phenomenology might almost be called a new, a twentieth century, Cartesianism.

We must complete the quote:

“Accordingly one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism, even though It Is obliged and precisely by its radical development of Cartesian motifs to reject nearly all the well-known doc­trinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.”

Descartes used the method of radical doubting to uncover the essential indubitable ground of the cogito. It is this drilling down beneath unexamined preconceptions guiding our everyday acceptance of the world that Husserl took from Descartes, not the conclusion that the indubitable essence of being is the cogito. This grounding Husserl rejected. I think all philosophy since Descartes takes from him this spirit of thoroughgoing doubting, with the aim of arriving at a point where skepticism can be dispelled.



“And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences. Let the idea guiding our meditations be at first the Cartesian idea of a science that shall be established as radically genuine, ultimately an all-embracing science.

But, now that we know longer have at our disposal any already given science ( after all we are not accepting any given science) as an example of radically genuine science , what about the indubitability of that idea itself, the idea mainly of a science that shall be grounded absolutely?

Is it a legitimate final idea, the possible aim of some possible practice? Obviously that is something too we must not presuppose , to say nothing of taking any norms as already established for testing such possibilities-or perchance a whole system of norms in which the style proper to genuine science is allegedly prescribed.

That would mean presupposing a whole logic as a theory of science , whereas logic must be included among the sciences overthrown in overthrowing all science. Descartes himself presupposed an ideal of science, the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural science. As a fateful prejudice this ideal determines philosophies for centuries and hiddenly determines the Mediations themselves.

Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the start that the all-embracing science must have the form of a deductive system, in which the whole structure rests, ordine geometrico, on an axiomatic foundation that grounds the deduction absolutely. For him a role similar to that of geometrical axioms in geometry is played in the all-embracing science by the axiom of the ego's absolute certainty of himself, along with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego only this axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of geometry and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding even of geometrical knowledge. None of that shall determine our thinking. As beginning philosophers we do not as yet accept any normative ideal of science; and only so far as we produce one newly for ourselves can we ever have such an ideal.

In a quasi-Cartesian fashion we intend, as radically beginning philosophers, to carry out meditations with the utmost critical precaution and a readiness for any-even the most far-reaching transformation of the old-Cartesian meditations. Seductive aberrations, into which Descartes and later thinkers strayed, will have to be clarified and avoided as we pursue our course.

That's more like Heidegger's version (he traded on his Husserl connection so that most people are too confused to tell them apart). Some flaws in Husserl's own version needed attending to and Walter Hopp in Phenomenology, a contemporary approach pubd Routledge 2020 covers the scheme systematically and the comments already made by others to make it hang together better. In particular Husserl identified three successive phases in perception including valuing (which ties in with Nietzsche's call) which is separate from judgment. — Fine Doubter

Maybe it sounds like Heidegger because I simplified it a bit.

Husserl maintained you can't genuinely perform "reductions" or "brackettings" (which just means hold two or more things in your mind alongside each other) beyond what "is" into the fact of "is" itself. — Fine Doubter

Reduction is the removal of all knowledge of the world that isn’t based on immediate intuitive givenness.

Heidegger reifies a thing he calls Being itself, which causes all sorts of personality and societal disturbances. — Fine Doubter

Heidegger’s Being isn’t a reification. Could you elaborate on what you mean by ‘personality and societal
disturbances’?

To my mind the meaning in what is, is "Is". Things that are, are telling us that they are, and that they are what they are. This is the answer to the "why is there something rather than nothing" question. (There must have been an existence wave or something. Popper's rather nice word is "propensity". I call it Sam Johnson's Toe.) Why questions are mostly how questions, and how questions are mostly what questions. To my mind, this must be the basic premise of logic. — Fine Doubter

This also the premise of empiricism, the myth of the given, and rationalism of logic. These are all concepts that phenomenology puts into question.

When one adds (to Husserl's scheme) the semiotics of Peirce (reading the language of nature as well as culture) and those forms of hermeneutics that resemble it (i.e not Heidegger's), not forgetting quasi-indexicality in holy texts (why gods are reported to say what they are saying and who it was as if to) and one gets a toolkit for sanity. — Fine Doubter

Peirce never freed himself from Hegelian rationalism.

The original issue here was phenomenology’s roots in Cartesian dualism and representationalism. — apokrisis

As Thompson’s recent reappraisal of Husserl indicates, it was never phenomenology that trafficked in Cartesianism and representationalism, it was the early Anglo-American interpreters of Husserl who imposed their own bias on phenomenology. That is why phenomenology is only now having its day in the sun for those in anglo-american philosophy and psychology who are looking for support for their anti-foundationalist, anti-rationalist models.

Romanticism is then the more general dualistic response to Enlightenment materialism - an effort to appeal to the reality of the ideal and sublime. — apokrisis

But Hegel , a romantic , was not a dualist.

Peirce might follow in Kant and Hegel’s footsteps in developing their antimonies and dialectics into a full blooded story of hierarchical development. But he went way beyond in pin-pointing the mediating role of a sign relation that forges a self along with its world. As I say, he showed epistemology and ontology to be two versions on the one rational structure of relations. — apokrisis

Right, he repackaged Hegel’s synthesis of mind and matter, and swapped out the former’s dialectical rationalist logic with his triadic rationalist logic.

So the conclusion is that Peirce is essentially still a rationalist - ie; argued a structuralist case. And you want to say that sounds like idealism-tinged metaphysics to you? — apokrisis

Hegel’s Rationalism is a form of German idealism.

Are you below the right question? — Prishon

Just pretend we’re talking about information.

the aspect I say is being overplayed by you is how the individual point of view becomes a justification for the reheated romanticism that animates PoMo pluralism and anti-structuralism. — apokrisis

Speaking of Romanticism, let’s get back to Peirce.
First, let’s review a definition of philosophical Romanticism from The Basics of Philosophy. You’ll notice that postmodernism is not mentioned as a form of Romanticism. On the contrary, it is generally thought that Nietzsche, the first postmodernist thinker, signaled the end of Romanticism.

‘The roots of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought that civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true nature and original freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism (see the section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world through our human point of view, an idea developed by the American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.

The German Idealists who followed on from Kant and adapted and expanded his work with their own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most important were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and (arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers, and his idea that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism) had far-reaching effects.’

Now let’s look at a discussion by Andrew Stables of Peirce’s relation to those ol’ Romantics Kant and Hegel.

