Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal. — Joshs

:up:
I agree. So I've been trying to sketch (influenced by Habermas and Apel) the widest concept of rationality that still actually means something. I cannot embrace 'anything goes' or 'science is whatever scientists do.' Or rather I can embrace 'anything goes' in a larger context of personal freedom limited by the personal freedom of others. But that's just my ICC. That's just something like what Habermas offers.

I recall/interpret that Feyerabend was afraid of what I myself find most intellectually horrible, which is a fanatical irrationalism that identifies itself with the rational. This is why some 'progressives' dismay me more than rednecks who never pretend to rationality in the first place. I'm guessing Feyerbend felt this same revulsion at times towards those with paradoxically dogmatic conceptions of rationality itself. 'Anything goes' should be recognized as a framework whose only unquestionable belief (its founding intention ) is that no other belief is unquestionable.

I don't learn how to feel pain as a result of the social world I may happen to live in, but suffer pain, am able to see the colour red, feel anger, — RussellA

:up:

I'd say we learn how to conceptualize and discuss a pain and a color that is just there, mostly nonconceptually, as a kind of overflow of any mere intending or labeling of it. I agree that our evolved bodies have innate capacities that make pain and color possible for us. I don't think the dead see color, because I understand that perspectives on the colorful world are given only to creatures which I therefore call 'sentient.'

If Structuralism focuses on the way that human experience and behaviour is determined by various structures external to the individual, then it is suffers from the same problem as Behaviourism. — RussellA

:up:
I agree. Not long ago, I was too structuralist. Reading some Husserl, who I thought of as 'too subjective' a thinker before closer examination, forced me to reconsider. The world is given only perspectively. This simple fact has huge implications. Just really noting how spatial objects are given to us is illuminating. We so easily take the theoretical posit of the object in Euclidean space (from no/any perspective) for granted as the real object -- because language is so profoundly social that the transparency of the subject is mostly useful --- until one is doing metaphysics.

Does Husserl’s categorial intuition help us ? Do we just see the plums in the icebox --and 'see' this seeing ?. The inferentialist (structuralist) insight is powerful, but is it not finally grounded in the individual subject’s immersion in the (our) sensual world which is categorically structured ? Does it not otherwise 'float' without its deepest [non-inferential ] 'meaning.' — plaque flag

hypothesis

The structural account explains the genesis of the private aspect of the reference of a concept that cannot exist without a public aspect.

When I am up all night with a terrible toothache, and I call the dentist first thing in the morning and explain my situation, I am referring to the terrible pain in my mouth. I can feel this pain in the 'transconceptual surplus' of experience, in the 'matter' that is 'formed' by 'intentional conceptuality.' I can only refer to this pain in a social space in which I have learned to explain myself and justify my beliefs. But I refer to my actual pain and not the concept of pain.

detour

Husserl speaks of a series of visual appearances or adumbrations of (for instance) lamp that are organized and unified by my grasping that series of perspectival eye-taking as a lamp that endures in time. This lamp (and every spatial object) is 'transcendent' in that it goes beyond any of the particular momentary perspectival appearances it unifies or tracks. But that is all. The lamp is not more than this system of its appearances. It is not behind this system of appearences. It is this system of appearances.

return

I can tell my dentist about my toothache because the public aspect of the reference 'is' its inferential role in the space of giving and asking for reasons. 'Can you get me in right away ? because I'm in terrible pain ! ' I claim that we already understand differential aspect to pain. The dentist experiences my pain as an entity within the world, but not in the same way that I do. We tend to understand a kind of 'direct' access to mental entities.

But we need not do this within a dualist or indirect realist framework. I think we should also grasp the limitations of an admittedly illuminating structuralist semantics. The idea of language as a system of differences without positive elements is beautiful in its purity, but does it tell the whole truth ? Are we really doing all this without an extra-linguistic referent ? Can we understand the referent strictly in reference to our discursive practice ? Brandom's inferentialism hugely inspired me, but I think I'm seeing its limits.

This is part of a broader attempt to do subjectivity justice without mysticism.

What other ways are you thinking of, of how the subjective mind of colours, pains, fears and hopes relates to the objective world of rocks, mountains, supernova and gravity. — RussellA

From a phenomenological realist point of view, the world itself is colorful, noisy, painful. The rose is red. Its thorn hurts my careless finger.

