In the second, we recognise that neither my position nor the other’s is central to a normative understanding. — Possibility

I'm assuming you want to keep both readings. So let me ask you this: Do you really think that neither my position nor the other's is central to a normative understanding. To be more specific, don't each of us interpret the norm relative to our own pre-understanding? Wouldn't that then mean that , whether i like it or not, my position will be central to my experience of norm, just as the other's is for them?

Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. — Number2018

I've always liked DG's style.Utterly original. Let's say that we think long and hard about what is the simplest, most irreducible and primordial thing we can say about any sense of meaning, and what we come up with is this: The most basic origin of being is something like a machinic algorithm, a conceptual pattern which is designed to do something, something very simple and basic. But it never does this thing alone, it does it as a differential relation to some other machinic process. So all there are are machinic processes and their constantly changing differential relations. Now lets ask the question of HOW this simple machinic functioning changes. If we say that some sub-component of a machinic process is altered, this doesn't really amount to a transcendence of the whole process. Instead it is only a variation WITHIN the already structured function of the machine. A real transcendence requires a move beyond the meaning of the machine in its design and intent as a whole. This implies disconnection, interruption, gap, contrast, becasue the machine does what it does, and to cahnge from one machinic functioning to another is to move on to a new functioning.

Let me contrast this to Eugene Gendlin's notion of the most basic, irreducible grounding of a sense of meaning. Gendlin begins from the lived body, but his notion of body is not a conventional one. It bears some things in common with Merleau_ponty's notion of body as background-figure gestalt structuration, but for Gendlin , body is what he calls an implicit intricacy, an unseparated multiplicity is not a whole composed of separate parts but an original interaffecting. It exists by implying into occurring. That is, an event which occurs, which is experienced,crosses with the intricacy. An event is this crossing which carries forward the intricacy rather than interrupting it or disconnecting from it. Occurring into implying is not a new event which takes the place of an old event. It is neither the same nor just different, but rather an explicating.

"If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they

Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and
with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.
Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behavior.

We can see the body's primacy and priority when we feel how the body now functions, always in a much wider way than language. The body functions in crucial ways, and in ways that are trans-historical. It is not the five senses but the sentient bodily interaction that takes on language and history - and then always still exceeds them.

Suppose, for example, that you are walking home at night, and you sense a group of men following you. You don't merely perceive them. You don't merely hear them there, in the space behind you. Your body-sense instantly includes also your hope that perhaps they aren't following you. It includes your alarm and many past experiences - too many to separate out -and surely also the need to do something, be it walk faster, change your course, escape into a house, get ready to fight, run, shout (.....).

My (.....) expresses the fact that your body-sense includes more than we can list, more than you can think by thinking one thing at a time. And it includes not only what is there. It also implies a next move to cope with the situation. But this implying of your next move is still a (.....) since your actual move has not yet come. Since it includes all this, the (.....) is not just a perception, although it certainly includes many perceptions. Is it then a feeling? It is certainly felt, but "feeling" usually means emotion. The (.....) includes emotions, but also so much else. Is it then something mysterious and unfamiliar'? No, we always have such a bodily sense of our situations. You have it now, or you would be disoriented as to where you are and what you are doing.

Is it not odd that no word or phrase in our language as yet says this? "Kinesthetic" refers only to movement, "proprioceptive" refers to muscles. "Sense" has many uses. So there is no common word for this utterly familiar bodily sense of the intricacy of our situations, along with the rapid weighing of more alternatives than we can think separately. We now call it a "felt sense." Notice that a (.....) is implicitly intricate. It is more than what is already formed or distinguished. In my example it includes many alternative moves, but more: the (.....) implies a next move - the body is the implying of - a next move, but after-and-with all that it includes, that move is as yet unformed.

The (.....) is interaction. It is the body's way of living its situation. Your situation and you are not two things, as if the external things were a situation without you. Nor is your bodily sense only internal. It is certainly not just an emotional reaction to the danger. It is that, but it also
includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you can see or think. Your bodily (.....) is your situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind you. The situation isn't the things that are there, nor something internal inside you. Your intricate involvement with others is not inside you, and it is not outside you, so it is also not those two things together.