Both Kant and Hegel were progressivists. Kant's moral absolutism can be contrasted with Hegel's universal progressivism. While Kant saw progression through assimilation (via duty), Hegel posits progression through agonism.

‘Kant explains the empirical as making sense only within the context of the rational: cognitively in terms of the fundamental Categories, and ethically in terms of the Categorical Imperative and the moral law that flows from it (Kant, 1909, p. 281).Thus mind dictates material/bodily experience. Peirce does not need to separate mind and body, at least in his later semiotic thinking, but he still offers a rational schema which accounts for experience: his various reformulations of the triadic models built on Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. As with Kant, the pure ‘categories' here are implicit and remain hidden: one cannot isolate Firstness any more than one could isolate pure Relation or Modality. Any attempt to explain Firstness in terms of Qualities begs the response that Qualities may be features of a noumenal world that remains ultimately inaccessible at the phenomenal level, though Peirce does not raise the distinction and committed Peirceans take him as denying it. However, as neither Kantian Category nor Peircean Firstness is either empirically or logically testable other than indirectly, through the creation and working out of alternative models, there are no grounds for resolving this.

Also, Peirce remains as committed as any idealist or rationalist philosopher to the logical possibility of infinite non-existent worlds and entities. Given the role that pure chance plays in the increasingly pansemiotic approach that Peirce takes towards the end of his life, the possibilities for change are potentially infinite.Why actual change should be progressive or rational is entirely unclear, unless some higher power has invested certain beings (specifically humans) with rational power and free will, such that arbitrary change at the level of Firstness (of there be such a level) is transformed into rational change at the level of Thirdness; however, for Peirce explicitly to take this position would be an admission that he had scarcely moved on from Kant at all. While Kant's argument for rationalism is circular, Peirce, like Hegel, effectively collapses mind and experience. Like Hegel, the rationalist idealist, Peirce seems increasingly to see the universe as spirit unfolding or revealing.

Kant, Hegel and Peirce are all Enlightenment progressivists insofar as progress is regarded as universal and rational. None would be sympathetic to a social constructivist, nihilist, poststructuralist or any strongly relativistic take on progress. Kant has progress flow from the actions of autonomous rational agents motivated by that which guides ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within' (Kant, 1909, p. 260): that is, universal rational laws which are expressed in nature and which guide experience but can be clear only to the mind. While for Kant progress comes through assimilation (freedom as duty), to Hegel it comes via the agonistic dialectic of inevitable opposition and resolution, as reason works itself out in and as the world (Hegel, 1977). Peirce’s concerns are always less social than Hegel's, but in the juxtaposition of Firstness and Secondness and in the resolution that Thirdness offers as the Interpretant Sign, there is a kind of implicit dialectical movement that resonates with Hegel. Also note that Hegel, while commonly construed as an idealist, is arguably not a dualist insofar as the body of the world cannot be divorced from mind itself. Peirce's progressivism can therefore be regarded as broadly Hegelian, though not expressed in terms of alienation, struggle and negation.

However, just as Hegelian progress can seem to some merely to be inevitable change, since there are no criteria for assessing it as progress (other than the accrual of power, perhaps), Peirce can be held to a similar charge. Peirce assumes change to be progressive because he attempts to explain it as rational process. Of the three, only Kant's Categorical Imperatives offer grounds for judging whether change has been progressive, and even the criteria for judgment thus derived would be open to evaluative interpretation. Universal unfolding is not necessarily progressive. As Peirce assumes it to be, then he must tacitly be working on a basis not dissimilar to Kant's: the logic of the rational outcome.
Peirce, therefore, owes many debts to rationalism and can be seen as its heir rather than its successor.

There are many who remain unconvinced that Peirce's work can offer the final word, even in terms of philosophical underpinning, but rather see it, for all its inspiring qualities, as a not entirely happy marriage of competing traditions rather than a final resolution of the tensions between them. Merrell, for example, cites Peirce's ‘collusion . . . of evolutionary cosmology coupled with his no-nonsense “realism” tinged with “idealist' metaphysics' (Merrell, 1997, p. 95). The present argument is that he does not move as far from an Enlightenment rationalism as his more committed followers claim.’
(Andrew Stables)

Sounds awfully Romantic to me.

Even great thinkers reflect their social era. Doesn't that prove my point about the social construction of even the most independently minded individuals? — apokrisis

No, their theologies were well ahead of their time. To the great bulk of the nonacademic culture that surrounded them , their ideas were generations ahead.

Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent?
— Joshs

Yep. Logic is logic. You haven't been able to pick holes in account of that logic and so now you chose to play the man rather than the ball. — apokrisis

I thought logic was a cultural creation like the rest of philosophy. Isnt that the view of writers like Lakoff and Johnson, who view logic as embodied activity? I’ve read 5 or 6 different interpretations of Peirce’s triadic model and they all differ. You don’t think the variability in how people interpret ‘firstness’ has any bearing on the use od the logic? I think how much the application of his logic will differ from user to user depends on what they want to do with it. The more abstract and complex the aspect of the world one looks at , the greater difference interpretation will make. If you don’t see God in Peirce’a triad, you’re not looking closely enough.

Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology. Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism.
— Joshs

Err. OK. So he was constructing himself as an anti-rational renegade ... yet now is recognised as just a rationalist positive psychology type responding early to the spirit of his age? — apokrisis

That’s one reading of Kelly, one he was bemusedly familiar with.

“Cognitive, behavioural, emotional, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and even dialectical materialist and Zen Buddhist: these are some of the ways in which George A. Kelly's (1955) theory has been labelled, as he himself tells with pleased irony (Kelly, 1969/1965, pp. 216-217). Such obstinacy in trying to insert personal construct theory (PCT) within already formalized psychological perspectives, and the odd variety of proposals so distant each from other on the epistemological and theoretical level, in our opinion testify as better would not be possi-ble the originality of Kelly's thought.”( Gabrielle Chiari)

As with any thinker , ther are different Kelly camps. I happen to agree with those who align Kelly with pragmatism , phenomenology and constructivism.

Self-actualisation and humanist approaches took off in the US because there was already the deeply engrained notion of the US being the land of the self-made man. But by the 1950s, corporations and unions dominated the society. People were suddenly rich, secure and leisured, yet still constrained by class and traditional values. So very ready to discover themselves and construct their own personal realities. — apokrisis

Are you kidding me? The 1950’s and early 1960’s were among the most conformist periods in American history. The last thing the average person was ready for during that time was self-transformation.
The counterculture didn’t emerge as a substantial force until after Kelly’s death in 1967.

