiction rely on a reductive idea of the reinforcing effect of chemicals.

Ratcliffe doesn’t deny that primitive sensory events of pleasure and pain are an important part of the organization of behavior , but what makes his account differ from the predictive processing one is that he integrates the contribution of the biological with the perceptual and intentional in a more complex and holistic way.

Ratcliffe's causal reinforcement-based model of affect assigns it the role of biasing appraisal via selectively guiding attention toward a heightening or lowering of perceived significance of various world events. The role of affective attunement is to produce “changes in the types of significant possibility to which one is receptive'. (Ratcliffe 2016) “...existential feelings determine the kinds of noetic and noematic feelings that one is open to. “...the existential feeling sets the parameters for the kinds of more localized experience one is capable of having.”(2016). “Emotions “tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. “(Ratcliffe 2002)

Bodily dispositions can actively direct one toward salient objects in one's world, but are “equally implicated in feeling unable to act upon something. Passivity in the face of threat may involve inclinations to withdraw, to retreat, along with the absence of any other salient possibilities.” (Ratcliffe 2015). For instance, in depression one cannot find the motivation to act to change one's situation ( a confident ‘I can' becomes ‘I can't'). Solipsistic self-perpetuating narratives, reinforced and organized by feelings of avoidance and reduced salience, tell one why they shouldn't or can't connect with others.

In order to situate Ratcliffe's orientation relative to the phenomenologists whose ideas he incorporates, it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention.

“...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus “mark” those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)

You can see that this account is closer to your own than the one I described in an earlier post. But I think there are still important differences.

Chimps have mutual grooming sessions as moments of intimacy. Cats prefer a brief sniff of noses. Humans evolved to tolerate the new behaviours of long term pair bonding and prolonged child rearing. That needed more of an off button for the kind of anxiety that being “overly close for too long” is otherwise liable to evoke. — apokrisis

Here I think Ratcliffe might object that neurohormones mechanisms are too closely and inseparably implicated in the encompassing higher order goal-orientedness of embodied cognition to be able to exert such an important effect on their own like forcing intimacy.

Oxytocin is not, in that light, an on button for intimacy, but an off button on anxiety. Even that is a simplification. But it makes more evolutionary sense and shows how we shouldn’t presume intimacy as some kind of universal good. Biology sets us up to be physiologically intimate as was functional in the typical pre-modern social setting.

Our affect system system is precisely calibrated to our million years of hunter-gatherer living. — apokrisis

But if the discrete contribution of neuro-reinforcers get swallowed up by and subsumed within the integrated goals of the system , then no genetically programmed reinforcement variant can have any more than a superficial effect on behavior. There has been study of ‘rage modules’ and other presumed inborn reinforcement predispositions and their effect on personality. We all know people who have hair -trigger tempers, or are prone to sentimentality. And of course we can cite the breeding of dogs for specific affective dispositions.
But thre question becomes how we are to situate the shaping effect of the biological component on the total personality. If we were able to genetically engineer a powerfully reinforcing olfactory response to human smell, would this amount to a superficial or significant influence on our social lives and propensity to intimacy?

If folk need lots of psychotherapy these days, that is not so surprising. Society has become its own historical project with its own socially-constructed framing of how to think and what to feel. Biology hasn’t had a million years to catch up with some of the ways we are now meant to live. — apokrisis

And if it did ‘catch up’ , no amount of monkeying around with reinforcement contingencies, no amount of dialing down of anxiety juice, would make a significant impact on ptsd or other anxiety syndrome. But then, I shouldn’t present my argument as if you are favoring one side of the equation over the other, the biological over the social.
Your model is consistent. Both the biological and the cultural in your presentation have a quasi s-r character to them. There is a dynamic of overall integration missing in your brain-body-world interaction such as to over emphasisize the arbitrariness and polarization of the pushes and pulls cutler and biology exert on the brain-body-world system.



You will react physiologically even before you can form a clear conscious picture. Your reptile brain - the amygdala in particular - sits poised to react to any sudden rushing object in a fifth of a second.

…whatever socially accepted narrative helps explain your feelings at the time in a reasonable light. — apokrisis

In a way it doesn’t matter whether you talk about fear and anxiety in terms of unconscious reflexivity or consciousness processes of attribution, because both depictions are dealing with response to situations as various kinds of unconsciousness and reflexivity. What I know consciously is what is reinforced via the social
milieu. It by s a kind of polarized causal cobbling with only the most peripheral feature of intricacy , intimacy, consistency and autonomy to it’s moment to moment unfolding. In a way it is a more sophisticated version of the mechanism thinking you reject, one that put probability, uncertainty and algorithm. at its heart.

Generalised anxiety is a pathological state. — apokrisis

Only if we are treating psychological phenomena reductively and missing all today the intricate complexity that makes such phenomena as anxiety much more than reinforced patterns.

