If I see an actual flower, the object I actual see
— Joshs

Why do you think that when you see an actual flower, you actually see something else? — Ludwig V

What I meant was that the idea of a spatial object as a persistingly self-identical thing enduring throughout changes in perspective is something we surmise, something we contribute to the phenomenon in front of us rather than something the world contributes. So what we see is a melding of conceptual expectation and what the world contributes, and the two sides are inextricably interwoven with each other.

Its objectivity is thus a socially constituted ideal.
— Joshs
I think that you misunderstand what objectivity is. It is something that happens irrespective of any socially constructed ideal — Ludwig V

Again, I’m thinking of objectivity as empirical objectivity. Following Husserl, this way of seeing objects is an idealization, The empirical object is something that no one actually sees, because it is a social construction derived from myriad subjective perspectives.

This just seems doubtful. I would expect that an infant sees what I see when it looks at a flower, despite it not having any sense of what is socially agreed upon. This concept would apply cross-culturally as well, lending support to the idea that we reach out to the flower to pick it not due to some inter-subjective, socially agreed upon basis, but because we think the flower it out past our hand ripe for picking — Hanover

I didn’t mean to suggest they a baby has to wait till it is informed of a social construct till it can recognize an object as a flower. What I meant was that the baby constructs the idea of a unitary object like a flower out of constantly changing perspectives, which it coordinates with its own movements. This personally synthesized construction
is not the same thing as the intersubjectively constructed empirical concept of flower, the identical flower for everyone. This ‘identical flower for all’ is something that no one actually sees, since it is an abstraction derived from multiple vantages.

As far as your question about what cognition would be like if emotions were removed is important because it raises the issue of artificial intelligence and robots. It is connected to the issue of sentience, because it is central to having an organic body. A computer doesn't cry, is not sensitive about what anyone says about it and doesn't experience sexual attraction — Jack Cummins

But then we have to ask what sense it makes to talk about what computers are, have or feel ‘in themselves’ , as though
there were such a thing as a computer self or personality (even if zombie-like) independent of human interactions with it. What I am suggesting is that our machines are appendages of us, like a nest for a bird or a web for a spider. The concept of a computer is only intelligible in terms of what we design and use it for. Without our aims, goals and purposes , which are intrinsically affective, a computer is a meaningless collection of parts. We couldnt say that on its own it calculates, because calculation is always for a purpose.

I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson.
— Joshs

Interesting! Thanks. :up: I hadn’t heard of him. Any suggestions for a starting point in his writing?
This book looks like an interesting combo of philosophy and psychology. — 0 thru 9

Feelings of Being is a good starting point, since it captures his fully developed notion of moods like grief and depression.

Matthew Ratcliffe
— Joshs

I'll be reading Rethinking Commonsense Psychology the next couple of months. I may rant about it at you. — fdrake

I look forward to your rant.

If I have an image of the flower in my mind after I close my eyes, I experience the phenomenal state of the flower with my eyes closed. If I open my eyes and that elicits a flower experience, then I then have that experience. Phenomenal states are brain created, often elicited by our senses, but not always. — Hanover

Or we could say that these are two types of phenomenological experience, experience given to us in distinctly different modalities. If I see an actual flower, the object I actual see is already shaped by my expectations, which I draw from memory. It is a concatenation or amalgam of expectations and the meager data that is given to me from the world. When I close my eyes I eliminate the data from the world ( which as I said is already concept-laden) and draw strictly from memory. In either case, the flower with its petals is not something there i. the world but a subjective construction. More precisely, the concept of flower is an intersubjectively constructed object. Its objectivity is thus a socially constituted ideal. We judge error and illusion in perception in relation not to a world as it is in itself but in relation to our constructed idealities, which, being relative, can always be other than how we now constitute them as objectively existing.

You will know if you read Stoic literature, that 'the passions' are something to be subdued, and that 'subduing the passions' is one of the marks of wisdom. I don't think they're praising callousness or mere indifference to suffering, but the ability to rise above feelings, emotions and moods. 'Constancy of temperament' was a highly prized virtue in the classics (reflected in the name 'Constance').


I wonder if what we call 'emotion' is in some way equivalent to what was meant by 'the passions' in those sources. I did learn, from practicing mindfulness meditation, that emotions always pass, and that's an important thing to learn. Because when you're feeling down, when you're possessed by negative emotions, which happens to all of us, it seems, in that state, that everything seems grey, in all directions. But once you learn that it is an emotion that will pass, it makes it easier to deal with. — Wayfarer

This take on the emotions seems to be the foil for Heidegger’s integrative approach to affect, feeling, mood and emotion:

people will reply:… Attunements-joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger-are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, 'feelings', are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant. They are merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events. Attunements-are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?”