The body-sense is the situation. It is inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things. The living body is an ongoing interaction with its environment. Therefore, of course, it contains environmental information. The bodily (.....) also implies a further step which may not yet be capable of being done or said. We need to conceive of the living body in a new way, so as to be able to understand how it can contain (or be) information, and also be the implying of the next bit of living. It is not the usual use of the word "body." As we have seen, the body is not just an orienting center of perceiving, nor only a center of motions, but also of acting and speaking in situations.

The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach."

Now DG might want to argue that Gendlin's implicit intricacy is a kind of machine, and that authentic change in experiencing would require an interruption of its mode of functioning. Perhaps Massumi would use affect as the body's way of disrupting the flow of the implicity intricacy.

On the other hand , Gendlin argues that DG's machines are like the way we think of word concepts, as discrete patterns that interact. But he would go on to claim that, just like word concepts and other logical patterns, there is a generating process which they derive from. A machinic pattern is something that drops out from the implicit intricacy.

"We can phenomenologically study how we use logic – for example in philosophical analysis, or in computing our bank account. We do it by holding the implicit intricacy aside, it is always there. We "know" why we are pursuing this logical chain just now, and what it means for our philosophy or our finances. We keep all this aside so as to follow "only" the logic. Without this implicit holding-aside, the logical thinking would not be possible. Logic does not control where it begins and ends. It also does not control the creation of the defined units it requires. One slight shift in the implicit meaning of any one unit can utterly undo a logical conclusion. By entering the implicit directly, we can generate a whole territory of distinctions and new entities, and then position the logical analysis where it is informed by the implicit intricacy. We can much better use the great human power of logic when we can enter the implicit and consider where to position and re-position the logic, and how to create its units. We do not need the assumption that reality consists of defined units.”

“ Recent thinking still assumes that all order and all interaction is externally programmed. For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) [13] argue that in order to overcome social control, a body would have to be "without organs", since it is through organs that it interacts with others. The assumption is that interaction is externally programmed; the body could be free only if it could give up all points of contact with other people. (The book has a laudatory preface by Foucault.) “

It does not follow from this that the origin of all things is subjective/ intersubjective, although it seems obvious that the latter plays a significant role in how they are experienced and understood. — Janus

I would prefer to say , with Rorty, Dewey , phenomenology , hermeneutics and radical constructivism that it doesn’t make any sense to talk of that which lies ‘outside’ of our subjective access to it except in terms of constraints and accordances
which themselves are co-defined by the subjectivity which is shaped by them.

AFAIK, Wittgenstein never attempted to “offer an origin of language”. — Luke

No, he didn’t.

“ After such a synthesis of Wittgensteinian philosophy and Merleau-Ponty' s phenomenology of perception, where Wittgenstein grows silent, when we reach beyond the 'language-games' and 'forms of life,' once again the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty presents itself to point toward the Beyond. The precedence and succession of Merleau-Ponty to Wittgenstein is not a temporal or honorary one, but rather, a logical or phenomenological one. For Merleau-Ponty dares to tread where language fears to go; cannot go. While Wittgenstein has restricted himself to ordinary language, Merleau-Ponty has advocated the primacy of perception.”

Dennnis Heinzig, MERLEAU-PONTY AND LUDWIG
WITTGENSTEIN: A SYNTHESIS

Eugene Gendlin:

“After Wittgenstein philosophers have assumed that only language gives meaning to sensing the body “from inside.” The common experiencing we have all day is philosophically ignored because they think of it as merely internal and indeterminate, made interactional only by language. There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies.”

AS for the discussion of "real" I say what science says about it speaks far more than anything philosophy brings to the table. — Darkneos

You may have to clarify what ‘science’ you’re referring to.
A wide range of social sciences as well
as biological disciplines , and even within physics , now recognize that the notion of the ‘real’ as it pertains
to their research is not unproblematic and cannot be easily disentangled from subjectivity.

It took Merleau-Ponty and Derrida to rescue Husserl from this often used charge of Cartesianism. Fortunately , a growing number of writers in philosophy and psychology recognize this error. You might want to look at Zahavi’s reading of Husserl, or Varela ,Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe
or Shaun Gallagher, all of whom defend him against the accusation of Cartesianism.

