I voted for Trump, because I am afraid of what Kamala would have done to our country. My policy is to vote for the lesser of the two evils, and not to abstain in principle — Bob Ross

Yep, you are definitely to the right of what used to be considered establishment Conservatism. I would say that the majority of the U.S. shares your view ( and always did), and that the outlook of educated urbanites is so far removed from your worldview that there is little room for compromise, which is fine with me. Trump supporters should work to strengthen the America that they believe in and urbanites need to do likewise. Neither side can be allowed to shove their values down the throats of the other side , so in order to protect the Union we need to devolve as much power to the states as possible, and the big cities need to think about coordinating with and supporting each other in more useful ways. I love my city and its values, and look forward to contributing to pushing it even farther away from Trump conservativism as it is now. I also love short visits to Trump’s America, but I can’t live there. I want both Americas to thrive, protected from each other’s values. (I know, you’ll say “ But my values are the morally correct ones, and the liberal cities are on the path to hell”)

Are they not presupposed in all scientific observations? Reiterating those sounds like just stating the obvious. No scientific observations would be done without all that predetermined and pre-equipped unless they are bunch of bird watchers, trainspotters, or sports spectators. — Corvus

Presuppositions are conceptual in nature. And the kinds of presuppositions necessary to do what I outlined are specific to the particular task. Science isnt monolithic in its methods or presuppositions. Different empirical endeavors develop their own methodological practices, their own criteria for what constitutes data and how to collect and organize it.

I am a strong leaning conservative and you seem to be a strong leaning Democrat, so this should be an interesting conversation :smile: . IMHO, the reason the democrats lost is because they have lost the common sense constitutional values. They have been advocating for censorship, prosecution for differing beliefs, essentially the revocation of the 2nd amendment, child mutilation, the disbandment of basic gender distinction in society (like bathrooms), etc. I think America woke up and realized that this is getting out-of-hand; and wants to go back to America’s core values — Bob Ross

I’m curious. Did you vote for Trump or abstain from voting?
I’m asking because all of the principled old-style National Review-style conservatives that I know of (David Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Liz and Dick Cheney, David Frum, Ross Douthat, David French, Brett Stephens and many others) have consistency refused to vote for Trump. I have concluded that one must be to the right of these people in one’s social and religious views in order for a vote for Trump to be seen as better than not voting.

You need to explain it further how and why observation is conceptual apparatuses of interpretation. Why do you need concept and interpretation when you are looking for and collecting data? — Corvus

What motivates and guides the search for and organization of data? How do we determine what is actually data and what is irrelevant?

What reason do you have or holding progressive values if you do not consider them in some sense superior than a range of alternatives you could hold? — Tom Storm

They’re superior for me, given my needs, the way I live my life and rhe community I identify with. They’re not for everybody.

Keep our focus on working class issues, e.g. support for unions, job creation through industrial policy. Biden actually has done a pretty good job on this, but people don’t give us credit — T Clark

You know how I think the Democrats could have won this election? If they had nominated an old-style National Review-type Republican in the tradition of George H. Bush, Eisenhower, David Brooks, George Will , Charles Krauthammer, Liz Cheney and David Frum (strong on national defense, supportive of an anti-Russia policy, economically libertarian and socially moderate). Progressives would have held their noses and voted for such a candidate over Trump, while enough potential Trump voters would have changed sides to put the Democrats over the top. But that could never happen , for a few reasons. First, the party would never support an old line conservative. Second, and most important: what the large densely-populated urban centers (which is where most democrats are concentrated) need is very different from what rural voters and social conservatives need. 70% of economic productivity and wealth generation is located in Democrat-dominated urban centers, and Democrat views on everything from energy policy to healthcare and education are direct expressions of their understanding of what it takes to make that economic engine thrive.

