This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nick Land is not a relativist in the pomo sense of the term; he is not simply reformulating but missing the essential features of ideas by Deleuze , Derrida and others. If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point? I agree with you it is inevitable that any complex, difficult to understand new ideas will be misread in ways diametrically opposed to the intent of the author, but I sense that , given the fact that your own thinking differs from the ideas of figures like Kuhn, Derrida and Deleuze, you see unproductive elements in what you call pomo ‘relativism’ and therefore you dont think they’re being entirely misread by people like Nick Land.

↪Tom Storm There was the famous Sokol affair, where a postmodern journal published an article arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct.

Unbeknownst to the publishers it was satire, exposing the lack of scientific rigor of the postmodernist.

Not sure they've fully recovered from that — Hanover

Pomo was never in high regard among the general population , so there was nothing to recover from. Those who have a rigorous , scholarly understanding of the best works in this area of philosophy know that Sokal never bothered to do his homework, having failed to show an adequate comprehension of the arguments involved.

↪Joshs I respect many of your views, but:

But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. [...] They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.
— Joshs

How is that not blatantly incongruous (this in non-dialetheistic systems, if it needs to be said)? — javra

I didn’t mean that I believe , or postmodernists believe, that
the far right ignores or distorts facts. I meant that those more moderate than the far right who share with the right a rejection of pomo relativism believe that the right is ignoring or distorting facts. In other words, both the non-pomo left and the far right believe in the non-relativist objectivity of scientific truth. They just disagree on what constitutes the proper scientific method for attaining objective truth. Postmodernists, on the other hand , disagree with both of these groups on the coherence of their various ideas of objective truth.

↪Joshs
As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.
— Joshs

Yeah, what would mathematicians know about maths — Banno

What would philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz or Avicenna know about maths? Don’t be fooled by the fact that recent philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl didn’t contribute innovations that would be considered mathematical within a conventional criterion of maths. Their work was intimately engaged with and reflected a profound understanding of the deepest foundations of mathematics and logic, every bit as much as predecessors like Leibnitz.

The article I shared was about as sympathetic as you might expect, and more than I expected. It takes an example from the literature,
Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct
— White 2009,
...and points out that
First of all, cultural relativism is out of context in this setting. When postmodernists claim that a mathematical truth is never absolute, they mean it is to be interpreted relative to a background. Certainly 2 x 5 = 1 is true in mod (3) arithmetic. No sane mathematician or educator would go around redefining addition or any other mathematical construct because his or her “personal situation” requires it to be correct. — Banno

This article is as ignorant of and unengaged with the actual arguments of key pomo figures like Deleuze and Derrida as is Sokal’s. None of the philosophers I follow claim that 2+2 can equal anything other than 4. They recognize that it is precisely the nature of numeric calculation that it abstracts away all meaningful contexts associated with what is counted, leaving only the repetition of ‘same thing, different time’. Derrida writes:

“I can manipulate symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification…Numbers, as numbers, have no meaning; they can squarely be said to have no meaning, not even plural meaning. …Numbers have no present or signified content. And, afortiori, no absolute referent. This is why they don't show anything, don't tell anything, don't represent anything, aren't trying to say anything. Or more precisely, the moment of present meaning, of “content,” is only a surface effect.”

The contentlessness of numeration leads to the fascinating fact that its components originate at different times and in different parts of the world as a human construction designed for certain purposes . And yet, even though these constructions emerged as contingent historical skills, their empty core of the identical ‘again and again’ allows them to be universally understood.

But the later Wittgenstein complicates matters here. Maths may have at its core empty repetition of the same, but its evolution plugs this into operations, rules and procedures that don’t guarantee in advance the persisting identity of their sense. As Lee Braver interprets him,

Wittgenstein’s early conception of meaning and his commitment to Logi­cal Stoicism drove him to rid the arena of truth and logic of all human interference, which required that the states-of-affairs asserted or denied by a proposition be completely delineated, as we saw with the questions con­cerning whether the book was still on the table under all possible circum­stances. He gave up this dream when he recognized our ineliminable role in
applying the rules. No matter how assiduously we strive to passively obey a rule, we still need to make the phronetic judgment call as to whether this state-of-affairs counts as an instance of the rule: “if calculating looks to us like the action of a machine, it is the human being doing the calculation that is the machine.”

We feel that all possibilities are settled in advance because we rarely step outside the normal circumstances where our footing is so sure we imag­ine it to be perfect. Wittgenstein spends considerable time constructing scenarios that throw our intuitions out of whack and leave us uncertain about what to say. This doesn’t expose a disturbing, problematic gap in our everyday usage, but rather shows that we get along fine without the propo­sitional omniscience he had previously found necessary. Without meaning-objects’ applications coiled up, as it were, within words or the mind like a retractable measuring tape, Wittgenstein now sees each application as metaphysically unguaranteed by past instances.

“We must not suppose that with the rule we have given the infinite extension of its application. Every new step in a calculation is a fresh step. . . . It is not in the nature of 23 and 18 to give 414 when multiplied, nor even in the nature of the rules. We do it that way, that is all.”

No matter how clearly the world seems to take us by the hand and lead us, it is always up to us to recognize its authority and interpret its commands; neither past usage nor reality forces us to go on in one particular way. We will never get to the other side of the ellipsis of “and so on . . .”—not because of our all-too­-human limitations, but because there is no other side; that’s the point of an ellipsis.

