I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary. — frank

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. That is to say, seeing colors and contrasts and lines and textures is not seeing purely what is there without any mediation from prior conceptually-derived expectations , any more than is seeing the visual field in terms of trees, houses and cars. It is just a different sort of conceptual stance.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.

When he writes, "The underlying dif­ficulty is their effort to separate rational, normative relations among semantic contents from their realization by humans as living organisms who evolved and developed in discursively articulated environments," is this a somewhat awkward equivalent to "There are no propositions that aren't 1st person singular or plural"? — J

The way I think he would put it is ‘all propositions, including 1st person plural, are derivative of 1st person singular stances, but the 1st person singular includes within its own autonomy its discursive, partially shared circumstances with others.

being a bishop is a way of treating that piece of wood, being a dollar coin is a way of treating that piece of metal and being two animals is a way of treating that cat and dog. — Banno

My point would merely be that, when paleontologists unearth two fossilized birds who fell into a tar pit together when the branch they were sitting on snapped 2 million years ago, they (and we) are justified in thinking that there were indeed two birds that fell into the tar pit. This, despite this event being prior to man or any human languages.
— Count Timothy von Icarus
Did you think that somehow this is incompatible with the account I gave? How? — Banno

A way of treating something as something is a convention. How can a convention pre-exist the existence of human beings on the planet? It’s one thing to say that there was a world prior to the arrival of humans and our conventions of language, but it’s another to specify the nature of that world (two birds, or a cat and a dog) on the basis of our contingent discursive accounts of it. It is neither true nor false to say that there were a countable number of animals prior to the arrival of humans.

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified.

The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted — frank

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. Predication is just an abstractive invention tacked onto perception. Just because predication may require an unchanging nature relative to properties, this does not mean that perception does. Perception recognizes ‘unchanging’ objected all the time, even though built into the recognition is that this self-persistence is only relative self-persistence, a way of continuing to be the same slightly differently. Recognizing sameness over time as inferential compatibility is optimally useful, whereas the propositional requirement of absolute unchangingness leads to confusions and the appearance of contradictions and incompatibilities.

Words are meaningful only when we put them to work. Repeat a word over and over again and it gradually loses all sense of meaning. We understand propositions as meaningful not because of but in spite of our presupposing them to be dealing with an unchanging identity. Wittgenstein describes the notion of changeless repetition as language on holiday or an engine idling.

“..the very attempt to achieve a clear view of matters by suspending usage renders them opaque, like shining light on a developing picture. This is what Wittgenstein means by his famous claim that “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.”

“…detaching a phenomenon from absorbed activity drains it of the meaning that flows through it while knitted into its language-game. It is this shriveled, barren husk of meaning that seems strikingly incapable of generating vibrant communication. Instead of a profound discovery about language or meaning or thought, however, this is just an odd fact about us, like the way repeating a word over and over again (“noodle, noodle, noodle . . .”) reduces it to a thick senseless sound. It offers no secret insight into the profound workings of anything, except the folly of philosophy. (Lee Braver on Wittgenstein)

Should we say that, at some given level of demonstration, we have "raw, unmediated perception"? Something we can point to and say, "This," sans interpretation? — J

This isssue is formulated in an interesting way by Joseph Rouse, who contrasts his view of discursive normativity as functioning ‘all the way down’ from the accounts of figures such as Quine, Sellars, McDowell, Davidson and Brandon, who each in different ways relies on a sovereign. account of nature to ground statements of fact.

Accounts of the intralinguistic, ra­tional determination of semantic contents and their inferential or other ho­listic interrelations ultimately depend on showing how those relationships are accountable to causal capacities and interactions of worldly objects. Each account—Quine on holistic adjustments of theories at the “tribunal” of sen­sory surface irritations, Sellars on integrating the manifest and scientific im­ages of humanity-in-the-world, Davidson on token identity of mental and physical events, John McDowell on relations between law-governed first na­ture and conceptual capacities inculcated by second nature, or Brandom on judgments of practical and perceptual reliability—fails. The underlying dif­ficulty is their effort to separate rational, normative relations among semantic
contents from their realization by humans as living organisms who evolved and developed in discursively articulated environments.

Yep, as you said there, it's not that conceptual schemes can';t be relative, but that there can't be conceptual schemes. — Banno

And , if I understand Davidson correctly, there cannot be conceptual schemes thanks to what Rouse calls Davidson’s assumption that semantic meaning is grounded in the ‘token identity of mental and physical events,’

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else?