Trump supporters know exactly how to make an economy of the 1950’s thrive, but that’s a recipe for failure in the 21st century. The urban dwellers are speaking a foreign language to the ears of Trump supporters, not just on social issues but also economic ones, so we progressives can’t expect the majority of the country who supports Trump, and a return to the economic thinking of a previous century, to fork over their money to support our causes. We need to find a way to use our own plentiful resources to further our way of life in the cities, which will only pull us father away from traditional America but is necessary for us to thrive on our own terms. The Democratic coalition between intellectuals and blue collar workers which was successful for 50 years worked because the great majority of people in both the cities and small towns were less educated workers. That coalition can’t be put back together in an era when the thinking of educated urbanities has moved so far away from that of the rest of the country. There is no language in common anymore, not on science, ethics, faith or economics.

I'm saying that individualism and neoliberalism is not so much an ideological stance but a form of values and ideals which have replaced a more balanced and collectively inclusive perspective on life. This, in turn produces polarized groups when the inflated expectations of life clash with reality and thus produce a reaction in the form of blame that these groups gather around — Christoffer

Unlike you , I make no moral judgements of individualism or neoliberalism as an ‘unrealistic’, ‘unbalanced’ , ‘regressive’ value system. I think all such value systems work for their adherents, but each works in a different way , and it’s the clashes between incommensurate systems that causes the problems we’re seeing today with political polarization. I suggest that it is not cognitive dissonance that is causing the anger among social conservatives, but the justified sense that they are being talked down to by people like you who believe they have some superior moral or objective vantage and try to shove it down their throats. I am a progressive , but I dont claim that my perspective is morally or objectively superior to other ways of thinking.

But don't simulation or modelling at the end of the day need observation to be meaningful? Simulation and modelling unobserved by humans don't exist, therefore meaningless? — Corvus

Observation takes place through an apparatus of perception, which includes not just telescopes and microscopes, but conceptual apparatuses of interpretation.

We can't ignore how individualism and neoliberalism combined disconnected people from each other. The formation of individuals who were brought up into believing they were the protagonists in contemporary history, that they, if they want, could be whatever they chose to be; a movie star? A successful business owner? The next president?

The cognitive dissonance facing adult life or older people realizing they never became anything they thought they would be transforms into anger and disappointment towards the narrative they were programmed to believe. This anger and disappointment therefor gets aimed at whatever is available to be blamed. Clustering in radicalized gatherings around a similar aim; "that group is to blame", "this ideology is to blame — Christoffer

I have a slightly different take. I agree that the idea of the autonomous individual, and the values of freedom and utilitarianism that surrounded it, characterized much of American society from the days of its founding until recently. And I think that the vast majority of those who voted for Trump still hold onto that worldview. But I don’t believe that their anger is directed at the “ narrative they were programmed to believe” if by this you are referring to that traditionalist worldview and its associated values. In the first place, there are many wealthy Trump supporters who voted for him precisely in to protect those values. Secondly, one has to appreciate how disconnected urban progressive thinking has become from the traditionalist worldview shared by Trump supporters.

Those of us who identify with a progressive worldview are the interlopers, the ‘aliens’, from the perspective of less densely populated and more traditionalist parts of the country. Our thinking has changed rapidly over the last 40 years and the rest of the country hasn’t had a chance to catch up.We speak an indecipherable language to them. But they can’t just ignore us because when we’re in power we try to shove down their throats values which are utterly alien to them. Plus we dominate institutions of higher learning education and other cultural domains , and produce 70 percent of GDP. So they feel that their way of is threatened by us in myriad ways.

↪Joshs If you'd have read and understood what I've posted, you'd know that my use of the descriptor "Post Truth era" doesn't reference "ideological combatants". — LuckyR

You make a distinction between objectively sifting the evidence in order to arrive at truths undistorted by existing prejudices , and allowing oneself to be biased by presuppositions shared by a group based on ideological considerations, and then go on to claim that what defines the ‘Post Truth era’ is a propensity to do the latter.
I argue instead that all formations of empirical truth are and always have been socially constructed according to forms of meaning and value which change from era to era. This doesn’t mean that truth is ‘fake’, but that what you would call bias, distortion and prejudice are necessarily built into what it means to produce truth., that its meaning is contextually and social situated

What is different about the contemporary era compared with previous periods of history is not that it is Post Truth, but that a growing number of people are only now recognizing in our highly polarized times what has always been the case, but was until recently denied in favor of a ‘God’s eye’ view of truth, the inextricable relation between socially formed practices and the determination of truth. But they arrive at the wrong conclusion from the fact that two sides of a polarized political community interpret truth differently, insisting that only one side has arrived at the properly objective God’s eye truth , while the other side is succumbing to ideologically driven prejudice.