Since the notion of infinite extensions occurs paradigmatically in math­ematics, Wittgenstein spends a great deal of time on this subject, origi­nally planning part II of the Philosophical Investigations to focus on it. Just
as linguistic meaning occurs in our use of it, so mathematics only exists in our calculations, which means that
“there is nothing there for a higher intelligence to know—except what future generations will do. We know as much as God does in mathematics.”

Mathematics and grammar are inventions, not discoveries. As Simon Glendinning writes, each new application of a rule “is ungrounded or structurally abyssal. That is, it is logically prior to a determined rationality (or irrationality).”Without timeless mathematical truths, the notion that humanity has always followed a rule incorrectly is simply incoherent: how we follow it is the right way. “The point is that we all make the SAME use of it. To know its meaning is to use it in the same way as other people do. ‘In the right way’ means nothing.”This seems to entail the worrying possibil­ity that if everyone began, say, adding differently—getting “6” from “2 + 3,” for example—then that “wrong” practice would become “right”, but this concern hasn’t followed the argument all the way out.

If we see this “new” way as maintaining the same rule of addition we have always used, then it isn’t new at all. If no one (except a few cranks) judges a change to have occurred then we have no ground to say that a change
has occurred. It isn’t so much that our notion of green may turn out to be grue as that, if we all “change” from green to grue without noticing it then no change has taken place—and scare quotes proliferate. If a tree changes color in the forest and no one realizes it, then who exactly is claiming that it changed? We imagine God sadly shaking his head at our chromatic apos­tasy, but the only way for this picture have an effect would be for Him to make His displeasure known—which would mean, in turn, that someone did notice. Alluding to the most famous modern discussion of skepticism, Wittgenstein asks:

“is no demon deceiving us at present? Well, if he is, it doesn’t matter. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

A deception, carried out perfectly, becomes truth.

Maybe there is a post-modern argument to be made that these social or historical factors shouldn't be ignored as much as they are (that said, historical analysis of mathematical concepts seems quite common in mathematics books I've read). But we aren't fixing anything with its own axioms, we are studying what happens, given we provisionally accept some axioms. This to me seems like a distinct difference. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not just a matter of avoiding fixing our axioms.
Axiomization itself, and the propositional logic it is grounded in, are deconstructed by writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze.

Then, finally, a huge swath of the public did start taking their critiques seriously, but it tended to largely be the far-right of the political spectrum who did this. "Who funds this research? Who stands to gain financially? What are the power relations in the field? What are the socio-historical factors influencing theory?"

These finally became areas of core focus, but ironically the goal of the critiques became things like denying climate change and denying that vaccines were beneficial. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The only thing the far right took seriously from pomo critiques of science was the fact that they were questioning science. They never had the slightest understanding of exactly what pomo was questioning about science, and so didn’t realize that pomo was not so much interested in rejecting the value or legitimacy of established scientific assertions, but instead wanted to bring to light its unexamined presuppositions so that it could be dethroned from its authoritarian pedestal. The far right, by contrast , maintains science on a pedestal of extreme authority, and specifically rejects scientific conclusions when they are derived using methods that are too ‘relativistic’ for the right, such as climate science.

Many have gotten the idea that the far right in the U.S. believes truth is something made up, and they blame pomo for this. But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. I've heard it said the right is living in a post-truth world. My response is that one could not fond a find a group of people more wedded to a doctrinaire and almost fundamentalist concept of truth.Talk about facts of the matter. The Trumpian right fetishizes and reifies facts with a religious zeal. Unfortunately they reduce scientific facts to simple causal relations. They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.

It is this Ayn Randian mentality toward rationality that makes them unable to appreciate ambiguities and complexities of the sort that crop up in climate change and covid science. The continual on-the -fly adjustments in medical recommendations in response to new study results over the course of the pandemic do not fit the simplistic image many Trump conservatives have of how science was supposed to operate. Their thinking about science has on the whole not progressed beyond a Baconian hypothetico-inductive methodology. As a result, they lost faith faith in the veracity of what they were being told.

How does one organize previous interactions? Surely, it's only an image, memory or concept of them that can be organized - presumably for reference. Organize, how? Form a mental model? Classify as to type? How does this process differ from describing the interactions themselves and deducing natural laws? — Vera Mont

A cognitive organization , as a living system, exists by functioning , and it functions by continually making changes in itself, prior to volition. This self-changing process leads to the disintegration of the cognitive system (or organism) if it doesn’t manage to maintain a relative normative consistency throughout these changes. Notice I am not making a distinction between change from within and change from without. The cognitive organization has no pure interior; it is radically outside of itself , always already in the midst of its world. What we call knowledge of the world is the system’s successful accommodation to the unique aspects of new experience such that it can assimilate such experience within its normative schematics. This is what happens when a theory successfully predicts observed phenomena. Our world always appears ‘lawful’ to the extent that perceived events can be placed within a network of referential relations.

. In my dictionary, a "presupposition" is
a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action
i.e. that which has not yet been observed and analyzed — Vera Mont

There must always be pre-existing cognitive structure to organize what is perceived. With each actual perception, such structure is both invoked and altered by what is perceived. Accommodation from scheme to world accompanies each assimilation from world to scheme. But because this modifying of of scheme by world need to allow for a relative ongoing stability of meaning, the presuppositions we bring to every encounter with things remain fairly consistent for long period of time. Kuhn described this relative ongoing consistency of presuppositions in terms of normal science , and the significant alteration of presuppositions in terms of revolutionary science, or paradigm shifts.