Nervous expectation is functional as a way of rising to the expectation of some temporary challenge. It is dysfunctional to get stuck in any particular physiological state for longer than the immediate situation demands. — apokrisis

Who says? Because others define what the immediate situation should entail ? Does the label of pathology imply the forcing of a third person perspective on a situation that doesn’t fit it? Do you think that prolonged nervous expectation is divorced from what the situation demands? What is a ‘immediate situation ‘ and what defines its temporal boundaries? There is no strict sense to immediacy for a human being because our present is always defined by and infused with its grounding past and an expectant future. One could argue that an experiential focus on the most narrowly defined notion of immediacy is itself pathological , or at least a great way to lose all sense of coherence in one’s world. By the same token, the most expansive and dilated awareness can often be associated with a strong sense of belonging, clarity and confidence. The issue with prolonged anxiety isn’t the temporal expanse it involves , but the fact that the issues that obsessively pop up over and over as unresolved and threatening have relevance right now, in ones immediate present. One is not being inappropriately directed to a certain set of ‘immdeiate’ concerns in prolonged anxiety . It is not the concerns that are inappropriate. It is the world as it is being construed that is being uncooperative. To pathologize this situation is to blame the messenger for the message .

But of course, culture can frame your reality as a state of constant threat, or a dread of a moment’s boredom. It can play all sorts of manipulative tricks.
— apokrisis

Yes. but it is your personal culture, as it connects with your past. It is you who are experiencing the crisis, not the entire culture you interact with.

you too have an amygdala as well as a prefrontal cortex. The neurology tells you what part of your responses are preverbal - or at least limited to the kinds of shrieks, screams and swear words the amygdala, in cahoots with the anterior cingulate, might cause you to emit even as you are trying to make sense of something scary that is in the middle of happening. — apokrisis

Pointing to the role of the amygdala in fear. is not the same as assigning it the role of a reinforcement.
There is plenty of research attributing to the amygdala a contribution to the processing of the event. If you can’t recognize and process the rapid changes i.n a situation , you will not be able to fear it. Brain injuries slow down processing of events.

Try stepping out on to a stage or the finals of a tennis tournament and not feel butterflies. It is essential to react physiologically and neurologically in a way that gets you up for the occasion. — apokrisis

Try performing the same speech in the privacy of your living room and with one audience member. No butterflies and arguably a better performance. Or play that tennis match without the huge crowd and see how your nervousness is reduced and how your focus may improve. You’ll notice that the benefits of the hormonal circuit only make sense in the context of additional assessment pertaining to risks to self-esteem ,worries of potential embarrassment and failure. The hormonal ‘ boost’ is only half of the anxiety equation . The other half is what defines it as a negative feeling. it is the experience of potential loss, the feeling of interruption of cognitive activity , a gap in awareness. This is the pain component of fear and anxiety. There are plenty of stimulants on the market, but only intentional attribution can produce the pain of potential loss. The persistent suffering of potential loss inherent in chronic anxiety and ptsd is what makes them emotional crises. The hormones are not producing the pain, and they do not have the power to trigger memory of loss. Only a relevantly meaningful thought of threat can do that. The hormone , in fact, is the only positive contribution to this cycle of anxiety, by encouraging rapid action.

habits take long to form and a split second to emit. Attention takes longer to develop, but offers more immediate fruits. — apokrisis

I would agree if you substituted for ‘automatism’ , the contribution my system of anticipations makes to
the recognition and construal of the event.
If it is truly unthinking, unconscious and automatic it will play no relevant role in my subsequent thinking This is why subliminal advertising never worked.

Even bored out of our skulls, we are constantly re-characterizing what time is. Even when we are most burdened by time unchanging, we are exhibiting its being change. — Gary M Washburn

Husserl wrote that the grounding of logic and mathematics depends on an idealization of the object. In order for there to be an object with extension, duration and magnitiude there has to be some aspect which is countable, calculable, measurable, mathematizable.
And in order fro this to be the case , an object has to resist time , it has to be present to itself , self-identical over time. Only this way can things appear ‘in’ time, as if time were an empty container. But Husserl shows that there is nothing primordially self-identical in experience. In order to construct the notion of a real object that persists as itself ‘in’ time , we must forget, ignore , disregard the fact that we are inventing this self-sameness out of an experiencing that in actually is presenting us with senses , aspects, perspectives of the world that change to moment to moment. We decide to intercept all of these flowing changes as a single ‘this’ and not notice we have done so.

we'll have to pick of the pieces and rebound from a major setback comparable to the ancient Greek or Medieval dark age in Europe? — Enrique

will society stagnate, and where will we be in a hundred or a thousand years? — Enrique

An awful lot of revisionist scholarship has been offered up in recent decades arguing against the idea that the medieval period was a time of stagnation or regression. They point out that every major innovation that we associate with the Renaissance and beyond can be traced to this alleged ‘dark’ time. Don’t discount the creative possibilities that crisis affords.

the external world is represented by neural patterning somehow. Information of the external world acts upon us to cause a patterning of brain matter - this patterning is identical to the external world. It is a nonsense to think we can extricate ourselves from our neurological state. — Pop

Let’s say that we define pattern as a particular way in which elements of a plurality or multiplicity are related to each other to form the whole. At a given moment this ensemble can be defined in terms of this internal structuralality. We could further define the elements of the pattern as one and zeros, and their relations with other elements of the pattern in terms of relative spatial location. Or we could describe the elements in qualitative terms , as having a qualitative sense that arises out of its role in the pattern. There are computational descriptions of informational patterns as ones and zeros, and non-computational accounts of the components as qualitative aspects of a gestalt.