Agreed. And the polarization is due to economic pressures, not ideology — baker

Across the world we’re seeing the same pattern of a split between social traditionalists living mainly in low density rural areas and social progressives concentrated in densely populated urban centers. This split isn’t caused by economic pressures, since what those pressures are is subject to different interpretations depending on whether one is a traditionalist or a progressive, and the economy is only one of many issues that divide the two groups. For many on the right , social values are more important than the economy.

↪Joshs I'm not an American, but do you think there has been an increase in deceptive behavior from politicians in recent times? — Tom Storm

No, just an increase in polarization.

what distinguishes the Post Truth era is which entities qualify as "what should be trusted". — LuckyR

There is no such thing as a ‘Post Truth’ era, except as a fabrication of the media based on partisan politics. Ideological combatants throughout history have accused each other of falsification.

Moore made the claim that "Here is a hand". On a forum such as this, we might instead point out that you are now reading this post. Now if you find it difficult to doubt that you are now reading this sentence, then you might also grant things such as that there is a language in which it is written, that someone wrote it, that there are screens and devices and networks linking you to that writer, and so on. — Banno

I’m not sure whether or not you are making the same mistake Wittgenstein argued Moore did, by confusing a grammatical proposition with an empirical assertion. Let’s see if you are. The ‘certainty’ of ‘here is a hand’ is not the certainty of an empirical fact, but the relative certainty that a stable system of practices (language game , form of life) provides. If an alien species from another planet saw Moore with his raised hand, they might be just as certain as Moore that something with a specific meaning was taking place, but within their alien language game the sense of the event would be entirely different that it is for Moore. It would not be a question of doubting Moore’s assertion, but of his assertion being irrelevant to their perspective.

When you take your coffee cup and put it in the dishwasher, does it still exist? A realist might say that it either exists or it doesn't, and since we have no reason to think it has ceased to exist, then we can reasonably maintain that it still exists. On this view, there are at least two things in the world, the cup and the dishwasher.

On the other hand, the anti-realist might suppose that since the cup is in the dishwasher we cannot perceive it, and so cannot say for sure if it exists or not. They might conclude that at best we can say that it is neither true nor false that the cup exists. They would conclude that there is at least only one thing, the dishwasher — Banno

Someone who rejects both realism and anti-realism, as I believe Wittgenstein did, would say that a scheme of interconnected practices of meaning provides the intelligibility of the realist’s assumptions, that the cup’s persisting ‘reality’ only makes sense within this scheme, and that such schemes are potentially infinite.

If the philosopher believes he's on firm ground demanding to know how the psychologist knows what he claims to know, the psychologist believes himself to be on ground just as firm in examining the philosopher's motives for demanding justification. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm, this drive to examine motives for justification. Who do you suppose was among the earliest, and perhaps still most radical, thinkers to situate the meaning of philosophical knowledge by way of values, and values by way of motives, and motives by way of drives? I’ll give you a hint. He had a very large mustache. And he would have critiqued Freud’s drive model on philosophical grounds, by demolishing the philosophical presuppositions undergirding Freud’s approach.

Supposedly Einstein said that if you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it. II know that if I can't put an idea in my own words, I don't understand it. Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. Clearly you don't agree with that — T Clark

He also said that he chose physics over biology because of the complexity of the subject matter the latter deals with.
The ‘explain it to me like I’m a six year old’ line reminds me of the corporate mentality that argues anything worth saying should be sayable in one sentence. Of course they think this. It’s in the very nature of for-profit business that there exists a direct relation between demand for a product and the size of the population who recognize that product as useful and valuable. In other words, that product must tap into widely shared conventions of meaning and use. This is precisely the kind of thing that can be described in a sentence. What can’t be described in a sentence is a product which requires the initiation into a new way of life, and a new set of conventions.