Within this familiar (life-)world, we enrich our knowledge of everyday entities by adding scientific entities which are inferentially entangled and semantically dependent on those everyday entities. So the scientific image is just another 'layer' of the lifeworld -- though even this layer metaphor insufficiently emphasizes the entanglement.

Wittgenstein wrote in PI 43 "For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

As Joseph Rouse wrote about a postmodern view of science - "we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality" — RussellA

Lately it looks to me that structuralist approaches to meaning (meaning as use, perhaps as inferential role) are illuminating but maybe leave something out. For instance, does 'red' mean more than its inferential role ? Those bornblind can use the concept, be knowledgable about redness. But this is exhaust the redness of red ? Does the structuralist insight rule out a private aspect of reference ?
I don't think it does, and I think a structuralist approach actually helps explain why a structuralist approach, albeit mostly correct, is so unintuitive for most people. I can't learn how to refer to 'pure pain' without membership in a inferential pragmatic culture, but this doesn't mean that I don't intend that pure private pain once I've learn how to structurally. In short, pain is more than the inferential aspect of its concept.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14582/sensational-conceptuality

Grammar does not reveal the being of things as they are, but as they are for us, that is, how we regard them, what they mean for us. — Fooloso4

:up:
Conceptual-categorical aspect (not the sound and color and music and ) of the lifeworld, for instance.

But if we regard the differences between species as a matter of degree or variation then we begin to take into account facts that were previously overlooked or disregarded. — Fooloso4

:up:

He accepts that there are facts, but facts do not determine concepts. We do not have the concepts we have because the facts are as they are, but if the facts were not as they are our concepts would not be as they are. — Fooloso4

:up:

FWIW, I think Husserl is right that we 'read off' facts from the way the world is given to us. We see that-the-door-was-left-unlocked both 'sensually' and 'conceptually' at once (the separation of sense and concept is this context is a useful but potentially misleading abstraction.) Yet much of this reading off depends on a form of life. I can only an aquarium from within a form of life where fish are kept in such things for amusement. And then (with Heid., as you know) there's also the circumspective 'seeing' of a couch as for sitting on manifest in plopping down on it unthinkingly, etc. But this too depends on a form of life where soft things are put in certain places with that use being obviously appropriate.

Would you agree that a difference between Kuhn on the one hand, and Popper and Habermas on the other, is that for Kuhn the transition between paradigms is not rational, whereas for the latter a meta-rational framework encompasses such transitions? — Joshs

I'd say that scientific paradigm switching is rational in the larger ethical-dramaturgical sense, and I'd support that by noting that it happens within science. Neurath's boat seems appropriate here. Some modifications are more substantial than others (perhaps foundational physical theories are questioned), but the basic style of communication ( under the meta-authority of the critical-synthetic tradition as such, which transcends all of its theoretical products ) remains intact.

A 'truly' irrational paradigm switch would be (for instance) the violent takeover of an institution by religious fundamentalists who found their authority in a sacred text (or in the unquestionable words of a living prophet.)

Ok, it seems you are really denying there is color and sound and pain beyond the inferential role of the tokens color, sound, and pain.

How are such tokens (historically contingent black glyphs on a white background) even invented or exchanged by the non-inferentially blind (by us, I mean, as opposed to the traditionally blind ) ?

Can you live your life as normal with your eyes closed ?

Are you committed to a p-zombie approach to human existence? So that the meaning of your own claims doesn't exist for you first-person ?

As far as we can say from experience, the world is only given perspectively to different sentient creatures. Denying subjectivity is just denying the being of the world.

I say this as a direct realist who doesn't think consciousness is more than awareness of this world. I see the world and not the inside of a private bubble.

I think the cult of the "genius" is something that we can do without, and arguably often holds back progress. — Janus

:up:

My only hesitation is that we may have evolved hero worship for a 'good reason.' In my dramaturgical ontology thread, I try to argue that the human entire personality is absolutely ontologically fundamental. The world is only given, so far as we know, to the hopefully harmonious system of such a personality. So me taking a hero is me taking on something that is already partially harmonic --- a proven, battlehardened life approach system. Very tempting for the young --- or at least my youth is full of my emulation of heroes, but not without the anxiety of influence. We resent/envy the dead less, and we can use them against living rivals. And we must make it new. Pound and Eliot were two of my earliest heros. Doesn't this from Eliot sound like Heidegger ?

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
...
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.