Terminologically though, I would rather say this is a refinement of our intentions, as opposed to our concepts. This is because otherwise, we would be forced to say that "wetness" or "human" is changing, but it seems to be an important distinction that are intentions are changing (and hopefully becoming more perfect). I did not experience a different water when I went swimming before I came to know that water was H2O, a polar solvent, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The concept of ‘object’ serves a purpose for us. It allows us to unite features and attributes into a single ‘this’. The concept of feature or attribute also serves a purpose for us. It allows us to anticipate how an aspect of the world will respond to our investigation of it. When we turn our head one way, we anticipate it will move in the other direction. When we walk around it, we expect to see another side of it. So in a sense, objects are instructions for how to anticipate responses to our actions on a part of the world. Knowing about water is know how it will respond to our touching it , moving in it, exposing other objects to it. Knowing about water is also knowing where it came from, how it was created and how it can be transformed. These are important to us when we want to interact with it in special ways.

We could say that the object is an anticipatory dance between us and a part of our surroundings. But notice how the ‘same’ object changes depending on the pattern of this dance. Take an object as simple as a point. Does it makes sense to talk about a point i swore t of the nature of the way we dance with it?

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

Note that these conventions are not just ways of describing a thing. They are instructions for how iinteract with it in particular ways in order to achieve a predictable series of responses from it. How that object appears to us is a function of what we are doing with it, how we are dancing with it. To ask if the planet Jupiter exists is to ask about a particular sort of interactive dance. It makes no more sense to imagine Jupiter the planet independently of some convention of practical engagement with it than it does to imagine a tango with only one performer, or a duet with only one singer. Is a photon a particle or a wave? It depends on which apparatus is dancing with it.

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are not disagreeing that the world poses constrains on what we can do with objects, so I have no problem with your laundry list of all the things we can or cannot do with specific things. What I am arguing is that our perception of of what we can or cannot do with a thing is based on HOW we understand what that thing is, how it works, and that understanding is not static, it evolves
over time. When our understanding of a thing changes, due to shifts in scientific and technological knowledge, it is not simply a matter of reconfiguring our knowledge of the external causal associations between objects. What also changes is the ‘core’ concept of object as center of properties and attributes. The reason that this core concept of objectness does mot remain stable in the face of changes in under is that it is an abstraction derived from a system of relations not only between us and the world we interact with, but between one part of the world and another.

Sure. That does not make the world only the result of those "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them". Not just any "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them" will do. There remains novelty, agreement and error, embedding us in a world that does not care what we believe. — Banno

That’s right. We don’t simply fabricate the world according to our wishes. And yet, the only access we have to the world is through our aims and purposes. Care is indispensible to the connection between us and world, in the form of relevance , mattering and significance. Isnt this the basis of the normative power of language games? No matter how strange and surprising things can strike us , they are always, at a more fundamental level, already familiar to us thanks to the fact that even the most unanticipated event is recognizable on the basis of a background intelligibility. This is what precludes radical skepticism and doubt.

What is your point of disagreement, if there is one? — Banno

I’ve forgotten now.

And yet not just any "processes of transcendental consciousness" will do; the "processes of transcendental consciousness" is itself restricted by the "factual world"...

It's not either realism or idealism, We construct the facts, from the world — Banno

Yes, neither realism nor idealism. But for Husserl, the factual world only has its intelligibility on the basis of acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them. Just as for Wittgenstein, there is never a norm-free basis for understanding the world.

You talk as if there were a discrete entity that is the "meaning" of π.

That's the bit to which I am objecting.

Whether you use π to find the volume of tanks or the orbital period of a planet, the extension of "π" is the very same. That much is clear.

That we are doing something different with π does not imply that we are using a different π.

If in your novel language game the value of π is different, then that is simply not a use of π. — Banno

Taking this step by step:

I should say sense of meaning rather than meaning.

When I talk about the use of pi I dont mean applying it to different problems, I mean that every time I hear or think the word ‘pi’ I am using pi. This goes back to Witt’s claim that words only existence in their use. The point is that we don’t first learn to understand a word or mathematical symbol and then draw on that understanding like a static picture stored in our memory every time we hear or think the word or symbol. Instead, something new happens when we connect our memory of prior understanding with the actual context we are faced with when we hear or think the word again. This is why we don’t simply recall a learned word, we ‘use’ it.