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness.
— Joshs

I like the sound of this, but I have to ask for more clarity. A great novel can be shown to meld all three of these qualities, but does that make it philosophy? What about a beautiful prayer? Perhaps you would say that the missing element in both examples is explicitness. What, then, are the discursive tools by which explicitness comes to be? I'm nudging you toward taking the "rational inquiry" idea a bit more seriously. And let's remember that rationality is not univocal. Two of the philosophers I've gotten the most from, Gadamer and Habermas, spent their lives trying to formulate better versions of what it means to be rational, versions that would provide an escape from the crushing scientific rationalism of the 19th century — J

Habermas grounded rationality in a Kantian a priori, whereas Gadamer located the basis of reason in contingent discursive hemeneutical practices. I think leaving Habermas’s essentialism behind, and taking Gadamer’s practice-based approach further can help us to see why the attempt to separate philosophy from other disciplines on the basis of any formal properties or logics is ill-conceived. I think this attempt to fix a sovereign standpoint for philosophy is the flip-side of the equally ill-conceived attempt to locate a sovereign ground for empirical truth in the ‘facts of nature’. In fact, the two tend to imply each other. The manifest image of philosophical conceptualization and the scientific image of nature, the ideal and the real, belong to a Kantian-type idealism. After all, modern realism was Kant’s invention.

Practice-based accounts can allow us to avoid turning the rational tools of philosophy into a spinning in the void, divorced from the empirical nature it conceptualizes in language. Philosophical inquiry, like all modes of linguistic expression, is practical engagement with a world that is already organized as discursive cultural systems or patterns. We don’t first concoct linguistic concepts and then impose them on the world. Our use of language is already embedded in and formed on the basis of the system of real, material interactions that it belongs to. Any formal system of rationality or logic one wants to associate uniquely with philosophy will have no more claim to universality or primordiality than other contingent cultural practices. There is no way we can climb above these contextual practices, no way to locate a method of thinking that surveys or organizes them from sideways on.

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression.
— Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true — J

What do you mean by metaphysics? You dont consider a scientific paradigm to be a metaphysical stance? And given that logic and mathematics have been developed by both philosophers and scientists, I would say that their status can’t easily be placed with respect to the latter disciplines.

By high-fallutin do you mean technically complicated language, such as that used by educated professionals? Or do you mean bullshit masquerading as insight?
— Tom Storm

There's no reason it can't be both. In this particular case I think "bullshit masquerading as insight" is probably a bit strong. How about gilding the lily — T Clark

It would help if you could give some concrete examples of highfalutin language in philosophy. I’ll give some for you and you tell me if I’m off base. Many of my favorite philosophers (Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida) have been accused of writing in an obscurantist style. It has been suggested that this is a deliberate strategy to attract a cult-like following of initiates into what appears to outsiders as a secret society. Since I know the work of these writers very well, I will say that there isn’t a single word chosen by them that isnt preceded by an enormous amount of careful thought, becuase the aim is to capture the meaning of their their thoughts in words in a manner that is as faithful and precise as possible. I would go further and claim that in a deep sense, their concepts are more precise than the engineering vocabulary associated with your profession. Why do these philosophers tend to be accused of bullshit, obfuscation and obscurity? It’s pretty simple They are culture’s crystal ball, venturing into virgin territory of ideas, for which there is no established vocabulary. So they have to invent a new language, or use familiar language in strange ways, stretching and pulling it to say new things. Readers struggling to catch up with the difficult new ideas become discouraged and lapse into blaming the messenger’s style of expression rather than the novelty of the message.