“...even in the most marked transcendental idealism, that of Husserl, even where the origin of the world is described, after the phenomenological reduction, as originary consciousness in the form of the ego, even
in a phenomenology that determines the Being of beings as an object in general for a subject in general, even in this great philoso­phy of the transcendental subject, the interminable genetic (so­ called passive) analyses of the ego, of time and of the alter ego lead
back to a pre-egological and pre-subjectivist zone. There is, there­fore, at the heart of what passes for and presents itself as a transcen­dental idealism, a horizon of questioning that is no longer dictated by the egological form of subjectivity or intersubjectivity.”(Derrida, Points)

It is quite a wonderland of extraordinary thinking that follows along with this. Caputo takes this up in his Radical Hermeneutics, but his Tears and Prayers of Jacque Derrida reveals, I believe, where this stain of though ends up inevitably: apophatic theology. — Constance

My impression was that rather than taking Husserl anywhere , Caputo simply misread him. I have to question whether Caputo ever fully grasped the implications of Husserlian phenomenology. In wanting to assimilated it to a Levinasian reading of Derrida , I think he was also misreading Derrida.

Derrida: “First of all, in this early text on Levinas, I did not charge him with transcendentalism. On the contrary, I tried to question him, at least provisionally, from an ontological and transcendental point of view. My objections were made to him from a transcendental point of view. So in that respect I have nothing against transcendentalism. On the contrary, I was trying to say that a transcendental philosophy such as Husserl's could resist, could more than resist, Levinas's objections.” (Questioning God: edited by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon(2001). From the conference ‘‘Religion and Postmodernism 2: Questioning God'' on October 14–16, 1999 )”

I completely agreed with Martin Hagglund’s
devastating take down of Caputo’s reading of Derrida in
THE RADICAL EVIL OF DECONSTRUCTION: A REPLY TO JOHN CAPUTO, and Hagglund was able to able to do so using more of a marxist than a phenomenological
argument.

You stated - or, at least, strongly implied - that, for Wittgenstein, 'thinking' is a "classical reflective cognition" according to which "one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private."

This is exactly the type of view that Wittgenstein was attempting to undermine in his Philosophical Investigations, particularly with his remarks on family resemblances, the private language argument and rule-following, but also more generally throughout. — Luke

You misunderstood me. I agree with you. The view that thinking is reflective cognition is the view Wittgenstein is opposing. My point was that there are alternatives to reflective cognition, such as certain phenomenological philosophical perspectives like that Heidegger’s. took of thinking or Metleau-Ponty’s embodied intercorpoeality, that do not posit a hidden inner repository of meaning, and yet offer an origin of language that is more primordial than Wittgenstein’s interaubjective grounding of language.

But I'm unsure if it makes sense to postulate "pure consciousness" absent a subject of experience- his "ego" I take it. I don't quite follow that train of thought. — Manuel

There is always a subject of experience for Husserl, or more precisely a subjective ‘pole’ rather than a constitutes ‘person’. There is such a thing for Husserl as a pre-personal ego. If I have not yet constituted other persons , then it makes no sense to refer to my subjectivity as a person. There is not yet a human being, since that is an empirical concept that is constructed via interpersonal correlations, just the subjective pole of acts of intentionality .

I do quibble with the idea of "physical objects", if that is taken to mean a real distinction between the physical and the non-physical. I don't think that distinction holds up anymore. — Manuel

Here’s Husserl’s view on ‘physical’ objects:

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

I can read this in two ways. According to the first, humans perceive events by filling in based on prior expectations. Thus, another person’s viewpoint becomes an additional aspect to our structure of perception.
The second way I can read this is that the structure you’re referring to is interpersonal. The other and my self are poles of a normative social structure of understanding,

if I'm hallucinating and seeing a dragon, I can say I'm seeing a dragon. You may reply by saying that the dragon I'm seeing "isn't real". Then what am I supposed to say? That I see fake dragons? No. I'd say I'm seeing an image of a dragon, which is relevant to the occasion of hallucinations, but not relevant for "ordinary life". — Manuel

Husserl wrote:

The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non- sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.”