Beyond this static , or synchronic account of pattern, there is the diachronic, or temporal aspect. Does it makes sense to talk about a pattern that we can move from place to place or from time to time, intact and unchanged in itself? We certainly are tempted to describe patterns such as dna codes in such mechanically reproductive terms. But what about human language and conceptualization? If we view perception , for instance , as the internal representation of a stimulus , or as a direct fitting between internal pattern and external stimulus,?are we assuming that the internal pattern is stored and waiting to be used? In this case , we are assuming the idea that an internal cognitive or pereceptual pattern is something that remains self-identical at least temporarily, to be drawn upon when needed. That’s why we call it ‘internal’.


The alternative does not accept the idea that in the realm of human perception, cognition and languaging it makes sense to talk about patterns as having self-identicality from one moment of time to the next. Thus these patterns cannot be spoken of as codes in any traditional sense. There are only relative temporary stabilities overlaying a ceaselessly changing neural patterning.

Their dynamical properties determine psychological processes as non-representational and non-decoupleable “...variables changing continuously, concurrently and interdependently over quantitative time...”(Van Gelder,1999)

Varela(1996b) says “...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act”(p.291)

Furthermore , if it doesn’t make sense to talk about an ‘internal’ milieu of stored, temporarily self-identical mental patterns , what do we make of the ‘external’ patterns that we like to in nature , such as dna codes , that appear to manifest temporal self-identicaility, such that they are transmissible and moveable in algorithmic purity? Do we ground our ‘messy’ mental processes in reproducible external pattern and materiality (Reducing human behavior and cognition to the computational , representational dynamics of neurons)? Or do we derive representationalism, computationalism , moveable and reproducible codes and patterns , algorithmic information, from a messy pattern making that is only any of these things in a derived and secondary sense.

What do you think?

"Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations." — Pop

Right. I think Isaac was confirming that this is the prevailing view among neuro scientists. — frank

The prevailing view among neuroscientists is that the cognizing organism actively attempts a useful fit between incoming stimuli and internally generated representations, so they do still endorse the idea of computationalist internal representations. Enactivists on the other hand reject computationalism and representationalism.

Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it. — Gary M Washburn

I agree with you about language. I’ve been arguing the same thing on the ‘what is information’ thread. Biosemiotics is all the rage these days, but it’s hard to explain to its adherents why it shares with physicalistic materialism the problem of reductionism. I notice you’ve written a lot on temporality. That’s a central theme of my work, too.

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining. — Gary M Washburn

Are you saying Sartre agrees with Husserl on this or differs from him?

Reference doesn’t have to be made to ‘the way things really are’ , only to pragmatic differences in behavior.
— Joshs

Hmm. Does Davidson assume that? Or are you saying he accuse his antagonists of so doing? — Banno

He argues that that the assumption of ‘conceptual scheme’ requires the above presumption:

“ In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get con­ceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board.”( On the very idea of …)

anxiety is part of the stress response - physiological readiness for fight or flight (or even the third strange choice of freezing). Noradrenaline in the brain goes up to change the signal-noise balance. We become less able to focus on endogenous/dopamimergic planning and more open to the exogenous/readiness response where we have no clear prediction of where the signals we seek might come from. So the brain as a whole is made readier to react to anything that might just normally be treated as peripheral noise. — apokrisis

Is anxiety part of the stress response or is the stress response simply an accompaniment to anxiety? If someone loses sensation, such that the physiological accompaniment is no longer kinesthetically and tactile perceived, do you think the anxiety goes away? All that goes away is the body’s stepping in to help optimize the movements that the anxious or fearful person is contemplating in rapid fashion. The situation as we construe it is what dictates the movements we want to make, not the feedback from our body. This feedback
follows, but does not lead. And when the feedback is absent , we still perform all the typical
actions and thoughts that we think of as
flight or fight, although we may do them more clumsily.

If I see a bear coming toward me, I can process very quickly the potential dangers , options and outcomes. I will do this quickly not because of physiological help , but because I already know that this is a situation that requires split second decision. Fearful situations also imply a rapid oscillation between anticipation of loss or hurt, and hope of escape. This is precisely because the feared event hasn’t happened yet. If what we fear happens, we will no longer be afraid but shift to a different attitude. So fear is a rapidly oscillating attitude between doom and hope. This is its meaning. We can dump all kinds of adrenaline into someone. .Sometimes they may initially confuse it for fear, but when they don’t find a situational cause they will shift attitude.