It seems to me that the confusion of primordial underpinnings with science mostly come about by philosophers, including us, who come up with philosophical positions which aren't consistent with what we know from observation, including science. One prime example of this is the whole hard problem of consciousness. Some say that it is a problem that will never, can never, be resolved by a scientific approach. When I describe to them the kind of work psychologists, including cognitive scientists, are doing, they dismiss it out of hand — T Clark

Yes, I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles
that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression. The move from philosophical to scientific language is toward a thinner, more conventionalized and less synthetic account of the same or similar phenomena (Nietzsche vs Freud, Merleau-Ponty vs embodied cogntivism).

Also, you point out that some say "psychological concepts like ‘mental’ , ‘physical’ , ‘value’ and belief’ are confused derivatives of more fundamental truths." I would put it differently. I think I can make the case that philosophical concepts like "truth," "ontology," "objective reality," and "morality," are high-falutin, often confusing, ways of talking about human thinking and experience. — T Clark

I would add that empirical concepts are in their own way ‘high-fallutin’. But what does this mean? To me it means using terminology which doesn’t overtly take into account its linkage to meanings from other aspects of culture. The more richly and explicitly we reveal these interconnections, the less high-fallutin the language becomes.

Where I think I'd disagree -- I'm not sure how to differentiate, but I feel that both philosophy and science articulate their presuppositions in a rich and comprehensive manner. This is part of why they look similar. — Moliere

Give me any scientific theory, and I’ll show you how philosophical questions can reveal the metaphysical presuppositions making its assertions intelligible. This job of uncovering metaphysical commitments is not something that the sciences normally engage in , since by their nature they take for granted such presuppositions in order to do their work. This is what I mean by richness and comprehensiveness. Science by its nature stops short of exposing its underground plumbing.

And what you're inclined to say about what goes on down there, and about what people are doing who study what's on the ground, it's more and more likely to be bullshit, something that sounds good to you, all alone, a thousand feet above them, when you can no longer see what's down there in any detail — Srap Tasmaner

I could point out the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees by spending all one’s time on the ground. You could point out the opposite danger of losing sight of the grounding facts by seeing them from too great a distance. But does the philosophical-empirical distinction have to be understood in terms of breadth vs detail metaphors?
Dont the best philosophers through history also have a comprehensive knowledge of the sciences? For them, isn’t it less a question of sacrificing detail for the sake of breadth than of enriching the understanding of the details by supplying what is hidden from their gaze, the underground plumbing so to speak? Let’s take Husserl’s method of bracketing, for instance. By putting out of commission our knowledge of the detailed facts of science, he stays as close as possible to those details, while burrowing beneath them to reveal the presuppositions animating their sense.

You describe philosophical thought as united by a "mode of discourse," that features certain attributes, whereas psychology is characterized by "a set of presuppositions." This is quite similar to an idea Leontiskos was talking about earlier, that the lack of presuppositions may be what makes phil. unique. Are you also trying to make this distinction? — J

No, I don’t believe there can be philosophy without presuppositions. Philosophers arise out of a contingent culture which shapes the sense of the questions they ask and how they interpret the answers. For me the distinction between philosophy and psychology has only to do with the how richly and comprehensively those presuppositions are articulated.

I think it is reasonable to say that philosophy is the study of thought, beliefs, knowledge, value, which are mental phenomena - the structure and process of the conscious mind. As such, it is a branch of psychology.
— T Clark

Also, are you arguing that there is not a philosophy of mind and a psychology of mind? Given my position, why would that be a contradiction — T Clark

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness. One can make any kind of thinking in any disciple more or less philosophical by moving in one direction or another along this spectrum. So a psychologist can become more philosophical, more ‘meta’, by moving from cognitive psychology to philosophy of mind. Does this mean that philosophy is a branch of psychology? No, because there are many philosophers who define psychology as an empirical discipline, the scientific study of mental phenomena in all its guises and levels of focus ( cognition, emotion, sociality, biological ecology, neuroscience, genetics, etc).