Behaviourism was popular among those who liked the idea of mind control. It was hardly central to popular culture. Cognivitism started out naturalistic and ecological - as with Neisser - but became over-run by computer science and the metaphysics of information. — apokrisis

Behaviorism ( and psychoanalysis) had such a stifling hold over academic psychology during this period that Jerome Bruner had to establish his own group at Harvard in the 1960’s to wrest control away from information processing and bring psychology back to its roots in pragmatism. That took more than 30 years to accomplish. Neisser’s groundbreaking text in 1967 made little impact until the 1970’s, and even then second generation cognitive science still had a struggle on its hands.

In Britain things weren’t much better. Only a few malcontents attempted to break way from the stranglehold of S-R and rationalistic cognitivism. These included Don Bannister, Rom Harre, Fay Fransella and John Shotter. Bannister had become close friends with Kelly and began to establish an academic community in Britain around Kelly’s approach, which spawned social constructionist , radical constructivist and hermeneutic readings of Kelly.

I'm not really buying your social history here. If you are determined to make Kelly the base of your argument against pragmatic positivism or social constructionism, that seems a poor choice. — apokrisis

The choice of individual shouldn’t be the issue. The issue should be how to divvy up and characterize an entire culture of an era. Claiming that America of the mid 1950’s was ready for what Kelly offered stands in direct contrast to the reality of a profoundly hidebound academic and mainstream culture. Yes, Kelly reacted against S-R, cognitivism and Freud , but I think he went farther than that , challenging even some enactivist notions.
Even if that’s not the case, I can think of any number of original thinkers( Heidegger , Nietzsche, Leibnitz) who were so far ahead of their ‘time’ ( the bulk of the populace) that they could count only a tiny handful of writers to directly contrast their ideas with. Nietzsche had Schopenhauer , Kierkegaard , Darwin and Marx, and more distantly , Hegel. The rest of the culture that surrounded him was living in a much more traditional world. In fact , 120 years later , only a small segment of today’s world has assimilated his thinking.

I think the typical situation for original thinkers is that their closet competition is a tiny handful of writers. Beyond that immediate sphere of influence lies a larger circle of maybe a few thousand thinkers who are regurgitating the previous generation’s cutting edge thinking. Beyond that is a much larger circle of non-academic educated culture which represents the best of an even older generation. And beyond that is an uneducated pluraity that still identify with even more ancient ways of thinking. So as far as the wider culture influencing the work of an original thinker, I think as we move out from the small inner circle in every wider approaches , the numbers of individuals grows, and the influence becomes more and more indirect.

transcendental subjectivity’
— Joshs

One of Husserl's? I don't properly understand it. Quick definition? — Tom Storm

Yep. Transcendental subjectivity is what is left after one has performed a thoroughgoing reduction of everyday experience. One could perform a partial reduction in order to reveal the intentional acts underlying and making possible psychological processes like perception and cognition. Brentano, the Gestalt psychologists and today’s cognitive science all make use of such an intentional approach. But they don’t perform a complete reduction, because they found their intentional psychologies on a material stratum. The transcendental move makes empirical naturalism secondary and derived from the more primordial stratum of intentional constitution. One would have to imagine a generating process that is not an object in the world , and yet not a solipsistic ideality.

It’s a bizarre approach for those of us used to starting with the furniture of the universe and constructing human beings out of those building blocks.

But there isn't much that can be said that applies to everything in the world. So we tend to be ontological pluralists by default — Manuel

Unless you’re a Continental philosopher, in which case everything comes down to ‘Will to Power’ or ‘ Dasein’ or ‘difference’ or ‘ transcendental subjectivity’. I think that even those considering themselves ontological pluralists make use of implicit unifying presuppositions, even as they cannot articulate them explicitly.

Each man probes a different part of the elephant’s body and comes up with his own interpretation of what the elephant looks like.

The point is that you already refer to a world. As if there is just one possible one. That is, the material world. — Prishon

You’ll also notice that everything about this ‘same’ world he refers to is going to be idiosyncratic to his perspective, such that he will have to use the
blind men and elephant metaphor to explain how different perspectives can all coalesce around a same world. Suggesting that there are as many different elephants as there are perspectives is threatening to an empirical bent.

…..

dialectics is the universal logic, the universal rational process, which produces any well-formed construct.

Kant fell down with his antimonies. Hegel got things a little wrong because he lacked a concept of vagueness. That is why I say Peirce worked it out best with his triadic systems perspective. — apokrisis

What Kant, Hegel and Peirce had in common was their grounding of Being in divinity. Peirce posited God as the source and creator of the dialectic , a God he said could
produce miracles( he and James had a fondness for spiritualist mediums) . He articulated his divine teleology as the developmentally assured triumph of love over hate.

Peirce infers from the Gospel and Epistles of John that ‘God is love’, and that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of love and loveliness.

But then because synchronic structure is itself opposed to diachronic process, we also have the other ur-dichotomy of the vague~crisp - the extension to dialectical reasoning made explicit in the triadic logic of Peirce.

Peirce was always trying to connect these two dichotomies in the one world description, which is why you wind up with his super-dichotomy of tychism~synechism. The local is pure chance or pure spontaneity, so also as vague and unformed as it gets. The global is continuity and universalised habit or law, so as crisp and definite as its gets.

Thus the content that results from dialectical inquiry is that which in the end can't be done away with. Peirce makes sense to me in his reduction of existence to these two complementary ur-dichotomies - the local~global and the vague~crisp, or the dichotomies of structure and of development. — apokrisis

I know you’ve said you don’t go along with Peirce’s theological interpretation of his metaphysics, but don’t you think he would defend the dialectic and the divine as inseparable? Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent? More specifically , doesn’t the developmental
model you have been laying out presuppose a hidden hand guiding universal rational process? A number of your colleagues in pan semiotics are quite sympathetic to theological writers like Charles Taylor, Kierkegaard and Martin Buber( Bergson comes to mind also ).

The local is pure chance or pure spontaneity, so also as vague and unformed as it gets. The global is continuity and universalised habit or law, so as crisp and definite as its gets.

Thus the content that results from dialectical inquiry is that which in the end can't be done away with. — apokrisis

I’m curious. Is what you wrote above consistent with the fact-value interpenetration argument?

Varela writes:

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

‘A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.’

Is the above consistent with Peirce’s definition of the real?

“ I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched.”