↪Tom Storm I suspect that postmodernists talking about mathematics woudl be a dime a dozen. Google supports this.

But a mathematician talking about post modernism... that might be interesting. — Banno

As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.

This leads me to think that social constructivism/constructionism is not necessarily postmodern in the philosophical sense, even if these distinct approaches are lumped together in the popular imagination.

EDIT: And note that the theory discussed in that paper is based on the social construction theory of John Searle, not usually regarded as a postmodernist. — Jamal

One could examine social constructionisms along a realist-relativist dimension, with Searle being a realist and writers like Ken Gergen identifying themselves as postmodernist relativists.

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?
— Joshs

You can't pre-suppose the world. Maybe a creator god can, but humans are in and of the world. They can't suppose anything that they don't already know something about — Vera Mont

I wasn’t suggesting we pulled these presuppositions out of our butts. Presuppositions are the products of human-world interactions. They are guides to future interactions based on ways of organizing previous interactions, and subject to change as the way we modify our environment by interacting with it feeds back into these presuppositions.

The "laws of nature" are just descriptions of how things behave.

Perhaps you meant to ask why things behave the way they do, or why their behaviour is consistent? — Michael

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?

I would reflect on the Bodily feeling presently "occurring" or released (?) during what one might interpret as anger or as hatred. Presumably, both would be felt as, for lack of a better word, "unpleasant," subject to possible varying degrees or subtle undectable differences (if any. maybe degree of unpleasantness is the only difference) — ENOAH

The distinction between somatic feeling and cognition harks back to a long-standing Western tradition. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I dont agree with this split between feeling and thinking. Pleasantness and unpleasantness are not just meaningless bodily sensations that happen to get tied to different experiences via conditioning. They are better understood in terms of enhancement to or interruptions of goal-directed thought. We are sense-making creatures who attempt to anticipate and assimilate strange new events via familiar schemes of meaning. We strive to make the world meaningfully recognizable and relevant to our purposeful activities, and pleasantness-unpleasantness are meanings that express our relative success or failure in making sense of things. Anxiety, guilt, fear and anger result from our finding ourselves in situations that threaten to plunge us into the chaos and confusion of incomprehension.

. The deflationary theories of truth that came out of undecidablity, incompleteness, and undefinablity seem in the same wheelhouse (more an inspiration for POMO, or ammunition for it, than possible targets) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily. After all, Gödel, the originator of the incompleteness theorems, was guided by his self-declared mathematical Platonism, the belief that humanly-created formal systems are ‘undecidable' only in being incomplete approximations of absolute mathematical truths. Husserl’s phenomenology questions the philosophical naivety on which Godel's theory of the object rests.

↪Joshs Does that to you then imply that something like 1 + 1 = 2 is constructed within specific culture contexts, such that the quantity "1" is arbitrary rather than ubiquitously universal? — javra

I’m not a mathematician either, but I know that there are multiple interpretations of the status and role of the number one (and zero) , including whether it is a basis for all other numbers or whether it is derived. Some argue that the concept of 2 is more fundamental than 1. Theses disputes suggest in a subtle way the cultural basis of concepts of number.

They may question whether mathematical concepts truly represent universal truths or if they are constructed within specific cultural contexts.
— Tom Storm

struck me as inherently plausible as a PM position, but inherently implausible as a serious position per se. Im not sure how it could be argued that natural numbers, for instance, are culture-bound as a concept. — AmadeusD

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl analyzed the historical origin of numeration in terms of the construction of the concept of the unit. Number doesn’t just appear to humans ready-made as a product of nature. It requires a process of abstraction. First one has to recognize a multiplicity, and then ignore everything about the elements that belong to the collectivity except its role as an empty unit. Enumeration, as an empty ' how much', abstracts away all considerations that pertain to the nature of the substrate of the counting. Enumeration represents what Husserl calls a free ideality, the manipulation of symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification.
So rather than a perception of things in the world, counting requires turning away from the meaningful content of things in the world. The world is not made of numbers, the way we construct our perceptual interaction with the world produces the concept of number, and this construction emerged out of cultural needs and purposes , such as the desire to keep track objects of value.

↪Joshs
So what would Thompson consider to be the difference between his valid thematic and Augustine’s valid approach? It can’t simply be that they contradict each other, since everything exists in a state of contradiction with respect to everything else.

He might say that Augustine’s self-contradicting thematic approach unfolds more slowly and ploddingly than his own, and he prefers approaches that transgress into new territory more aggressively since they bring him pleasure and a richer sense of meaning. We could say Thompson swaps out the ethical notions of refutation , truth and falsity for fast vs slow speeds of transformation.

Again, he might say it, but he'd have no justification for it. For it would be equally valid to say that it is Augustine's approach that unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space. But presumably, in choosing to advance his interpretation, and in choosing to label it "pragmatism," Thompson does not think his speculations are simply equally pragmatic and unpragmatic, worthwhile and not worthwhile, when compared to all other possibilities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t think he wants to justify it, not as a trans-historical absolute. All preferences , for the large over the small, the faster over the slower, the more pragmatic over the less pragmatic, the more worthwhile over the less worthwhile, produce differentiations made intelligible with reference to a specified content , a sense of meaning. Thompson isn’t assuming that content is absolute. On the contrary, such preferences only maintain their stable sense within a given cultural context. So within Augustine’s cultural context it would make sense to say that his approach unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space.