What binds all these domains of study together as psychological is a shared acceptance of a set of presuppositions concerning what it means to be empirical, scientific, objective , natural and real. Those philosophers who don’t consider their mode of inquiry as belonging to psychology, who believe that disciplines like philosophy of mind (and writers like Daniel Dennett) ‘psychologize’ philosophy, argue that psychology forces us to confuse the primordial underpinnings of being and existence with the contingent results of a science. They may argue psychological concepts like ‘mental’ , ‘physical’ , ‘value’ and belief’ are confused derivatives of more fundamental truths that no longer belong to psychology, but are instead ontologically prior to it.

What you describe could also be taken as showing that philosophy is a trap: inquiry is in danger of getting stuck there, no longer producing knowledge. (Which, let's be honest ... — Srap Tasmaner

You feel that philosophy is longer producing knowledge? How long has this state of affairs been the case?

There are many other important and useful discourses besides the rational/philosophical. They may even lead to vital truths. — J

Even more to the point, there are many other useful
discourses WITHIN philosophy besides that of rationally generated consensus and the primacy of rationality itself.

Eventually, the chemist himself will have to reach for physics, because while reduction is a myth, and the laws of physics are not enough to do biochemistry, biochemistry is constrained by physics and you can eventually reach a level where the explanation for what happens and what doesn't comes not from chemistry but from physics. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s easy to say that in theory the higher order sciences reduce to an order below them, and all reduce to physics, but the reason this does not work out in practice is that the complexity of the phenomena which make the higher order sciences ‘higher’ in the first place tend to lead to innovations in theory which then eventually lead to an adjustment of the basic concept of the lower level science. For instance, until recently physics notoriously ignored the central importance of time for understanding the nature of physical phenomena. It took the influence of the ideas of evolutionary biology to trigger a transformation in thinking within physics.

I'm sure there are more versions. Add on if you like.
— frank
Neat topic.

Better to stop at Anscombe — Banno

Have you read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self?

↪tim wood I feel your pain, like half of America and about 90% of Australia, I'm vastly dissappointed by the re-election of DJT — Wayfarer

You may want to think twice about that percentage.

https://this.deakin.edu.au/culture/trumps-australia-why-are-more-australians-supporting-trump

philosophers have no business offering opinions within a scientific discourse
—

Dope. — Srap Tasmaner

How about opinions that directly challenge the presuppositions of a science? Heidegger’s ideas about emotion, and Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’s models of perception were decades ahead of the psychological sciences. Have you ever read Phenomenology of Perception?

agree that philosophy begins with a problem or with questions that need to be asked. I suppose amongst the problematics of Platonism was the nature of knowledge, the good, the true, the beautiful, the just, and such large and difficult-to-define questions. But also notice the significance of aporia in those dialogues - questions which can't be answered and for which no easy solution presents itself — Wayfarer

Notice further that framing the essential questions of philosophy in terms of the nature of knowledge, the good, the true, the beautiful and the just already poses the questions by way of a pre-understanding of what these concepts mean and constrains the direction of their answer, such as whether and in what sense they lead to aporia, and how to interpret the meaning of the aporia.

It's yet another field where we the plebs must defer to the experts, like we already do with scientists, doctors, lawyers etc. — goremand

Except that these days we’re beginning to discover that such supposed ‘experts’ get their expertise by dipping into cultural practices that we all participate in, so the knowledge they would like you to think to exclusive to their special elite is in fact a specialized version of knowledge already circulating widely through the larger society.

In any case, I stand by the initial point - that the absence of presuppositions is what was intended by epochē, both in Husserl and in the original skeptics. — Wayfarer

I’m not denying that. I would say that there is no such thing as a presuppositionless philosophy. If philosophy begins with questioning, it is also the case that to question is to already have in mind the matter about which one is inquiring. What opens up the space within which the matter appears as intelligible is prior to philosophy, and in relation to which philosophy has no more claim than do literature, poetry, music or science.

↪Joshs Probably not obscurantist enough for him to blather about — Wayfarer

He only seems obscurantist because you don’t understand him. That’s the curse of great philosophy. It takes hard work to gain the rewards.