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

We stated in a provisional and rough and ready manner that attunements are the 'presupposition' for, and 'medium' of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which irrupt then disappear. Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

You'd probably get a lot out of "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman-Barrett — fdrake

Feldman-Barrett’s alright, but predictive processing approaches are a bit behavioristically reductive for my taste. I find Matthew Ratcliffe’s work to be among the best of the current crop of writings on affectivity, mood and emotion. He combines the phenomenological work of Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger, the Pragmatism of James and Dewey and cognitive enactivist approaches like that of Evan Thompson.

our emotions can alert us to danger, show us our attachments, and help focus on things that are important in life. But emotions, if allowed to run unchecked can lead to us to our own destruction. Pain can lead us to danger or loss, but it can also lead us to down the road to torment and despair. Love can set us free, but also lead to paranoia or anguish. Desire can awaken us to our potential, or it can lead to greed and obsession. Anger can spur us into action, but it can also lead us to death or destruction. Fear can show us obstacles and help us plan, or it can paralyze us into inaction. Emotions are good if they are useful or beneficial- after that the emotions are more of a distraction from happiness than anything else.' — Jack Cummins

In the above quote, emotion is considered as some kind of substance that is added to the mix of mentation and behavior, as though we could imagine functioning without it. Emotion does this and that, adds this and that, provides us with this and that. I want to offer this question:Is there any aspect of cognitive function that can be made sense of if we imagine removing the thing we’re calling ‘emotion’? What if, instead of artificially extracting from experiencing some mysterious entity we label emotion and then asking about its nature, we abolish the distinction we have been making between affect, will and cognition and instead see affect as an inseparable dimension or aspect of all human functioning?

Contrary to ↪Joshs, if we commence by assuming that there is no possibility of communication on important issues, then we are throwing out the possibility of "ameliorating" the "violent breakdown in communication".

Again, we can come to understand that the rabbit is a duck-rabbit, and hence to see the point of view of those who only see the duck. Only where there is some potential for agreement is there also potential to avoid violence. — Banno

The impossibility of communication on important issues is a historical fact, which is to say, it is a product of historically
situated philosophical assumptions concerning the necessary preconditions for agreement. If, for instance, it is stipulated that agreement must be grounded in pre-existing states of affairs (i.e. that all individual points of view look out onto some aspect or other of the same pre-existing field which already contains ducks and rabbits), then agreement on many important issues will be impossible.
We have to allow that one point of view sees a rabbit, another a duck, a third a duck-rabbit, and a fourth a new form whose sense of meaning may not be available to the other three because it brings a new form of life into existence whether than representing a pre-existing form. To agree about the meaning of this new form, one must first enact it intersubjectively rather than simply discover it in the world. If we are having trouble enacting some other community’s new form of life, we can still respect its validity and legitimacy for them.
Requiring agreement to hook onto a same world for all forces outliers into the position of error and falsity.

I think I see what you are getting at. I would worry that this way of putting it seems to claim (or could be misinterpreted to claim) that we are infallible or that certain beliefs are infallible. Don't we have to acknowledge that error (I assume that's what "a disconnect between what is actual and what we think is actual" means) is always possible? The point is, we can recognize it and rectify it (in principle). — Ludwig V

The concerns you express here address our epistemic and empirical goals within the confines of our paradigmatic schemes, but those paradigmatic grounds for our beliefs are not themselves beliefs, so at this level the issue is not one of fallibility or error. Our paradigms are not epistemic hooks looking to grasp the actual, they are already actual. This does not mean that there no progress of paradigms, but this cannot be u destroy as a progress from error to truth.

Some thinking out loud:

Incommensurable is the word I'm tempted by :D

But then it seems to be too convenient, in a way. It depends upon just how radical is radical incommensurability, I think -- taking Kuhn's book sometimes it seems a matter of harsh disagreement, and sometimes it seems they inhabit different experiential worlds which in turn give the theories meaning which in turn explains their radical incommensurability. — Moliere

There are lots of degrees and levels of agreement within science, and just as many degrees and levels of incommensurability. Among participants in a scientific paradigmatic community, there need mot be unanimous agreement on conceptual definitions in order to work
productively together. I do think it can be helpful to conceive of normative discursive communities in terms of shared worlds, as long as we treat the idea of world as something like form of life or language game. In a shared world, my behaviors and your responses are mutually intelligible enough to allow for each of us to anticipate the other’s next moves in the game. Now let us say my scientific community undergoes a paradigm shift. Is our new shared world incommensurable with our old one, and if so, how are we then able to go back and forth between the old and new paradigm? I suggest what happens here is that in formulating the new way of thinking, at the same time we subtly reconstrue the sense of meaning of the old concepts such that we now see that old vocabulary in a different light. It is not as if we are able to make the old theory and the new one logically commensurable, but our redefining of the old terms in themselves makes it possible to form a bridge between the old and the new concepts. The old scheme becomes an inadequate or incomplete version of the new one as we retrospectively look back at it. Much the same thing happens in religious conversion. When look back at our old thinking, we implicitly reshape what the old notions were through the filter of the new ones.

Now let’s say we encounter someone who remains within the old way of thinking. We can share their world with them, maybe even consciously taking into account that we no longer conceive of the particulars of that old
world exactly in the way that we used to and the other still
does. But the bridge we created between the old and new doesnt exist for the other. Our new world is mostly invisible to them, at least as evidenced by the impossibility of sharing practices based on that new thinking.

But there are many other ‘worlds’ of practices that we CAN share with the other. We can participate with them in shared recreational activities, for instance. We can do the same with ‘alien’ species like dogs, when we play fetch with them. Whether we are ‘really’ understanding each other is not a question that need be asked as long as the game is flowing smoothly. Given that astrology makes use of concepts that are loose enough to be amenable to a wide variety of interpretations producing different practices among disparate communities, one can find those who consider themselves to have undergone a ‘conversion’ form astrological belief to astronomy, where for others astrology and astronomy can happily co-exist as distinct but not incommensurable worlds.