My point was that Kelly's approach was constrained by the certitudes of 1950's US intelligentsia - the tropes of rationality and self-actualisation. He saw his impoverished Kansas farmers as needing training in how to become rational and self-actualising in a way that was a society's generally stated goal. — apokrisis

Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology.
Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism.
Self-actualization as a buzzword made its way into American psychology in the 1950’s due to the indirect influence of European trends such as existentialism, American pragmatism, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. These tropes were not embraced by mainstream intellectual culture until many years later.
In the 1950’s only a handful of American psychologists and philosophers adopted them. The mainstream endorsed S-R positivism and the new discipline of cognitive science, a rationalist offshoot of 19th century idealism.

But is it a universalizing structure?
— Joshs

Of course. The dichotomy is the basis of rational analysis itself. There would be no philosophy without the dialectic. — apokrisis

But there are different ways of looking at universality. One could say , for instance , that there can be no existent , no experience, no world without time, and time
presupposes both similarity and difference. So absence and presence , sameness and difference , form and content are irreducible , universal requirements for any kind of world. Notice that there is nothing in this assertion to differentiate Kant’s notion of universality from Hegel’s or Nietzsche’s or Kelly’s . But when we start inquiring as to whether there are universal contents constraining the dynamics of dialectics, such as Kant’s transcendental categories subtending time, space, causation and morality, we can distinguish different kinds of universality. Like Kant , Hegel fills in the dialectic with a universal content. For Hegel, however, this content doesn’t subsist in static categorical schemes , but in the ordering logic guiding the movement of the dialectic.

With Nietzsche and the postmodernists there is no longer any universal content determining either schematic form or dialectical movement. Both schematic form ( value systems ) and dialectic movement are utterly contingent and relative.
One could say that such a notion of universality is, as Derrida put it , a quasi-transcendental , or quasi-universal, idea. It is always a new ,contingent, relative sense ( content) of absence, presence, sameness and difference that appears to make up a world.

If there ain’t also differentiation then any claim of integration becomes meaningless. Things must be separated to also stand in some relation. As they say, time had to exist so not every happens all at once. — apokrisis

Yes, differentiation and integration together form the irreducible basis of any world.

But look at the difference between the ‘flow’ experience of the intuitive , organic unfolding of a dance duet, and the hostile , conflictual exchange of a political disagreement. Both situations are built upon a ‘separation of things’ , but yet they differ vastly in the relation between separation and integration. There are a number of dialectically based philosophies that make a certain irreducible violence, or at least conflict, a necessary precondition of social change. Kelly’s isn’t one of them. Where does Peirce stand on the necessity of conflict in cultural development?

The global social constraints are meant to shape the individual’s psychological development in some time-proven useful way. But as I’ve said, the same system wants to be able to learn and adapt, and so a tolerance for local variety is also part of the deal. If every individual interprets cultural norms according to their own local contingencies, then that feeds back cybernetically to ensure the collective social order can change its own global settings. The whole system can adjust. — apokrisis

A global system implies that each of its components be co-determined by reference to the functioning of the whole.

If an Islamic fundamentalist and a pan semioticist engage in a debate about metaphysics , every word that each uses in the conversation will be interpreted by the other according to their own construct system. Does this mean the contribution of each to the exchange has no effect on the other’s thinking? No, my perspective and that of another are not to be understood as independent, private regions. The interpersonal relation directly remakes my sense of what my `own' perspective is, as well as what I assume to be the other's integral position. It is always a new sense of `me' and `other' that emerge in conversation. And yet , this mutual affecting between us is not to be conceived in the same way as our personal
construct systems. My own system , my own world , is
a global system in which each of its components is co-
determined by reference to the functioning
of the whole, and so is my debating opponent’s in relation to his global system. But there is no such global system BETWEEN. us , or encompassing us and a much larger culture within a superordinate global system. Each word I use gets its sense from its categorical inclusion within a superordinate hierarchy of personal meaning. The trivial day to day events of my life get their relevance from the broader themes of my life, and the most superordinate of these involve my sense of myself as a social being.
I can’t perform the same hierarchical move in drawing up a global , between person system. There simply is no neutral vantage point from which such a system can be determined. My personal meanings aren’t determined by a global cultural system the way that my superordinate system determines the sense of my day to day trivial experiences.


Anything one might attempt to say about it would apply differently to each of its participants. There are as many global systems as there are participants in a culture. Try getting agreement on the nature of this global system. You might respond, sure, each of us are accessing and contributing to this system from own vantage within it. But I’m saying there is no ‘it’, no same system and no same world.

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields.

In a ‘community’ of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

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

There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians,
— Joshs

But perhaps not one communist for every one fundamentalist. Care to guess at a realistic ratio? — apokrisis

But what’s your point , that one can articulate a global system here using evidence of a majority worldview? If indeed the fundamentalist perspective was much more prevalent than the communist view in Kelly’s social environment , this certainly didn’t constrain Kelly’s model. You could claim that his approach was in dialectical opposition to it , but the central critique in his work was directed against positivism, Feduaniam and Marxism, not fundamentalism.

And how should we then read his efforts to impose a therapy that indeed imposes a universalising rational structure on the perhaps idiosyncratic and fairly contingent social learning of that farmer? — apokrisis

But is it a universalizing structure? The asymptotic approach to truth that Kelly envisioned doesn’t originate at the intersubjectively normative but at the personal level.

Kelly says:

“The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.”

Kelly says all events in the universe are interlocked via temporal succession. What does he mean by interlocked? He says “all its imaginable parts have an exact relationship to each other”, but by ‘exact' he doesn't appear to mean an objectively causal exactitude, even though he describes it as all working “together like clockwork”. The order of material causality is dictated by the empirical content, which is inherently arbitrary. A car engine's parts have an exact causal relationship with each other, but not an inferential one. If one part were removed, the others would retain their identity, even if the engine no longer worked. By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is different than saying they are just causally connected.

Certainly Kelly never gave up a realist-sounding language that spoke of a universe seemingly ‘out there' and which we are mirroring more and more accurately through successive approximations, but If one follows the implications of the theory itself, it seems to me what one ends up with is not a correspondence theory of truth, but rather a developmental teleology of intentionality itself directed toward endlessly increasing internal integration. This subordinates what would be external' in reality to relational activity between subject and world. I think that's what Kelly(1955) was aiming at with the following awkward rendering:

“The truths the theories attempt to fix are successive approximations to the larger scheme of things which slowly they help to unfold.”

Notice that Kelly does not say our approximations UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality. I interpret this to mean that our approximations co-create the ‘larger scheme of things’ in contingent fashion.

