I don't know Thompsons’s work, but there is something odd in what ↪Joshs quoted, since it wrongly claims Davidson was a realist, then sets out an approach that rejects realism and antirealism in much the way Davidson actually does, but then re-introduces conceptual schemes — Banno

Thompson is simply reiterating Davidson's claim that “with a correct epistemology we can be realists in all departments.”

Two interpreters, as unlike in culture, language and point of view as you please, can disagree over whether an utterance is true, but only if they differ on how things are in the world they share, or what the utterance means. I think we can draw two conclusions from these simple reflections. First, truth is correspondence with the way things are. (There is no straightforward and non-misleading way to state this; to get things right, a detour is necessary through the concept of satisfaction in terms of which truth is characterized.' So if a coherence theory of truth is acceptable, it must be consistent with a correspondence theory. Second, a theory of knowledge that allows that we can know the truth must be a non-relativized, non-internal form of realism.

So if a coherence theory of knowledge is acceptable, it must be consistent with such a form of realism. My form of realism seems to be neither Hilary Putnam's internal realism nor his metaphysical realism. It is not internal realism because internal realism makes truth relative to a scheme, and this is an idea I do not think is intelligible.' A major reason, in fact, for accepting a coherence theory is the unintelligibility of the dualism of a conceptual scheme and a 'world' waiting to be coped with. But my realism is certainly not Putnam's metaphysical realism, for it is characterized by being 'radically non-epistemic', which implies that all our best researched and established thoughts and theories may be false. I think the independence of belief and truth requires only that each of our beliefs may be false. But of course a coherence theory cannot allow that all of them can be wrong.
(Davidson, A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge)

As to Thompson re-introducing conceptual schemes, he can’t be doing that since that would imply a representationalist view of the world, which Thompson is rejecting. His approach, like Davidson’s , assumes that language is directly in touch with the world. The key difference between his pragmatism and Davidson’s unconventional realism is expressed in Thompson’s assertion that “the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.”

Davidson rejects the view, held by both metaphysical realists and anti-realists that persons represent the world (scheme vs content) to themselves. Hilary Putnam argues that we all share a single scheme, but, as As Evan Thompson explains

Davidson's conclusion is not that we all share a scheme, but that, since we have been unable to give adequate content to the scheme idea, the idea has no application. As he concludes in another essay, “there can never be a situation in which we can intelligibly compare or contrast divergent schemes, and in that case we do better not to say that there is one scheme, as if we understood what it would be like for there to be more.”

I find Thompsons’s pragmatist pluralism an appealing alternative to Davidson’s non-representationalist direct realism, so I’ll quote his argument here:

We can accept the idea that there is no such thing as a scheme or representational medium interposed between us and the world while making merely the inference that we should not explicate incommensurability by appealing to the dualism of scheme and content. The problem of incommensurability is primarily empirical: it arises in the work of historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists when they attempt to make sense of what seem to be widely divergent systems of belief. We can give up the difference between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world, and yet hold with Whorf that the Hopi way in the world and ours cannot be “calibrated.” Davidson is right to insist that we must assume an overall agreement to make sense of differences in belief. We must concur about all sorts of things, such as that cows eat grass, that snow is white, that people must eat to survive. But Davidson is, in Hacking's words, a “superholist.”~~ (Remember that a Davidsonian theory is meant to interpret all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker.)

Thus he seems to think that these mundane agreements are enough to preclude incommensurability. I am suspicious of superholism. Feyerabend might have been mistaken in thinking that “there is still human experience, as an actually existing process independent of all schemes”, but he was right, I think, to insist that theories and practices proliferate, and that the connections among them are often loose and chaotic. These loose connections indicate that our everyday, superficial agreements with another may not help all that much in resolving our differences. That possibility is all that is needed, I think, to warrant occasional talk of incommensurability, where incommensurability simply means that one language may have a range of expressions that cannot be translated into another language without remainder. In such a situation, one may have no choice but to learn the foreign range of expressions and incorporate it directly into one's language. (Isn't this all that Kuhn ever really claimed?) What we learn from Davidson is that we need not, and indeed should not, support such an appeal to incom- mensurability with the metaphysical idea of scheme and content. We should instead make the case directly in anthropology, literary theory, and the history of science.

Davidson does seem to think that he has vindicated realism, but I suggest that he has shown us a way of continuing to do philosophy after representation (pace Rorty) and beyond the realist/anti-realist debate. Recall that the philosophical device of the field linguist abstracts not only from cultural conditions in general, but also from the detail of local, pragmatic situations (e.g., problems of understanding within and among the paradigms, disciplinary matrices, and research programmes of a given science). But these conditions and situations are precisely those in which substantial epistemological and hermeneutical issues arise. Davidson's realism cannot address, then, the realistlanti-realist disputes that arise within these situations. Davidson grounds the claim “that knowledge is of an objective world independent of our thought or language” by trying to show that most of our beliefs must be true.

But these true beliefs are the commonsense, everyday beliefs that most people share; they are not, for example, beliefs about particle physics, selection in biology, authorial intention in literature, or representation in painting, Recent anti-realism, however, has not arisen as a challenge to commonsense; it has arisen in cognitive domains of perplexing complexity, such as particle physics and literary theory. Only if one accepts a superholist view of belief and meaning will one suppose that Davidson's defense of commonsense realism is also a gobal vindication of realism. I suggest, therefore, that by adopting the stance of the radical interpreter to achieve a global perspective on belief and meaning, Davidson has shown us how local issues about realism and anti-realism must ultimately be.

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

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

I'd sort of agree, although Marxist materialism is a different kettle of fish. — Wayfarer

As is new materialism.
https://www.academia.edu/40986241/WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM

To me this fits into the American pragmatism of Dewey and so on. Only in transcendental terms
— JuanZu

To me it sounds like that, and it also sounds like Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Augustine.