“Let us imagine that we effect natural apperceptions, but that our apperceptions are always invalid since they allow for no harmonious concatenations in which experienced unities might become constituted. In other words, let us imagine that, in the manner described above, the whole of Nature, in the first place, physical nature, is "annihilated."”.. (Ideas I).

Husserl here isn’t eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call ‘real objects’. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the wortld of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.

Husserl explains:

“In Ideas I , I chose the way which at that time seemed to me the most impressive. It proceeds egologically at first, as a self- reflection entirely within the realm of purely inner-psychological intuition, or, as we can also say, as a "phenomenological" reflection in the usual psychological sense. Eventually it leads so far that I, the one reflecting on himself, come to realize that, in the consistently exclusive direction of experience toward what is experienceable purely as inner, toward what is "accessible" to me phenomenologically, I have a proper essence that is self- enclosed and self-coherent. To this essence pertains all actual and possible experience by means of which the Objective world is there for me with all the experiential verifications in which it has for me ontological validity, one that is verified even if never scientifically examined. This essence also includes the special apperceptions through which I have for myself the status of a human being with Body and soul, a human being who lives amid others in the world of which he is conscious as surrounding world, who is engaged with them in this world, who is attracted or repulsed by it, and who deals with it in work or in theory, etc. Reflecting further on myself, I realize as well that my phenomenologically self-enclosed proper essence can be posited absolutely, as the Ego (and I am this Ego) that bestows ontological validity on the being of the world of which I speak at any time. It is for me and is what it is for me only insofar as it acquires sense and self-confirming validity from my own pure life and from that of the others who are disclosed to me in my own life.” (Ideas II)

Occasions of disagreement at this level can be interpreted as suggesting a broader relational structure in which increasing awareness, connection and collaboration with the variability in this rational relation might bring possibility of agreement. I — Possibility

Do you have in mind a kind of hermeneutic process of fusing of horizons?

You might have an interesting point to make, but your conspicuous misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy isn't helping. — Luke

You need to make your point yourself, instead of throwing a long quote at me and then concluding that I completely misunderstand Wittgenstein, without telling me how specifically you are interpreting my claims, and how the quote refutes them. I may indeed completely misunderstand Wittgenstein , but please make the argument yourself so I know what the hell you are talking about.
In the meantime , you might want to glance at this paper I wrote ( published in Theory and Paychology ) that discusses social constructionist positions influenced by Wittgenstein. That may clarify my argument.

https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social

Everyone on this forum ( at least if they have anything interesting to offer) attacks unceasingly. That’s what makes it fun.

I think they’re singing ‘Kumbaya’

if you construct your world view and your own one is all you have, how does communication work? How do you spot differences? — Dawnstorm

Part of the worldview you construct includes
your construction of the worldview of others. If their worldview is radically different than yours, there will be only superficial basis for communication. We live among multiple worlds , even within our own immediate family, offering us various levels of effective communicative understanding. We spot differences whoever out anticipations of the others’ behavior are invalidated by something g they do which puzzles us , which forces us eventually to re-construct within our worldview so as to anticipate more effectively. A worldview is nothing but an integrated system of anticipations.

Actually , those quotes came from an article by John Shotter (IN DIALOGUE: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AND RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM). But I’d recommend Gergen’s Realities and Relationships .

Are you familiar with 'Anti-Oedipus'? You can call this work arbitrary, but it is effective. All in all, our disagreement is primarily about choosing a more effective conceptual framework. So far, I still do not see why 'radical temporal approaches' are more effective. — Number2018

Let’s get specific. I’m going to take Kenneth Gergen’s
approach to psychotherapy as reasonable proxy for Foucault-Deleuze.
For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition [end p.43] seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture" (MSp.9). For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.

As Gergen sees it, instead of failures of understanding being crucial (and provoking adaptive reconstructions), "what we count as knowledge are temporary locations in dialogic space - samples of discourse that are accorded status as 'knowledgeable tellings on given occasions’.”