This what Thompson means when he says

We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

He doesn’t mean that we navigate among these domains from some neutral vantage beyond them all, but by being shaped and changed in the interactions within and among them.

Anger is a manifestation of our own failure to find a more productive expression, one which solves the problem. The problem is, the proximate cause is not always the only - or the real - problem — Pantagruel

I think I agree, but I would add that it is not the expression of anger which is the biggest problem today in our polarized world, but the failure to see the world from the perspective of others such that what appears as malevant intent can be seen instead as the other’s best effort to live ethically based on their vantage. Anger is blame, and blame impugns intent, delegitimizing the other’s motives. Whether we express our anger or not , as long as we cling to blame, we delegitimize the other, as seen in today’s political discourse.

The point is, you can't reduce anger to a logically valid behaviouristic framework. Human interactions are "overdetermined" to use psychiatric jargon — Pantagruel

Yes, but overdetermined by what? The litany of aggravating events that pile up over the course of the day are not stored in some internal ‘anger pot’ as the accumulation of a random collection of negative energy, they are interpreted in terms of how they impact our ability to make sense of our world , how we are valued by others and how we value ourselves. Emotions are not expressions of assessment thought in terms of formal logic or rationality , but of our relative success or failure at maintaining a normative equilibrium, an ability to keep our world recognizable, coherent and anticipatable. This we share with all animals.

Our emotional health depends on our sense of control and agency, and everything that happens to us in the course of a day puts that equanimity to the test. Whereas a single disappointing or angering incident may be not threaten our confidence or self-esteem, a multitude of such events , especially by people we consider friends, may plunge us into self-doubt and magnify our anger.

↪Joshs a
Absence of emotion is an interesting area. In particular, the philosophy and spectrum of autism, raises this question. However, if does come down to what the absence of emotion signifies. Is it about being overwhelmed by the conflicts of the dichotomy of emotion. — Jack Cummins

Autists don’t lack emotion. No one on the planet lacks emotion. Autistics have difficulty in interpreting the meaning of emotion cues in others. Affect is never absent in our lives. What we call absence of feeling is a neutral or blase mood , but this is far from an absence of feeling. All experience is meaningful, and all meaning is valuative. All valuation is affective.

One can become angry, yet not allow anger to dictate or motivate one's responses. Becoming angry does not entail displaying anger. I guess anger could be viewed as a "motivational challenge". — Pantagruel

So the way I would construe anger is as a rapid , multi-step construal of a situation that begins with loss and disappoint, and is immediately followed by assessment of blame. The instigator of my disappointment deliberately did what they did , knowing i would be hurt by it. Alongside this blamefulness assessment is the mobilization for action to get them to change their ways. Given that anger is this complex of assessments , what would it mean to not allow anger to dictate or motivate one’s responses? If anger is preventing us from thinking or doing something else, isnt it because the way we are assessing the situation is preventing us from responding differently ?
1)that it is disappointing and violating
2) that the person responsible for our letdown did what they did deliberately.
3) that we may be able to coax, shame or force them to change their attitude or behavior.

Yes, we could choose not to ‘display’ anger , but that would involve modifying assessment 3, that we have a chance of correcting the other person. It would be a matter of employing the most effective strategy of provoking improvement in the other’s attitude. We could , for instance, decide that physical assault , while possibly effective, may land us in more trouble than it’s worth. But only if we changed assessment 2, that the other was completely culpable, would we be motivated not to display anger at all.

Anger can be legitimate and yetq still unhelpful. It can be a source of strength, courage, and motivation, but only if effectively sublimated. — Pantagruel

But this description seems to separate anger from the perceived meaning of a situation. In your paragraph above, what would happen if we removed the word anger and attributed legitimacy, strength , courage and motivation to the nature of the situation as it is construed , rather than to some separate device we call anger adding these qualities as some special spice? It is the world that is angering, not our physiology.

Would the absence of emotion and anger lead to indifference, and a consequent philosophy of ideas of indifference? — Jack Cummins

The absence of emotion would lead to the absence of experience. Emotion is not some coloration added to thinking, it is the ground of thinking. Every perceived distinction and differentiation is intrinsically affective in nature.

Discussions on the philosophy forum often deteriorate into angry exchanges. In those cases, anger is counter-productive to philosophy — Pantagruel

Bitch

where human emotions come from is also an important question. Emotions, and the instinctual aspects of human life may go back to the instinctual aspects of physiology. This is about lower and higher needs, as suggested by Maslow's in his hierarchy of needs. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I think the physiological and evolutionary aspects of anger (and emotions in general) won’t tell us the central things we need to understand about anger. Even if we could entirely remove what people think of as the ‘instinctive’ or reflexive physiological responses associated with anger, the essential features of anger would remain , which, as I mentioned above, have to do with a cognitive assessment of blame and culpability. The cool , rational judgement of culpability is just as much a product of anger as is uncontrolled flailing about in rage. To understand the origin of anger is to understand the basis of goal-directed cognition.

↪Joshs I'm of the opinion it's determinate of the person venting, regarding a strong or weak will. One can be angry at things that can't apologize. — Vaskane

I think , in a sense, when we are angry at things that can’t apologize, we are anthropomorphizing them. We angrily kick the chair that got in our way to punish it, as if it had a personality. We dont really believe this in a later moment of lucidity, where we realize the one our anger was directed at, the one we are trying to punish, isnt really the chair, but our spouse or our boss, orthe gods who put that chair in our way, or maybe even ourselves for being such a spaz. But as long as there is anger, there is a desire to teach a sentient being a lesson.