I agree except I don't hold with the idea of "genius" especially the stink of authority it always seems to carry. — Janus

I agree there's a dark side of the concept. To me thought it's also a pretty good label especially for people who are way too young to be so good at what they do. Blake wrote that true religion was the 'worship' of great human beings. But where we probably agree very much is that this 'worship' cannot be 'alienated.' If I truly appreciate and value Einstein, then I seek to understand him by becoming him.

You can probably see how this fits with my general rejection of what I can't experience and therefore can't give definite meaning to. The genius for the alienated beginner is a vague hope, a promise shining in the distance, a magical father figure, a gleaming token in the fallacy of argument from authority. But we hopefully grow out of this vain and confused game (which I'd say is conceptually close to Heidegger's idletalk, a gossip from the outside .) [ Hopefully I've demonstrated how much I also dislike cheap appeals to fame and mystique. ]

some think that their own faith-based beliefs must be amenable to being rationally argued for. If someone comes on a philosophy forum and tries to argue for such beliefs, they commit a category error and are fair game for rigorous critique. — Janus

To me the 'real' esoteric stuff, which is important to me, is properly a secret in a circle of trust. I find clues and hints in certain texts, as if the authors were (maybe) leaving a trace for those who could read between their lines. I'm not at all against an extra esoteric layer, even here, but I think we should mostly decide what game we're playing.

The Crying of Lot 49 is good on this stuff. Undecidable conspiracy theory of an alternative postal system.

the assessment of what seems most plausible ...i s always an individual matter. — Janus

Absolutely. So rationality is just a way of harnessing collision the collision variety.

I don't think it follows that everything experienced is available for public scrutiny and assessment in the way that. for example, the observations of the natural sciences, mathematics and logic are. — Janus

Just to be clear, I agree. My ontological inclusion of anything we can talk about only works by acknowledging an infinite variety in the way such entities are accessed. In the mundane case, we can both talk about your pain, but you have different access to that pain. You suffer it.

A profound spiritual experience might also come up in a conversation as an explanation for why someone quit drinking or got rid of most of their property. A listener would not have the same access to that experience, but they could still discuss it in the space of reasons. 'My friend had a realization , so he got rid of all his stuff.'

Thank you. Sounds fascinating. It's so out of my typical discourse framework that I'll play it safe and just let it marinate in my mind for now. But I respect the boldness without pretending to understand it yet. We need 'biodiverity' and daring novel approaches.

I do believe skepticism of phenomenal properties is the way to go. — goremand

Feeling and sight can be accounted for functionally, so yes I have feelings and yes I see colors. — goremand

I understand that you want to be careful conceptually. But what I was trying to clarify here is whether you grant (basically) that life/experience involves a 'nonconceptual surplus.'

I think that people born blind can have knowledge of color because they can reason about color in a public language. So I wouldn't say that typically sighted people know about color, but I would say that there is an extra 'dimension' or 'aspect' in the way the world is given to them.

Coming from another angle, I think red functions structurally and inferentially in a way that makes knowledge of red possible for those born blind, but I don't think the referent of red is exhausted by or as its role in this structure.

I think Wittgenstein's beetle in the box analogy is brilliant, but it doesn't address what exceeds a structuralist semantics. The reason most people can't understand Wittgenstein's point is because they've used the structural place of red tacitly to locate a 'subjective' (qualitative) referent. They 'know' that pain --- the pain they care about --- is not primarily a concept. It's like the difference between the idea of bread and bread itself. Only one keeps you from starving.

He critiques the superstition in religion. — Joshs

:up:

To me the essential difference between religion and philosophy is the rationality I specified a moment ago. Both Popper and Kojeve talk of a second-order critical-synthetic metamyth, which is basically that infinite framework of the meta-authority of reason itself. Reason is god. I mean the 'rational' human community recognizes no higher authority beyond or above itself.

The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. — Joshs

:up:

Well put, and I agree.

You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary — Joshs

Rationality is something like trying to be a good citizen in an ideal communication community --- living toward or into that hope. I don't think there can be some final specification of this community, for it must itself be specified rationally. But Habermas seems to get the basics right.