This sounds like a constructivist rather than a realist idea. The asymptotic convergence of ‘outer reality' and human formulations, then, far from being a progressively more exact inner mirroring of an outer causal process, has the character of Kelly's Organization corollary, the events of the universe functioning as sequential variations on a moving superordinate theme. The content of the theme seems to be beside the point. In fact content doesn't seem to play a significant role either on the side of the subject or the world. A psychology in which the in-itself content of events plays second fiddle to the relationship between events and the psychological system is not much of a realism. By the same token, a construct system guided by no ‘internal gyroscope' other than the abstracting of events along dimensions of similarity and difference doesn't seem to accord with the kind of inner content- based rationalism that his critics attribute to him.

Is it the farmer that does all his or her own self-actualising? Are the constructs truly personal creations that are merely being excavated and brought finally to light?

Or are they vaguely organised thoughts being constrained within a cultural context - such as the US circa 1950 - that prized both rationality and individuality, and so made it natural to frame its therapeutic interventions in that fashion? — apokrisis

Does the cultural context constrain the theory like a frame that limits the range of variations that can occur within it, or does each individual participant redefine the boundaries of the frame in some measure?
Of course, no theory is born of immaculate conception, but isnt the frame just an abstraction generated from individual variations?

What was the cultural context of Kansas in the 1950’s? It depends on who you asked. There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians, So there was a range of ideologies, and certainly they all interacted with and were defined in relation to each other and with Kelly’s thinking. But is any major thinker just a product of their time or does a Descartes, Kant , Hegel extend the frame and move slightly beyond their ‘time’? Of all the ideas circulating around the American Midwest in the middle 20th century, postmodern constructivism was nowhere to be seen except in the work of George Kelly. Even today , 70 years later , one can hardly claim that Kelly’s perspective characterizes the mainstream intellectual climate there yet. Phenomenology was the closest thinking to his approach, but he had never read any of the original authors.

wonder why the circa 2020 Kansas farmer might seem such a different creature if Kelly were still around? Did something happen to the dream of universalising rationally-structured individuality in the decades of mindless culture wars inbetween? — apokrisis

The vocabulary Kelly used showed the influences of the experimental psychology of the time, but the content of the ideas are much more at home in 2021 American psychology.

Thanks for reading and citing Kelly. It gives us a shared focus.

And Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructing constructs - the generalities that ground the ability to then particularise in terms of individuated balances on some spectrum that lies between "two poles of being". — apokrisis

I think you understand this correctly , but just to make sure, whereas a concept understood via traditional
metaphysics is a context -independent, universal logical definition, a construct is idiosyncratic to one’s own system. As a therapist, Kelly would notice that what a client meant by a word like honestly could only ascertained, with the client’s help ,by teasing out the contrast pole, which oftentimes the client was not explicitly aware of. So whereas for one person , the contrast pole for honest could be ‘prone to telling untruths’, for another person the contrast pole could be ‘disloyal’. And what is true for common worlds is also true for the most important orienting values of our lives.

The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things. — apokrisis

And even then , the prejudices of the people around him don’t automatically become his prejudices , because the differentiations he forms will be idiosyncratic to his own system of dichotomies. ( I think you gathered that already).

Yet if we are talking about the mind and its model of physical reality, then the dichotomies are objectively real in that reality self-organises via its fundamental symmetry breakings. The Universe is not pluralistic but unified as a system. — apokrisis

I don’t remember if you said that you said Hegel’s dialectical metaphysics was monistic or pluralist. It does provide us a ‘key’ to logic of the dialectic, doesnt it? This gave the phases of historical development a logical necessity. Eventually this gave speculative dialectics a bad name, because one could ignore empirical contingency and just use the ‘key’ to unlock the logic of historical development without paying attention to real material circumstances. Peirce , coming in the wake of Darwin and Marx, wanted facts on the ground rather than a metaphysical key to decide the twists and turns of the dialectic , if I have it right. So when you talk about a unified system , I assume you are not making recourse to a metaphysics.

Our chore becomes the one of placing ourselves as free individuals within some vast space of seven billion people all meant to live by the same social code. Any local diversity or plurality is a freedom gained by accepting some even more trans-communal and pan-species moral system and Platonic-strength abstraction. — apokrisis

I think you lost me a little. Who is it who is claiming there is a trans-communal and trans-species moral
system? Certainly Kant endorsed a trans-human moral universality, and Hegel’s metaphysical ‘key’ points to a different sort of moral universality. If you and Peirce are making the claim for a trans-species normativity how are you differentiating such a moral system from these idealist moralisms?

We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct - which of course breaks into its dichotomies as its must. If there is a coherent leftish position, it is automatic that there is a rightish position that is just as loud and proud in its cultural demands. — apokrisis

So is the above what you mean by trans-species moral system, that which is universally correct? Perhaps, then, this is a sort of metaphysical key , albeit not identical to Hegel’s.

The commonality corollary

Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.

Both the personal and the public are being recognised. But bad. It isn't being framed as a dichotomy of localised construction and globalised constraint.

It is only about the bottom-up construction which thus roots things in the individual and leaves the communal as some kind of collection of accidental choices rather than a larger universalising view that has evolved to provide a generalised constraining hand over local acts of individuation. — apokrisis

You are right about it being bottom up. You left out Kelly’s favorite corrolary, the complement to the commonality corollary. Kelly's Sociality Corollary say that “to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of
another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person”

Kelly explains the difference between the commonality and the sociality corollaries:

“...for people to be able to understand each other it takes more than a similarity or commonality in their thinking. In order for people to get along harmoniously with each other, each must have some understanding of the other. This is different from saying that each must understand things in the same way as the other.” “In order to play a constructive role in relation to another person one must not only, in some measure, see eye to eye with him but must, in some measure, have an acceptance of him and of his way of seeing things. We say it in another way: the person who is to play a constructive role in a social process with another person need not so much construe things as the other person does as he must effectively construe the other person's outlook...social psychology must be a psychology of interpersonal understandings, not merely a psychology of common understandings.”

I’m probably digging a deeper pluralist hole for Kelly from
you vantage , but let’s see how for Kelly an individual is influenced by their society if not in a top down fashion.

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”
for
Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.

“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”

Here we see the problem of failing to distinguish between the biological and cultural sources of semiosis that shape the individual person. It is bad enough to reduce social constructs to personal acts of construction. It is really bad to omit the biological basis of a person's world modelling. — apokrisis

Kelly initially wanted to be a physiological psychologist. He always said that personal construct theory had a limited range of applicability. It was designed as a psychological theory. He offered that one could just as well use a physiological construct system. One would
get different results of course , but that could be useful depending on how one wanted to look at a phenomenon ( I know , pluralistic ).