We can’t concentrate in fear not because of the hormones but because then worry over the situation is a greater priority to us than other interests PTSD isnt a disorder of chemicals , it is a problem of failure to effectively understand events the past that have relevance for ones present and future.

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Anxiety is just a machinery for paying better attention to the uncertain environment when that is the processing mode that makes better sense than remaining head down and focused on some narrow task or activity r — apokrisis

This is redundant. We don’t need the explanation of the machinery stepping in to tell us to focus when the situation as we construe it is already telling us in capital letters to focus on nothing else. Try injecting yourself
with adrenaline and see how it ‘makes’ you focus. It actually has the opposite effect unless you are already gearing yourself up for action, action which ebbs and flows in it’s urgently in precise orchestration to the now imminent, now not so imminent danger. Hormones are dumb, but one’s assessment knows exactly what it is afraid of, why and what it wants to do about it, and it can think all this ina split second.

n

An organism must be able to resist change to its structure of habits so as to persist as that functional set of habits. But the same organism must also have the plasticity to adapt as the world changes in ways it hasn’t encountered. It must have the attentional level of processing to complement the habitual. Paradigms need to be tweakable.

So any systems minded biologist or neuroscientist gets this. Existence for an organism is a dialectical balancing act in terms of staying the same and yet constantly adapting. — apokrisis

I would only add that an organism ‘persists’ as a set of habits only in a relative sense. It is crucial
to bring temporality into the equation and remind that , as Piaget said, each assimilation to ‘habits’ is at the same time an accommodation to the novelties of the environment. The world is always, minute by minute, changing in ways the organism hasn’t precisely encountered. Look at perception. Each moment , the world presents our senses with a slight new set of data. We effortless accommodate our perceptual system to this unless a more significant anomaly occurs and causes us to stop and take notice.
In this way , our perceptions and our languaging are immediately in the world, never merely ‘persisting’. Awareness would be impossible if it didn’t present an always slightly novel world.

This may be an interesting difference between us. What is novelty to you? Do organisms and humans just rearrange previous bits and codes most of the time?

Hmm. I have difficulty seeing why this is a problem for Davidson. Where does memory fit in his argument? — Banno

Actually, I was thinking more of Putnam here. Davidson wants us to believe the idea of a conceptual
scheme presupposes a dualism of scheme and an uninterpreted reality. It doesn’t. Reference doesn’t have to be made to ‘the way things really are’ , only to pragmatic differences in behavior. If we impute to the other an incommensurable scheme, we are anticipating a whole range of behaviors on the r part of the other that we are unable to make sense of in the way we can with someone who shares our scheme. Thus the notion of conceptual scheme validates itself via the behavior over time of the person who we claim holds this scheme.
To unmuddy things a bit , we could rename conceptual scheme ingrained habits of thought. We would also have to assume that Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought. As we have learned in our current polarized world , differences in political worldview are sweeping in the areas of thought that they encompass.

Sure. Incommensurability is indefensible, so those who propound it soon backtrack. Feyerabend did the same. — Banno

I do have problems with Davidson’s argument against incommensurability of schemes. For one thing , memory is reconstructive. There is no veridical past to re-access and compare with the present. To do so is already to be dealing with a re-interpretation. As regards the translation of concepts not only between languages but within a given language, if one wants to argue that general agreement on what is the case is always possible , then I would assent to that as long as this must be a pragmatic agreement. More importantly, I would add that in many cases , such as political polarization , agreement may be theoretically possible , but for all intents and purposes is impossible. This is because there can be no translation from one political camp to another without an enormously difficult work of transformation and expansion of political concepts in order to glimpse the opposing political viewpoint in a way that is recognizable to the other side of the conflict.

Perhaps it is also hard for folk to paradigm shift if they haven’t first established a paradigm to shift away from? Often people don’t understand their own socially constructed belief systems, just like fish don’t know water. — apokrisis

That’s true, but they do know when their paradigm is crumbling , because this is for Kelly the meaning of what are conventionally called negative emotions. Kelly did away with the dichotomy cognition-feeling-conation and instead made what we think of a a feeling the expression of the organizational status of our attempts at anticipating events . Anxiety , threat , guilt and hostility all have to do with a ‘paradigm’ , what he calls our superordinate system , running into trouble in its attempts to make sense of things. One can think of such feelings as anxiety as the experience of impending chaos , the near meaningless of a world that one cannot construe on the basis of similarities with what one already knows. One cannot move forward.