So what happens when we use a word in a new context, but within a stable language game? If that word is pi, then there is little likelihood of any dispute arising over whether one of us is following the ‘rule’ specified by pi correctly. That stability is not the consequence of the description of pi as the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. There is a much richer network of significations underlying that seeming simple and straightforward description making it possible for us to agree on what it means to apply pi correctly. Put differently, the ‘bedrock’ belief alleviating the need for doubt in the case of applying pi is in the underlying language game , not the extension.

Intentional consciousness as Husserl understands it is necessarily (in a modal sense) dependent upon the factual world in which the Living Subject in the phenomenological sense is immersed. And that factual world, most of the time, is the world of ordinary life. The "Lifeworld" of Phenomenology is just ordinary life. — Arcane Sandwich

You have it exactly backwards. It is the factual world which is dependent on the processes of transcendental consciousness. Husserl was not a realist. The factual world was for him a product of the natural attitude, which concealed its own basis in subjective processes.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)


“Indeed, perhaps it will turn out later that all externality, even that of the entire inductive nature, physical and even psychophysical, is only an externality constituted in the unity of communicative personal experience, is thus only something secondary, and that it requires a reduction to a truly essential internality.”

I use π to work out the volume of a water tank. You use it to lay out the design for your garden. We are not here making use of a different thing. You could also use it to work out the volume of the tank.

That you do something different with π does not suggest that you are using a different π — Banno

We are using more or less the same sense of meaning of pi if we are proceeding within the same language game. This form of life is not strictly defined by the description of pi as the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. It is rather a larger network of interconnected references that forms the basis of intelligibility of that description, as well as a potentially unlimited variety of similar but not identical descriptions. If the language game were different, the meaning of pi could change even if the description remained the same.

Realism is true. That's not to say that materialism is true, it only means that realism is true — Arcane Sandwich

Post-realist approaches would agree with you. Realism is indeed true, but that’s just a circular statement. Realism is that way of thinking which thinks truth in terms of adequation and correctness of fit. Post-realist approaches, by contrast, understand truth as correctness to be a secondary form of truth. For instance, for Wittgenstein, within the norms provided by a language game , one can determine truth and falsity. But this notion of truth is irrelevant to the comparison between different language games. The life transitions that take us from
one language game to another can’t be made sense of in terms of truth as adequation.

↪Joshs The extension of π, what it refers to, is the ratio of a circle's diameter to it's circumference. The "sense" or "meaning" of π? If we have what we do with π, what more is there? — Banno

What I’m trying to say is that a description of what pi refers to cannot guarantee that what I do with it is the same as what you do with it. Witt goes over this in his account of rule following.

But that brings back Count Timothy von Icarus's point about the debate between Rorty and Eco. Things cannot be pragmatism and convention all the way own. That's what Eco said to Rorty. And it's an excellent, sound, reasonable thing to say. Why? Because it's true, that's why. — Arcane Sandwich

In case you didn’t see it , I responded to Count Timothy this way:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956726

↪Arcane Sandwich I don't find Heidegger of much use. Same goes for most of that school of Phenomenology. — Banno

Apparently you dont have much use for practice-based accounts of discursive normativity either.

the meaning of pi is only partially shared...
— Joshs
But that's not quite right - π refers to the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle; that's it.

Moreover, the idea of meaning as shared is decrepit. Meaning is something we do. Or better, stop looking at meaning and look instead at use. — Banno

Use determines the sense of meaning , and use is a function of partially shared discursive practices within a community of language users. The definition of pi doesn’t determine its sense any more than any rule determines its use.

If π is a brain process in your brain, and also a brain process in my brain, then it is two different things.

But if that were so, when I talk about π I am talking about a quite different thing to you, when you talk about π.

This is a cut-down version of the private language argument. π is not private thin in each of our heads, but a public thing that is used openly to make calculations and settle disagreements. — Banno

Pi is like any other word. It is communicated in partially shared circumstances. This circumstance includes your brain processes and my brains processes , along with their embodiment in each of our organisms and the embeddedness of our brains and bodies in a partially shared social environment. None of these aspects
can be neatly disentangled from the others, but the fact that the meaning of pi is only partially shared between us explains why its use by either of us can always be contested by the other.

EDIT: According to Google Translate, "Remanens capax mutationem" means "remaining capable of change" in English, and "Siendo capaz de cambiar", in Spanish. That doesn't make any conceptual sense to me, so I doubt that it many sense for anyone other than Heidegger himself. — Arcane Sandwich

I assume he means , that which truly is is that which remains self-identical in its substantive qualities as it undergoes quantitative change in spatial or temporal location. I’m with Heidegger here. I don’t believe there is anything in the world which retains its exact qualitative identity over time. It just appears to us as if this is the case because things can remain SIMILAR to themselves over time, and that’s why we invented number (same thing, different time).