A theory of rationality thus attempts to reconstruct the practical knowledge necessary for being a knowledgeable social actor among other knowledgeable social actors.
...
From a social-scientific point of view, language is a medium for coordinating action, although not the only such medium. The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas, requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding,” which he regards as the “inherent telos” of speech.
...
Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
...
According to the core principle of his pragmatic theory of meaning, “we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance—in short, when we know what makes it acceptable” (1998b, 232). With this principle, Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to the practice of reason giving: speech acts inherently involve claims that are in need of reasons—claims that are open to both criticism and justification. In our everyday speech (and in much of our action), speakers tacitly commit themselves to explaining and justifying themselves, if necessary. To understand what one is doing in making a speech act, therefore, one must have some sense of the appropriate response that would justify one's speech act, were one challenged to do so.

A speech act succeeds in reaching understanding when the hearer takes up “an affirmative position” toward the claim made by the speaker (TCA 1: 95–97; 282; 297). In doing so, the hearer presumes that the claims in the speech act could be supported by good reasons (even if she has not asked for them). When the offer made by the speaker fails to receive uptake, speaker and hearer may shift reflexive levels, from ordinary speech to “discourse”—processes of argumentation and dialogue in which the claims implicit in the speech act are tested for their rational justifiability as true, correct or authentic.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct

[delete]

Another victim of the mighty Amazon. — Quixodian

If you mean you spend lots of money on books there, I can relate.

I came into philosophy through the Adyar Bookshop. — Quixodian

Fair enough. A quick Googling has me saying that makes sense.

in the sphere of ethics, or the qualitative dimension, we have a kind of view that all opinions about it are equal. — Quixodian

I'd say we just have [ or pretend to aspire to have ] equality before the law, individual rights.

In our polarized climate, is it 10% of the population that thinks another 10% is dangerously insane ? I think you miss / ignore the religious feeling in politics. The sacred is always with us.

hat reminds me of something we discussed previously, in an essay by Edward Conze about perennial philosophy - the belief that 'as far as worth-while knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted than others.' — Quixodian

Well this is a rich issue. I'd say that almost no one believes in the actual equality of people but only (ideally, hopefully) in the framework of equality before the law. In a pluralistic society, everybody gets to talk themselves into a sense of the superiority of People Like Them to The Other People.

I do it too, of course, but part of what makes People Like Me so wonderful < grin > is that we can endure the sight of this inescapable elitist deepstructure and articulate it. I agree w/ Kojeve that philosophy is a journey of self-consciousness. To me, the 'psychoanalytic/shamanic' aspect of that, discussed more in Jung & Campbell, is 'integrating the shadow.' This is part of why Shakespeare is a great symbol. He is, as a single personality, an organized chaos of personalities. Is anything human alien to Shakespeare ?

there's a real tension between that and liberal democracies. — Quixodian

Yes. An Inner Circle is potentially tyrannical --- like the Inner Party.

I'm certainly frustrated with a lot of what passes as philosophy in our society. — Quixodian

I can't imagine anything better than phenomenology at its best, though it's the job of the phenomenologist to try. Husserl, early Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. All three are turned toward reality in its fullness, correcting scientism without embracing irrationalism. I can only think they don't interest you as much as they might because they aren't esoteric.

If you only mean that, as a philosopher, you are opposed to other philosophers, IMO that's just actual [ autonomous , critical ] philosophy -- as opposed to an Inner Circle 'philosophy' in which debate is no longer necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I like when people agree with me. I also want profound community.

So, I think the answer is, 'very many', and I think it's directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension, the qualitative dimension. — Quixodian

I just meant 'meaning' in the tapwater sense that we are conceptual creatures. I would never deny that we need stories and symbols to mitigate the horror of life. As you probably recall, I think Joseph Campbell is great, and I reread a good chunk of Jung not long ago.

I think the ladder is within the abyss of the self. The kingdom of god is within. The usual stuff. But one doesn't argue this, or not primarily. Even in the grim Leviathan, Hobbes appeals to his reader to look within for evidence. Campbell and Jung hint carefully at things they can't actually say --- a muted post horn, an open storm thud.

There is a kind of understanding that requires a transformation in the knower, that can only be known first-person. — Quixodian

So it might seem 'mystical or esoteric' in the absence of that. — Quixodian

You'd be wrong if you think I can't relate. I'm quite fascinated by the idea of the esoteric, which is after all the shadow cast by rationality. Structurally they are understood as a pair.

Let's look at the etymology.

"secret; intended to be communicated only to the initiated; profound," 1650s, from Latinized form of Greek esoterikos "belonging to an inner circle" (Lucian), from esotero "more within," ...

Does this inner circle advertise, argue for the same public scientific-rational recognition that it simultaneously claims is impossible ?