Radically temporalapproaches , by contrast , sees each person as only being able to relate to, assimilate , construe that in the social sphere which can be construed on some basis of similarity with respect to one’s history of understanding. So we find in Kelly, Gendlin, and Heidegger a description of the ongoing history of an individual’s experiencing in terms of an overall pragmatic self- continuity: Here’s Heidegger:

“In its familiar being-in-relevance, understanding holds itself before that disclosure as that within which its reference moves. Understanding can itself be referred in and by these relations. We shall call the relational character of these referential relations signifying. In its familiarity with these relations, Da-sein "signifies" to itself. It primordially gives itself to understand its being
and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world. The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.“

Can you imagine Deleuze assenting to this way of describing moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation?

Now let’s look at George Kelly’s view of sociality.

In order to understand the crucial distinction between using the social sphere as validational
evidence and having one’s behavior normatively shaped in joint action, we have to keep in mind
that the meaning of validation is closely tied to the replicative anticipatory aim of my construct
system. However directly I attempt to connect with a world of fellow persons, each with their own subjective systems, all I can ever experience of that otherness is what I anticipatively, replicatively construe as consonant with my own system. As participant in an intersubjective
community my construals frame and orient my reciprocal interactions with others in such a way that my own subjective thread of continuity runs through and organizes it. That is to say, hidden within the naive exteriority of my social encounters is a peculiar sort of coherence or implicate self-consistency.

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.”

If you take some time to think about this statement, you'll see that it's based in an equivocation of "forgotten". If taking something out of your active mind, and placing it somewhere that it can be retrieved later, is a case of forgetting it, then retrieving it is obviously not the same thing as learning something new. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that’s an information processing view of memory associated with first generation. cognitive psychology , which modeled human cognition after the computer.

Newer approaches have discarded the computer analogy in favor of organismic metaphors. Cognition belongs to an embodied self-organizing system. Processes like cognition and perception are not the processing of raw stimuli but forms of interaction and self-transformation. Memory, then, is never veridical because it is not the retrieval of data from a filing cabinet. Rather it is a reconstructive activity that changes rather than retrieves.

So language is representation, but it is also "poesis" (making). Why must these dual, or better multifarious and interdependent, roles of language be reduced to a narrow polemic, a black and white case of 'one or the other'? — Janus

I think the Wittgensteinian as well as phenomenological argument would be that if we believe that a role of language can be to represent extant meanings, then the basis of the creativity of language becomes a mere synthetic function, a putting together and reshuffling of pre-existing meanings, and nothing is ever really new

If on the other hand, to engage in language is never to refer to a pre-existing thought or feeling, but to instead enact a new sense of meaning, then creativity goes from a re-combining to a genuine birthing.

their disagreement isn't about the merit of riots of protests as political action, but about whether or not you believe Trump supporters honestly believe what they claim to believe, or whether that is just a convenient cover for whatever grievances they wanted to express anyways. — Echarmion

I’m not disagreeing with you, but the way I would
put it, it is a disagreement about the obstacles that lie in the way of forming a consensus of what is true.
A says the protesters could have done all due diligence to verify their beliefs and still ended up coming to the conclusions that they believed justified their actions.This is because what makes us believe what we do about important subjects like politics and religion is a complex network of pre-suppositions that forces us to interpret a whole range of data in ways consistent with those pre-suppositions.
B says they stopped well short of such due diligence, that they were in too much of a hurry to act on first impressions and untested assumptions. I think this is because B thinks that the biases and pre-suppositions that we all bring to the table can be fairly easily overcome with a little effort at testing them out.

I’m glad that you used Derrida as an example. I agree that he effectively questions Austin’s assumptions concerning intention of meaning. I think the tricky thing here is how to determine the meaning of ‘context’ for Derrida, that is , the way that it intervenes on an intention such that “ Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)”.

there is the gap between one’s conscious intention and the unfelt determinants of the enormously complexed indiscernible context. — Number2018

The unavoidable presence of various unconscious factors makes any context of iterative performative utterance analytically undeterminable — Number2018

So the way that I want to interpret the way Derrida uses terms like context and unconscious is that they are sequential changes in intention, rather than a ‘co-existing’ unconscious context. The unconsciousness, then, would not be within but beyond, the unavoidable exposure of intention to the alterity of new context with each iteration of the ‘same’ intention. Put differently, context would not be a spatially present surround but a temporally spacing ( and transforming) interation.

