Considering that we only get our knowledge about the external world through our senses, it seems very cavalier for Hegel to write that we need not concern ourselves about the role our senses play in understanding the external world. — RussellA

Hegel is not denying the use of our sense organs. As I see it, you are locked in a particular metaphor so that you can't yet make sense of alternative conceptualizations without this metaphor.

We need sense organs, yes, but we aren't gremlins trapped in pineal glands. We aren't even our brains. We who do philosophy and science together are enmeshed and even products of semantic-rational norms. I claim that it's this normative linguistic center of rationality that makes indirect realism absurd.

I agree. As an Indirect Realist I agree with Searle that the experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain.

Unfortunately, many who argue against Indirect Realism don't accept this. They believe that Indirect Realism requires that there must be something in the brain that is interpreting incoming data, something they often call a homunculus. — RussellA

Recently I've criticized both versions. In one version, there's a pineal gremlin looking at the screen. In the other version the gremlin is the screen. The self 'is' sensations and ideas. But, while this is better, it entirely misses the normative function of the self. It fails to explain the unity of the reasoning voice, that these sensations and ideas cohere, have structure and direction, are stretched between the past and the future with memory and anticipation.

I agree that we rationally and directly talk about the world. — RussellA

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The question is, where is this "world". — RussellA

It's all around us. It's the world. It's the one philosophers talk about and make claims about. Even people who want to talk about their private images of world are still talking as if those images were also 'in' the world, even if invisible to all others.

Even if just as an experiment, start with what philosophy thinks it is doing and work backwards. What must be true (what must we assume) for the 'game' of philosophy to make sense ? We have to be talking rationally in a shared language about a shared world. To talk rationally is to tell a story that does not contradict itself. Look for what a self is there, as a storyteller who is not allowed to disagree with itself. Look at what we are doing now, keeping track of what we and the other has said, both of us appealing to reason, careful to make only legitimate inferences. As Hegel might put, there is a we at the foundation of the I, even if it's 'just' cultural software. And what do I do but argue for the adoption of new inferential norms --- try to convince you that Q legitimately follows from P, or that conceiving the self in way X leads to contradiction. In other worlds, selves are coherent inferential social avatars ---or something like that....

Also bumped into these Dennett quotes which remind me of Heidegger / Dreyfus:

Competence without comprehension is the way of life of the vast majority of living things on the planet and should be the default presumption until we can demonstrate that some individual organisms really do, in one sense or another, understand what they are doing.

Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences.

Is that what inferentialism entails? That's a bummer.

You're in danger of forcing me to read Brandom. — Jamal

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...like waking up at the wheel of a roaring race car.

The more I read Heidegger, the more Heidegger I find in Hegel --- and the more I believe Heidegger carries a torch passed by Hegel, namely this metaphor of Geist as a flame that leaps from torch to torch, leaving a trail of spent torches behind. It's crucial to this metaphor that the flame grows hotter and brighter as it hops from torch to torch. We, as software, time bound up in symbols, become more and more aware of what we are : a self-articulating, self-defining process, a blossoming selfreferential vortext, constrained less and less by the inhuman nature and more and more by the social, by our runaway power and suspicion and greed.

But this discussion is about meaning. I claim the hermeneutic is a spiral. We are all bots running a circular spiel, but we run in wider and wider circles. Repetition with variation, a ring of metaphors lets in a new child to join the mad dance.

Is clarification worth it ? Is it not easier to pretend that everybody already knows [some issueevasive platitude ] ? Aren't edifying supplements from the local drugstore better than the icy climb into the lonely heights of no longer being intelligible, if only in this tiny regard, by Tom, Dick, and Harry ? Should an ecstatic critical metaphysics offering sober joy be thrown over for a bumper stick which offers a wonderful ratio of comfort over cost ?

The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity – he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.

Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness of meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude. But just as there is a breadth which is emptiness, there is a depth which is empty too: as we may have an extension of substance which overflows into finite multiplicity without the power of keeping the manifold together, in the same way we may have an insubstantial intensity which, keeping itself in as mere force without actual expression, is no better than superficiality. The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving out its substance. Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a pretence of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute Being, and of philosophizing in all holiness and truth, it hides from itself the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for all measurable precision and definiteness, simply attests in its own case the fortuitous character of its content, and in the other endows God with its own caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all understanding, they are thus God’s beloved ones to whom He gives His wisdom in sleep. This is the reason, too, that in point of fact, what they do conceive and bring forth in sleep is dreams. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

A single act of charity or sacrifice can bring tears to the eyes, much like a piece of music. So I think there is something to the idea that morality, even basic manners, has a certain beauty to it. — NOS4A2

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Where they enter the picture is in the attempt to treat philosophical issues as scientific problems, which they're not - and this, in the context of a culture which has essentially abandoned its own metaphysical base. — Wayfarer

Are we the same culture since the Enlightenment ? How does one separate this abandonment of our metaphysical base from our abandonment of superstition ? To me it's hard to see how one can put rational limits on critical post-Enlightenment thinking. It's only more and better critical thinking that can hope to do that, it seems to me. As I see it, going forward does (always?) involve a rethinking and even an impetus from the past, but that's not the same as an impossible return.

Ideas have consequences. — Wayfarer

Yes. But then the idea that ideas have consequences could also have dangerous consequences --if it's used to hobble science or freedom of thought.

The problem being that one doesn't affect others (more than being a bit sad at a philosophy) while the other has a major affect (a whole other person and stuff). — schopenhauer1

To me it matters whether or not a movement has a real chance in my decision to spend much energy on it. If I'm not really going to change things, then what am I gaining by persisting in talking about it ? My guess would be an heroic sense of identity. I write this without malice, because I think we're all caught up in this game of self-esteem. Maybe it's in our evolved hardware. We know that your namesake played the flute on climbed on prostitutes. A philosopher need not be a saint. His life may tell a deeper truth than his work. He's a aesthetic man. Nietzsche's ghost took a timemachine back to convert him into a mere poet of the ghastly demonic will to live which he mostly enjoyed incarnating, the musical old goat.

Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
Dennett

not to conform to human values but to the just, the beautiful or noble, and the good. — Fooloso4

All of these in whose eyes though ?

he sought to reform or transform human values. — Fooloso4

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Bingo!

What I think Chalmers is actually trying to convey by 'something it is like...' is, simply, being. Being, and what it means to be, is surely one of the major preoccupations of philosophy (and much else besides) although it's not always explicit - for Heidegger questioning the meaning of being is philosophy. (And I do wonder whether eliminative materialism is in some ways a manifestation of what Heidegger called 'the forgetfulness of being'.) — Wayfarer

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I think there's a completely unambiguous answer to that: we are not robots, or machines, or even simply organisms, but beings, and a science that doesn't understand that is a risk to humanity. You never know what you, or the person next to you, is capable of being, or becoming. — Wayfarer

Whether it's offensive or not to call us robots (an admittedly risky metaphor) seems to be a matter of how we think of and feel about robots. Descartes thought animals were machines, right ? To many us who love pets or resent brutal farming techniques, that's an ugly thesis. Fair enough. Dennett is maybe even indulging himself here, because I know from From Bacteria To Bach that he's very interested in our softwhere, which are the memes that live in the 'termite mound' of our neurons. I'd guess (and perhaps he'd agree) that we are more meme than robot, more language than flesh. To me we are incarnate spirit, with the meaning of our words 'out there' in enacted norms. The dance and the dancer are one.


We Homo sapiens are the only species (so far) with richly cumulative culture, and the key ingredient of culture that makes this possible is language.

Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.

The claim that I defend is that human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences yielding various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles, and then gradually de-Darwinized, becoming ever more efficient in its ways of searching Design Space. In short, as human culture evolved, it fed on the fruits of its own evolution, increasing its design powers by utilizing information in ever more powerful ways.

The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered in the scientific image. It is a user-illusion that we are so adept at using that we take it to be unvarnished reality, when in fact it has many coats of intervening interpretive varnish on it.

This last one doesn't seem quite right to me since the scientific image is itself interpretation, but it gets or historicality right, that we use timebinding software to orient ourselves. Imaging the lifeworld in layers is appealing to the degree that some interpretations seem less fragile than others, so we might say they are deeper. But I personally wouldn't think one could peel this 'sediment' off a Real world (a mere Void) 'buried' beneath. It's all sediment, interpretations all the way down, inasmuch as we can talk about it.

I think we agree that humans aren't just their bodies and that consciousness should be explained as much by philosophers as by scientists.