I think it’s important to take seriously the reality of radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, worlds, forms of life. The often violent breakdown in communication that incommensurability between ethico-political communities produces cannot be adequately ameliorated by consultation of a presumed single real world, even Davidson’s indirect one One needs to recognize that these multiple worlds of practices cannot be reduced to a single correct one., even if we believe such reduction is only an asymptotic goal never to be reached.

Isn't the limit something that is imposed on us from the things themselves? (I.E. imagine a perfect triangle-square) We cannot impose that limit on ourselves at will, it is shown as something foreign to our will. — JuanZu

In the case of the constitution of a real spatial object via the synthesis of perspectival adumbrations, passage to the limit never succeeds in fulfilling the idea of the object as a unitary identity. We strive for this fulfillment through our continued interest in the object , but the self-identical object always remains transcendent to what we actually experience. In the case of a geometric ideality like a straight line or circle, passage to the limit assures an exactitude because mathematical shapes are free idealities, whereas real spatial objects are bound idealities.

Mathematical idealization is free, unbound (within the strict limits of its own repetition); no contextual effects intervene such as was the case in the attempt to constitute a real spatialobject. Contextual change implies change in meaning, and a mathematical ideality can be manipulated without being animated, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification. Such an ideality can be repeated indefinitely without alteration (passage to the limit), because its meaning is empty. In the case of a bound ideality, what repeats itself as self-identical returns to itself as `the same' subtly differently each time; the immediate effects of contextual change ensure that alteration is intrinsic to the repetition of an intentional meaning. Put differently, we impose the real unity of a spatial object via intention acts, but can never fulfill this intention. We likewise impose the ideal unity of an identically repeatable geometric shape through intentional acts. But in this case we succeed in fulfilling its exact and universal reproducibility because it is an empty , unbounded iteration.

So we inhabit a series of contingent 'domains' which we can explore through our shared presuppositions or rules? Which means that we do not access Truth/Reality but shared truths/realities - frames which are without foundation, are relational and context dependent. A meta-narrative version of reality is not something even recognisable from this position. We inhabit forever preconditions for belief and doubt, but never reality itself. Can you expand on this or correct my take? — Tom Storm

I think your summary captures the idea. The meaningful sense of what is true and what is false is only coherent relative to a background intelligibility that orients us in terms of what is at stake and what is at issue for us, and this background grounding shifts over time as our purposes change. Lee Braver puts it this way:

…this lack of justification does not rob thinking of its legitimacy; rather, it makes certain factors and structures “groundless grounds.” The important point about this phrase is that both terms are in effect: while the grounds of all thinking lack the kind of foundation philosophers have long dreamt of, and thus are groundless, they still function as grounds for finite creatures like us. (Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds ;A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger)

Wittgenstein likens this relationship between the fast dynamics of ascertaining proportional truth that play out within larger frames of grounding, and the slower movement of the grounding frames, to the waters of a river and the underlying river bed.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.

97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other. (On Certainty)

Since we are talking about an internal relationship that is deduced from elements of an object that differs in its identity from the mind. That is, in order to reduce it to a psychological act you would have to express the internal relationship in terms of a relationship of psychic elements. — JuanZu

Husserl analyzed the origin of geometry in terms of a historical genesis, imaging the proto-geometer as someone who needed to strive toward more and more abstractive forms out of practical needs.

"In the life of practical needs certain particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always aimed at the production of particular preferred shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness. First to be singled out from the thing-shapes are surfaces—more or less "smooth," more or less perfect surfaces; edges, more or less rough or fairly "even"; in other words, more or less pure lines, angles, more or less perfect points; then, again, among the lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces, straight lines, and points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are undesirable for many kinds of practical interests. Thus the production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) always plays its role in praxis. So also in cases where just distribution is intended. Here the rough estimate of magnitudes is transformed into the measurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts."

“Out of the praxis of perfecting, of freely pressing toward the horizons of conceivable perfecting "again and again/' limit-shapes emerge toward which the particular series of perfectings tend, as. toward invariant and never attainable poles. If we are interested in these ideal shapes and are consistently engaged in determining them and in constructing new ones out of those already determined, we are "geometers." In place of real praxis—that of action or that of considering empirical possibilities having to do with actual and really [i.e., physically] possible empirical bodies—we now have an ideal praxis of "pure thinking" which remains exclusively within the realm of pure limit-shapes. Through a method of idealization and construction which historically has long since been worked out and can be practiced intersubjectively in a community, these limit-shapes have become acquired tools that can be used habitually and can always be applied to something new—an infinite and yet self-enclosed world of ideal objects as a field for study.

Like all cultural acquisitions which arise out of human accomplishment, they remain objectively knowable and available without requiring that the formulation of their meaning be repeatedly and explicitly renewed. . It is understandable how, as a consequence of the awakened striving for "philosophical" knowledge, knowledge which determines the "true," the objective being of the world, the empirical art of measuring and its empirically, practically objectivizing function, through a change from the practical to the theoretical interest, was idealized and thus turned into the purely geometrical way of thinking. The art of measuring thus becomes the trail-blazer for the ultimately universal geometry and its "world" of pure limit-shapes.