One can attempt to stave off such chaos for a while , constricting one’s world to simple routines and situations that are familiar( the ultimate constriction is suicide) and avoiding the situations one no longer cope with, but only a reorganization of one’s system ( a new paradigm) offers the possibility of moving forward again. In this regard, Kelly makes a distinction between aggression and hostility. Aggression is simply confident exploration of new situations, with no intent to harm or destroy.
Hostility is the attempt to force a round peg into a square hole, the recognition that one’s social
predication has failed ( one discovers one’s lover has cheated , violating one’s sense of trust in them). Rather than reconstruing the situation so as to determine how the other came to their behavior , one attempts to force the other back to the way we expected
them to act in the first place. Hostility and anger are thus impetuses of conformity. We blame the world for our failure to understand it, to keep up with the changing flow of events such as to discern replicating patterns.

Notably missing from Kelly’s treatment of affect is recourse to bodily sensation. He contradicts the classic view of feeling as instinctive , raw, primitive , bodilly, non-intentional , a force , surge, glow , energy.

That is just the general rationality of the Cosmos expressing itself.
The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself — apokrisis

Perhaps the ‘rationality’ of Kelly’s approach can be linked to this ‘rationality’ of the Cosmos.

The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself. But then also inserts a self interested point of view into the map of this terrain. Hence Gestalt psychology. We experience an Umwelt which is symmetry broken into the figure and ground that has now a personal meaning. We highlight what matters to us as a point of view, and ignore everything else as peripheral detail. — apokrisis

Is the brain’s inserting a self interested point of view necessary? Could it be imagined differently? Enactivists like Thompson argue that all living things have a point of view, a functional unity that makes them norm generating goal-oriented systems. As Piaget defined it, for an organism , ‘interest’ is simply the system’s actively pursuing a continuing pattern of interaction with its world, and need is the interruption of this cycle.

So it’s not simply that we ignore what doesn’t matter to us , we would disintegrate as organisms if we attempted to ‘assimilate’ what was not compatible with our current functioning and interests. I suppose one could put this in dialectical terms and say with Piaget that the interest-based equlibrarion of cognitive structures is progressive ,
the direction is from weaker to stronger structures. Put differently, self-interest, point of view and normativity produce new structure from older ones. Without relevance, mattering , interest there is no dialectical
progression of structural integration, only a mechanical reproduction or re-shuffling of pre-existing pattern.

I suppose that , rather than taking the individual
organism as focal point , one could take a broader ecological stance and put in question the coherence of biological ‘selves’. I don’t think that such an approach would alter the general features of the dialectic. It would merely identify the self as the totality , the world coming to know itself.

Neuromodulating chemical signals that produce reciprocal states of response. One puts us in a cooperating state of mind - inclined to be sympathetic in terms of our empathic understanding of another’s state of mind. But high testosterone, low oxytocin, switches things. You employ your empathic skills to find the least sympathetic ways to undermine your competition. — apokrisis

Everything is a nested hierarchy of switches that delivers a self-balancing outcome - one that is both stable and yet dynamic, conservative and liberal, loving and hateful, habitual and attentional, or whatever other dichotomy has come to your notice as a nasty dualism that must be hammered flat by your brand of philosophical monism. — apokrisis

What I’m wondering here is how much of a role a sociobiological component plays in your model. Are these just general capacities for affectivity and motivation you’re ascribing to the nwueohormonal machinery , or do they specify content? If a series of mutations were to occur , could they wreak havoc with the motivational-affective system in such a s way as to reverse the poles of the dichotomy cooperation-competition , fight-flight, approach-avoid, love the insider-hate the outsider?

Piaget once debated Chomsky and Fodor , who were both innatists when it came to semantic content of language. Piaget’s positions was that the instincts play essentially no role i. human behavior , other than the Babinski reflex. The general organizing principles of cognition and affect ( assimilation , accommodation , progressive equilibrarion) belong to the general organizing principles of life( and he wanted to extend this back to physics ). Dan Dennett also disagreed with evolutionary psychologists who , along with Dawkins and Pinker, ascribed specific innate grounds for many behaviors. Dennett believes that human behavior is almost entirely explainable without reference to innate modules or other kinds of machinery , other than the general capacities required for goal-oriented cognition. Where do you stand on this?

Do we suspect the outside and embrace the insider because of arbitrarily tuned machinery or because we attempt to make sense of our world with the neural machinery we have and the alien is intrinsically unassimilable? That is , can’t a general notion of predictive sense-making encompass what you are delineating in terms of fine-grained switches, hormones , dichotomies? What is it this hardware detail is adding to our understanding of human behavior? Do we have to uncover a flow chart of arbitrarily patterned sequences of instructions in the individual , and coordinate the this with a large arbitrary social patterning , in order to understand human behavior?

When I interact with someone , like with you right now , I read every word that you write as belonging to a system of meaning that guides the sense of each word. I try to discern what that larger system is, what your overarching philosophical
presuppositions are , and I experiment with different versions to ‘try on for size’. I know I’m getting closer if I know that I can compose a response that you will find remarkably consonant with your thinking ( obviously that’s not what I’ve been aiming to do up
till now ). Thus, my goal is to better abs better anticipate the trajectory of your thinking , where your passion lies in the conversation. Again, how successfully I construe your larger worldview is not up to me to decide, it’s up to you to let me know by your assent or objections , by the fruitfulness of our interchange.

