I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality. — Joshs

I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme.

OK, I got a pdf of CIS.

Here's a good one.

In my liberal utopia, this replacement would receive a kind of recognition which it still lacks. That recognition would be part of a general turn against theory and toward narrative. Such a turn would be emblematic of our having given up the attempt to hold all the sides of our life in a single vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary. It would amount to a recognition of what, in Chapter I, I call the "contingency of language" - the fact that there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.

He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies. Trapped within his wee contingent vocab, he somehow grasps the essence of every possible vocab and its limitations.

This is the classic Kantian false humility. 'True' knowledge is impossible, I'm truly fucking sure of it. And Rorty liked to stress that oldtimey philosophy, the stuff he was transcending, was Kantian in intention. But there he goes: Can't get big truth, except of course for my big truth that you can't get big truth.

those discourses which begin from difference within identity — Joshs

This sure sounds like that familiar river. The intentional object has a certain place in the justification of claims. The word 'same' has never been pronounced the same way twice, even by the same person. Form is a fundamental experience. Husserl's categorical intuition. That kind of thing.

When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? I — Joshs

I assume the correct answer is infinitely complicated, but I'm confident that it involves individual subjectivity (dramaturgical ontology), with various actors intending new ideas, creating new metaphorical entities that harden into familiar literality. Then of course there's technology and the relentless change in our lifestyles. And so much more. But that's a start.

This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring. — Joshs

Rorty was one of my favorites for years. As much as I love the guy, I wouldn't take the old sophist at his word on that. I will grant that many people who gnash their teeth about this or that ism are thinking of cartoons.

Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/12612-Richard_Rorty

But supposing there was a god, can we all agree that this world is sufficiently evil enough to account for an evil god? — schopenhauer1

I can imagine a much worse life than I have. So a pure sadist isn't plausible to me.

What I do find plausible is the 'demiurge' sketched by Darwin. Where that motherfucker came from I cannot say. No one can, in my view, cuz they's always another why. But so much makes sense in that Darwinian framework. Demystified Schopenhauer, basically.

Graveleaping sex (in squirts of lost time) and graveleaping knowledge.

To be a bit more specific, critical-rational ontologists do not appear fully formed, but arise out of that tradition that questions its own moral worth, which is the religious tradition. That aspiration to the ideal community is the religious aspiration in modern dress. — unenlightened

:up:
Yes !

Hence my love for Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec00.htm

The reproach that according to my book religion is an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion, would be well founded only if...that into which I resolve religion, which I prove to be its true object and substance, namely...anthropology, were an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion. But so far from giving a trivial or even a subordinate significance to anthropology... I, on the contrary, while reducing theology to anthropology, exalt anthropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God; though, it is true, this human God was by a further process made a transcendental, imaginary God, remote from man.
...
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion – and to speculative philosophy and theology also – than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality.
...
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

I'm not endorsing every ounce of tone, etc., but showing him as a self-consciously transitional figure.

It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance. — Joshs

That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.

If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.'

But here, I think is where I start to become deviant. Because this is exactly what science has claimed to be doing since Descartes or Newton or thereabouts, that arrived at a mechanical world devoid of meaning. — unenlightened

Newton said : fuck it ! I make no hypothesis ! A mere mathematical pattern is good enough for me.

That mechanical world devoid of meaning is (I hope you see) a big part of what I'm challenging in all of my recent threads. It's a reductive 'fiction.' As fundamental ontology, it sucks. But we are practical primates dazzled by gadgets. Whatever smells of tech must be right. Hence my futile critique of a pragmatic irrationalism that'll always be with us.

Funny thing is I'll be misread initially by scientistic 'rationalists' who'll think I'm selling Mystic Kool-Aid when I'm trying to tell the minimal internally coherent beginning of the truth. Explicating the mere starting point. Some of 'em don't even see the 'field of normativity' yet that gives their 'skepticism' meaning.