What makes geometric idealities identically transmissible form person to person and culture to culture is their rootedness in the construction of numeration, in which we abstract away everything meaningful about a collection of objects except their identity as an empty unit, for the purposes of iterating the ‘same thing different time’. This empty enumeration at the heart of geometric idealities makes the latter ideal rather than real.

I don't understand why you think I take the position that "evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real." Our interaction with the rest of the world and its results are the best evidence we have of the real. — Ciceronianus

I didnt explain myself very well. I meant that this is a position I assumed you would not take. But it’s worth examining the consequences of rejecting such a path. Going back to Descartes, the belief at that time that the world offers itself up to us in its unvarnished truth only when we use our faculties of reason correctly was accompanied by the anxiety that evil liars and manipulators could plunge unsuspecting innocents into a 17th century version of the Matrix. All an evil genius would have to do is take advantage of the fact that the world that appears to us doesn’t have the power by itself to reveal its true nature, it needs our help via our proper use of rational faculties. Perhaps all Descartes succeeded in demonstrating to his peers is that those faculties are adept enough to make his doubt- based thought experiments seem ludicrous. And yet it did highlight a common assumption of the era, which is that the difference between truth and falsity hangs entirely on the functioning of a rather arbitrary mechanism of logical cogitation.

By the time we get to Peirce, the thinking has shifted in favor of a more equal participation of the material world in the production of truth, thanks to his absorption of Hegelian dialectic. Rationality is not dependent entirely on the skills of a solipsistic cogito, but is intersubjectively produced through interactions with the world. The Matrix scenario no longer makes sense given the dependence of truth on pragmatic interaction, so evil liars become less of a threat.

But still with Peirce we have to worry about situations in which we fail to gain purchase on truth:

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question. That truth consists in a conformity to something independent of his thinking it to be so, or of any man’s opinion on the subject.

The independence of that truth produces anxiety that we might fall victim to hallucination, madness, illusion. We doubt the reality of our world, which is different than saying we doubt that there is such a thing as a real world. That would be self-contradictory, given that doubting one thing is only possible against a wider backdrop of certainty.

But for Peirce as well as Descartes that certainty rests ultimately on faith, faith that whether we have gained proper access to it or not, there are intrinsic objective truths that apply to the world. For the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, faith is no longer needed in order to ground certainty in the existence of the world. They have freed themselves of the anxiety that has accompanied all belief and evidence based foundations of the really true. For them it can never be the case that a disconnect exists between what is actual and what we think is actual, a source of fear that illusion and error could cloud our apprehension of what is true.
We always already find ourselves ensconced within one language game or another, one or another form of life providing the frame of intersubjectively shared certainty within which we can agree or disagree on what is true or false. The frame itself is not a belief but an unquestioned prerequisite and precondition for belief or doubt.

:100:

And don't forget George Berkeley, the Irish priest who thought material things were just malarkey. God saved us all in his thinking as well.
I’m with Peirce in thinking that we shouldn't doubt in philosophy what we don't doubt in our hearts (which I take to refer to how we act and what we do, regardless of what we may say). . — Ciceronianus

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Peirce buttressed his epistemic realism with a belief in God. I should also mention that Dewey, James and Mead ‘doubted’ the grounding of Peirce’s ‘pragmaticism’.

So although the philosophers in question may figure something out to remedy their "doubt" the question remains why they "doubt" in the first place, which it seems comes down to a belief that we just are incapable of knowing by nature. — Ciceronianus

And you are arguing that we are capable of knowing. And what is knowing? It would seem that for you it is dependent on a process of weighing evidence, of having a belief, theory, expectation validated by reference to the world around us. I mentioned earlier that your own grounding of everyday knowledge in assured belief may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies. The doubt I have in mind is not a denial that we can know things through evidence-based methods, but a doubt that belief-validation is the fundamental basis of everyday understanding. There is remarkable agreement between the later Wittgenstein and your pal Heidegger on this, as Lee Braver explains:

For Heidegger,

“…nothing exists in our relationship to the world which provides a basis for the phe­nomenon of belief in the world. I have not yet been able to find this phenomenon of belief. Rather, the peculiar thing is just that the world is “there” before all belief. The world is never experienced as something which is believed any more than it is
guaranteed by knowledge. Inherent in the being of the world is that its existence needs no guarantee in regard to a subject. . . . Any purported belief in it is a theoretically
motivated misunderstanding. This is not a convenient evasion of a problem. The question rather is whether this so-called problem which is ostensibly being evaded
is really a problem at all.”

It’s not, of course, that we don’t believe in the world, but rather that belief is an inappropriate way of cashing out our usual being-in-the-world. Wittgen­stein gives an uncannily similar assessment of the foundational framework within which all of our actions and thoughts take place, but which itself does not belong in the arena of reasoning, justification, and belief:

“the language-game . . . is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unrea­sonable). It is there—like our life.”

There are two good reasons why we are under no obligation to dem­onstrate the validity of our belief in the external world: first, as discussed above, because the world is not external; and second, because we don’t believe in it. Not because we’re skeptical, but because our relationship takes place at a much deeper level, so that to approach it in epistemic terms is to commit a category mistake.