Heidegger was an intellectual thief. — Arcane Sandwich

Are you saying that his work is more derivative
than these other thinkers?

Is there a Dasien/being-in-the-world binary in Heidegger's philosophy? If there is, then it's just a historicized version of the good old subject-object binary from The Good Old Days. — Arcane Sandwich

For Heidegger , subject implies self-consciousness, S=S. Dasein is neither subject nor world, but the in-between. The self does not pre-exist its world, but is reflected back from what it is involved with.

Heidegger’s notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Dasein’s being in the world.
— Joshs

But would he agree that time is inseparable from lived experience? — Wayfarer

Absolutely

Thanks to Heidegger's analysis of Kant's work we have to say that the time we say is subjective is in fact constitutive of subjectivity itself, which determines it as objective or trascendental. This form of time I would say is more fundamental than the one provided by physics (because of the problems that arise when we think of time as a series of discontinuous points that follow one another). — JuanZu

This may be true of Kant’s work on time, but Heidegger’s notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Dasein’s being in the world.

The intuition that a phenomenon flows is in conflict with the intuition that the phenomenon is comprised of a sequence of states, as per Zeno's Paradox. So if talk about experience deflates to talk about phenomena, and if the nature of phenomena is relative to how it is attended and phenomena doesn't always flow, then must the existence of phenomena necessitate the a priori existence of a psychological time series? — sime

It isn’t necessary to use a notion of flow to address the necessity of the inclusion of past in the experience of the punctual now. Regardless of whether we attend to a discrete ‘state’ vs a flowing continuum, in either case the ‘now’ we experience includes within it the just past.

↪Joshs I see you're lookong for an education... accepted I was trying to save it for the June 6th thing... but alas those who don't read need to be read to apparently.

Oh, on, second thought, I realize what error your having... because you understand that Nietzsche doesn't believe things exist solely in black and white dualism, that you think opposite ends of the spectrum don't exists. Hehe cute, though it's pretty poor logic to assume spectrums don't have opposite ends. And you have to also understand Nietzsche's use of the term "opposite" when he uses it means "the other end of the spectrum." Not a black and white 180... — DifferentiatingEgg

I want to distinguish two uses of the word ‘opposite’. The first use includes both binary ‘black vs white’ oppositions and differences of degree within a spectrum. What both of these have in common is that they derive the opposition between two things from their mutual belonging to a shared superordinate category, like color. The second use of ‘opposite’ is the one that Nietzsche develops alongside his notion of the Eternal Return. This concept of opposition refers to qualitative differences among things which belong to no shared binary category or spectrum. He embraces this use and rejects the first use of opposition.

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist — Corvus

The experience of any thing is the consciousness of time. When we think or perceive an object , we are synthesizing the ‘now’ of its existence for us as a three-part structure of retention (immediate past), present and protention (anticipation). Without awareness of time there is no awareness of the continuity of the flow of experience. It would be impossible to understand music, for instance, or the spacing of space.

↪ChatteringMonkey He does indeed believe in opposites — DifferentiatingEgg

The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it is actually needed the most – even though they had vowed to themselves “de omnibus dubitandum.”? But we can doubt, first, whether opposites even exist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositions that have earned the metaphysicians' seal of approval might not only be foreground appraisals. (Beyond Good and Evil)

If anything signifies our humanisation, a true and actual progress, then the fact that we no longer need any excessive oppositions, any oppositions at all . . .

In sum: morality is precisely as 'immoral' as every other thing on earth; morality itself is a form of immorality. The great liberation this insight brings, the opposition is removed from things, the homogeneity of all that happens is rescued - - ( The Last Notebooks)

Freddy seems to me 'an absurdist skeptic of European modernity' (both heir to Epicurus, Spinoza & Voltaire and predecessor of Zapffe, Camus & Rosset). "Some are born posthumously" ... yet, apparently, his protean works have been coopted – mis/appropriated :mask: – by both existentialists and postmodernists (as well as nazi / fascist propagandists). Just my two shekels. — 180 Proof

I recommend Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ for insights into his thinking that may be new to you. You might also enjoy Daniel Smith’s comments on Klossowski’s book.

https://philarchive.org/archive/SMIKRO

And others view him as the father of postmodernism
— Joshs

Yeah, but that's like saying Nietzsche's responsible for Nazi Germany too. Just a poor interpretation of Nietzsche, regardless of N sprouting the idea in someone's mind... thats due to their incipient reification with his ideas making it their own. — DifferentiatingEgg

I view Nietzsche as the father of postmodernism, and as a critic of existentialism. I am not alone in that assessment. Some of Nietzsche’s most notable interpreters ( Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Bataille, Heidegger , Derrida) see his work as an attack on existentialist humanism from a postmodern vantage.

What do we make of Nietzsche today? Considered by some as the father of existentialism, it seems that others hold Nietzsche in contempt, as representing the hazards of philosophy, of going too far, by going mad in the end — Nemo2124

And others view him as the father of postmodernism.

I wonder, though, whether he believes our animal nature to be conceptual owing to it being shaped by our acculturation and language acquisition (and he is stressing the continuity of the process and substrate) or if he believes other animals and human infants to also have conceptual abilities (and he is stressing the similarities between linguistically informed and non-linguistically shaped conceptuality). If it's the former, then he would seem to be closely aligned with McDowell in that regard. — Pierre-Normand

Rouse believes both animals and infants have conceptuality. The distinction he makes between humans and animals is between what he calls one-dimensional and two-dimensional intentionality. Only humans possess the latter, which not only allows our practical perceptual activities to be guided by conceptual normativity as is the case with other animals, but we can put into question those norms, in terms of what is at stake and at issue for us.