But that's my point: there are aspects of the world which are not mathematizable. They're called objects, in the literal sense of the term. They are "out there", outside of our brains, they are what Descartes called res extensa. — Arcane Sandwich

Res extensa forces onto objects the concept of persisting identity, which is also the basis of enumeration.

Heidegger explains:

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”

Heidegger argues that the fundamentally undiscussed ontological foundations of empirical science since Descartes are based on his formulation of objective presence. Just like number, the notion of pure self-persistence is a fiction applied to the world.

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.

Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”

Well I mean, if you want to get technical about it, it has a lot of math to it, but it's ultimately within the domain of what physicists study. To them, math and logic are just tools, they have no ontology. Physics is the academic discipline that deals with the ontology of the world, not math — Arcane Sandwich

I think math is more than a tool for physics. Physics deals only with those aspects of the world which are mathemetizable. The objects of physics are based on geometric idealizations such as space and time. These are presuppositions imposed on the world by physics rather than emanating from the ontology of the world. Forgetting the role such presuppositions play leads to such confusions as Wigner’s famous paper on the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics in the natural sciences.

But I claim that it's the property of having physical spatiotemporality, not the mereological property of being a part of the largest whole. — Arcane Sandwich

I like what you, and Bunge, have to say about numbers being fictions created by the brain (idealizations a might be a better word than fictions). But how can we assign a reality to the universe independent of such brain processes consisting of spatiotemporal localizability? Isnt the notion of spatiotemporal localization based on a mathematical
abstraction?

Gays have been subjected to instances of bullying, beatings, and murder, true enough. In my experience, gays managed to get along in a frequently unfriendly society by keeping a low profile when necessary. I'm not sure how much protection was gained by being a tightly knit community. Whatever tight-knit community existed was more the result of seeking sex, partners and love. Informal institutions -- cruising, bathhouses, bars, adult bookstores, and so forth were the core of at least the gay male community. Later, by the mid 1970s, social institutions became more prominent -- religious, social, or sport groups. Without the cell phone and internet, physical proximity was essential — BC

If you haven’t spent much time in the few truly large gay communities in the U.S., you may not appreciate how important they were to gay people of a certain era. The gay community I am most familiar with is Chicago’s Boystown, which I frequented beginning in the ‘80’s. The kind of protection that it offered many who lived there was multi-faceted. Some young men had been excommunicated from their families and considered the gay bars as a substitute family. It was where they celebrated birthdays and holidays, found a shoulder to cry on, emotional and sometimes financial support.
Gay teens who found themselves homeless after being kicked out by their families would get a room at the gay bathhouse, sleep at the gay theater, the gay YMCA or transient hotel.

For others it was the only place they felt (relatively) safe holding hands and showing open displays of affection with other men. Some had been so traumatized by experiences of rejection from the larger community that they turned the neighborhood into an all-purpose gay ‘ghetto’, socializing exclusively with gay men, getting services only from gay doctors, dentists, psychologists, mechanics, real estate professionals, playing sports only within gay sports leagues, working out only at gay gyms and heath clubs, getting their news from local gay newspapers (Gay Chicago, Windy City Times). When AIDS came on the scene, at first it was only in places like Boystown or Castro that one could get new, affordable treatments and supportive emotional care.

It can be difficult to quantify magic by its very nature. However, if the adage “magic is science we don’t understand yet” is true, then the reverse may also be true: that science is magic that we do understand. If so, then magic is, in a way, real if only in that there are lots of things we collectively and individually do not understand but that still have tangible effects on reality and our lives. It is also possible to use technology you do not understand, so it may be possible to use “magic” you do not understand. — MrLiminal

It’s easy to get hung up trying to figure how to make categorical separations between religion and science , and between magic and understanding. But the central issue I discern in the OP has to do with the consequences of HOW we understand something.

For instance, Wayfarer quotes Feynman saying:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
— Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics — Wayfarer

and then adds:

“And yet, these devices we’re using to read and write these ideas depend on it!”