In Dennett's view, scientific method must be truly universal in scope - whatever can't be included in it, is either not worth knowing about, or unknowable. — Wayfarer

Perhaps science is a torch carried into the dark. Who's to say ahead of time what can't be included in it ? To me Dennett is brave. He's earned your ire just by cheerfully trying to make more sense of consciousness and evolution, exactly the themes that matter to you (and me). Why should a serious study of consciousness not result in counterintuitive results ? We carry our torch into the dark beyond our comfortable assumptions and find out. I don't deny that different researchers have different initial attunements, but that's why science is open and everyone has to make a case. Hopefully all our biases cancel out and we (for the wrong reasons) keep one another honest.

I think what is behind this is the fear of the mystery of consciousness - the fear is what provides the sense of urgency, the impatience with critics, and the demand that we all must recognise scientific authority as the only path to certainty. — Wayfarer

I'm willing to grant you that some people may indeed find it embarrassing to talk about consciousness. On the other hand, some people are likely terrified of there being no gods, or us 'just' being clever primates. I suspect that fear of a bruised 'final vocabulary' is universal. We can always headshrink the stupid stubborn other. But isn't that where serious discussion breaks down ? And it's basically 'pomo' paranoid confusion when carried to extremes.

Isn't scientific authority an oxymoron ? To me it's just that educated people tend to settle for the scientific consensus of a field when they can't do better (aren't experts themselves.) Even then the goal is being less wrong, less crude, less uncertain.

I can't speak for Dennett, but I hope I've presented something like his attitude and at least a stronger target than that scientistic fellow who was just banned.

Your criticism, which is fair, reminds me of what Dreyfus writes in Being-in-the-world. But I think the tension between owness and falling immersion can be (mis)read as courageous destructive-creative interpretation. Philosophy 'is' the battle of sedimented dead metaphor against itself, for we have no other tools. This helps explain Heidegger's tonal ambiguity when it comes to gossip or chatter. It is us in our everydayness, our generic tribal soul, the deaf repetition of platitudes as a genuinely convenient and valuable substitute for thinking, when it's not appropriate to really think. The (misread?) authentic baste 'philosopher' 'restores force to the elemental words,' heats up the wax of dead metaphors, appropriates or makes explicit the past as interpretedness that leaps ahead as unwitting projection, contingent mistaken for necessity. 'One' is the stillbirth of the Bloom strong poet. The anxiety of influence is that of having never even been born as a poet, of dying as a bot. So he rages against it, like Axl Rose, just a small town Catholic workingclass white boy, doing the right thing (at first) for the wrong reason (reactionary etc). Did he with the Being stuff generalize Kierkegaard into a more glamorously negative cryptotheology ? For me the key stuff is human historicity in language, which Gadamer ran with, along with lifeworld centrality and the unbreakable unit of world-self-language-others that makes philosophy possible. Braver fits it into an ICS framework running from Kant through Hegel through Heidegger. [ICS is impersonal conceptual scheme]

For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average public practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all. What is shared is not a conceptual scheme, i.e., not a belief system that can be made explicit and justified. Not that we share a belief system that is always implicit and arbitrary. That is just the Sartrean version of the same mistake. What we share is simply our average comportment. Once a practice has been explained by appealing to what one does, no more basic explanation is possible. As Wittgenstein puts it in On Certainty: "Giving grounds [must] come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.
...
This view is entirely antithetical to the philosophical ideal of total clarity and ultimate intelligibility. Philosophers seek an ultimate ground. When they discover there is none, even modern philosophers ... seem to think that they have fallen into an abyss -- that the lack of an ultimate ground has catastrophic consequences for human activity.
...
There is, however, something that average everyday intelligibility obscures, viz., that it is merely average everyday intelligibility. It takes for granted that the everyday for-the-sake-of-whichs and the equipment that serves them are based upon God's goodness, human nature, or at least solid good sense. This is what Heidegger called "the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation." One cannot help thinking that the right (healthy, civilized, rational, natural, etc.) way to sit, for example, is on chairs, at tables, etc., not on the floor. Our way seems to make intrinsic sense -- a sense not captured in saying, "This is what we in the West happen to do." What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate "ground" of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply obscures its own groundlessness. This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation. — Dreyfus

Sure. That's more technically careful (I've looked into the text very recently), but I still maintain that its existential payload is that the gods themselves must conform to human values. Else we'd call them demons rather than gods. Exemplars, heroes, egoideals, Fathers, Mothers,...

Is it Norman Rockwell versus Salvador Dali...? — Tom Storm

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If (?) we make Dali something that never quite arrives but is always over the horizon...