Not only did we start out with nonlinguistic cognitive and expressive capa­cities alongside the emergence of language, but those capacities have also proliferated and further developed. I think that Dreyfus’s own recognition
of this important point, coupled with a mistaken inclination to equate conceptual articulation with explicit expression in language, has been an important motivation for his resistance to McDowell’s claim that conceptual
normativity is pervasive in human engagement with the world.
We can recognize why it would be a mistake to equate conceptual articulation with linguistic expression when we acknowledge that language is not a self-contained practical–perceptual domain. Our linguistic dis­cursive practices open onto and “incorporate” other sensory/cognitive/ performative capacities, via recognitive, demonstrative, anaphoric, and indexical locutions, even while they are themselves only intelligible as an integral part of our biological capacities for practical–perceptual interaction with our surroundings.

Conceptual understanding is not something external to our practical– perceptual involvement in the world, that would then have to become “operative” in perception. Conceptually articulated discursive practice is a
distinctive way in which practical–perceptual bodily skills can develop through an extended process of niche construction and coevolution of lan­guages and language users.

Rouse treats

conceptual understanding not only as pervasive within
perception and practical coping with the world, but as practically–percep­tually constituted. In doing so, we would follow McDowell in providing a normative account of conceptual understanding (while acknowledging
Dreyfus’s insistence that this understanding can be deployed “mindlessly” and non-thematically). Yet we would also extend Dreyfus’s account of practical–perceptual skillfulness to incorporate the capacities for con­ceptual articulation that accompany the acquisition of a language. We would only challenge as mistaken Dreyfus’s separation of discursive and non-discursive practical–perceptual skills as coextensive with conceptual and non-conceptual domains.

Regarding the intelligibility of placing individuals in different worlds, this may also be a matter of stressing the overlaps, following Davidson's ideas about the principle of charity, or stressing the differences owing to the (conceptually informed) empirical content being impotent to serve as a neutral arbiter for resolving the disputes (or islands of mutual unintelligibility) at the boundary. But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual. — Pierre-Normand

What is key here is that Rouse understands conceptuality in a fundamentally different way than does McDowell. From Rouse’s vantage, Mcdowell treats conceptuality, and language, in a detached and over-intellectualized manner , while Rouse sees both linguistic and pre-linguistic conceptuality as contextually-dependent and purpose-driven.

Roise does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.

I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla. — Pierre-Normand

I would add that a central point of Rouse’s is that our animal nature is not pre-conceptual at all. Also, the Yo and Lo book was by Kukla and Mark Lance.

Tying this back to the OP, Rouse replaces the concept of conceptual scheme with that of normative discursive practices. Would Rouse respond differently than McDowell and Davidson to the question of whether it makes sense to talk of individuals or communities as living in ‘different worlds’? I think he would. I think Rouse’s treatment of material circumstances as already intertwined with normative practices makes the data of perceptual experience internal to social practices in a way that it is not for either Davidson or McDowell.

I am trying to remember who wrote something along the lines that, man always seek to control other men, and avoids being controlled by others. — Jamesk

Sounds like Nietzsche — Vera Mont

Or a bad reading of Nietzsche.

The relation of force to force is called "will:' That is why we must avoid at aIl costs the misinterpretations of the Nietzschean principle of the will to power. This principle doesn't mean that the will wants power or wishes to dominate. As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a "desire to dominate," we inevitably make it depend on established values, the only ones able to determine, in any given case or conflict, who must be "recognized" as the most powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of aIl of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized. The will to power, says Nietzsche, consists not in coveting or even in taking but in creating and giving. Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole. (Deleuze on Nietzsche)

, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that neurological damage can manifest itself at different levels of perceptual processing doesn’t mean that the ‘lower’ levels of processing of the visual field arent as conceptually saturated as the higher levels. The effects of lsd and optical illusions both reveal how at the lowest level conceptual expectations organize the appearance of the seen world.

I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Most contributors to the Philosophy Forum share, to one extent or other, your belief that the meaning of the truth of the world is ultimately bound up with the way things are outside of , and pre-existing, our interactions with them or our schematic constructions of them, even if we never have direct acces to such a reality. The philosophical positions I endorse, however, insist that our contact with the world is neither that of indirect representation nor direct seeing of an independent reality. Instead, to perceive a world is to enact it or produce it. Let me make it clear that enaction is not the imaginative act of a mind. In interacting with our environment, we don’t internally model an outside world, we produce an actual world. More precisely , an absolutely new, never before existing aspect of world is produced through our practical engagement with our physical and social surrounds. It is neither from inside a mind nor from the world that this production of the new proceeds, but in-between the two.

The reason is that world is not a flat space of pre-existing objects for us to encounter, is that it is continually changing itself nature, and human -world interaction is just one manifestation of this. Since for the realist meaning and truth require an anchoring in a nature composed of pre-existing objects, the idea of what sounds like a chaos of Heraclitus flux would seem to destroy the very possibility of meaningful truth and replace it with nihilism. But meaning isn’t the product of fixed, pre-existing facts, it is a function of the experience of patterns of familiarity, relevance and consistency within the always changing flow of events that we enact in our inter-affecting with world. Nihilism and meaninglessness is only a possibility to the extent that we try to freeze the flow of events into fixed , pre-existing objective facts. And even when we think this way, we are still enacting a new world implicitly while we explicitly hold to our belief in the objective independence of the facts of reality for our engagement with the world.

That the enacted world of continual becoming is not a chaotic, senseless flux is demonstrated by the fact that it allows us to theorize it in realist terms as directly perceived or indirectly represented. To abandon realism for enactivism doesn’t at all mean that we have to abandon the security and stability provided by belief in independently existing ‘facts’ of nature. It instead allows us to replace the arbitrariness and duality of such models with a way of thinking which sees our relation to the world as more intimate, connected and relevantly meaningful.

This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefs — Pierre-Normand

Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidson’s approach of treating conceptual thought as a “frictionless spinning in a void”, McDowell’s attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire.