What does Feynman mean by physicists ‘not understanding’ quantum mechanics? It is easy to read this as pointing to a peripheral sort of mystery that doesn’t have any impact on the achievements of physics. But I would argue that this ‘not understanding’ affects the very core of what physicists say they do understand very well. That is to say, it is not enough to claim that a science produces devices that work. We have to notice HOW they work, and remind ourselves that they can always be made to work differently. In other words , it could be that if a new approach within physics addresses and resolves the lack of understanding Feynman is referring to, it will result in devices that not only work differently than current ones, but work better. What does this have to do with religion and magic? I agree with you that in an important sense, science and religion are talking about the same thing.

They are both utilizing a framework of intelligibility to try to make sense of the world. When magic is invoked as part of an explanation, it also belongs to a framework of intelligibility. It is not as though the subject matter that magic is attributed to lacks all sensible structure, it’s just that the parts connect in only a loose , murky and partially arbitrary manner. Magic is the fiat of a mysterious black box. We find the use of black boxes not only in religion (God is the biggest of them all) but in the various sciences ( their unquestioned metaphysical presuppositions) . What would it mean to move away from a reliance on magic and black boxes, and is it even possible? I think it is, but such thinking is best done in a philosophicalmode which reveals the processes leading to the generation of the metaphysical presuppositions on which sciences and religions depend.

If the butterflies-in-themselves are never seen, then he's probably right, and we can't say in which direction they fly. But we don't seem to need butterflies-in-themselves to have a simple chat about the direction in which butterflies fly.

That is, Husserl appears to be talking shite. — Banno

Just read the man instead of working yourself up into a tizzy. Do you honestly think he’s stupid enough to claim that we can’t do what we obviously know we can? He’s not trying to take away from us a single scientific achievement, consensual fact or logical inference. He’s simply showing us how we manage these feats from a more fundament vantage than the how’s that the sciences take as their starting point.

In a debate with Richard Rorty, Umberto Eco tried to press the point that things cannot be pragmatism and convention "all the way down." A screwdriver, in some sense, shapes what we choose to do with it. Rorty disagreed and gave the unfortunate counter example that we could just as well scratch our ear with a screwdriver. Except we wouldn't, because of what a screwdriver is and what we are (or, if the point isn't clear enough, consider a razor sharp hunting knife). The world, and truth, imposes itself on how we deal with things — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we are using a thing for shapes how we perceive the constraints and affordances offered by that thing. If we understand what a computer is for , then we perceive the properties of that computer and how those properties shape what we can do with it in terms of speed, memory, screen brightness, quality of manufacturing, etc. If we have never heard of a computer, and find one on the side of the road, we will not consider the tower, screen, mouse and printer as even belonging to the same thing. We may then use the tower as a doorstop, and then it’s properties will appear to us in terms of its weight, ability to grip the surface it’s placed on, and other considerations relevant to effective doorstops.

A series of connected lines and curves made out of sticks doesn’t shape what we do with the this ‘object’ all by itself. What we do with it may involve interpreting it as a string of letters that form a meaningful sentence, if we read that language. Or if we don’t recognize that language, the stick objects may appear as random collection of shapes. In either case, what the object is and how it shapes us is a function of the role it plays for us a system of meaningful references tied to useful purposes. In order to decide that a screwdriver drives screws better than it scratches ears, we have to already know about not only the role of a screwdriver , but that of screws and the surfaces that screws fit together, the role of these fitted surfaces in a construction project, the role of the construction project in relation to a finished building or machine, the role of that building or machine in our activities, and so on. What makes the screwdriver a screwdriver for us is not inherent in the object all by itself but in this totality of chains of ‘in order to’s’ that belongs to and on the base of which it was invented.

Do the world, and truth, impose themselves on how we deal with things? Yes, but only in and through how we deal with things.

As mainstream stereotypes become narrower, so do the alternative categories that arise to challenge them. LGBTQIA+ identities, for instance, have expanded to include more and more letters, each reflecting a specific experience or distinction. But why must a bisexual man need a separate category? Why must we continually subdivide? This hyper-fragmentation suggests not a celebration of diversity but an inability to communicate across divides or truly respect individuality.

At its core, this fragmentation doesn’t erase the fundamental human need for belonging—it amplifies it. In response, we see the rise of tight-knit communities: gay enclaves, the “incel” movement, the manosphere, the femosphere, and so on. — Benkei

You don’t think one important reason for the rise of categories of gender identity is that individuals found themselves rejected and ostracized over their behavior, which in many cases they had no control over? A feminine-acting gay male could be the target of bullies, and their partnership with another male not legally recognized. A tight-knit gay community was necessary as long as gays felt unsafe in mainstream society. Now that mainstream attitudes have changed these ‘gay ghettos’ are fading as their residents integrate back into the wider community, while maintaining their gay identity. And with further liberalization in attitudes toward non-conforming gender behaviors among the general population, the relevance of the concept of gay identity will likely diminish. Thus we can see how the creation of identitarian communities can serve a vital, if temporary purpose.