To me exclusivity and secrecy make more sense.

But the salient point here is that such an ability is 'above nature', so to speak. It is 'above' it, in the same sense that the explanans is above the explanadum - it grasps the underlying causes (logos, in the archaic sense) which make general observations, and therefore explanatory principles, possible. So, I'm persuaded that this faculty is linked to the ability to grasp universals (which have generally been rejected by philosophers since the Enlightenment). For Aristotle, this faculty - 'nous' - was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals possess. For him, nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind grasps definitions in a consistent and communicable way (hence universals as a theory of predication) and whether the mind possesses an innate potential to understand them. And in the broader platonist tradition (philosophy generally) there is undoubtedly an heirarchy of being and knowing, but which has been generally occluded by the over-emphasis on empiricism. — Quixodian

To me this just points to the necessary being of ontology itself. Or, more mundanely, to conceptmongering humanity. How many people deny the existence of meaning ? Of concepts ? Of the human mind's grasp and even creation of concepts ? Almost no one. Though one can of course debate the details.

Given this widespread acknowledgement of conceptuality, which doesn't seem to satisfy you or even be acknowledged by you, it's very hard not to read you as insisting on something mystical or esoteric. Which is fine of course.

I haven't fully explored that book, either, but suffice to say for this post, that I think the faculty of rational judgement is indeed 'ethereal' or at least incorporeal - and that this is the original meaning of the 'rational soul' in Aristotle and the Western tradition. It was originally understood as the faculty which discerns the real, albeit in a sense that was subsequently lost to contemporary culture (although arguably preserved in Hegel). That faculty, to grasp meaning or essences, is associated with 'nous' which is the source of rationality. — Quixodian

I'd say that ideas are relatively incorporeal -- lighter than air. But we only know them as living flesh. While concepts transcend any particular host, we can say nothing about them transcending all such hosts. I mean we cannot speak from experience. We'd be daydreaming, possibly of round squares, for I can't imagine an idea that's not imagined.

But I don't think the idea of the idea was ever lost. Husserl's book Ideas is about (among other things) grasping ideas with intuition. It's a reboot of metaphysics, a new first philosophy, a redo of Kant.

I'd say that the bigger issue is that humans are primarily practical beings. I can't help but think you are frustrated with the status of philosophy in our society. But I think the world has always ignored philosophers when it didn't poison or burn them. So it's got to be its own reward. To me, expecting the world to be more intellectual or spiritual is like expecting the world to stop making babies. I imagine serfs with gum disease in the old days comforted to some degree by a single enforced theology,, and maybe they found the depth in such undeniably rich symbols. But they didn't have autonomy. They didn't wrestle the devil for their victory. How many of us would accept a brainwashing that was certain to make us happy but slavish ? Only the suicidal, I think.

But given that, he recognises the need for levels of being, which correspond also to different levels and kinds of knowing, to which end he adopts and adapts a version of neoplatonic ontology, culminating in what he describes in a later series of talks as 'transcendent naturalism' (that is, naturalism not confined to materialist reductionism). — Quixodian

To me there's nothing apriori objectionable in that. The issue is again whether the rational community is the arbiter or whether a prophet who alone can the higher levels appears and takes control. Husserl's phenomenology has often been accused of mysticism because he insisted that experience gives more than sense data. But Husserl does nothing more 'mystical' than what Popper does with his basic statements. For instance, is it hard for you to see that 'your keys on the table' is true or false when you are standing over that table ? It's like reading some number on a screen --- so simple and yet tangled up in the problem of the world being given only perspectively.

But can't see any choice but to do that in order to arrive at a meaningful ontology. And that inevitably provokes this kind of response. That's a kind of unstated premise in the description 'flat' - no levels! — Quixodian

The issue for me is really just social-rational versus esoteric-private. We could all agree to a God, but that God would still be determined rationally. So in this sense rationality is the 'real god' (the final authority.)

Isn't what you mean by 'rational' in this thread empirically or scientifically justifiable? — Quixodian

In this particular thread, I'm talking about both inferential role semantics (actual inferential norms) and the crucial role they play for philosophers subject to the rationality of the ideal communication community.

I was strongly inspired by Brandom inferentialism. The first insight is that much of a concept's meaning (some would say all) is to be found structurally-relationally in the norms that govern inferences involving that concept.

Note also that philosophy determines the real rationally. I use ontology to emphasize a 'scientific' as a opposed to 'esoteric' conception, but 'scientific' only means the ideal communication community thats founded on autonomy.