Each view develops its own model of conceptual understanding as a Sellarsian “space of reasons”: Davidsonian radical interpretation, McDowell's second-nature acculturation as rational animals, Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons, or Haugeland's account of constitutive skills, standards, and commitments. Each then tries to show how performances within this space of reasons are genuinely constrained externally, by objects, experience, or the world. Their critics, myself included, respond that only the semblance of constraint has been demonstrated: we are left with a “frictionless spinning in a void,” a second nature disconnected from any explicable relation to first nature, a self-contained game of intralinguistic moves in which perception and action always remain “external,” or a self-binding commitment with no greater normative authority and force than New Year's resolutions.

Common to these accounts is an understanding of us as thinking and knowing subjects (whether as individuals or as discursive communities) who “have” conceptions of things in the form of mental representations or intralinguistic dis-cursive commitments. “Objects” “stand against” these conceptions as external normative constraints upon what we (should) think, say, and do, via their experiential or causal impingements upon us from “outside.” In each case, their externality to the conceptual or epistemic domain (ascribed in order to provide the needed constraint or “friction”) blocks any effective engagement with epistemic justification or conceptual understanding. My account begins differently. We are not subjects confronting external objects but organisms living in active interchange with an environment. An organism is not a self-contained entity but a dynamic pattern of interaction with its surroundings (which include other conspecific organisms). The boundary that separates the organism proper from its surrounding environment is not the border of an entity but a component of a larger pattern of interaction that is the organism/environment complex.

The basic idea in Davidson's paper is fairly straight forward. That folk have different points of view can make sense only if there is some common framework from which we might notice the difference. But if we have such a common framework, then by that very fact, aren't we working in the same conceptual scheme? Doesn't the difference now become that of a disagreement within a conceptual scheme, and not between conceptual schemes? — Banno

The schemes dont have to be identical , they can be similar. And they can be alike when it comes to superficial aspects of behavior that don’t matter deeply to us, but differ profoundly concerning matters of great personal significance. One person can subsume another’s conceptual scheme as a variant of their own, thereby recognizing both the points of similarity and of difference. One person can understand another person’s conceptual scheme better than the other person can understand the first person. I dont have to understand you to know that your way of thinking about a certain matter is different from my own.

Enjoy.

https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer

For as I have insisted already, though Dao has sometimes been depicted as some kind of vague or partial equivalent of the idea of God, it is better described as the most extreme possible antithesis of that idea.

I have Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) and I like it. I certainly don't put myself up against him as an expert, but I understand the place of god in Taoism differently. Taoism isn't atheistic in the sense we normally mean it. It doesn't deny god's existence, it just (mostly) doesn't address it. It's non-theistic not anti-theistic. — T Clark

Ziporyn’s claim is that what monotheisms and the atheisms of the ‘three horsemen’ (Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris) have in common is belief in a single purpose behind existence. For theists that purpose is God and the laws of morality he intends, and for Dawkins et al it is the sole authority of reason. Ziporyn argues that Daoism believes in no ultimate purpose, intention, principle, morality.

Objectivity in the metaphysical sense is an unwarranted absolutizing or sedimentation of half of a two-step process. The philosophical worldview of objectivism is read off from an aspect of this process and made into a doctrine about metaphysics, when in fact it’s just one of many tools in the hands of a hungry animal. So even though it may be the case that, to the extent that we are admitting reasoning at all, the monotheist God can be disproved, there will always be Tertullian, that fascinatingly volatile and wickedly histrionic Church Father, who blurted out the unsurpassable final word on this issue way back in the early third century: I believe because it is absurd, said Tertullian. And no amount of reasoning will be of any use in convincing someone who has declined to accept the ultimate authority of reason.

It is no use saying, “Look, Tertullian, you’re already using reason, you tacitly admit it, so how can you exempt this one issue from application of the same standard you use when you cross the street?” Why must he have only one standard? Should he do it because it’s reasonable? But he’s already shown he’s willing to eschew reason when he feels like it. If we think of beliefs as tools, this sort of move becomes unremarkable: why should I have only one tool that I use on every kind of material? A hammer
for pounding nails, a nail-clipper for clipping nails—for not all nails are the same.

We call all things “things,” but not all things are the same or require the same type of treatment. The illegitimate step lies in assuming that there must be a single standard applied at all times, for all types of situations, regarding every type of subject matter. Why assume that there is any unity of this kind applying to the world, that all existence must form one single system with a single set of laws and rules applying to all of it? That too is part of the circular assumption of the sole universal authority of Reason—an assumption that, I would argue, ironically has deep roots precisely in the idea of God.

The Latin (axio + arche) means Value/Principle & Ruling/Primary. The article says It's “a novel view that pictures the creative power . . . . as a non-personal force that creates the best world . . . but not for us.” {my bold} Also, “Axiarchists argue that only a non-causal force or principle can ultimately explain why things exist”. As an abstract, impersonal, natural, acausal creative principle it seems quite similar to Lao Tse's Tao. Yet, in terms of the value-based “path” or “flow” of the universe, it may be analogous to an algorithm-crunching computer program. — Gnomon

For an alternate atheistic take on Taoism , especially the thinking of Zhuangzi, I highly recommend the recently published book by Brook Ziporyn, one of the top translators of ancient Chinese texts. It is called ‘Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond‘.

If there is any tradition that is really marked by its consistent and thoroughgoing atheism in the sense that matters, it is the Chinese philosophical tradition. This is true of all three of the main classical traditions, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. The clearest and most paradigmatic anti-God resource in the Chinese tradition is the conception of Dao, as the term comes to be developed in what are later known as “philosophical Daoist” texts such as the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi. For as I have insisted already, though Dao has sometimes been depicted as some kind of vague or partial equivalent of the idea of God, it is better described as the most extreme possible antithesis of that idea. Indeed, classical Daoist thought can very well be described as one long polemic against the idea of purpose—the idea of conscious design, of intentional valuation as a source of existence, of deliberate creation, of control, of God.