↪Joshs If one does not feel the effects of their power from venting, perhaps. Which, one's power tends to be easily felt, in the midst of an apology — Vaskane

I would think venting is only a first step toward dissipating angry thinking. It moves one from a state of active to passive anger without resolving the cause of the anger, so the anger will continue on as seething resentment. Getting the other’s contrition, or forgiving them, takes one further. But even these don’t tell us why the other deviated from our expectations of them. Only discovering that the other’s actions were not deliberately meant, or were justified in our eyes, can our anger be completely eliminated.

Hatred leads to formulated values? Anger is something the rises up, and can be overcome upon venting. — Vaskane

It is only reliably overcome by attaining the other’s sincere apology. Venting achieves only temporary relief.

In some ways, anger may be seen as something to be overcome emotionally, or as an idea,or frequency. How does it stand in connection with philosophical ideas and ideals of love and hatred? — Jack Cummins

I believe the affective spectrum of anger includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Anger is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

So what do all of these have in common? Anger is a complex multi-step process of assessment. It always begins with a disappointment of expectations , the perception that another has violated or fallen short of our standard of conduct. But this recognition is not enough to produce anger. Anger implies blame, and in blame we believe the other knew better than to do what they did to us in breaking a bond of trust . In other words, in anger we perceive that the other succumbed to some arbitrary , capricious impulse or temptation to deviate from how they knew they should have behaved with us. Thus, built into our angry assessment is the hope that we can sway the wayward other back into the fold, to return them back to where we believe they should have been, to ‘give them a taste of their own medicine’, ‘teach them a lesson’ to coax them to ‘mend their ways’, to repair a lost trust or intimacy. This hope is what gives anger its active quality. But the impulse of anger is not fundamentally aimed at destroying the wayward other , but toward achieving the other’s remorse, apology, repentance.

One could say it, but whether or not they would nonetheless be contradicting Augustine's standpoint is another matter. If I claim that "truth is absolute," and you in turn claim that "yes, truth can be absolute, but only ever relatively," this seems more like negating my claim than "subsuming" it. Further, the claim that "truth can be absolute, but it is only ever absolute in relative terms, based on presuppositions that are taken-for-granted, and people can always accept multiple equally valid, but different presuppositions," itself appears to be an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth." So aside from contradicting the position it claims to still affirm, it also refutes itself — Count Timothy von Icarus

Earlier, I commented that an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth” isn’t really how I see what I do when I find constant change in my experience moment to moment. An absolute statement is absolute only because the person who makes it has already decided that it will always be the case and doesnt have to be re-affirmed. When one believes a meaning is absolute , they don’t believe it has to be checked against the contextual changes that time brings. When I declare that the world continually reinvents itself moment to moment, this ‘truth’ is only applicable this moment. You’ll have ask me again next moment , and the moment after that , if I still find this to be the case. I am letting time, history and actual events dictate for me whether this ‘truth’ continues to be valid, and in what form, rather then deciding in advance what is absolutely the case.

Since l don’t believe there is any aspect of the world that sits still, that persists as itself, that isn't changed by a change in any other aspect of the world, truth and refutation mean something different for me that for you. Contradiction, in the sense of fundamental difference that precedes any notion of identity or the same, is thus the basic ‘fact’ of being. Can one understand something that contradicts itself every moment , yet continues to be the ‘same’ differently , through and as a result of this endless self-contradiction, as a style, pattern, theme? If we say that something is validated in the sense that it belongs to such a continually self-contradicting, temporally unfolding theme, pattern or style, then what do people mean when they say that something is refuted or is self-refuting?

Thompson would look at his approach as continually self-contradicting, but in a way that maintains a relative ongoing thematic unity. He would also consider Augustine’s model of truth as a continually self-contradicting thematic that maintains its own validity.
Augustine’s assertions already deconstruct themselves internally. When he depicts truth as presence, it is presence relative to a context of use and relevance, and this context of relevance re-affirms itself by altering itself. It may sound like I’m adding things that are foreign to and contradict Augustine’s assertions, but all I’m
doing is drawing out explicitly what is already implicit in his own thinking.

So what would Thompson consider to be the difference between his valid thematic and Augustine’s valid approach? It can’t simply be that they contradict each other, since everything exists in a state of contradiction with respect to everything else. He might say that Augustine’s self-contradicting thematic approach unfolds more slowly and ploddingly than his own, and he prefers approaches that transgress into new territory more aggressively since they bring him pleasure and a richer sense of meaning. We could say Thompson swaps out the ethical notions of refutation , truth and falsity for fast vs slow speeds of transformation.

if we are to embrace a position like Thompson's we must have some way of determining between it and Saint Augustine's formulation that "truth is equivalent with being; what is true is, and what is false is not." To say that Thompson is right is to say that Augustine is wrong. To say that they are both right, is still to say that Augustine is wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One could say that Thompson’s position subsumes and enriches Augustine’s without invalidating it. Each offers a valid, workable guide to navigating the world by anticipating events. To say that Thompson’s approach enriches Augustine’s is to say that Thompson understands from his vantage , and can effectively summarize and live within, Augustine's approach. But he can also place the dimensions of Augustine’s model within a more intricate structure of understanding that accomplishes what Augustine’s does, but exceeds it in of anticipatory power.