My subsuming of your construct system , or your subsuming of mine, is not the capturing of a dead thing. In every word exchanged between the two of us , your entire worldview is aight alight altered by exposure to my thinking, and so is my thinking changed by the interaction. When each of us go back to read each other’s posts, we find that the sens of each word has changed as a result of the effect of the previous interaction on both of our perspectives.


There is a reciprocal dialogic altering of thinking going on, but that doesn’t guarantee that our two approaches become more aligned with each other. That can only happen if either one or both of us manage to transform and expand our own thinking enough to accommodate what initially appears as the alienness of the other.


Norice that the only motive I presume here is sense-making , the need on the part of each of us to anticipate the events the others words express. There may be switches going off like nobody’s business and neurohormones up the wazoo, but the balance of integration and differentiation that is being sought via all this machinery is in the direction of replication of events, construing the most novel and strange future in terms of an aspect of the familiar past.

Tell me how you attempt to make sense of an interchange such as this. Let me put my subsuming skill to the test. Certainly you would construe my personalistic, individualistic bent (construct system ) as itself a narrative product of a social scheme. I convince myself there is something called a personal construct system because socially induced motivational mechanisms select for such a thinking.

At the organismic level, my notion of a functionally unified motivational telos would appear incoherent at best , or a relic of Romanticism. There would likely be a range of loosely correlated , motivational systems which
are the expression of evolutionary mechanisms, and thus could be other than what they are. In sum, a complex of contextually embedded semiotic codes ( my syntax, semantics and affectivity) denotes
the epistemic cut between the material and the informational.

Kant and Hegel, in different ways, recognized the absolute inseparability of form and content in understanding the real. Biosemiotics in all its varieties brings this insight into the realms of physics and biology.
I hadnt realized the influence writers like Partee and Peirce have had on people whose work I am familiar with (Bateson, Deacon). So this brings biosemiotics right up against the cognitive work on language I am familiar with. It seems to me that a cognitive semiotic can play the role of challenging remnants of traditional views still hiding within the various versions of biosemiotics. Certainly ,hermeneutical ( influenced by Gadamer and Heidegger) and Wittgensteinian pragmatical semiotics can help in this direction. I also think dialogical models inspired by Bakhtin and social constructionism ( John Shotter in particular) can help us leave behind computationalism on the plane of human language.

“

The classic example of incommensurable paradigms is from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Banno

Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability evolved over time.

“Since 1962 Kuhn's concept of incommensurability has undergone a process of transformation. His current account of incommensurability has little in common with his original account of it. Originally, incommensurability was a relation of methodological, observational and conceptual disparity between paradigms. Later Kuhn restricted the notion to the semantical sphere and assimilated it to the indeterminacy of translation. Recently he has developed an account of it as localized translation failure between subsets of terms employed by theories.”(H. Sankey)

Putnam had this to say about Kuhn’s changing notions:

“In more recent work one finds him expressing admiration for the work of Joseph Sneed and Wolfgang Stegmuller. The notion of incommensurability still appears in his writing, but now it seems to signify nothing more than intertheoretic meaning change, as opposed to uninterpretability. According to Sneed and Stegmiiller, who build on ideas that go back to Carnap, the theoretical terms in a theory' refer to complex logical constructions out of the set of models of that theory, which in turn depend on an open set of "intended applications." I shall not go into details. But one point is worth mentioning: When two theories Con-flict, then, although the common theoretical terms generally have dif-ferent meanings and a different reference on the Sneed-Stegmiiller account (that is what "incommensurability" becomes), that does not mean that there is no "common language" in which one can say what the theoretical terms of both theories refer to.

In fact, if we have avail-able the "old terms," that is, the terms which existed in the language prior to the introduction of the specific new terms characteristic of the two theories, and enough set-theoretic vocabulary, we can express the empirical claim of both theories, and we can say what the admis-sible models of both theories are. Kuhn still maintains that we cannot interpret the term phlogiston in the language that present-day scientists use; but what this in fact means is that we must use a highly indirect mode of interpretation, which involves describing the entire phlogiston theory, its set of intended applications, and its set of admissible models in order to say what phlogiston means. A serious residual difficulty still faces Kuhn: he has long maintained that the meaning of old terms (say, observa-tion terms) is altered when new theories are constructed.

But the whole assumption of Sneed and Stegmiiller is precisely that this is not the case. Their sets of admissible models are well defined only if we can assume that the old terms have fixed meanings which are not altered by theory construction. It is precisely the aim of neopositivism to view scientific theories as constructed in levels in such a way that the terms of one level may depend for their meaning on the terms of a lower level, but not vice versa. Neopositivism denies that there is a two-way dependence between observation terms and theoretical terms, whereas Kuhn has long agreed with Quine that the dependence goes both ways. Even if I cannot make full sense of Kuhn's current position, I think that I have said enough to indicate the general nature of the development.