“To have faith in the Reality of the “external world,”
whether rightly or wrongly; to “prove” this Reality for it, whether adequately or in­adequately; to presuppose it, whether explicitly or not—attempts such as these . . .
presuppose a subject which is proximally worldless or unsure of its world, and which must, at bottom, first assure itself of a world.” (Heidegger)

It seems to me you’re trying to arrive at the conclusion these two reach without taking the extra step they take in bypassing epistemic belief entirely. But then, the price you pay for taking this step may not be worth it to you. By giving up epistemic belief as the ultimate basis of knowing in favor of language games, you eliminate skepticism concerning the existence of the world, but you turn that world into a place of relativism. After all, if evidence is no longer the adjudicator of the real, then my culture’s world doesn’t have to jibe with your culture’s world. One doesn’t doubt one’s own world , but doubts that this world is the same one as another’s, and doubts that the world as it is for me now is the same one that I will
comprehend at a later date. One might wonder why anyone would find such a philosophy appealing. From an ethical point of view, while it destroys the idea of a ‘same’ world of universal truths, it opens up a path toward tolerance and empathy toward those with alien values that is not available to common sense realist thinking about ethics.

It seems to me that the view that we can never know the extent to which we (I don't think our minds are separate from us) make contact with the rest of the world is far more radical than the view that we do. The latter is based on what actually takes place to our knowledge when we interact with the rest of the world; the former is based on the belief that what takes place when we do so doesn't matter. What actually happens when we interact with the "external world" is apparently of no value. — Ciceronianus

I think that what actually happens when we interact with the world is taken into account by all of the philosophies which
you accuse of affectation in their doubting. This is why they all come up with explanations for why the world makes sense to us. For Descartes God ensures that we have rational facilities which allow us to tell truth from error in our dealings with things. For Kant, it was our innate categories which steered us in the right direction. You undoubtedly have your own explanation as to why we can reliably make sense of our relations with the world. I’m assuming you jettison (doubt) divinely-based a prioris of rationality in favor of empirically-based, biological foundations.

You’ll notice that in order to assert whatever new and improved ground for reason a philosopher is embracing, they have to show why the previous era’s assumptions should be placed in doubt. For instance, although Descartes may have done an awkward job of it , he needed to place in doubt the basis of medieval assumptions concerning knowledge in order to advance his alternative. Similarly, once you put Descartes’ divine source of cogitation into doubt, you take away his justification for rationality. And once you place into doubt Kant’s transcendental categories, you need a new basis for the relation between our conceptual schemes and the world. Your own pragmatically-based grounding of everyday knowledge may be susceptible to doubt on the part of certain contemporary philosophies and psychologies.

When we say we can't know what the world really or actually, I think we make certain assumptions, the primary of which is the assumption that there is something that is real behind what we experience which can't be determined. Something hidden from us because of our nature. It's a kind of religious view, perhaps. — Ciceronianus

It’s a metaphysical view which formed the basis of thinking for the sciences until recently. It also lends support to particular religious perspectives. The metaphysics dependson the concept of substantiality. Mind and matter are composed of substance. To be a substance is to have intrinsic content, qualities, attributes that persist as self-identical, independently of their interactions with other aspects of the world. Since the mind, with its intrinsic , substantial qualities, differs from the substantial stuff of the external world, its representations of the world will always leave doubt concerning what remains intrinsic to external objects, and thus hidden from the mind’s eye. The question will always be left open as to what extent the mind makes contact with external substance. We only escape this doubt when we cease to assume the idea of intrinsic substance, and opt instead for a radical interconnectedness of subject and object ( Hegelian dialectics, phenomenology, pragmatism, hermeneutics).

First contraceptive pills came to the market in 1960.

That was a medical advance that had an impact of it's own, even if other societal changes did matter (as for example condoms have been around for quite a long time) — ssu

It certainly did. On the other hand, what sort of pill do you think influenced this song lyric from the band The Byrds?

"Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?

All my two-dimensional boundaries were gone,
I had lost to them badly,
I saw that world crumble and thought I was dead,
But I found my senses still working.

And as I continued to drop through the hole,
I found all surrounding,
To show me that joy innocently is,
Just be quiet and feel it around you.

And I opened my heart to the whole universe,
And I found it was loving,
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made,
Scientific delirium madness.

I will keep falling as long as I live,
Ah, without ending,
And I will remember the place that is now,
That has ended before the beginning ...

Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?"

The skepticism that questions the "external" world (as if we were not already world) would be, in a certain sense, the closure feigned by the subject in the absolutely immanent monad. A subject who believes he can distinguish himself absolutely from something else that he calls the "external world."… I claim a meaning of "objectivity" that is discovered by the impossibility of closure of the subject in the monad. This impossibility is what grounds the theoretical activity of the subject and forces him to be oriented to an other (which is also the world), including himself as another in the case of self-knowledge. — JuanZu

You apparently consider Kant to be a proponent of this latter kind of objectivity. But doesn’t Kant ‘s thinking, in its own way, lead to skepticism? Doesn’t he retain a gap between the thing in itself and our concepts?