“Certain widely shared or public construction systems are designed primarily to fit special fields or realms of facts. When one limits the realm of facts, it is possible to develop a detailed system without worrying about the inconsistencies in the system which certain peripheral facts would reveal. We limit the realm and try to ignore, for the time being, the intransigent facts just outside the borders of that realm. For example, it has long been customary and convenient to distinguish between ‘mental' and ‘physical' facts. These are two artificially distinguished realms, to which two types of construction systems are respectively fitted: the psychological construction system and the natural-science group of construction systems. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we have on our hands two alternative construction systems, which can both be applied profitably to an ever increasing body of the same facts. The realms overlap. Consider more specifically the realms of psychology and physiology.

These realms have been given tentative boundaries based upon the presumed ranges of convenience of the psychological and the physiological construction systems, respectively. But many of the same facts can be construed within either system. Are those facts ‘psychological facts' or are they ‘physiological facts'? Where do they really belong? Who gets possession of them, the psychologist or the physiologist? While this may seem like a silly question, one has only to sit in certain interdisciplinary staff conferences to see it arise in the discussions between people of different professional guilds. Some individuals can get badly worked up over the protection of their exclusive rights to construe particular facts. The answer is, of course, that the events upon which facts are based hold no institutional loyalties. They are in the public domain. The same event may be construed simultaneously and profitably within various disciplinary systems— physics, physiology, political science, or psychology.

No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event', we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. A further idea that we must keep straight is that the physiologically constructed facts about that event are the offspring of the physiological system within which they emerge and have meaning, and that a psychological system is not obliged to account for them. It is also important that we continue to recognize the limited ranges of convenience of our miniature systems.

It is always tempting, once a miniature system has proved itself useful within a limited range of convenience, to try to extend its range of convenience. For example, in the field of psychology we have seen Hull's mathematico-deductive theory of rote learning extended to the realm of problem solving or even to the realm of personality. Freud's psychoanalysis started out as a psychotherapeutic technique but was progressively enlarged into a personality system and, by some, into a religio-philosophical system. This kind of inflation of miniature systems is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does cause trouble when one fails to recognize that what is reasonably true within a limited range is not necessarily quite so true outside that range.”

Maybe pansemiotics is what Kelly was waiting for.

The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification.
— Joshs

Oh quick. Before our start gets us to the "wrong" destination, let's jump our escape hatch and return to the comfort of PoMo pluralism.

There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line. There is just all us little chirping personalised differences - small, accidental, and localised reactions that constitute a Secondness that doesn't want to venture any further into the thickets of grand univocal metaphysics. — apokrisis

How do you reconcile “There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line” with “ We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct.”

I'm sure the post-structuralists had no violent intentions when it came to smashing structuralism. It was just a helpful conversation to help the old guard come to see the error of its ways. — apokrisis

But don’t you think one could lay out a spectrum of positions within ‘structuralism’ and pomo such that it becomes difficult to discern the actual
boundary between them? Isnt this why no one can nail down exactly what these terms refer to , except by pointing to very general families of resemblance, and why even those commonly labeled as within one camp or the other can’t agree on a category?

Yes, this kind of thinking about the parasitic dependence of oppositions on each other is very pomo. It is also very deconstuctive.

The mindless pluralism that seeks out the best available examples to find the mindless universalising that makes its own mindless polarity the "definitely right one". — apokrisis

That wasn’t true of Hegel was it, unless we consider his metaphysical ‘key’ as the ‘definitely right one’ to unlock the logic of dialectical becoming.
What about Kelly’s constructive alternativism? How would you state the mindless universalism and polarity he settles on? Elevating the personally psychological and its dichotomous processes to pre-eminent status?

In this passage, Kelly confuses us by waffling on the question of an ordered universe.

“ Do I not believe the universe is organized? My answer to that is that I would not claim to know that it is. Whether it is organized or not is still one of those things that are unknown. I don't even know whether it is a good question or not.But while I don't know the answer to the question, I need not be immobilized. There is a psychology for getting along with the unknown. It is a psychology that says in effect, "Why not go ahead and construe it to be organized-or disorganized, if you prefer-and do something about it.” (Kelly 1963)

Earlier in the same paper, he clarifies what I think was always his real aim.

“Let us say that the whole of truth lies ahead of us, rather than that some parts of it ahead and some behind. What we possess, or what we have achieved so far, are approximations of the truth, not fragments of it. Hopefully we are getting closer, in some sort of asymptotic progression, and, at some infinite point in time, science and reality may indeed converge.“

Please let me know if anything just said in this post - regarding a multitude of agencies that typically work in unison constituting a single mind - strikes you as too audacious. — javra

The modular view of mind has a long pedigree in cognitive science. Check out Marvin Minsky’s ‘Society of Mind’.

you are arguing PoMo's case for the plural, the arbitrary, the individual - the case it must make to distinguish itself from its natural "other". That other is identified as a metaphysics which instead gravitates to the other pole that is univocal or in other ways prescriptive, constraining, hierarchical, etc, etc. — apokrisis

This is a cultural war that became entrenched after the unifying forces of the scientific enlightenment triggered their own natural dialectical response in a Romanticism that sought its identity in being rationality's "other". — apokrisis

we can only even talk about it from the vantage point of some dialectic framing - like vague~crisp indeed, or the PNC's failure vs the PNC's success - that provides a measurable degree of othering. — apokrisis

Part of what’s throwing me here is that , while I do make use a notion of dialectic , it is closer to George Kelly’s concept of the construct as dichotomous. By this he means it is a way in which two events are alike and different from a third. Your use of dialectic seems closer to that of Hegel. The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification. this is not only the general way I see changes in individual experience over time , but the way I view historical change in social, political, scientific and philosophical ideas. So what from a certain broad perspective could appear as a harsh or abject opposition between two ideologies , when looked at more closely, can be characterized as less revolutionary that evolutionary. One can always see pomo in opposition to what came before it, but a closer look should reveal an intricate development within pomo that bridges what came before such that the appearance of dialectical conflict and othering is replaced by something more on the order of a continuum of historical change.

infinity is one limit on unbounded counting, and the infinitesimal is its “other”. And it is a reciprocal or dichotomous definition, 1/ infinity = infinitesimal/1. And vice versa.