And I guess this then connects up with my original question about how a social determinant, as a contextual influence, shapes and changes my intent?
Because if we say , with Wittgenstein, that the contextual game performs a unitary meaning for the participants in it , the what of the other piece
of Derrida’ s formulation of iterability, which is that each newly shaped intention borrows from what it displaces?
If each participant in a language game is experiencing a ‘shared’ language context but is borrowing from their own individual history as they share in the ‘same’ context, it seems to me that the norms, rules, practices, grammars and conventions that belong to language use must be understood as abstractions from a multiplicity of differing individual experiences of it.

Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants. — Number2018

How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?

The OP is a response to the rising popularity of ways of thinking about how the individual relates to the environment, both bodily , physical and social. They reject the idea of language as a mere tool for representing already existing meanings in the head. They reject the idea that we know and empathize with other persons by consulting our own interior cognitive mechanics. I agree with them as far as they go. I agree that experiencing , perception , cognition and language is not a matter of consulting internal schemes and templates, but is instead a being-with, already exposed
to the world. Language is already present as
perception , and perception is interactive behavior with an outside that perceives by changing itself. This disclosive construing is already languaging, expression and sociality . It participates in social conventions but is not dissolved into them.

Hero’s an example of the type of position I’m critiquing.

“When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”

In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person’s thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them.

And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no
idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413)

I believe that my being affected by Paul, and he by me, emotively, linguistically and perceptually , does nothing
form a single system but is two systems revealing two
perspectives. There is my point of view and my understanding of his point of view from my vantage.
Then there is his point of view from his vantage and his understanding of my point of view from his vantage.
You can see how this would be applied to the sharing of linguistic conventions.

We have to ask what is the pragmatic use of the categories we construct. Prior to Darwin, species were kept separate in neat,
fixed categories. Those tidy boxes had to be unraveled
in favor of a much messier order of evolutionary change. But the larger effect of abandoning the categories in favor of continuous process was to reveal a more profound order of relation where there had been only arbitrary separation. Wittgenstein accomplished that with language, showing that they not just arbitrarily created entities, solipsistic categories unto themselves, but are formed through , and never depart from, relational contexts of pragmatic use. The Op’s quibble with Wittgenstein concerns his depiction of such contexts
as centered group structures.

Speech-acts, then, are socially negotiated, stereotypical communicative behaviors, highlighted and isolated from the experiential continuum of communication, which, when practiced according to a set of mutually identified conventions, allow for the successful mediation of the speaker’s intention across the experiential gap. When conventionalizing a speech-act, what the members of the community agree on is this: “from now on, when we behave this way—when, in these particular contexts, we use this intonation, this word order, this gesture—we mean to ask a question (or make a promise, or tell a story).” (The Instruction of the Imagination).
— StreetlightX

I think the op is questioning where the need for conventions is derived from? There is no need for conventions in common day to day language use, we could get along fine with just the "multi-layered, variable, vague, dynamic, analogue". However, there is for some reason an intent toward a higher level of understanding, and it is this intent which drives the need for conventions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually, what I would question here are the assumptions embedded in the claims concerning the effect social negotiation produces on the participants. I want to specifically focus on terms like mutually identified conventions , normative agreement , stereotypy.
How effectively do they lock-in shared meanings? If we use as a criterion a relaxed definition of shared use, then we can just ignore the variations from
person to person in their construal of their sense of the conventions involved , and more specifically, in their behavior, as long as the aims of the communicative
context are vague and general enough to make these differences unimportant, to make it seem for all intents and purposes as though there is one unified game being performed, a system that is prior to its participants.

But the most important communicative
contexts also happen to be the ones we encounter every day, involving conflicts of intention that cause us to experience stress, anger, depression and guilt.
As I write this, protesters are storming the U.S. Capital. This political conflict cannot be understood outside of a psychological and psychotherapeutic understanding of the terms of ‘shared’ conventions.

Is a a mutually identified convention a centered structure? Or does it subsist as the same differently from one person to the next?