Husserl can't see the butterflies? — Banno

What he sees is similar but not identical to what every other observer of the ‘same’ butterflies see.

“If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere "representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Crisis Of European Sciences)

We can apply the Principle of Charity to reach agreement on all these observations.

And this speaks to the communality of language, that what we say about how things are is part and parcel of our role as members of a community. This in firm opposition to the view that some individuals observations are somehow paramount, or must form the foundation of knowledge. Knowledge is not built from solipsism.

This is in contrast to Wayfarer's thesis that science neglects lived experience. A better way to think of this is that science combines multiple lived experiences in order to achieve agreement and verity. So sure, "our entire perceptual and cognitive apparatus biases our understanding of the world", and yet we can work to minimise that bias by paying attention to contexts and wording our utterances with care, so that they work in the widest available context. Not the view form nowhere but the view from anywhere — Banno

This is, up to a point, compatible with Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the construction of empirically objective facts via the coordination of subjective perspectives among an intersubjective community. But when Husserl points out that the intersubjectively produced empirical objects are entities that no one actually sees, he doesn’t find it necessary to anchor this objectivity in a principle of charity that assumes a transcendence of perceptual bias via a grip on ‘the way things really are’.

Part of the problem here is perhaps that both analytic and continental philosophy of science has become so divorced from how scientists tend to think of their work that it has become largely irrelevant to scientific practices. The extreme skepticism and general anti-realism one finds in a lot of philosophy of science seems contained largely to the philosophers — Count Timothy von Icarus

Scientists aren’t paid to think about their work, they’re paid to produce results. That’s why we need philosophers of science. When scientists do engage in metaphysical speculation, it rarely reaches the level of sophistication of someone like a Heisenberg or Bohm, which is why it may seem to many scientists that philosophy of science today is ‘divorced from how they think of their work’. But there is an important difference between a philosophical perspective being irrelevant to scientific practices and that perspective being treated as irrelevant by those who don’t have deep enough insight not the nature of their own practices. It wasnt that long ago that scientists were oblivious to concepts like Popperian falsificationism and paradigm shifts, which are now ingrained within the way many of they think about their practices.

I don't read the Blue Book or PI as saying there is no use for reduction in all cases. The objects of shared experience do not have the same problems as what is experienced by us as persons. The discussion of mental states thrusts us into an unknown. To say that nothing more can be learned would be a kind of nominalism… That "sometime perhaps we'll know more about them" militates against imagining ourselves at the end of explanations — Paine

I find that many people are inclined to assume that neurophysiology and cognitive psychology between them will supply the deficit - a computer model of the mind. (The latest developments in science/technology imported wholesale into philosophy.) So the traditional language morphs somewhat, but survives. — Ludwig V

I think it’s a different story when it comes to neurophenomenology and enactive embodied cognitive science. Like Witt, these approaches reject the idea of inner, computational processes in the head in favor of practices of interaction immersed in the world.

The theme, one that may be becoming prevalent, is that post modernism has noticed that not just any narrative will do. Global warming does not care what narrative you adopt, and relativism works for oligarchs as well as anarchists. The truth doesn't care what you believe. That's for Joshs. — Banno

Given your emphasis on language as use, I want to point out the implication of truth not caring about what one believes, desires, feels or cares about. That is , a notion of truth as pristinely separate from issues of affect, value, power and purpose, as though those factors were at best peripheral to, and at worst repressive of attainment of truth. Pragmatism and hermeneutics, which treat truth as a function of discursive practices, know better than that.

So . . . can this process take place with any physical series? Would Husserl countenance using an apple, say, as the starting part or element? Does it matter where we start? I think the answer is, "Sure, anything at all will do, as long as its perception counts as a 'sense act'," but I want to get your take on it. — J

We have already indicated the concreta on which the abstracting activity is based. They are totalities of determinate objects. We now add: "completely arbitrary" objects. For the formation of concrete totalities there actually are no restrictions at all with respect to the particular contents to be embraced. Any imaginable object, whether physical or psychical, abstract or concrete, whether given through sensation or phantasy, can be united with any and arbitrarily many others to form a totality, and accordingly can also be counted. For example, certain trees, the Sun, the Moon, Earth and Mars; or a feeling, an angel, the Moon, and Italy, etc. In these examples we can always speak of a totality, a multiplicity, and of a determinate number. The nature of the particular contents therefore makes no difference at all. This fact, as rudimentary as it is incontestable, already rules out a certain class of views concerning the origination of the number concepts: namely, the ones which restrict those concepts to special content domains, e.g., that of physical contents.
(Philosophy of Arithmetic)

Is Rouse's point that (i) there are no rules (or social regularities or norms within a practice), or that (ii) nothing compels us to follow them?