So counting seems to make sense just as it seems to make sense that a line is a infinite series of points, and every one of those points can still be infinitely divided as just very small intervals. — apokrisis

infinity and the infinitesimal are two poles of the same concept, and that concept depends on a mathematicized view of the natural. The geometric concept of the line is an abstraction that makes possible the notion of measurement and calculability. It is an arbitrary , but useful , abstraction based on actual experience in which there are no lines , no self-identical qualities whose instances can be enumerated infinitely or subdivided infintessimally.

Shouldn’t the answer be ‘both’? It seems to me Peirce is presupposing two states ……(
— Joshs

One more time you want to abandon the internalism that you claim as your thing. Everything must have some monistic ground rather than co-arise as a dialectical process. — apokrisis

lIm not sure what is monistic about ‘interbleeding’ in relation to dialectic. Firstness is a unity. It’s designed that way. It is a monism: this and only this, before, outside of relation and plurality. You can’t have a dialectic without unities ( monisms) that compose it’s poles.

The difference between the poles of your dialectic ( or the in-itself of firstness) and the poles of my interbled unity is that your starting point is inert, dead, static, and only is brought to life by adding a relation to it in a secondary move. Saying it’s vague, fuzzy, dances around or fluctuates doesn’t avoid the problem that it is still treated as an intrinsic thing.


And it’s too late by the time one has added secondness. You’ve already missed a whole universe of intimately changing sense. This intimate sense doesn’t exist to you. It is misread as Romantic qualia , as some abstraction that needs to be reduced to its physical-semiotic basis in a relation between signs and matter. You read my terms as a naive gloss on the real underlying explanation.



For my part, I find your account to be absolutely true in terms of what it is trying to do and the way it improves on older models. I don’t want to refute or disprove it. Nothing of the kind. I just think that what your model is taking as the rock bottom irreducible basis of the physical, biological and cultural world (and yes, of the extant empirical accounts , I do think panbiosemisis is the most satisfying effort to synthesize these three realms ) is hiding within its terms a rich process of meaningful change that is invisible to you. As long as you stay within the bounds of the physical and biological, you’re not going to find any tightly articulated alternative models to seriously challenge your account.

However, at the level of the psychological and the cultural , your account has a lot of competition from enactivist, poststructuralist , hermeneutic, social constructionist , phenomenological and deconstructive alternatives which all view language as self-referential rather than pointed toward an ‘out there’.


The brand of realism that you and Peirce subscribe to would not be possible without nailing down an inert( inert not because it isn’t vague or fluctuating , but because it is intrinsic before it is relational ) if temporary, ground. It is what makes it possible to talk about a real world thar exists independently of any individual’s account of it. Once you begin questioning the basis of this ‘ independence’, intrinsic entities like firstness lose their stability of sense , and the whole enterprise of third person science becomes a social game of pragmatic preferences divorced from any connection to what ‘really exists out there’. Because now it appears that what ‘really exists’ only exists as a node in a language game, and the ‘really out there’, is just one more game.

Coming to such a realization is why the Wittgensteinian notion of language game affected philosophers of science like Kuhn , Rorty and Feyerabend the way it did, why putting language front and center became their obsession, and why this treatment of language is incompatible with that of Peirce and Popper, for whom falliblism and falsifiability presuppose that the criteria of a method of approach to scientific truth , if not a guaranteed arrival at an ultimate endpoint,
are secured by the fact that there is indeed something intrinsic to nature beyond our local, contingent conversation about it.

At this point in our conversations , I’m thinking we are echoing the Putnam-Rorty, Popper-Kuhn debate.
Tell me how Pierce and Popper defend their realism from Kuhn.

The existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietszche and Sartre always emphasize the individual above society — Ross Campbell

Hi there. As I mentioned in your previous OP, the ‘existentialist’ reading of Nietzsche is only one interpretation of his work, and I think it’s way off the mark. If you’re looking for readings of Nietzsche as fundamentally intersubjectively grounded, you have a lot to choose from among the postmodernist philosophers. Enjoy!

These philosophers are attempting to solve this problem by putting us into a relation with the other, seen/judged, or pushed away from/connected to a body. But there is nothing ensuring the vision of, or connection with, the other — Antony Nickles

There may some truth to that with regard to Sartre, but Merleau-ponty’s ‘body’ is not only my body , but the social body.

According to Merleau-Ponty, the individualistic assumption is that

“the psyche, or the psychic, is what is given to only one person…I alone am able to grasp my psyche—for example, my sensations of green or of red. You will never know them as I know them; you will never experience them in my place. A consequence of this idea is that the psyche of another appears to me
as radically inaccessible…I cannot reach other lives, other thought processes, since by hypothesis they are open only to introspection by a single individual: the one who owns them.”

In contrast to this assumption, Merleau-Ponty proposes
that the rudiments of self-consciousness emerge from a more basic ‘‘state of pre­communication (Max Scheler,) wherein the other’s intentions somehow play across my body while my intentions play across his.’’ At this stage of the infant’s development, ‘‘there is not one individual over against another, but rather an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life.’’ Only later, ‘‘on the basis of this initial community, both by the objectification of one’s own body and the constitution of the other in his difference, there occurs a segregation, a distinction of individuals’’ whereby self-consciousness, understood as awareness of oneself as a distinct phenomenal subject, can be said to emerge. Merleau-Ponty thus concludes that ‘‘[c]onsciousness of oneself as a unique individual, whose place can be taken by
no one else, comes later and is not primitive,’’ developmentally speaking.”

In general ,

“…as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”(P. Of Perception, p.412)

Sense always co-implies body, and subjectivity belongs to intersubjectivity. Being in the world for Merleau-Ponty is occupying a position within a shared gestalt (the same world for everyone). I am primordially situated in an intersubjective world.

As for Heidegger, the issue of putting us into a relation with the other doesn’t arise , since he doesn’t begin from the subject-object dichotomy in the first place.

one generally plays a competitive game with the intention of winning. One here intends to win, i.e. as psyche, stretches out from where one is in the game to a future state where one has won the game. This notion of a psyche's stretching out so far seems to me to be a different category than that of aboutness. — javra

The way I see it , being about something entails having an attitude and aim toward that object. I understand what you’re saying. Instantaneous perception would seem to imply a kind of passive contribution of then subjective intending or ‘aiming’ in comparison to the active, engaged preparatory posture of competing to win.
Husserl a tally brews foe what would seem to be a simple and immediate structure of perception into a complex of constitutive levels. At the most primordial level of sensing, intentionality is absent. The stimulus exerts an attraction on the the subject which the subject responds to be being attracted. At the next level of constitution, the subject actively turned toward the stimulus to ‘get a better look at it ‘, that is ,it strives to understand it better. What beings to this striving is a series of preparatory postures and bodily adjustments.