Language does not exist in serene isolation from which we dip our toes in and out of willy nilly. It is always-already public otherwise it is not a language at all. To put it in overblown Heidggerese: all language with language-with. — StreetlightX

But Heidegger’s long exegesis on idle talk and das man seems to make your notion of public language into idle talk. His notion of “primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself” sounds a lot more like Gendlin ‘s implicit bodily intricacy ( which is why Gendlin embraced Heidegger) than public language.

“ The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. — Joshs

Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its ini­tial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.” — Joshs

Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner­ worldly beings — Joshs

“ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself — Joshs

Perhaps you might be more sympathetic to Gallagher’s critique of Heidegger than to Heidegger’s view of language.

“In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

But the most important function of language is to understand others’ behavior. as well as our own. The events that are of greatest impact on our lives occur every day when we must battle with guilt, anger, depression, anxiety and other social feelings that mark our puzzlement and confusion concerning the actions of others. These aren’t just breakdowns of behavior , they are breakdowns of communicative understanding.

the self cannot be isolated in some pristine self-enclosed splendour, — StreetlightX

So tell me how you would describe the self, this entity which cannot be isolated but which you still have a name for.

But before you do, I’m curious about one thing. You read copiously in philosophy. Are you familiar with Zahavi’s notion of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness? It seems to have become a focal point of
research for an increasing group of writers. Among those who have been won over by the idea that consciousness implies self-consciousness are Ratcliffe, Slaby, Gallagher, Thompson and Fuchs.
Do you bribe this idea is an example of
quote="StreetlightX;485196"]A reworked Cartesian solipsism wearing phenomenological dress.[/quote]?

To think of it, not of them, in other words, lest we become mired in a pointless, and indeed conceptually fatal, disunity. — Janus

Unity doesn’t have to depend on holding onto the idea of a single categorical fixity. Isn’t the unity that science looks for a unity within change ? That is , a way of understanding a continuously evolving flow of events such that this multiplicity appears orderable as referentially consistent?

Nothing in Derrida warrants some kind of 'exclusivity' to an individual. It's an utterly wrongheaded reading. — StreetlightX

Again, you’re beginning from a presupposition of self and social as distinguishable entities . By unraveling self, Derrida also unraveled the interpersonal social structure that depended on it.

And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing as following it.

Wittgenstein is making a distinction between thinking as classical reflective cognition and his notion of practice, which is comparable to recent notions of primary intersubjectivity, which conceives the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”
So a rule , as a practice, forms the meaning of the word.
By contrast , according to the traditional notion of reflective cognition , one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private.

But Wittgenstein did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’.

For Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin, thinking is not consulting an inner template. It is an act of transformation akin to what Wittgenstein is describing , but one which takes place not as following a rule forged between two or more people, but between ‘me’ and the world , which includes what used to be considered ‘introspection’ not as consulting an inner realm inside one, but as interaction with a world.

To advocate such a prodigiously multitudinous way of metaphysical thinking would be to advocate an egregiously unparsimonious ontology. — Janus

Welcome to the worlds of Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl.

Derrida writes:

“And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193)”

Nothing is Derrida's texts 'limits' iterability as function 'within' a person - whatever that could even mean. — StreetlightX

.. It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in orderto interrupt oneself for a moment. — Joshs

Who is this ‘one’ who puts the shopping list in ‘one’s’ pocket? Who is this ‘oneself’ who is interrupting ‘oneself’ by changing the very sense of the meaning that ‘one’ intends, even before other persons are involved?

I just added to my last post.

To the extent that the unity of the word— what makes it recognizable as a word, as the same word, the unity of a phonic com plex and a sense— cannot be merged with the multiplicity of the sensible events of its employment nor does it depend on them, the sameness o f the word is ideal. It is the ideal possibility of repetition and it loses nothing with the reduction of any, and therefore of every empirical event marked by its appearance." (Voice and Phenomenon). — StreetlightX

I interpret Derrida as saying here that the same (word) is the same differently WITHIN one person from moment to moment. This doesn’t take place accidentally
or specifically as the result of the interventions of
other persons.