All validation cannot depend on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn necessarily be based on unquestionable presuppositions we take for granted. If this were the case, then all judgements re validation/truth/accuracy etc. would be equally valid, merely a matter of which presuppositions we have embraced — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are equally valid, but not at the same time and in the same context. We only inhabit one social milieu at a time, and each dictates its own unique ways of making our way around. We may take these ways of sense making for granted. That is , their presuppositions may be hidden from us, but they are nevertheless always being put into question in subtle ways in the way our language continually shifts the sense of its meanings within a given culture. This is what Wittgenstein’s language games point to. Every time we use a word, its conceptual meaning subtly shifts its sense in response to the novelty of the context of interaction. Word use is thus a kind of questioning concerning what is at stake and what is at issue whenever we use a word concept. Wittgenstein said that these subtle shifts in sense of words via their use can be seen to share a family resemblance. But this resemblance is not a general category of meaning supervening on the particular senses. There is no common element among all the senses.

We take for granted that words just mean what they mean, that they are merely tools that hook onto a reality independent of the words. But this taking for granted doesn’t prevent actual word use from continually shifting. We simply don’t notice this in the way we tend to talk about the relation between concepts and reality. As we alter our milieu with our arts , sciences and technologies, the way these changes feed back to us requires us to alter our metaphysical assumptions and along with it the basis of our scientific truths. Again, we may take for granted that the truths about the world we describe with our word concepts remains constant as we adjust those concepts, because we simply don’t notice the subtle way that our paradigm shifts alter the very foundations of those truths.

This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
— Joshs

Can you elaborate on this evaluation? Why could a paradigm shift not be both? — Pantagruel

Actually, Kuhn would say yes. Paradigms shifts are revolutionary in the sense that the content of new schemes and standards of measurement and validation are not logically commensurate with those they replace. But they are evolutionary in that new paradigms solve more puzzles than older ones.

↪Gnomon I'm closer to saying that there is no metaphysical speculation; it is rather metaphysical imagination. We speculate only about that which might later be confirmed or disconfirmed. — Janus

A metaphysical position is closely related to a scientific paradigm. To empirically confirm a paradigm is just to tighten up the definitions and boundaries that were formed prior to confirmation . Such validating procedures allow us to identity what it is we are overthrowing when we eventually dump that paradigm in favor of another. But the movement from one paradigm to another is not driven by confirmation. It is driven by a wholesale qualitative reconceptualization of premises, the fabricating of a new world. This does not have to do with what is ‘true’ but with how the world can be organized to make sense in a qualitatively different way. Truth is then a secondary procedure within the newly created frame.

Much of metaphysics consists in playing dialectically with language—what if such and such (such and such that is the dialectical opposite of what we actually encounter) is really the case.

For example, we appear to be mortal...but...what if we are really immortal? We appear to be finite intelligences...but... what if there is an infinite intelligence...and further what if that is our real nature? We appear to encounter only the physical...but...what if what appears physical is really mental? And so on. — Janus

You seem to be attempting to shove all metaphysics into the particular slot of a dialectical metaphysics. The change from one metaphysical scheme to another is not a matter of dialectical opposition. For instance, it is not the opposition between mortal and immortal , finite and infinite, the physical and the mental, since moving from one pole to the other of this binary is merely a matter of slot rattling within an already given frame of meaning. To move from one metaphysical worldview to another is arriving at a different world, a new frame. Rather than simply choosing one term over the other, both what it means to be mortal and what it means to be immortal take on an entirely new sense within a new metaphysics. This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

↪Joshs

Perhaps my stance appears to be an unquestioning taking for granted because it appears so alien to your way of thinking. But I continually question everything about my philosophy.

It doesn't seem unquestioning at all. I was referring back to your statement that: "only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive."

I am having trouble understanding how validation, proof, evidence, demonstration, etc. can rest only on what is taken-for-granted. If this was true, I don't get how radical relativism and skepticism wouldn't follow. Epistemology can be circular and falliblist, but it cannot be arbitrary without epistemic pessimism seeming to take hold. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ah, now I understand. Well, let’s compare Popper’s falsificationism with Kuhn’s Paradigm shifts. The former is a favorite among scientists because his approach seems to explain how empirical results can be both self-reflexively questionable and yet allow for progress in the ascertainment of truth. It is circular and falliblist, and it would appear to avoid arbitrariness and skepticism by assuming that what allows us to identify any theory as having been falsified is a method of verification that transcends the contingency of the theory itself.

But Kuhn argues that falsificationism’s assumption that the methods of verification are independent of the content of the theory amounts to a taken-for-granted , unquestioned normative presupposition. Kuhn’s alternative does not amount to arbitrariness , but neither does it treat scientific understanding as epistemological belief in what is the case. Our attempt to make our way around a constantly changing world is not fundamentally a matter of belief, but of engaged coping. Engaged coping has nothing to do with conceptual representation. It is more like intuiting the next move in a dance as it contextually unfolds. As Even Thompson writes:

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

One might find metaphysics to be a confusing mess and accept no metaphysical theory, and yet still find statements about truth and falsehood intelligible and use them effectively in their daily lives — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a difference between being able to articulate one’s metaphysical presuppositions and the very existence of those presuppositions. Metaphysics is not simply a game academic philosophers play, not a theory to be falsified. It is a precondition for any kind of experience of the world. It is precisely what makes statements of truth and falsity intelligible. We no more falsify a metaphysics than an organism falsifies its environmental niche.