This might be summed up in three stages. Stage 1: There is a doctrine of radical incommensurability, that is, impossibility of interpretation. Stage 2: The doctrine is softened. We can, it turns out, say something about theories which are incommensurable with our own, and we can use some notions (justification, rationality) across paradigm changes. Stage 3: Something which is thought to be better than interpretation is embraced and propounded, namely, the structural description of theories.”(Realism with a Human Face)

Personally, I support Lyotard’s differend.

As Gallagher describes the problem with Robert’s ‘conversation of manikins’,

“ The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it is a
metadiscourse and worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends.
But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something which cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation.
This is one of the issues between Lyotard and Rorty.”

I suppose that those who think logic normative might be more incline to think of conceptual schema as discreet and incommensurable. I think they are neither. — Banno

Could you give examples of a treatment of schemes as discrete and incommensurable vs non-discrete and commensurable?

You can identify yourself as a “phenomenologically informed enactivist” - and direct the collective hate towards its evil “other” - by taking a stand with the correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion. — apokrisis

“

It’s all a game of pragmatics in the end. Reality will weed out the foolish extremes in the long run. — apokrisis

What if you are a social constructionist like Ken Gergen, who has certain affinities with phenomenology?
Does the following sound like ‘directing collective hate via a correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion’? And what’s all this about ‘reality’ weeding out anything?

“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

So yes to empathy as a necessary aspect of humans as social animals. But we have to accept the corollary that aggression is the other side of the same coin. The brain is wired to make this epistemic cut, this fundamental neuromodulated shift in state, from love of the group to hate of the outsider. — apokrisis

I should explain that empathy as it is understood within phenomenological and cognitive research is not the common meaning of the term. It doesn’t refer to sympathy or positive feelings or caring for one another. It deals with how we learn that other persons are not inanimate objects. In order to be aggressive toward another we have to empathize with them first. That is, we can’t despise them if we don’t perceive them as having thoughts, attitudes and feelings of their own. Autistics often feel like they are observing beings from another planet. Affect in particular is very difficult for them to make sense of, not just in humans but in other mammals , like dogs.

There is some support for the theory that we are wired, via mirror neurons , to recognize the actors. of others as being akin to our own. Shaun Gallagher explains:


“Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is, we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding their behavior. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do. TT claims that we explain another person’s behavior by appealing to an either innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general; a theory that is framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or motivating behavior. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this, because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate the other person’s mental states. We model others’ beliefs and desires as if we were in their situation.
Claims that such theory or simulation processes are explicit (conscious) are dubious from a phenomenological point of view. That is, if in fact such processes are primary, pervasive, and explicit, they should show up in our experience – in the way that we experience others – and they rarely do.The phenomenological critique also rejects the idea, clearly found in TT, that our everyday dealings with others involve an observational, third-person stance toward them – observing them and trying to come up with explanations of their behavior. Rather, our everyday encounters with others tend to be second-person and interactive.

Long before the child reaches the age of four, the capacities for human interaction and intersubjective understanding are already accomplished in certain embodied practices -- practices that are emotional, sensory-motor, perceptual, and nonconceptual. These practices include proto-mimesis (Zlatev, this volume), imitation, the parsing of perceived intentions (Baldwin et al. 2001), emotional interchange (Hobson 2004), and generally the processes that fall under the heading of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979). These embodied practices constitute our primary access for understanding others, and they continue to do so even after we attain our more sophisticated abilities in this regard (Gallagher 2001).
In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s mind. What we might reflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is expressed directly in their actions and behaviors. This phenomenologially direct understanding is likely made possible by the above mentioned complex neuronal processes described as the mirror neuron system(s) and shared representations.”

When you say the brain is wired to make the shift from love of the insider to hate of the outsider, it sounds like you are presuming a fairly sophisticated sort of innate neural machinery. Can you elaborate a bit on this?

It is not about being beholdened or enchained by our biological and social contexts. They are the information that informs our being in the first place. — apokrisis

What defines a social context? I have two parents and two brothers. We all lived in the same household in the same city. My older brother is 18 months older than me and went to the same schools with the same teachers. We even had some of the same friends. And yet we all live in entirely different worlds, with different politics and different relations with technology. What was it that made the difference in how each of us was informed by the social world? My explanation is that there is a certain thread of consistency that runs through person’s experience, assimilating the new in a thematic manner to one’s precious history. The novelty of the world always redefines and reinvents from moment to moment the ongoing ‘self’ , which in fact has no strict identity. If we dont see this ongoing self-consistency bin ourselves or in others, we will attempt to understand them by reference to larger categories of social meaning in the way Marx does, or Foucault does in a different way. Individuals become nodes in a social formation. But from what vantage is this formation being glimpsed? One could say it is constantly being realigned as the nodes of the system interact. Most phenomenologically informed enactivists today adhere to a quasi-Foucaultian notion of the relation between self and world. For instance , Shaun Gallagher has written recently about socially distributed cognition:

“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.” Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own
and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities.”