..a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a meta-institution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification

Finally we see that the entities whose nature are to be determined by ontology are already inferentially linked. Indeed, for the inferentialist they only have meaning in terms of one another ---structurally. Some of the motive for dualism is obliterated.

[In other threads I try to explain how the intentional object and the dramaturgical-discursive subject always necessarily being worldly points to direct realism --- to consciousness understood in terms of the being of the world through or for a perspective. This further flattens ye olde dualism. ]

But I'm not a total inferentialist. I think the system is grounded by what Husserl describes as bodily givenness and categorial intution. I can see that my car keys are on the table. I can articulate this seeing. I see that-my-car-keys-are-on-the-table. This also helps explains Popper's 'basic statements' and why (in my view) a measurement requires a human being.

If what you’re striving for is immanence without transcendence, then you’d need a triadic relational structure without pre-existing relata. Consider: rationality (logic) - quality (ideal) - energy (affect). It presents rationality as mutually fundamental, while also allowing for its limitations and doing away with humanism and its hubris without ‘suffocating’ our capacity. And it’s simultaneously dynamic, stable and symmetrical. — Possibility

I'd be glad to hear more about this. I neglected it at first as I was caught up defending my 'flat' metaphor.

These are the fields of sense, realms of discourse, where ignorance, unknowing, tears open the horizons for the imagination and intuition to play at will. Fields of faith, if you like. — Janus

:up:

I don't stand opposed to that stuff. In fact, I think anything potentially experienceable is part of the lifeworld, which is essentially 'horizonal' and infinite. My ontology includes anything that could possibly be discussed, given the minimum grip of some kind of inferential role.

I'm not even opposed to intense investment in esoteric mysteries. I do criticize the performative contradiction of those who can't make up their mind about whether they are transrational or not. If it's beyond mundane reasoning and open critical-synthetic discussion, then so be it. Seriously. But some people argue that logic is spiritually futile --- that they have nothing to learn from others, in other words. They show up anyway presumably because humans crave recognition, which is maybe one reason why the critical-synthetic tradition was born. Some of the prophets got bored of being ignored by one another and decided to work together on something that they could all find themselves in.

I think that disagreement is over the "in itself' that dialectical counterpart to the "for us" that you seem intent on restricting us to in all domains. — Janus

I insist tho that I am 'existentially' humble. Maybe the mystic is on a better path. I don't preach my suffocating & claustrophobic* ontology to anyone who isn't preaching their own brand, looking to criticize and synthesize with me.

But within the serious game or foolish science of 'ontology,' I take a strongly anthropomorphic position, perhaps (if I may reduce/ignore/subvert my responsibility for a moment ) because of a sense of duty to know what I'm talking about. My 'ego ideal' is a certain kind of cognitive hero. I tend to dig for the cognitive treasure. My mystical tendencies have always been more psychoanalytical and immanent than transhuman or astral. I love thinkers who make the mundane glow, who unveil the 'miraculous' in the rule rather than the exception.

*I had a friend once react as if mildly suffocated by my way seeing things.

coupled with the demand that if you are going to participate you must be minimally acquainted with the current state of the art, or risk being irrelevant. — Janus

And, I'd think, with a willingness to meet challenges, elaborate, edit, comment on others' work. A young Wittgenstein may occasionally get away with oracular bad manners, but that's against a background of 'non-geniuses' adversarially cooperating, putting in the time.

I cannot see "the field of normativity" as consisting in anything more than the principle of consistency. — Janus

No doubt that's a crucial part of it, but we can't forget the attitude of fallibility and a willingness to learn from others --- the second-order synthetic-critical tradition. I mean we can't do so as philosophers.* Humans have proven themselves very capable of burning witches. The 'rule' (the monster child in us and our heritage) is a dogmatic refusal to debate. Internal consistency is a tribal norm. One is one around here. If a superbaby from Krypton could materialize its own food and vaporize whatever annoyed it with an angry glance, it might never develop a coherent personality. It would never have to negotiate or compromise.

* As individuals in the larger sense we can 'consistently' be mystics, ironists, quietists, thugs...

from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement. — Joshs

Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ?

Now you know my intention was obvious --- but indeed even over here they are not all red.

When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. — Joshs

Again, you agree with me. A consistent skeptic/ironist avoids the temptation to play Kant.

... his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim — Joshs

You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best