↪Joshs Could you elucidate the bearing this has on the OP? For example how this might provide a basis for ethical normativity? — Wayfarer

The awareness of the incessantly changing nature of experience is not a hinderance to, but the route of access into a robustly ethical involvement in the world. Dynamical changing life doesnt unfold as arbitrary disconnected moments but as a mesh of intertwined social practices. Currently, I’m enjoying that work of Hanne De Jaegher, who clarifies the relation between ethics and enactivism.

“Humanity is shorthand for humanity-partly-produced-by-nature and Nature shorthand for nature-humans-participate-in. Networks of biological processes interlace with regional practices in what Haraway (2016) calls sympoietic (“making-with”) webs.”

Sense-making is “the active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. [It is t]he basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring” (Di Paolo et al. 2018, 332)…Whether we act or we perceive, whether we emote or we cognize, a structure of caring is at play in all forms of sense-making

Individuating systems in relation open the possibility of new metastable states to which they can transit. These transitions are not in themselves normative because they are open; they follow no “algorithm”. But they have or express values, the relation between current and potential states…to act ethically must involve forms of knowing (incorporated in practices of behaviour, emotion, and reflection) about values in configurations of becoming, i.e., about the good expressed not in the maintenance of a current configuration but in its future (and inevitable) transformation.”

“At its fundamental, engaged knowing requires a particular attitude to flourish, the attitude of letting-be; otherwise, it degrades. Limited knowing can either take the form of overdetermination, i.e., a knower who attempts to force the known into an obstinate epistemic frame, or it can take the form of underdetermination, i.e., disengagement, a “respect” for the known that forgoes any serious relation with it, letting-be degrading into letting-go. Both are fundamentally attitudes of not-caring, situations in which participation is thwarted, leading to epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007). Both can also be resisted or contested, making knowing an open arena for struggle. Engaged/engaging epistemology is both descriptive and prescriptive; it tells us what lies at the basis of a knowing relation, and it tells us also that there are better and worse ways of knowing. If a knowing relation is to flourish it should not be dominated by either end of the relation, which means inevitably that to engage in knowing is to engage in a mutual transformation, a co-becoming of knower and known.”

“ To care ethically is to be morally attuned to differences in becoming and to act in ways that cultivate, nurture, protect, and/ or repair configurations of becoming according to values. Caring for the sick and vulnerable is to help them revert a narrowing in their world. Caring for growth is to promote the value of openness and expansion in possibilities of becoming. Caring for the oppressed is to act so as to destroy patterns of blocking and neglect towards actors whose becoming is systematically thwarted.”(2021)

“While there is not one truth to how or what something is, the example shows that there are also not infinite ways in which we can know things. As Maclaren says, “[w]e can do injustices in the way we take things up”. In our knowing of things, we never fully know them. But the real problem is that we can “know” them quite wrongly.”

Arbitrary doesn't imply 'unconditioned' so your point, sir, is a red herring / strawman. My point: a 'consistent relativist' forfeits all standards for deciding between competing or incommensurable truth-claims, ergo her preference is arbitrary. — 180 Proof

There are always standards to be consulted in matters of competing arguments, but these standards get their intelligibility from within some discursive system, rather than being external to all systems. Paradigm shifts in the sciences are neither arbitrary nor do they take place under the control of some extra-discursive standard of correctness.

Well said, I say. But foundational ethics is, alas, lost. — Astrophel

One can only hope. Henry never struck me as an ethical foundationalist.

That sounds complicated and a lot like hard work. Is this exhausting to live by?

As a non-philosopher I find this hard to grasp or at least accept. Is it making too much out of too little change? — Tom Storm

Every moment we are conscious our perceptual system translates a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sensations into stable meanings, and the way we tend to think about language accomplishes the same thing by ignoring the fact that every use of a word involves a subtle reinvention of its meaning . So if we typically normalize and stabilize our world without effort , what advantage is there in noticing the underlying variations?

Whenever you suffer negative emotions, you are presented with an opportunity to examine your taken-for-granted assumptions about the world, assumptions which failed to prepare you to anticipate the changes in your world which triggered your anxiety, fear , anger or guilt. My point is that the kinds of thinking which assume a world composed of sold, unchanging physical object, principles or laws is a world of violent polarization, because arbitrary, violent change goes along with such assumptions That’s why fundamentalisms of all kinds are inherently cruel and unforgiving. The price you pay for a world of fixed and nailed down concepts is capricious oppositions and contradictions

By contrast, the incessantly changing universe I described in my earlier post is at the same time a flow of extraordinary self-intimacy and intricacy. Abandoning fixed truths, objects, concepts, laws and principles at the same time significantly reduces the perceived arbitrariness, violence and polarization of change, and allows for a more peaceful anticipation of what is to come.

Quine stabilized the world with his naturalism, ridding the equation of pesky semantics. You affirm the pesky semantics, but deny naturalism. Your idea of objectivity is certainly different from his. Or is it? — Astrophel

I deny Quine’s version of naturalism, but I affirm Joseph Rouse’s naturalism, which doesn’t force the normativity of scientific inquiry into the constraints of a sovereign view of physics.

No doubt, the "slightly different semantic sense" occurs from moment to moment, but does this really undo self persistence? How is it that I am the same person that I was a moment ago? Technically, you would say, I am not. But on the other hand, this belies the very concrete "sense" of my existence, which is not analytically reducible. — Astrophel

Aren't there times when ‘being the same’ matters and other times when ‘being different’ matters? The point is that it is not the question of persistent self-identity which is primary but why it is important and for what purposes. There is relative ongoing stability in purpose and mood, and this stitches together continually changing moments of sense. We don’t need an unchanging world, we need a world whose changes we can navigate coherently, with some sense of familiarity.