Fear of death is maybe (also) fear of change. Some paint us as thrown into endless interpretation, the hard work of sensemaking. Others call this our being condemned to be free. A god of deathless stone who offers the Final Word offers freedom from freedom, sleep for the mind weary of making it new.

It was Socrates who posed, “Is it good cause the gods like it or do the gods like it because it is good?” — schopenhauer1

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This leads to Feuerbach and others grasping that the divine predicates are of course just the kinds of things we humans like, so that God is an idealized human (and a tribal god is an idealized/idolized tribe member/leader, which would not be a human in our nowcommon global or generic sense.)

Translation please, Sir. — Tom Storm

Far as I've been able to tell, Wittgenstein is talking about Feeling that eludes conceptualization. He also seems to make ethics a matter of taste (emotivism?).

It respects people's suffering. Everything else is gaslighting, justifying why other people need to do X, or just fixing broken things (including our own broken tranquility). — schopenhauer1

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I do like the respect for people's suffering. But it can also cause people's suffering. I can hurt people by wrecking their final vocabulary (their spiritual substance, really) in the name of fixing them or waking them up. 'Don't you see that you should not have been born, sir ?'

I don't preach the gospel of ironic atheism, for instance, to people who might not be able to run that program in their lives. Whiskey for me is poison for them.

I'm afraid Hegel is like a too rich chocolate cake. I can only have a nibble before feeling done... — Tom Storm

Fair enough. That is some dense stuff. To me this is the essence:

God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

We created the incarnation myth because we feel like gods trapped in crucified dogs. How could such glory live in food for maggots ? How else could it live ?

rival aesthetical perspectives may be as significant a source of misunderstanding and conflict as anything generated by politics. — Tom Storm

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That remind me of Lakoff's take on metaphor as the way we cognize. William James wrote of the (existential) world as a stage for heroism. I hypothesize that a vision of the world and an always complementary heroic role to play to within it are something like a rockbottom map in all of us for an otherwise terrifying chaos. I guess/hope there are sophisticated/evolved versions of this where the narcissism has become more magnanimous and inclusive.


Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

One last chunkydense quote, which I hope you'll tolerate. I'm a bit of an 'atheist Christian' or some such in the sense that the incarnation myth speaks to me (as myth / metaphor /poetry). There's a Romantic-atheistic way to assimilate its beauty and insight.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom.

This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.

Yet absolute subjectivity as such would elude art and be accessible to thinking alone if, in order to be actual subjectivity in correspondence with its essence, it did not also proceed into external existence...

...the Absolute does not turn out to be the one jealous God who merely cancels nature and finite human existence without shaping himself there in appearance as actual divine subjectivity; on the contrary, the true Absolute reveals itself and thereby gains an aspect in virtue of which it can be apprehended and represented by art.

...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — Hegel

For the professor, an atheist worldview was ugly and deficient. His account of god provided a type of poetic wholeness, coherence and perfection. Or so he thought.

Any views on this, or am I full of shit? — Tom Storm

I think you've nailed down a great issue. Of course the professor just couldn't appreciate the kind of beauty available to the atheist, that maybe the cosmos is more open and terrible and wonderful for those who don't pretend to know its origin or final law.

Then it's just hard to do much with the professor's tacit feelings cookoff. Maybe there should be a poetry contest ?

Is there anything which can't be regarded aesthetically? — Tom Storm

This reminds me of Schegel versus Hegel, which I mentioned in passing before. As I see it, the world as spectacle requires the assumption of at least a minimal self as spectator. Kojeve's comments on skepticism are probably also relevant here.

Fichte sets up the ego as the absolute principle of all knowing, reason, and cognition, and at that the ego that remains throughout abstract and formal. Secondly, this ego is therefore in itself just simple, and, on the one hand, every particularity, every characteristic, every content is negated in it, since everything is submerged in this abstract freedom and unity, while, on the other hand, every content which is to have value for the ego is only put and recognized by the ego itself. Whatever is, is only by the instrumentality of the ego, and what exists by my instrumentality I can equally well annihilate again.

... But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

not too frequently that I stumble upon an idea or an argument that makes me revise all or even most of my previous "commitments" — Manuel

I'm not sure where you are getting this all.