The civil rights movement was the only substantive thing about the 1960s counterculture. Everything else was fluff. We are a far cry from all the drugs, wars and politicians of the 6070s, but the civil rights are here to stay. — Merkwurdichliebe

To me the politics was the least interesting aspect of the counterculture. What fascinated me were the new philosophical, spiritual, social and sexual attitudes it spawned.

I think the 2 biggest causes of the 1960s counter culture were the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights — Relativist

A central element of the counter culture was the rise of the hippies. The epicenter of the hippie counterculture in the U.S. was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and to a lesser extent NYC’s East Village. The hippies were generally apolitical and weren’t protesters. So while the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement helped to draw people to the hippies, their origins have to do more with a combining of the Beat philosophy of the 1950’s and the inspiration of lsd and other psychedelic drugs, along with rock and roll.

Is there not in all philosophy and science an intention of truth, of objectivity, of universality of discourse? Therefore, isn't the skeptic's doubt a gesture in a certain sense that is anti-philosophical and anti-scientific? Doesn't it necessarily fall into the liar's paradox? Doubting the world would be like cutting the branch on which I am sitting, waiting for the tree to fall and not the branch. — JuanZu

Isnt it precisely the intention to objectivity that lends itself
to skepticism? Since Descartes the modern formulation of the subject-object relation depends on a gap that courts doubt.

These things exist through a sort of consensus, or consensual understanding, and they aren't simply arbitrary as they have some kind of foundation in our nervous systems. When you feel shame, for example, you blush and you can feel it right down to your bones, it affects you physically. This isn't simply an imaginary or arbitrary phenonemon, and it's not merely about preferences or an intellectual exercise — GRWelsh

Don’t imaginary phenomena and fictive stories express themselves in terms of bodily feelings? Are you saying we are pre-wired physiologically for the reinforcement of certain moral attitudes? Or is it rather that such somatic manifestations are merely expressions of socially constituted preferences? ( We blush because we are embarrassed, we are embarrassed because we construe situations in a certain culturally and personally contingent way so as to feel shame) . Is there an intellectual
exercise which is not accompanied by appropriate affective tonality?

Well, but that's just it -- you don't. We stipulate that your listener can't tell the difference. You may have the intention, but it's not expressed. BTW, I agree that we're going to need some appeal to intention as a way of explaining what's going on, but I'm not sure a hardcore OL proponent would — J

Is the issue here that if we stipulate word use as strictly shared , then we have no way to explain hidden meaning and personal point of view? Wittgenstein certainly wouldn’t claim that word use is identically shared meaning.

Let’s take Ken Gergen’s social constructionist take on Wittgenstein:

“Each of the numerous ways in which I may respond will attribute or lend to your utterance a specific kind of meaning. The utterance has no commanding presence in itself. Its meaning is revealed only in the manner of my response--in the coordination between my response and your utterance. Still, we should not conclude that I create your meaning. For my responses are not in themselves meaningful or, rather, they are not full of meaning ready for transfer. Absent the utterance of your proposals, my seeming acts of disagreement lapse into nonsense.”

Gergen makes room for lying by arguing that the liar is trying to navigate between two disparate discursive communities. The lie results from their being alienated from one community. The above quote, however, still is true of the liar’s words even though their interlocutor understands their sense differently than the liar intends them.

The meaning of a word is its linguistic use. That's what Wittgenstein tries to show in his Philosophical Investigations. How can meaning be anything else?
— Michael

Easily. If I promise you something but don’t mean it – that is, I’m lying – this use is indiscernible (in that moment, and assuming a talented liar) from a sincere promise. So what makes the difference in meaning? Indeed, our aggrieved “ordinary language” response to such a situation, if it's revealed, is, “You didn’t mean it!” So what’s going on here? — J

My intention to lie is different from the use of my words in discourse. In the moment of my promise to you , I express my intention to lie, but the specific meaning of my lying words only emerges for me in the actual interaction with you as you respond to my words. It doesn’t matter that you take my words differently than I do. For both of us, the interaction determines the use of our words.

Phenomenology insists there are objects in the world that are not me/ Itis just that when one thinks in the phenomenlogical attitude and out of the naturalistic one, the world becomes a very different place. — Astrophel

It certainly does. How would you interpret the meaning of transcendence as Husserl uses it to refer to such entities as spatial objects? For instance, when he says that a real object like a ball is transcendent to the various perspectives of it that we actually see? Does he mean the ball is external to the constituting ego, or that we constitute its transcendence via an idealizing gesture immanent to the ego?

Again, pain, joy and all of the ooo's and ah's and ughs of our existence have this moral dimension such that when such a value is in play, we are not dealing with mere social constructs. — Astrophel

No, we’re dealing with personal constructs, which to say that emotional pain and pleasure are inextricably bound up with the breakdown of our constructs to make sense out of the chaos of events. Moral emotions like anger and guilt express our struggles to cope with the changes in others and ourselves which take us by surprise, which force us to choose between a sweeping overhaul of our ways of understanding them and trying to put the genie back in the bottle by demanding conformity to our original expectations. Unfortunately most approaches to morality take the latter route.

Got a phone or internet connection? Someone who believed in moral realism made that.

A car or drive on public roads? Someone who believed in moral realism made that.