IMO, the relativist sees 'many paths to many mountains and therefore arbitrarily choses between them' whereas the pluralist sees many paths up the mountain s/he (we) cannot escape from and seeks the shortest to the summit (C.S. Peirce ... D. Deutsch). — 180 Proof

The choice can never be arbitrary, precisely because our attitudes, values and actions must always conditioned from within a specific system of discursive practices which legitimate and make intelligible our ethical choices. The consequences of our decisions matter deeply to us in ways that we recognize as profoundly relevant in our lives as interpreted from the vantage of our involvement within partially shared ways of life. Nothing could be more arbitrary than this. It would be a mistake to separate our discursive practices from the ‘way the things really are’. Our practices are directly plugged into the world; they are the way that world shows itself to us, and there is no way to get beyond or above these practices to a non-discursive reality.

Most accused of radical relativism agree that it is self-refuting, and for that reason it is a straw man argument. Joseph Rouse puts forth a good explanation of the difference between ‘anything goes’ relativism and the non-sovereign, ‘normativity all the way down’ positions writers like Foucault actually espouse.

Relativism is an assertion of epistemic sovereignty, which proclaims the epistemic "rights" of all knowers or knowledges. The most fashionable forms of epistemic relativism today, which are also those frequently and mistakenly associated with Foucault, are those which dismiss all claims to objectivity or truth as merely masks for power. But such claims are the exact epistemological parallel to the radical critique of law as itself a form of violence, which Foucault insisted always "assumes that power must be exercised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness." To make this assumption, whether about power or knowledge, is to remain committed to a conception of sovereignty, from which such fundamental lawfulness can be rightly assessed.

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

But what if no certainties can be assumed?
Well, then that would be a certainty.

Because this is a structural feature of our existence.
Thus, a certainty ...

When any and all standards of certainty are of no avail, we face metaphysics, ...
i.e. another certainty, no?

...real metaphysics.
In contrast to 'unreal' (fake) metaphysics?

It is an absolute, inviolable.
Ergo a certainty – a conclusion which contradicts (invalidates) the premise of your 'argument'. Another wtf are you talking about post, Astro?! :shade: — 180 Proof

Let's see if we can flesh out a little the thinking of those who are truth relativists. I’m not saying that Astrophel is a ‘radical’ relativist, but I am. Let me throw out a hypothetical approach in this vein. Let's say that in my experience of the world and myself, I've discovered that anything I observe or imagine or think or see other people observe has a curious habit of constantly changing its meaning in subtle ways every moment . If i read or repeat the word 'cat' over and over, each time, each moment it has a slightly different semantic sense than the previous. And the same effect occurs when I perceive an object in my environment. I conclude form this that I have discovered something that others haven't noticed, but is there for them also. they just don't see it because it is a subtle effect.

So I then form an explanation of objective truth that goes like this:people believe that there is such a thing as an object that has a certain permanence to it, that can be pointed to or referred back to as the same over time. People believe that self-identity, self-persistence, self-permanence are features of our world. We can find such attributes in the physical world, in our language concepts, in our memory, etc.
But I believe that we only think that such attributes as self-persistence, self-identity over time and permanence are what we are experiencing. I surmise that what we are really experiencing is phenomena that , as I said before, are subtly shifting their semantic meaning every moment of time. So we just assume meaning permanence, self-identity,etc where there is instead very tiny shifts and transformations in the semantic sense of object, percepts, concepts. In practical terms this isn't a big deal. We can understand each other, point to what for the most part is the same reality, and agree on our empirical descriptions and physical laws.

So would I then be able to say that objective truth does not exist? Well, first of all, I could agree with Heidegger and say that truth for me is just the way that each new moment of time unveils a slightly new semantic meaning for me. Truth is just the unveiling of new experience, not its matching up to a standard. So there is truth, but what about objectivity? So does objectivity exist? AlI I can say is that every moment I have to test myself, ask myself the question again. Do I this moment experience a thing that persists identically, be it a concept, a percept, a law of nature, a norm of any kind? IF each time I ask the question the answer is still no, then I can say that as far as I can tell, this moment, for me and apparently for everyone else that I've observed or thought about, reality doesn't sit still even for a moment, such as to allow persisting semantic self-identity or the self-persistence of any object.

I can say that when someone claim's that objective truth exist, they are absolutely right. Every moment there is a truth about the meaning of an object. And every moment that meaning changes very slightly, for everyone that I've observed. So I would want to rephrase that question to: 'does the objective truth about anything stay exactly the same for more than a single moment? What about my claim that objective truth never stays the same for more than a moment? Is this an objective claim? Well, it is me saying, at this moment and from my recollection, I do not now nor ever remember having an experience of self-identity or self-persistence of anything, physical , conceptual or otherwise. But others are welcome to keep asking me the question. I can tell them that I have a theory about why others believe they are seeing objective truth as stable, and that it is possible to miss the instability of reality without it in any way jeopardizing one's ability to do formal logic or science.

So , based on this argument, the relativist isn't really stating a negative claim(objecivity does NOT exist) so much as a positive one, that they are seeing something beyond, within, underneath, overflowing what those who believe in the semantic stability of objects(logical, perceptual, conceptual) arew seeing. Their claim should be: 'objectivty exists, but does a lot more interesting things than the objectivist is able to see). They are seeing dynamism where others are seeing only stasis. Is this dynamism 'objective'? Is it a theory, a principle? It is certainly a general claim. But , and here's the most important point, its not an objective claim as long as it doesn't turn 'radical dynamism ' into a stable object. It has to be modest in its claim. It has to say simply that each moment the question must be asked anew, because the very nature of radical dynamism is that there is no horizon beyond the current moment for any assertion. I can say that I anticipate that the next moment I will generally believe something very similar to what I am now asserting, because in my experience so far the world not only changes every moment but preserves a certain overall stability in its ongoing transformations. Each new moment is not a profound semantic break with the previous but only a very subtle one.This is a post-objective claim, requiring a different method of test.