As to the plausibility of Brandom's reading of Kant, I may have some doubts, but for that Mww is your guy. He knows his Kant better than most scholars, as far as I can see. And he's quite a character to boot. — Manuel

Thanks. But let me stress in the light of a thousand candles that I'm not intrinsically interested in Kant but rather in reality which Kant may indeed help me understand. Pinker gives a nice spiel on 'professional narcissism' which echoes Heidegger's notion of gossip/chatter. It's too easy for us in our vanity to forget to keep one's eye on the matters themselves. Note also how you are tacitly tracking Brandom for getting Kant right, etc. This is even appropriate, since Brandom makes explicit just this kind of endless scorekeeping. These great names and even our little names are avatars tracking still other avatars.

But without us, these distinctions couldn't be made and what would remain as far as we can tell, is at best a bunch of fields of energy and a worst (from our want of understanding) a "I don't know what" Lockean substance, or a noumenon in the negative sense, in Kant's philosophy. — Manuel

Seems to me we can't say anything at all. But maybe part of the problem is a Cartesian fantasy that we are spirits for whom it makes sense to gaze on the such a Void. To be fair, language and reasoning has a way of 'floating' above bodies, even if it depends on them as hosts.

By mind-independent I mean what the word says. If we did not exist, there would still be planets and suns - in some fashion - as would there be photons and fossils. I don't believe that we literally created the world, that there was nothing here prior to homo sapiens. — Manuel

Sure. I think the world was here before us and will be after us, in some sense. But I don't think that implies science studies mindindependent stuff. We simply project our models before and after our ability to talk, which we can do now while we are here. I agree that this is weird situation.

It feels a bit strange to say that one is to be held responsible for making a judgement - I don't think that must follow. — Manuel

Here we are though discussing the very norms you don't find plausible. Which inferences play by the rules ? Are valid ? That's us discussing what concepts mean in the first place, or so might an inferentialist claim.

To grasp what I take from Brandom, just zoom out and look at what we are doing right now, along with everyone on this forum. Claims and inferences. Trying to get our moves and conclusions recognized as valid.

I think rationality (more so than norms) goes significantly beyond stop-signs or handshakes, it's an innate characteristic of a very peculiar creature, namely, human beings. — Manuel

Respectfully, can you not hear the vagueness in this ? Is the difference qualitative or more a matter of complexity ? When will the bots become good enough to make you doubt the divine spark that seems to be hinted at here ?

What's your take on Direct Realism ? — RussellA

We talk about the world (directly) in our language according to our rational and semantic norms. How dare I make such a claim ? Simple. A philosopher (in that role) can't deny it. He'd be talking about our world or just babbling. He'd be talking in our language <semantic norms> or I can't understand you pal. He'd be appealing to our (self-transcending, my self and yours) rational norms or just blabbing about his hunch or prejudice. So pineal gremlins know not what they say when they claim that I can't know that I'm not a pineal gremlin. They have smuggled in norms from the outside without realizing it.

We are not ghosts trapped behind Images that may or may not mediate a Hidden world beyond them (gremlins in the pineal gland). We are not those Images themselves (metaphysical subjects, more plausible at first than the pineal gremlin.) I capitalize to stress how adjacent philosopher's Entities are to Mysticism. Our anemic mythos* is one step away from Inner Light. I'm not even against mysticism, but let's not mix oil and water and confuse ourselves.

Selves and a meaningful language and others all in one and the same world are is an unbreakable unity which 'must' and always in fact is 'assumed' when one tries to do philosophy. [ <being-in-the-world-in-language-and-norms-with-others> ] So much of this framework is so stubbornly and deeply tacit that folks lean on it unwittingly, just as they do the metaphorics of beetles in boxes.

*See Derrida and Anatole France on 'white mythology' for more detail on the unshakeable metaphorical origins (can't wipe all that mud of their feet) of our technical abstractions. Or check Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff).

Try harder at seeing the full picture. You don’t see the spider ripping off that insects head? The homeless man having a meltdown? The terrible accident? The unwanted chore? The starvation of not doing X to get Y? Disagreement? Physical pain? Emotional pain? Ennui? The uncomfortable situation? The hostile situation? The annoying situation? The dire situation? The deadly situation? — schopenhauer1

Don't forget the festival of cruelty. Maybe people often check the news to get their fix of others' suffering, pretending it's a drag (maybe it's also a drag, such being our twisted complexity.) Some vivisect themselves. One who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises. It may be that the humiliation of our rivals is a sweet nectar indeed. See Rorty on private irony. He whispers our nasty secret. Why those who question the gods and seek to remove all hiding places from the thunder ? Isn't antinatalism one more knife ? The ultimate rhetorical killjoy ? An attempt at 200 proof moonshine ?