In my article ‘What is a Number’ , I wrote :

Specifically, Derrida's groundbreaking reading of `Origin of Geometry' pursues the implications of Husserl's transformation of the Kantian thesis that an ideal object of any kind is an ideality in the extent to which it is identically repeatable again and again. As Derrida puts it,

“Absolute ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition."(Speech and Phenomena,p.52).

Derrida takes up Husserl's interest in this process of idealization, borrowing from Husserl a distinction between bound and free idealities (footnote 2). Derrida deconstructs the Husserlian usage of these terms, transforming them into species of iterability. Spoken and written language, and all other sorts of gestures and markings which intend meaning, exemplify bound idealities.
Even as it is designed to be immortal, repeatable as the same apart from any actual occurrences made at some point, the SENSE of a spoken or inscribed utterance, what it means or desires to say, is always tied to the contingencies of empirical circumstance. Derrida explains:

“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in orderto interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.(p53).

You could always try the same argument about a game with equally established rules, such as chess - that everyone interprets/understands it differently, that everyone plays it by their own rules, that there is no standard or template to transcend the interpretations, that there is no singular game that we call "chess". It would be equally false. — Luke

Or that two physicists in a room play it by their own rules, that there is no singular game called ‘physics’.

As John Shotter wrote:

“ So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in providing explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in the different directions their new inquiries would take, “in ‘frontier' thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).”

We don’t have to duplicate each other’s understanding to play chess or do science, we only have to approximate it, and much of our day to day communication together is at such a general level that the interpersonal
differences in interpretation will be completely irrelevant. They come into play when a deeper understanding of the other is required, such as takes place with religious, political or moral topics.
Then our belief in ‘established rules’ of language makes it impossible for us to believe that the other who voted
for that evil politician or supported that dangerous conspiracy theory or rejected basic public health advice interpreted the ‘same’ language in their own way. Instead we are forced to accuse the other of bad faith, lying, succumbing to brainwashing , coercion , ‘fake news’, immoral intent , greed.
Such accusations dominate media on both sides of the aisle mainly for this reason.

Understanding is exhibited (with all the public resonance 'exhibition' has), and not introspected. — StreetlightX

I do agree. The issue for me is that I reject the whole
concept of introspection when it comes
to what takes place when a person experiences the world (whether in what is conventionally called dreaming, imagination, sensation, social interaction, etc) moment to moment.
There is no psychic interior , no ‘intro’ to ‘spect’.
If you begin with that assumption, then you need other bodies , a public world, to get you out of your navel.
But the notion of an inner , self-affecting , self-reflexive self is one that I reject. There no such thing as a self that subsists in itself.
The self is a movement of transition, a tie between past and the world which changes it. This tie doesn’t survive past the moment of its instantiation in a moment of time.
The tie become a new tie , the self becomes a new self, every new moment. Reflection on one’s past is a new construction. The past is always a new past.
The ‘continuity’ of self that I refer to comes about because each change in self ( every moment) borrows from the past that it changes. So the ‘self’ continues to be the same differently. I look at others and empathize with them , which only means that I recognize that they too are a process of being the same differently.

But my going along with their behavior recognizes that they are other to me , that they are a variant of my changing movement of intention and motive
that isn’t ‘hidden’ from me, just other.

It is the same language inasmuch as it has the same total lexicon. — Janus

And someone has to interpret that lexicon. Each of us. Differently. What secures and justifies the use of the word ‘same’ rather than ‘similar’ here? Objectivity is an idealization resulting from interpersonal correlations. It’s a shared faith that turns ‘similar’ into ‘same’. But the same is the same differently from person to person.

One's understanding of a public language does not itself constitute a language. That is, you don't interpret a public language via the "language" of one's subjective understanding (because one's subjective understanding is not a language). — Luke

But isn’t this merely a truism? We begin by pre-supposing that there is such a thing as a single language that we each subjectively interpret. So the premise is :single language, multiple subjective interpretations of it.
But what if we don’t begin by assuming there is a single language, since the only way to verify its existence is through the multitude of subjective interpretations of it. There is no standard or template to transcend the interpretations. If there are three of us in a room, one is speaking English, one French and the other German, we obviously don’t say that the three speakers are
are offering three interpretations of one language , because in this case the language is synonymous with the speaker.