Right, and this is validation of what? Validation that something is or is not the case. Or in more fallibilist terms, that something appears or does not appear to be the case. But what is broadly meant by "appears true or false" is precisely that something appears to be the case. This difference just seems like semantics — Count Timothy von Icarus

When a new event validates my anticipation, what this means is that I construe it along dimensions of similarity and difference with respect to that anticipation, and it appears more similar than different to the expected result. It can, however, never duplicate what is anticipated, and the remembered expectation never duplicates its sense from moment to moment. It seems to me that declaring an event to be “the case” implies comparing two cases, what one holds in memory and the new event, and finding them to be the same with respect to some criterion.

So validation is referential consistency on a relevant
(anticipated) dimension, where neither the anticipated, remembered meaning and the actual event duplicates their sense from moment to moment , whereas being the case is a match, replication or identity between comparators. When we believe we can determine something to be the case, we ignore the fact that the sense of meaning of the subject and predicate subtly transform themselves at every stage in the comparison. The naive understanding of predicative truth depends on not delving into the basis of the idealizations ( such as the persisting self-identity of a sense of meaning) that such logical constructions are built on.

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But is such "making sense" necessarily based on unquestionable presuppositions that must be taken for granted? Fallibilism, allowing for uncertainty, is not self-refuting, but the statement that all claims are ultimately arbitrary appears to be. I couldn't really tell which you were advancing here. Is "all [you] can say is that [your] way of construing matters has continued to be relatively consistent," because the only thing that can be known is the contents of your own past experiences (in which case, why even trust your own memory?) Or is this simply a claim about how we can always be surprised by the future — Count Timothy von Icarus

I must stress that the way that experience transforms itself
moment to moment is never arbitrary , but motivated. It produces neither arbitrariness nor identical self-persistence. Can I trust my memory? I don’t trust it to be an archive of veridical, unchanging facts. I trust it to be, because I continually experience it as being, a reconstruction of a past shaped by my present interests and goals. It is a continually morphing guide to the future. To say that experience is never arbitrary is to argue that we are always surprised in some fashion by the future even when it appears most predictable and familiar to us, and by the same token, even the most unusual and unprecedented series of events is recognizable at some level. The moment the world ceases to appear to us as at least minimally interpretable and meaningful is the moment experience vanishes completely. This is why most of the time our experience of our world has the character of a relative ongoing consistency

Predicative logic and truth statements produce arbitrariness in the form of contradictions, because they fail to understand the grounding of their terms in a background mesh of contextual relevance that gives sense even to the irrational. Causal empirical models produce arbitrariness and skepticism for the same reason.

Stating that I find myself born anew ( thrown into) a world that is at the same time built from my presuppositions and a subtle displacement of those presuppositions, is this itself an unquestioned presupposition, or am I continually questioning and reforming this supposition? If I say I continue to be the same differently , is this an unquestioned presupposition that I take for granted? If so, what aspect of the presupposition remains unchanged over time? Certainly not the content of my experience, since it is a requirement for the continued survival of my presupposition that the world will always appear to be changing for me. I would argue only the empty categories of past and present remain unchanged, since no matter how much my view of myself or the world changes, this will always presuppose a relation between memory and the now.

Perhaps my stance appears to be an unquestioning taking for granted because it appears so alien to your way of thinking. But I continually question everything about my philosophy. It’s just that events as I construe them bring me back into its fold rather than pulling me in the direction of an empirical realism.

I am aware of the existence of para-consistent logic. I would not call that metaphysics, I would not even say that it hinges on metaphysics. It is simply a different syntax — Lionino

The critical analyses of the principle of non-contraction I have in mind were conducted by Witntgenstein, phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and poststructuralists like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida.


For instance,

In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Wittgenstein tells us that it is his aim "to alter the attitude to contradiction." We should lose the superstitious fear of contradiction and cease to think of it as the bogy. He writes:
There is one mistake to avoid: one thinks that a contradiction must be senseless: that is to say, if c.g., we use the signs ‘p’, ‘n’, ‘.’ consistently, then ‘p and not p’ cannot say anything.

When Wittgenstein poses the question of whether the law of non-contradiction is a fundamental law governing all conceivable language-games, his answer appears to be negative. Although a language-game may lose its sense through a contradiction, this need not necessarily be the case. Wittgenstein imagines several situations in which a contradiction would have a definite function and sense.

Consider the following three cases:

Why should not a calculation made for a practical purpose, with a contradictory result, tell me: "Do as you please, I, the calculation, do not decide the matter'?

The contradiction might be considered as a hint from the gods that I am to act and not consider.

Let us suppose that a contradiction in an order ... produces astonishment and indecision-and now we say: that is just the purpose of contradiction in this language game.

Whether these be actual or merely possible uses of a contradiction is a matter of no consequence.
Wittgenstein's point is that a contradiction may be given a use and hence acquire a sense. Our use, or lack of use, of the expression ‘p and not-p’ is no sure indicator of the necessity of erecting a "super-fence" around contradiction.

These suggestions concerning contradiction seem to constitute a special case of Wittgenstein's more general thesis in the Remarks and, to some extent, the Philosophical Investigations' that logical rules, although made necessary by human convention, are suggested by contingent facts of experience. If these facts and/or our purposes were different, we might engage in entirely different language-games.