To test the claim of radical changeability in all objects of experience for everyone is to do two things:
1) it is to try to teach a believer in stable objectivity to see the underlying movement in supposedly static experience. How do you convince someone to see more than they see? Either they see it or they don't. Meanwhile, as relativist, you can leave them to their objectivism, knowing that it works for them, and isn't 'wrong' or 'untrue', just incomplete.
2)The believer in radical relativism must every moment of experience test their own perception(make it contestable) to see if this dynamism continues to appear very moment, everywhere for them.

The world as such becomes an epistemic and ontological vacuum, and it is HERE now one can ask about suffering, because suffering is not a language construction; it clearly has explanatory possibilities that come to mind when we think of it, but there is in this something which is ontologically distinct and imposing that stands outside of language's contingencies — Astrophel

If one sticks to the view of language as representative symbol this is true, but in the approaches to language we find in such figures as Merleau-Ponty , Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida language isn’t separate from the affective enacting of world, it is that enacting.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus Would you say postmodernism is best understood as a form of skepticism, or does it represent a distinct philosophical approach? — Tom Storm

Many who are included within a postmodernist camp use one form or another of a practice-based approach (Foucault, Deleuze, Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida) which sees all forms of knowledge and belief, including religion , science and philosophy, as discursive practices. We are always ensconced within one system of practices or another, even when we discard one belief for in favor of another. Recognizing the socially norm-based nature of meaning precludes any sort of radical skepticism in a way that neither Cartesian doubt, nor religious faith based on ultimate purposes, nor an atheism that elevates science and man to the role played by God can. Arguing that a science doesn’t begin from radical doubt, that it “works from established beliefs/knowledge, and then tries to explain what is less well understood in terms of what is more well understood” just subsumes it as a secularized version of the belief in a God of fixed purposes. Because both rely on faith in sovereign purpose, this faith is itself nihilistic, productive of skepticism.

As I see it, what makes Henry so difficult lies in his stand against Husserl's phenomenological ontology, which, he holds, is compromised by intentionality. Husserl holds that when an object is acknowledged, the universality of thought's grasp upon it is itself part of the essential givenness of the pure phenomenon. But for Henry, this entirely undermines the phenomenological purity, as "the singular is destined, in its ephemeral occurrence, to slide into
nonbeing" (Material Phenomenology) Husserl's pure seeing separates the seen from the seeing, and Henry thinks actual conscious life is lost. — Astrophel

As you know, it’s not just Husserl’s version of phenomenology that Henry objects to, but Merleau-Ponry and Heidegger as well. And one could imagine that, despite his never mentioning him, Henry would fault another thinker of immanent life, Deleuze, for the same weakness he finds in the others. That is, they are not true philosophies of immanence because they each slip into representationalism
by formulating thr self as an ecstatic relation with the world.
But I think Henry misreads these authors If the path to the elimination of suffering involves the deconstruction of the subject-object relation, this cannot be accomplished by holding onto the notion of a purely self-affecting subject. Henry rightly wants to get beyond representationalism and egoism, but to do so he must let go of the need for a notion of affect as present to itself.

No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. It nevertheless is the 'cause of sorrow' as the Buddha teaches it, radical though that might be (and it is radical).
— Wayfarer

This is, of course, brilliant — Astrophel

Do you think it’s compatible with the thoughts of Michel Henry below?

The movement of life is …the force of a drive. What it wants is …the satisfaction of the drive, which is what life desires as a self and as a part of itself, as its self- transformation through its self-expansion, as a truth that is its own flesh and the substance of its joy, and which is the Impression. The entirety of life, from beginning to end, is perverted and its sense lost when one does not see that it is always the force of feeling that throws life into living-toward. And what it lives-toward is always life as well. It is the intensification and the growth of its power and pathos to the point of excess. (Material Phenomenology)

For Husserl, purpose is bound up with the anticipatory nature of intentional acts.
— Joshs

Not what I had in mind. More a sense of purpose, not anticipatory processing. I'm not talking of scientific accuracy, either, but existential angst, which is presumably what both religion and existential philosophies seek to ameliorate — Wayfarer

Which is one reason Heidegger is not an existenrialist. For him, authentic angst is not something to be ameliorated, since it is the wellspring of transcendence and becoming.

“He who is resolute knows no fear, but understands the possibility of Angst as the mood that does not hinder and confuse him. Angst frees him from "null" possibilities and lets him become free for authentic ones.”

“The fundamental possibilities of Da-sein, which is always my own, show themselves in Angst as they are, undistorted by innerworldly beings to which Da-sein, initially and for the most part, clings.”

I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isn’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third.
— Joshs

I'm considerably more sympathetic towards your argument than is the Count. I will just make some additional observations.

Isn't what you're referring to here the subjective unity of perception? This is how the mind 'creates' or 'constructs' (both words have problematical connotations) the unified experience of the world which is our lived world ('lebenswelt'). Something I often mention is that neuroscience has no account of which particular neural system or systems actually perform the magic of generating a unified world-picture from the disparate sensory and somatic sources inputs - and that's a quote from a paper on it:

What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience.

This is, of course, the basis on which I argue that cognitive science lends support to idealism - that experienced reality is mind dependent (not mind-independent as realist philosophies would have it.) — Wayfarer

I should mention that what I had in mind with that quote was not neuroscience but Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of perception. The fact that it could be taken for an empirical account shows how closely aligned contemporary empirical approaches to perception are to Husserl, up to a point. Husserl would say that where empirical accounts fall short is in remaining within what he calls the natural attitude, assuming an objectively causal ground for intentional processes. In this connection, you may be interested in the role that Husserl’s notion of the noema plays with regard to the subjective intentional constitution of objectivity. The noema gets to the heart of the process of idealization. Derrida describes it this way:

Within consciousness, in general there is an agency which does not really belong to it. This is the difficult but decisive theme of the non-real (reell) inclusion of the noema. Noema, which is the objectivity of the object, the meaning and the “as such” of the thing for consciousness, is neither the determined thing itself in its untamed existence (whose appearing the noema precisely is), nor is it a properly subjective moment, a “really” subjective moment, since it is indubitably given as an object for consciousness. It is neither of the world nor of consciousness, but it is the world or something of the world for consciousness. Doubtless it can rightfully be laid bare only on the basis of intentional consciousness, but it does not borrow from intentional consciousness what metaphorically we might call, by avoiding the real-ization of consciousness, its “material.” This real nonappurtenance to any region at all, even to the archi-region, this anarchy of the noema is the root and very possibility of objectivity and of meaning. This irregionality of the noema, the opening to the “as such” of Being and to the determination of the totality of regions in general, cannot be described, stricto sensu and simply, on the basis of a determined regional structure.