Husserl calls this active intentional process objectification, because it is how we constitute spatial
objects out of what are only a constantly changing flow of data. one could look at the constituting of a kind as a kind of sport, with the aim being to see the phenomenon as a more and more harmoniously correlated unity ( this chair, this ball, etc, rather than these disparate perspectival appearances and disappearances). In a sense we are competing with ourselves to achieve this elusive goal of the perfectly unified perceptual object, and we know we have gotten on the wrong track when we encounter optical illusions and mistaken identifications , such as when a shape in the dark first appears as a person but on closer inspection turns out to be only the shadow of a lightpost. So I think simple
perceptual identification is already well along in capturing the centra composted of the kind of intentionality you have in mind.

But it is this search for a static ground that must be rejected, simply because that is already a ground divided by the PNC. What answers better to the challenge of modelling vagueness is a "ground" of utter uncertainty - an infinity of unbound fluctuation or impulse. Or Peircean tychism.

So this is an apophatic description that can't in the end evade claiming something concrete and PNC - the idea of a "spontaneous and unbounded fluctuation". — apokrisis

I want to focus on the language you are using here. I know it is tentative, but let me start with infinite. Infinity pertains to an already established category of meaning, the counting of instances of a theme. What ever it is that has infinite instances of it maintains its sense throughout the counting. It is an infinitely counting of a ‘this’ thing or this phenomenon or this vagueness or this fluctuation. So what is the category here that is infinite? What about the term ‘fluctuation’ . In order to fluctuate , mustn’t something change over time? So this wouldn’t be a singular thing we are talking about but already a complexity , a changing process. Would a fluctuating then not presuppose a multiplicity of some sort , now behaving this way, now that way? So far we have something that seems to be defined categorically and is multiple, doing a variety of things , but determined as the ground of all else. Could there not be a more fundamental
ground within this ground, which does not yet have the categorical sameness to be infinite, and is not yet a complex activity , a changing multiplicity of shapes or patterns or conformations?

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.
— Joshs

And here we are already off the road by returning to Cartesianism. — apokrisis

An infinite entity is a Cartesian entity in that it presupposes a category that remains unreduced, and a firstness treated as a ground of all else , but already a complex activity also seems Cartesian to me.

The question Peirce found interesting was whether the boundary between the ink blot and the rest of the paper is black or non-black. His answer, it seems, was "neither

Shouldn’t the answer be ‘both’? It seems to me Peirce is presupposing two states ( white space and black space) and a boundary between them, and then questioning how to characterize this boundary. But the position I’ve been arguing jettisons the notion of in-itself entity . The black of the ink blot isn’t its own state all to itself, not just it’s own shade of black. It is a more particular kind of black. Specifically, it is the black that emerges from the background of the particular white that borders it. The white doesn’t simply surround it. The very essense and defintion of this particular black is the white that it emerges from. This particular white surround inhabits the interior of the black and thus co-defines its sense. One could call this the blending or interbleeding of the background and figure as sense. As you know, a color only appears as what it is relative to the background we see it against. Red on blue is a different appearing red than the ‘same’ red on a yellow background. Is there a ‘true’ red to be protected from this contextualization? That is what advocates of qualia believe, but not enactivists. The interbleeding of perceptual background and figure can be likened to Wittgenstein’s language games , where the dictionary definition of a word concept has no actual existence. What does exist are an endless variety of senses of meaning of a word as it is used in actual social contexts, where one’s background sense of a word and the contextual usage interbleed to form the pragmatic sense.And this dependence of meaning on sense isn’t restricted to the social sphere. When I think or read alone I am always creating slightly néw and different sense from old words as I use them. A radicalized account of phenomenology would insist that there are no entities or processes in the world that we can point to as independent of our contextually formed and interbled pragmatic construal of them. Just as word concepts and perceptual data don’t exist outside of particular blended sense contexts , firstness is already interbled as contextual sense.

This notion of interbleeding is not one that is part of the language of physical science , nor is it part of biosemiotics as far as I can tell. It also is not present in Descartes. Kant , Hegel or the other Romantics.

This is related to the subverting of the fact-value distinction that Quine , Sellars and Putnam championed but goes further , thanks to figures like Nietzsche , Rorty and the phenomenologists.
I’m not sure where Peirce stand in relation to the notion of fact-value interpenetration. Maybe you can help me with this. Also, is the philosophy of scientific method you and Peirce share more in tune with Popper or figures like Kuhn and Feyerabend?

The world around us will never be the same from one moment to the next.
— Joshs

I've never found this to be particularly true to my experience. But I don't live in Afghanistan... — Tom Storm

I’m talking about a very subtle phenomenon. But notice your perceptual world as an example. There isn’t a single object you can pay attention to right now that will appear exactly the
same when you turn your attention back to it a minute from now. Everything that goes into your perception of it, your bodily stance as anger of view , the lighting , the color , and also your affective attitude, all these subtly change. It doesn’t seem to have much relevance in such a small time frame , but becomes much more
significant when we compare greater stretches of time.

It sounds like you are essentially saying, go with the flow but with some qualifier? — Tom Storm

I guess what I’m saying is that there will not be much of a flow to go with , or at least not as a reliably regular part of one’s life, if one doesn’t take active steps to explore different ways of construing situations in response to feelings of stuckness , puzzlement and anxiety. A relentlessly experimental attitude toward
one’s presuppositions, especially when they no longer seem to be useful ( which is what negative feelings warn us of) , can help us to orchestrate the preconditions for confident, joyful flow. Flow doesn’t just drop into our lap , it’s a certain attitude toward a situation that we have to work to achieve.

If the paradigms of reason just don't quite cut it, isn't difference more "primordial"? And if so, contrariety is more foundational than contradiction. That is, we are more potently contrary to the inadequacies of reason if we discover that contrariety in contrariety to each other. In doing so we become a community in contrariety. But, naturally, that community only extends in dissipation of the moment of it, its worth is lost, and we are set upon a new dialectic of reduction and intimation. That is, we may never agree, but the terms of our discourse fully emerge — Gary M Washburn

I certainly agree that difference is primordial. This sounds a bit like Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, a community of differences in which the whole never commands or encompasses
the many.

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.