Isn't there a relationship between not entertaining presuppositions, and the epochē of ancient skepticism, revived by Husserl? Recall that ancient and Pyrrhonian skepticism differed from modern skepticism by simply 'withholding assent from that which is not evident' and strictly attending to the quality of phenomena as they appear. — Wayfarer

Yes, and Heidegger critiqued Husserlian phenomenology for harboring its own presuppositions at the very moment that it was invoking a return to the ‘things themselves’.

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy.
— Joshs

They do, and the issue here is the nature of how they "put into question" those presuppositions. Is it possible to do this without invoking further philosophy -- as opposed to some allegedly pure scientific approach? That's what I'm doubting (and I bet you'd agree), though as I say, I don't think most scientists are engaged in some nefarious conspiracy to demolish philosophy with bad arguments. They're just doing their thing, and rarely get the chance to reflect on their presuppositions. — J

I think what we’re talking about here isn’t a dichotomy between something called science and something called philosophy , but a spectrum of explication. Philosophy isn’t a content of meaning to be invoked or not. It’s a dimension of discursive style which pertains to the degree of conventionality, richness, synthetic unity in a description . Any mode of explication can be more or less philosophical depending on where it locates itself on this spectrum.

And I would say that these cases like the neo-Freudian rely on philosophical thinking to debunk philosophical discourse, and therefore result in a kind of performative contradiction.
— Leontiskos

Yes, though many an honest scientist is probably unaware of doing this until it's pointed out. — J

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy. I suggest that it is mostly these specific philosophical presuppositions that psychologists , biologists or scientists in other fields are attacking when they critique philosophy. There are exceptions, such as Stephen Hawking’s blanket dismissal of philosophy in general, as if the past limitations in philosophical speculation precluded any new kind of philosophizing. That new brand of philosophy would only be ‘higher’ than the disprove of theoretical physics in the sense that it is able to enrich it , and even surpass it, by making explicit what is only implicit in the scientific theory. But then who’s to say that explicit thinking is ‘higher’ than implicit thinking? Does literature offer higher truths than music?

Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”
— Antony Nickles
This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity? — Ludwig V

Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is substituting a practice theory for a cognitivist account. Thinking isn’t in the head, it is in the interactive performances that co-determine both the person and their world via our patterns of engagement with each other.

↪Joshs - This is elsewhere referred to as deautomatization — Leontiskos

The use of magnets? Interesting.

There might be something specifically autistic about what Baggs is doing, but the phenomenology doesn't reduce to the autistic cognitive style which promotes stimming — fdrake

One way researchers have attempted to simulate savant skills in neurotypicals is by applying powerful magnets to the brain to impede more rapid processing of complex stimuli. Without the ‘distraction’ of this more complex mode of processing, it was found that subjects began to do the sorts of things savants excel at, in the way that savants do them, by bypassing the ‘normal’ conceptual routes. I suspect that non-autistics can shift into a state of mind that favors a stimming-type intensity of processing by a variety of means, such as hallucingens, which can predispose one form of processing over others , and sleep deprivation, which impairs concentration on high-level cognitive tasks. Perhaps Baggs was misdiagnosed as autistic, but her cognitive challenges nevertheless
enabled and reinforced the pre-conditions for robust stimming.

Indeed.
— Joshs

That strikes me as incredibly reductive. The specificity of Baggs' conduct has been dissolved into a broader glut of sensorially infused and creative sociality. — fdrake

Incredible indeed , oh the horror of it all. No, I was just too lazy to spell out the kinds of differences between autistic and neuro-typical cognition that can explain the preference for stimming on the part of autistics. Such as the difficulties the former have in rapid processing of complex stimuli. We all have to learn at our own pace , and that pace is dictated by a balance between novelty and familiarity. There is a direct connection between the less intense exposure to novelty set by stimming and the kinds of savant feats performed by the likes of Daniel Tammet, who can articulate pi to 22,00 places, which he does not via number crunching but by the unfolding of an imaginary landscape.