The assertion that there are no rules or norms within a practice seems obviously false. It is easy to observe that many people do follow the rules more often than not - in driving, chess, sports, language, and much more. Many people have followed the same rules of classical chess for more than a day, at least. Also, any social practice involves norms, so it is redundant to refer to the norms within it. It would not be possible to learn how to play chess unless there was an everyday practice of playing it. The everyday practice is the rule, the custom, the correct application to future instances.

If we assume that there are such rules, then perhaps Rouse is right that there is nothing that compels people to follow them. But so what? People do follow rules. Clearly, you can drive through a red light or move your rook diagonally or say a meaningless string of random words if you so choose, but then you are no longer playing the same game as everyone else; no longer following the custom; no longer following the rule. Nothing forces you to play chess but you aren't playing chess (correctly) unless you follow the established rules/customs/practice of playing chess. — Luke

As Antony pointed out , issues concerning the normativity and correctness of rule following are outside the scope of the reading, but let me just offer that the grammatical distinction Wittgenstein makes between causes and reasons, or causes and motivation, is relevant here in the way it points to his later analysis of the situation when I exhaust my reasons and simply declare that my spade is turned. In this book, he says “When the chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question "why?" is asked, one is inclined to give a cause instead of a reason.” He calls the grammar of causal explanation a kind of hypothesis or conjecture rather than knowing. By the time of P.I., he seems to treat conjecturing of cause in terms of the bedrock of a language game. “ If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."
We may then try to come up with a causal explanation.
With regard to Roise on rule following, as Wittgenstein say, a rule, when followed, is never followed “ at a distance”, but when its symbols can be directly used as a guide. And even here, Rkise’s larger point is that rules and social norms underdetermine how we actually follow them.

↪Joshs
In a way, the number 5 implies all other numbers, because its meaning is rooted in its place in a sequence. And everything is like that — frank

Yes indeed.

The question was much more ordinary: What are the concrete contents or data of which Husserl speaks, that allow us to form our idealization of numbers? Can you give an example of how this might work? — J

Here’s my long-winded attempt at a Husserlian explanation of the subjective constitution of number:

In Philosophy of Arithmetic(1891), Husserl described a method for understanding the constitution of a multiplicity or plurality composed of independent parts, which he dubbed ‘collective combination'. According to Husserl, the basis of any sort of whole of independently apprehended parts(a whole in the pregnant sense) is the collective combination, which is an abstracting act of consciousness uniting parts.

“Collective combination plays a highly significant role in our mental life as a whole. Every complex phenomenon which presupposes parts that are separately and specifically noticed, every higher mental and emotional activity, requires, in order to be able to arise at all, collective combinations of partial phenomena. There could never even be a representation of one of the more simple relations (e.g., identity, similarity, etc.) if a unitary interest and, simultaneously with it, an act of noticing did not pick out the terms of the relation and hold them together as unified. This 'psychical' relation is, thus, an indispensable psychological precondition of every relation and combination whatsoever.”

In any such whole the parts are united in a specific manner. Fundamental to the genesis of almost all totalities is that its parts initially appear as a temporal succession.

“Succession in time constitutes an insuppressible psychological precondition for the formation of by far the most number concepts and concrete multiplicities - and practically all of the more complicated concepts in general.”“Almost all representations of multiplicities - and, in any case, all representations of numbers - are results of processes, are wholes originated gradually out of their elements. Insofar as this is so, each element bears in itself a different temporal determination.””Temporal succession forms the only common element in all cases of multiplicity, which therefore must constitute the foundation for the abstraction of that concept.”

The first step of constitution of a multiplicity is the awareness of the temporal succession of parts, each of which we are made aware of as elements “separately and specifically noticed”. In the case of numbers, one must abstract away everything else about those elements (color, size, texture) other than that they have been individually noticed as an empty ‘unit’. The concept of number is only possible once we invent the idea of identical sameness over time ( same thing, different time). This concept is not derived from the concrete data of experience (i.e. real apples as their appearance is given to us via continually changing perspectives). Rather, it is a concept we impose upon a world in continual flux. It was necessary to invent the concept of identity, and its pure repetition, in order to have the notion of the numeric unit.