Every human has some conception of truth or falsity, even if they have never spent much time pondering metaphysics. There is a naive sense of true and false that is endemic to the human experience — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree that humans have a conception of validation and invalidation, but I would distinguish this from truth and falsity in the following way: as anticipatory sense-makers, we are able to determine the extent to which new events are are referentially consistent or inconsistent with our expectations. Included in this claim is the assumption that experience never repeats itself; it is always in motion with respect to itself from moment to moment. This does not mean that there are not robust regularities and patterns to be construed within the flux of time. It is these regularities that make science, and human communication in general , possible. We always find ourselves ensconced within these normative regularities, and even when there is revolutionary change , this takes place not as a completely arbitrary event , but against the backdrop of an already structured, if always changing, understanding of the world which , while differing from one person to the next and one moment to the next, avails itself of relative social consensus for given periods of time.
If the notions of truth and falsity presume we can experience events that sit still, that persist self-identically over time in their content such that we can refer back to them in order to compare them with other events, then I would say that conception of truth is something that emerged at some point in human history as a contingent assumption , but that such a notion of truth as correctness cannot be said to be pre-metaphysical , universal , a priori or anything of the kind.

Do I claim that my theory of validation is true? I can only say that it is the way that my experience of events makes sense to me in this moment. A moment from now i will have to retest my construal of events to see if how I interpret things to be is inferentially compatible with my current anticipations, based on my current schemes of thought. All I can say is that thus far my way of construing matters in a metaphysical sense has continued to be relatively consistent from moment to moment, day to day and year to year. I can’t make any claims beyond this. I will say that this structured , regulated and patterned self-transformation is the case for all people at all times , but in making this claim I have to put it to the test every moment. It can never be a settled fact for me but only a construal that must re-validate itself against new events. At least this is how I construe it to be right now. You can see how self-reflexive change is built into my very notion of knowing.

What I have offered concerning the difference between validation and truth doesn’t invalidate for me the claims you have made about how language works, how scientific truth is grounded, the nature of subjective experiences like pain. Instead , when I hear you talk about objects , be they linguistic, subjectively felt , intersubjectively agreed on or independent of all human experience, I burrow beneath the alleged intrinsicality, fixity and self-sameness of these objects as ‘truths’ to locate a rich , hidden realm of subtle changes in my construing of such things, and I imagine such changes taking place within your awareness of them, but at a level that is deeply implicit. What you explicitly identify are static , temporarily unchanged objects that can be manipulated via logic and mathematics, without recognizing either their flux or the dependence of their sense on your anticipatory construing. In deconstructing your concepts, I leave intact everything you are trying to preserve about truth , but enrich these concepts.

The reward I get from my endless testing out of my anticipations is not truth, but the validation that the fresh new event in front of me bears a reasonable resemblance to the previous, that it makes sense, that it makes my world familiar, recognizable , intimate, relevant and meaningful.

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not?

Can anyone point me in the right direction as I have no idea how to help her? — OwenB

Check out Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of spatial objects in Cartesian Investigations and other works . In particular , see his distinction between perception and apperception , where he explains how we draw from memory aspects of an object which are not actually perceived ( the backside of a chair), and use that memory to anticipate further details of the object which we also don’t directly perceive ( how the object will change when we walk around it).

… there belongs to every external perception its reference from the "genuinely perceived" sides of the object of perception to the sides "also meant" not yet perceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional emptiness (as the sides that are "coming" now perceptually): a continuous protention, which, with each phase of the perception, has a new sense. Furthermore, the perception has horizons made up of other possibilities of perception, as perceptions that we could have, if we actively directed the course of perception otherwise: if, for example, we turned our eyes that way instead of this, or if we were to step forward or to one side, and so forth. In the corresponding memory this recurs in modified form, perhaps in the consciousness that, instead of the sides then visible in fact, I could have seen others naturally, if I had directed my perceptual activity in a suitably different manner.

Moreover, as might have been said earlier, to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of awakenable recollections; and to every recollection there belongs, as a horizon, the continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualize on my initiative, actively), up to the actual Now of perception. Everywhere in this connexion an "I can and do, but I can also do otherwise than I am doing" plays its part without detriment to the fact that this "freedom", like every other, is always open to possible hindrances. The horizons are "predelineated" potentialities…. the die leaves open a great variety of things pertaining to the unseen faces; yet it is already "construed" in advance as a die, in particular as colored, rough, and the like, though each of these determinations always leaves further particulars open.” (Cartesian Meditations)

Like we assume any viewpoint has metaphysical presuppositions, but then the validity of those presuppositions is ultimately borne out...in a metaphysical sense. In other words, a metaphysical theory is consequential… having a theory about the nature of reality (if it is accurate) ought to prove useful in some way, or lead in some direction. So I'd say metaphysics is about the relationship between our understanding of reality and reality. — Pantagruel

Doesn’t any viewpoint or theory implicitly lead us in certain directions and prove useful in the sense that it organizes our world in some fashion? What does it mean to ask if a metaphysics is ‘accurate’ in its depiction of the real? Can’t different metaphysical systems be ‘accurate’ in very different ways?

What do you think about the placement of logic outside the circle of metaphysics?
— Joshs

Valid, no metaphysics can make a married man a bachelor. — Lionino

Metaphysics can’t put into question the law of non-contradiction?

But the most salient is that metaphysics is about what is real. — Pantagruel

You don’t think the history of metaphysics has to do with the changing ways we think about the sense of meaning of what is real? In other words, isn’t metaphysics more about sense than reality? For instance, if one can claim that the change in physics from Newton to Heisenberg is a change in metaphsical presuppositions, then this involves a subtle transformation in the sense of meaning of terms like mass and energy, rather than whether mass and energy are real.