I’ve only encountered 5 writers who endorse what I call a radically temporal model of experience.
Gene Gendlin is one of them.


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

In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities.

Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's implying of behavior possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate . Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person. Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual
incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social.

The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society.”(What First and Third Person Processes Really Are (2009)

These are neurological disorders that strike at brain organisation at a far more basic level than any “cognitive module” like the rather shaky TOM story. They are both about fine grain and pervasive disturbances to the microcircuitry that in general has to achieve a meaningful balance of integration and differentiation in terms of a modelled self-world relationship.

They show as disorders of social thought because social thinking is the most complex and challenging level of human thought. But the dysfunctions are at a deeper neurodevelopmental level.

Trying to fix the empathy circuit is not addressing the root issue. But reframing the social space of the person in a suitable fashion is of course a way to make their lives better — apokrisis

I don’t dispute that the disturbances are at a deeper neurodevdevelopmental level, I am trying to point out that shifting the account from the cognitive to the subpersonal ‘neural’ doesn’t clarify disputes about the understanding of human behavior any more than shifting from a neurological to a subatomic account. It can be that the supposedly more primordial empirical account
is not up to the task of effectively addressing the supposedly higher order, emergent phenomenon , and this can be not simply because the ‘harder’ scientific model is focused on different aspects of the world, or at a different level of focus , but because the model is an expression of an older philosophical worldview. That’s right , physical, neurological and cognitive theories are manifestations of broader philosophical perspectives, and as these perspective change, so does the ‘hard’ science.

The difference between TOM , simulation and interaction theory accounts of empathy and autism is at the same
time a dispute about how to understand the underlying neural processes, and this amounts to a philosophical disagreement between neo-Kantian realism and phenomenology. Varela developed a tentative model that he called neurophenomenology to point the way out of the older philosophical influences much of neuroscience is beholden to. That is, to offer a neurological account that is no -computational and non-representational.

It may be that such a rethinking of the organism-world interaction is consistent with recent movements rejecting disturbance’ models of schizophrenia and autism. The ‘hearing voices’ movement that destigmatizes hallucination , and the autism-spectrum community, (spearheaded by Temple Grandin , Donna Williams and others,), that refuses the label of pathology, are some examples.

“Trying to fix the empathy circuit is not addressing the root issue. But reframing the social space of the person in a suitable fashion is of course a way to make their lives better”.

Note that the fundamental issue is UNDERSTANDING the behavior one is witnessing. TOM and interaction theory lead to different predictions and anticipations when we are in the presence of real human beings who we care about who act in ways that may puzzle us , and our puzzlement is well noted by them and adds anxiety and depression to their other issues. So when you meet an autistic person( do you know any?) , what do you draw from when you attempt to form a bond with them?
My hunch is your philosophical
presuppositions. which ground your neurological model will give you no choice but to embrace TOM.

pragmatism then points out that we are “selves” to the degree we have managed to construct the separation that in fact allows us to be in this kind of modelling relation with “reality”. — apokrisis

I think you are saying there is no Kantian self , which I agree with , that self is a construction emerging developmentally through social interaction, which I also agree with. Merleau-Ponty, who btw was a child developmental psychologist as well as being a philosopher, said that initially the child makes no distinction between self and other , that self only emerges over time.

But what about models, representations , algorithms, calculations neural machinery? I wouldn’t call this ‘self’ in a strictly Kantian sense , but is it not a temporary internal environment? Yes, it’s only adaptive function is to interact with and adjust itself to an outside , but isn’t the idea of internal machinery troublesome?

The later Wittgenstein who had Ramsey softly whispering the Peircean corrections to his earlier logical atomistic realism in his ear? — apokrisis

Yes, I read about that. Wittgenstein apparently did read Peirce , although only mentioned James as someone whose work he was enthusiastic about. And yet he submitted Pragmatism to a critique. I do think he left Pierce behind at a certain point , but I would have to take a closer look at it to say anything more.

See my comments above regarding Feyerabend. The issue you raise has been of interest to me for the last forty years, and remains unresolved. — Banno

Yes, I read them, and I agree with what you wrote:

scientific progress does not result from a more or less algorithmic method - induction, falsification and so one - but is instead the result of certain sorts of liberal social interaction - of moral and aesthetic choice. — Banno

Did you ever see this comment Lakatos supposedly made to British philosopher Donald Gillies? “Wittgenstein was the biggest philosophical fraud of the twentieth century".

This would seem to support the idea that Wittgenstein would be more sympathetic to Feyerabend than Lakatos on the grounding of logic.