Ever used a band-aid? Been to public school? Read a book? Watch a YouTube video? Eat anything beyond a poorly cooked hunk of raw animal flesh? Yup. Provided by a moral realist. — Outlander

You’re conflating nihilism and ‘nothing matters’ sentiments with moral relativism. I’m not a moral realist, and yet I believe strongly in moral progress. In fact I dont think it’s possible to achieve optimum social harmony until we jettison moral realism in favor of ways of ethical thinking that aren’t dependent on blame and culpability, which are presupposed by moral realism.

↪Michael ↪Michael The only difference is that some sentences use "is" and some use "ought", and that this verb indicates how we are using the word: the statements which use "is" have a direction of fit from the words to the world. What we say is made true or false because of the states of affairs of the world. It doesn't get much more specific than "states of affairs", I believe, unless we want a metaphysical exposition of facts — Moliere

In trying to relate the logical, propositional view with a psychological perspective, I start from the thought that ‘ought’ and ‘should’ arise where there is an indeterminate situation, with at least two outcomes being possible. In science, when we say a certain outcome ought to ensue, we mean that it is statistically likely given our knowledge of the facts involved. When we say a moral outcome ought to ensue, we dont mean one outcome is more likely than the alternatives, but that we prefer one outcome over the others. Where things get tricky from a psychological perspective is when we compare the grounds for our moral preference with the grounds for considering one empirical outcome more likely than another. Even if we believe that moral preferences can be justified on the basis of something more than whim, the social realities we might argue bind our moral preferences ( people shouldn’t happily torture dogs) would seem to be a different category than the empirical realities binding our scientific oughts. But is this distinction justified? If we say the direction of fit for empirical oughts is from the word to the world, aren’t we forgetting that the world we are relying on is already defined on the basis of the social reality of a discursive paradigmatic scheme? So it seems in both the case of the empirical ‘is’ and the moral ‘ought’ , we are relying on a grounding in a social reality that is itself the product of a pragmatic, contingent coordination of values.

A buddhist thinker likens the passage of spirit from one form to the next like the transmission of fire between two pieces of wood… All things being equal, would you rather trust the ethic of someone whose actions are premised around the belief that, when you're dead you're gone. Or someone who believes in the idea of an ongoing responsibility for deeds? — Pantagruel

China has the largest buddhist population in the world, but this doesn’t seem to have prevented them from also being the world’s highest emitter of carbon, surpassing the U.S. So much for ongoing responsibility for deeds.

I think what you say may be correct in the case of Kuhn's incommensurability /"conceptual schemes". Scientists construct models of how the world may be beyond the limitations of direct observation. It’s not just about fitting labels to observations; scientific models operate in the opposite way too in the sense that they stipulate what can and might happen in certain situations. We try to make sense of observations by constructing models of worlds which is not directly observable. Different scientists may happen to be drawn to different models that say completely different things about the world — Apustimelogist

I’m inclined to say that for Kuhn it’s not a question of a theoretical scheme, or an aspect of it, being beyond the limits of direct observation, but of direct observation being in itself an element of discursive practice. What we observe cannot be divorced from methods of measure and apparatus of observation. They are intrinsic to the meaning of what is directly observed. This is where Davidson gets confused, I think. He understands schemes as either fitting or organizing “sense data, surface irrita­tions or sensory promptings”. While it is certainly true that for Kuhn scientific practices and theories organize their subject matter, the content they organize does not consist of such stuff supposedly external to discourse.

Joseph Rouse puts it this way:

“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant “objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. The practice itself, however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted

From my perspective, what people like Wittgenstein and Quine seemed to do is take away the foundation out from underneath meaning and justification in both language and knowledge. Under these perspectives, everything becomes about practise but there becomes no fact of the matter about the reasons for people's behavior. The way forward from there then seems to be learning empirically, scientifically exactly why and how people behave, use language, learn, perceive, how brains work, etc. I've actually always thought these philosophers (Kuhn too) feel like they resonate amicably with the brain and mind sciences. — Apustimelogist

Isnt the upshot here, the concept so difficult for many to grasp, that conceptual schemes don’t represent a pre-given world but enact a world? That is to say, the reason we can’t link different schemes back to the one ‘same’ world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. Rather than funneling back to a unitary source, they are themselves the sources of new differentiations, new objects and worlds of meaning.

I do think there was a strangely fast break in the 60s, and though that decade is definitely the focus of many documentaries, etc. I think that the rapid cultural shift that happened can't be overstated. It is fascinating and lends itself to philosophical questions as to how much impact an event can have in the broader culture. Is it more causation or more correlation? Without going too much into how much any event can be considered a "cause", I would propose that the Kennedy assassination at least correlated strongly with a radical cultural shift that came immediately after. — schopenhauer1

I think it was mainly the baby boomers driving that rapid change. I also think that the best way to chronicle the transformation is through the evolution of rock music, which dictated attitudes, fashion and politics. Between 1962 and 1969 rock music reinvented itself on a yearly basis. Given the fact that the oldest boomers were in their late teens when Kennedy was assassinated, it’s not surprising that 1964 seems to herald a sharp acceleration of musical and cultural change. After all, innovators like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were just starting out in 1962, and reached their creative peak around 1966. I think it’s pure coincidence that this seems to come on the heels of the assassination.