The collective combination itself only emerges from a secondary act of consciousness. This higher order constituting sense changes what was originally a temporal succession into a simultaneity by ‘bringing' back ‘ the previous parts via reflecting on them in memory. Husserl says that a combination of objects is similar to the continuity of a tone. In both cases, a temporal succession is perceived through reflection as a simultaneity.

“For the apprehension of each one of the colligated contents there is required a distinct psychical act. Grasping them together then requires a new act, which obviously includes those distinct acts, and thus forms a psychical act of second order.” “It is essential that the partial representations united in the representation of the multiplicity or number be present in our consciousness simultaneously [in an act of reflection].”

The constitution of an abstract multiplicity is analogous to the creation of any whole, even though the former involves a peculiarly external form of unification in comparison to combinations unified by similarity or continuity.

A key feature of the fact that a totality is a product of a temporally unfolding series of sense acts is that prior elements of the originally apprehended series have already changed by the time we move on to the succeeding elements of that series. “In forming the representation of the totality we do not attend to the fact that changes in the contents occur as the colligation progresses.” The secondary sense-forming act of the uniting of the pasts into the whole is not, then, ‘faithful' to the original meaning of the parts it colligates, in that they have already changed their original sense via the passage of time at the point where we perform the uniting act of multiplicity. Rather than a being faithful, the sense of the unification act may better be described as a moving beyond the original sense-constituting acts forming the apprehension of the parts. In forming a new dimension of sense from retentional and protentional consciousness, the unifying act of totalization idealizes the parts that it unifies. In addition to the abstractive concept of groupness (collective combination), many kinds of more intimate idealizations are constituted as wholes out of original temporal successions. We can see this clearly in the case of the real object, an ideal totality formed out of a continuous synthetic flow of adumbrations in which what is actually experienced in the present is not the ‘faithful', that is, actual presencing of temporally simultaneous elements but a simultaneity of retentional series, present sense and protentional anticipations.

So the question I'm posing is whether the "concrete data" are pre-theoretical, which Wang thinks is not possible. Personally, I think it is possible, but I'm wondering how you think Husserl understood this in relation to numbers — J

I believe Husserl argues that all perception is conceptually driven. What appears as concrete data of experience are themselves given relative to modes of givenness constituted by a subject.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

The question now is whether a thing, which indeed remains one thing under all circumstances, is the identical something of properties and is actually in itself solid and fixed with respect to its real properties; that is, is a thing an identity, an identical subject of identical properties, the changing element being only its states and circumstances? Would this not then mean that according to the various circumstances into which it can be brought, or into which it can be thought to be introduced, the thing has different actual states, but that in advance-a priori - how it can behave, and, further, how it will behave, is predelineated by its own essence?

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the "Objectivity" of natural science.”(Husserl, Ideas II)

We can maintain that mathematical objects are mind-independent, self-subsistent and in every sense real, and we can also explain how we are cognitively related to them: they are invariants in our experience, given fulfillments of mathematical intentions. The evidence that justifies our mathematical knowledge is of the same kind as the evidence available for empirical knowledge claims: we are given these objects. And, since they are given, not subjectively constructed, fictionalism, conventionalism, and similar compromise views turn out to be unnecessarily permissive. The only twist we add to a Platonic realism is that ideal objects are transcendentally constituted.

We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense … . They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. (p. 13).

Mathemarical concepts for Husserl are no more ‘real’ than the spatial objects we interact with in the world. That is to say, their reality is the result of an abstractive idealization on the part of the subject, drawing from encounters with concrete data but imposing on those contents an idealized form. Derrida explains:

Numbers are mental creations insofar as they form the results of activities exercised upon concrete contents; what these activities create, however, are not new and absolute contents which we could find again in space or in the 'external world'; rather are they unique relation-concepts which can only be produced again and again and which are in no way capable of being found somewhere ready-made." This remarkable passage, which already designates the production, therefore the primordial historicity, of idealities which no longer will ever belong to the time and space of empirical history, is from Concerning the Concept of Number (1887), which is taken up again as the first chapter of Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)

The authority with regards to the correct use of language is not any individual, but the norms and accepted customs/rules of language use within a society. — Luke

And what does Wittgenstein tell us about the authority of norms, customs and rules of language when it comes to the actual correct USE of language? As Joseph Rouse interests Wittgenstein:

…we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.