Even “ghastly nihilism” can be seen aesthetically. — praxis

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Important point. Why do people drink moonshine ? Because they can ?

It is, unconsciously... but usually no philosopher will admit as much consciously, that is the philosophers conceit, their pride in their reason getting in the way. — ChatteringMonkey

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I think life and humans are pretty dreadful, but what can you do?I don't whine. I don't celebrate. I have a tendency towards optimism which, try as I might, I can't suppress. Absurdism works for me too. — Tom Storm

:up:
Fuck yeah ! (Is this just an Americanism? Or you got it over there too?)

The relation of perception to the experience is one of identity. It is like the pain and the experience of pain. The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain. Similarly, if the experience of perceiving is an object of perceiving, then it becomes identical with the perceiving. Just as the pain is identical with the experience of pain, so the visual experience is identical with the experience of seeing. — RussellA

He articulates quite well a default assumption. He makes a certain (questionable) conceptual norms explicit. But what he presents is no discovery. He did not check and see, dipping a ladle into the. bucket of his 'Private Experience.' Ladies and gentlemen, I give you an 'impossible' blend of scientism and mysticism...

Whether knowledge is an instrument or passive medium to bridge the gap, it alters what passes from a mind-independent world to our conscious mind, meaning that our perceptions are indirect.. — RussellA

This assumption of the instrument/medium is what's being mocked as a fear of truth that confuses itself for a fear of error.

With suchlike useless ideas and expressions about knowledge, as an instrument to take hold of the Absolute, or as a medium through which we have a glimpse of truth, and so on ..., we need not concern ourselves. Nor need we trouble about the evasive pretexts which create the incapacity of science out of the presupposition of such relations, in order at once to be rid of the toil of science, and to assume the air of serious and zealous effort about it.

Chomsky not only argued that language was uniquely human but he also questioned Charles Darwin's theory that language evolved from animal communication and B.F. Skinner's theory that language could be reduced to learned behavior. — Gnomon

The better our bots get, the more it seems that yeah it's continuous with animal communication and we even have synthetic brains analogous to our own that can learn language from examples, finding the structure implicit in those examples to create novel and successful sentences.

What norms? If a scientist is speaking about astronomy, she is specializing in a specific branch of science, attempting to clarify what exists in the mind-independent world. — Manuel

What makes what a particular human being does science ?

I suggest also that mind-independent world is way too biased metaphysically. I claim that science gives objective unbiased explanations of this world, our world. Its claims aren't independent of 'mind' (it's not even clear what this means) or even of the language they are made of. Its claims are independent of this or that observer. What's negated is not mind but personal perspective. In my view, this kind of dualism is hopeless and yet so often projected on physics, for instance.

nor do I see how a scientist or a philosopher is "to accept the selftranscending bindingness and legitimacy of these norms." — Manuel

Let me use some weird rhetoric to try to get the point across. The following is not meant to be rude.

Who cares if you can see it? Seriously, who ? One cares. A philosopher as such cares. What are doing at this very moment if not holding one another to a joint responsibility to be clear and consistent ? If I speak as a philosopher, then I claim to speak with the authority of our great god secular rationality behind me. Except I'd say that rational norms are between us like stop signs and handshakes, even if they surely leave and depend on marks they leave on personal biology such as our brains.

I don't know how simply saying that the self is a kind of fiction or a necessary social construction is any less clear than adding the aspect of a "tradition we perform" — Manuel

Did you understand Brandom's take on Kant's transcendental unity of apperception ?

It's the same thing? — Jamal

I think (?) inferentialism would say yes, but of course we have to think of all possible inferences involving 'define.' Personally I find this plausible. What after all do we do with concepts ? But decide what to do, often together ? And justify why we did it. Justification seems deeply and maybe essentially inferential.

This is a bit like understanding the bishop by talking about checkmating the king.

I'm actually just trying to pass on mainstream philosophy from the 20th century in my own playful way. As I see, it is pretty radical at first, so it's hard to make sense of at first. It sounds crazy. I studied constructivism in education briefly, and I think it's correct that our assumptions get in the way of interpreting statements that question the basic framework of those assumptions. As I see it, you are forced to understand me using the very system of concepts I'm trying to put in question. But I'm not at all trying to reduce you to some skepticism. It's just about looking at familiar things in a new way.