Obviously, if we're to believe the official story, we must also believe in X-men's Nightcrawler as the shooter. But the members of this forum seem to be okay with official stories — Vaskane

Humans arent as clever as conspiracy theorists think. Can you think of a single conspiracy that was able to keep their secret for 60 years?

it's much the same point as Wittgenstein made in On Certainty; one might doubt something, but one cannot sensibly doubt everything; since then one must doubt the very stuff that makes doubt possible.

One can sort the shirts in the cupboard in a different way, but that would remain a sorting of the shirts. There would still be shirts, and so commonality. Two different ways of sorting the cupboard are not incommensurate. So one cannot make sense of incompatible schema in this way. — Banno

Yes, the meaning of the shirts already bound up with the integrated set of pragmatic relations that includes what they are being used for and how and where they are stored. In relation to this, I understand Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions as pragmatic presuppositions on which something like the meaning of a shirt hinges. Doubt, unworkability and breakdown get their intelligibility from within a totality of relevance uniting particulars on the basis of a network of ‘in order to’. But this totality of relevance isn’t grounded by some link to an external cause. The causes are within the totality and the totally is perspectival.

If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences.
— Joshs

Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but let’s be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science — J

When I say ‘concerned with’ , I don’t mean the way scientists have traditionally explained what they are doing when they do science. A central aspect of Husserl’s project was to show how we construct the idea of a world external us and then live naively within that construction, making the constructed the ground for the construing process. But the external is internal to the construing process.
m

it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, it’s no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isn’t observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy! — J

You should check out physicist Karen Barad’s ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ for an alternate reading. She argues, updating Bohr, that every aspect of the universe is observer-dependent, but this agency is not restricted to living observers.

Do you think that the 60s counterculture in America would have played out the way it did if Kennedy was not assassinated? Clearly there is a sharp cultural divide between the 60s prior to 1964 and after. The mid and then precipitously in the late 60s, the counterculture became more prominent. This went surely hand-in-hand with the evolution of various things- Civil Rights Movement, the beatniks (or just the "Beats" were existential writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and can perhaps be associated with 20s writers like Hesse, Elliot, etc.). — schopenhauer1

It might have been the biggest cultural transformation that took place in history in the shortest amount of time between the years of 1963-1969. I'm trying to think of a time where more change could have occurred in that short amount of time in terms of social mores, economic and social legislation, and forms of dress and speech. Perhaps the 20s comes close. — schopenhauer1

Perhaps the Kennedy assassination was as much a symptom as a cause of the rapid changes that went down in the 1960’s. A feeling of impending unhingedness was in the air already in 1960, hinted at in popular entertainment via movies like Psycho, and 1962’s Manchurian Candidate. The Twilight Zone was an interesting example. Its power to disturb depended on conformist assumptions carried over from the 1950’s of a single reality. To venture into the terrain of alternate realties, to be a freak, was to descend into terrifying chaos. 10 years later this clinging to the one true reality had been defeated. The counterculture motto was to proudly let one’s freak flag fly.

I would not underestimate the role of lsd in catalyzing and accelerating this shift in mindset from conformity to the embrace of weirdness. Lsd was legal until 1966, and in the the early ‘60’s was given to many volunteers on the West Coast as part of CIA mind control research. The writer Ken Kesey was one of these volunteers, and it changed his life. Tom Wollfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test chronicled how the relatively small 1950’s beatnik counterculture was ‘mass produced’ for a generation of baby boomers through the formation of the hippie counterculture centered around San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and Kesey’s merry pranksters . The perfect vehicle for spreading the gospel of lsd was rock music. The acids tests, one of the origins of the modern rock concert, were wild gatherings replete with a giant vat of Kool- aid laced with lsd (unbeknownst to some attendees). Psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead cut their teeth on these events and spread the gospel to the hinterlands through AM radio. Many prominent figures claimed that lsd changed their entire way of looking at the world. Among those was Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, who was convinced that dosing all of the world’s political leaders would end war. The worldviews of John Lennon and George Harrison were so radically transformed by the drug that they feared they could no longer relate to Paul McCartney, which induced him to try it.
The documentary Berkeley in the 60’s has a scene in which it becomes apparent that the old school political activists at Berkeley have suddenly become ‘psychedelicized’. A narrator recounts how they went from singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’, marking the rise of a hybrid of activist and hippie, the Yippies, a melding of Berkeley politics and Haight Ashbury counterculture.

I don’t think lsd in itself was responsible for the profound changes in ways of thinking that happened in that decade. Rather , it acted as a source of inspiration for some of those who were already headed in that direction. The Berkeley documentary articulates this well. It was a generation looking to find themselves, and over the course of that decade they became self-consciously aware. For instance, initially, the goals of campus activists were restricted to narrow changes within the system. They saw themselves as connected linearly with previous generations of leftists. But over time they realized that what they were onto was a sweeping rethinking of all values, political, aesthetic, social , sexual and spiritual, touching on all aspects of life. Lsd can help loosen attachments to old ways of thinking, but only if one is already wanting to go there.
It’s ironic that younger generations now associate baby boomers with right wing thinking, which reflects the fact that only a small percentage of baby boomers at gatherings like Woodstock were really committed to countercultural ideals.