The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?
— Joshs

But then, I think what your musings lack, is an overall sense of purpose. Isn't this the factor which Heidegger addresses through his writings on 'care'? The point being, consideration of what matters to us, why it is important. And on not kidding ourselves (something I myself am prone to, regrettably.) 'Seeing things as they truly are' is not necessarily a matter for scientific analysis, because we're involved in life, we're part of what we are seeking to understand. And that's what religions seek to provide - a kind of moral polestar, an over-arching purpose or meaning, towards which these questions, or quests, are oriented. (But then, I am mindful of the postmodernist skepticism towards meta-narrative, which is also a factor here.) — Wayfarer

For Husserl, purpose is bound up with the anticipatory nature of intentional acts. A striving to know further along a a trajectory of sense projects itself forward into all acts of constitution. Husserl says “… the style, so to speak, of "what is to come" is prefigured through what has just past”. Both he and Heidegger critique the goal of scientific accuracy as a symptom of the elevation of an idiosyncratic method ( logic-mathemarical idealization) to the status of ultimate ground, which conceals its basis in more fundamental processes of self-world relations. While for Husserl, these primordial relations are processes of striving for knowledge, for Heidegger Being-in-the -world as care is a holistic being-in-relevance. But Care is not the same thing as living for a purpose. It is a living for the mattering of what Dasein is thrown into, how beings disclose themselves.

Everything depends on there being again a beginning of philosophy wherein philosophy is itself this beginning so that be-ing itself sways as origin. Only in this way the power of beings and their pursuit, and along with it every purpose-oriented calculation, will be shattered… Throwing-oneself-free unto enownment is preparedness for the sway of truth to place itself in mastery, and prior to all “truths”, that is, prior to all “goals”, “purposes” and “usefulnesses” to decide beings unto the ownhood of be-ing.

In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well.

No, I like a lot of work using enactivism and phenomenology, in part because they avoid notions like "all we know are our own concepts" and "words don't have reference, only sense (or sense IS their reference)." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could have fooled me. Every point I have made that you have shot down comes directly from either the phenomenologies of Husserl (the reference of sense is to other senses), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger or the enactivist work of Gallagher, Varela and Thompson. And you dismissed as wrong or unintelligible Astrophel’s reading of phenomenologist Michael Henry, whose work is closely tied to Husserl and enactivism. If you are a supporter of phenomenology or enactivism, it must be to a brand that I’m not familiar with. Perhaps a pre-Husserlian form of phenomenology?Hegel perhaps?

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? Don’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?

Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m aware of two kinds of empirical accounts to describe perception, representational and enactivist, and versions that combine aspects of the two. I am not a representationalist, but just used that term for convenience. In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well. Does this mean you are questioning all contemporary psychological accounts of perception, or can you suggest a contemporary empirical alternative I’m not aware of? ) Btw, the text photo you inserted was too blurry to read).

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us

This is conflating existence and being experienced. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.

The concept of depression that replaced melancholia will eventually undergo the same fate as melancholia. You would deny that the word coastline could suffer such a fate, but on the basis of what criterion can we draw the line between that word and phlogiston or melancholia? You don’t imagine any way in which ,coastline’ succumbs to the same process of having its underlying practices of understanding shift along with the evolution of culture and language use, such that coastline becomes a quaint expression harking back to a time when they thought about such aspects of nature in a different way than they do now?

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? Can’t both ways of seeing lead to maps that can be validated? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? Don’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?

you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience. I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities (visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources.

Most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

You may respond to all this by observing that I’m simply describing how the brain creates a representation of the world. But what I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isn’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third.

But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. Yes, but the question is, how does the actual flow of events constrain the kinds of patterns we can construct to model them? Apparently the actual flow of events can accommodate an indefinite variety of construals. We can look at a landscape and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us. Seeing it as a unity by synthesizing its temporally and spatially spaced out elements into an instantaneous whole in the brain allows us to do things with it like creating maps of it. And there are many other ways of construing the scene that are equally true in the sense that we can test out our knowledge in our actual interactions with it and validate our model.

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former? Let’s say that it is indeed better in that it subsumes the features of the former into a more holistically integrated unity. In other words, we can always perceive a phenomenon in restrictive terms as ‘this and only this’ , or in terms that are permeable to alternative constructions. Is the latter way a more accurate representation of reality? I think it’s better than accurate. The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?

We can model physical phenomena in terms of efficient causality, where the behavior of interacting objects is described on the basis of fixed properties (mass, energy), and then declare that the physical world behaved according to the laws of objective causality before humans arrived on the scene. This approach validates itself perfectly well, but perhaps it can be subsumed as just one aspect within a more permeable model of nature, one that doesn’t invalidate the causal account but reveals it as limited and restrictive, like seeing a coastline as disconnected segments. We can declare that dinosaurs existed before we discover them, and then in 50 years a new biological approach will discard names for living things in favor of a radically holistic ecological approach in which it no longer makes sense to talk about discrete objects moving through space we call animals , but instead a web of reciprocal relations within which we no longer need to tease out categorical entities we call animals. And they could then declare this ecology (but not dinosaurs) something that existed before humans arrived.

We can apply this subsuming account of knowledge to ethics as well. We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.