Yes moral and rational beings with language in a world together. So ontology has to account for all that in some way. — unenlightened

Actually ontology (I claim) takes that for granted. But then goes on to clarify that blurry taking-for-granted. Actually ontology often has to first figure out, painfully slowly, what it's already committed itself to. Hence Brandom's title : Making It Explicit.

the map is not the territory... — unenlightened

This gets a little more complicated maybe. Concepts intend the world. The map is not the territory.. is presumably about the territory ?

If say there are apples on the table, I intend apples that I can go see and pick up. Husserl is great on this issue. Categorial intuition. An empty intention occurs when the apple is not around and we make the claim, but it can be fulfilled by the apples being on the table when we go check. We see that-apples-are-on-the-table.

We, I hope, but now I am worried, understand that the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory... Don't we? In general a map is reduced to "salient features". The reduction is not a fiction any more than the failure to say everything that is true all at once is a fiction — unenlightened

Conceptuality is not sound or shape or smell. I can see the mountain and not just reason about it. The mountain as mountain is 'organized' perhaps by my 'conceptual' (sensory 'transcendent') intention. I can see the same mountain from many perspectives. I can step in the same river day after day, though never the same water.

I would personally not equate the the failure to say everything at once to inferior ontologies that, while taking their time, still leave out something crucial. Note that I've already indicated the horizonal-infinite nature of the project. We are never done clarifying. But part of that clarification is the recognition that early versions of our story of HOW IT IS are inadequate.

What is this? A map the size of the territory with every feature marked would be unwieldy. — unenlightened

Yes. Of course. But fundamental ontology is where we finally tell the essence of the whole truth. Others can sweep the embarrassing/difficult aspects of subjectivity under the rug. But unworldly ontologists aren't satisfied with the usual shortcuts. Hilarious pompous word: 'ontologist.' Pure 'mathematicians' of the big picture, laughed at by 'chambermaids' ( nursing students ?) who hear their big words and see their 'economical' lifestyle. Actually some of us know better than to talk about Hegel with regular folks. But if we did, we'd be clowns. Maybe lovable, but clownish.

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time. — Joshs

Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure.

To be sure, philosophy gets more self-referential in this way as the story progresses, but it doesn't lose its lust to transcend its own moment.

I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined. — Joshs

Can we step in the same river twice ? I think so.

Brandom tries to put meaning entirely in inferential practice. We perform concepts. But unless there's some relative stability in this performance, knowledge is impossible.

Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it. ]

language functions as communication and depends on the prevalence of truth. Aesop illustrated this very clearly with the fable of the boy who cried "Wolf". Without a commitment to truth language loses meaning and function and becomes empty 'sound and fury'.

But how do I, or you, get from there to an ontology? It seems to me that nothing in what you have said here entails anything ontological. What am I missing?

Am I not supposed to assume that what there is (apart from our dialogue) does not depend on our dialogue taking place or coming to a conclusion? — unenlightened

Our commitment to the truth is not quite enough. The prophet also intends the truth. Gods can whisper truths in the ear of the chosen. The missing ingredient is justification, which is implicitly about Enlightenment autonomy, at both the personal and communal level. The critical-rational ontologist embraces a second-order critical-synthetic oracular tradition. 'We the rational' articulate the real together, fallibly, against a kind of horizon. It's implicitly adversarially cooperative. We each ideally see around the other's biases. I can disagree with you but not with me. At least I am ideally or aspirationally coherent. Our community as a whole is also ideally coherent, for sure enough we work toward a consensus in our co-articulation of the conceptual aspect of the lifeworld.

I can of course be challenged on my unfolding of the concept of rationality, but it's likely that such a challenger will ask me to justify my claims in terms of communal inferential standards.

So we've already got persons in a world and language together. And they can be wrong about this world individually. Is it funny to work so hard to end up with common sense ? Yes. But methodological skepticism was on to something. It works (maybe) at the species level, which was probably the confused intention anyway, given the assumption that subjectivity had a trans-personal structure. [ Your bubble was supposed to be structurally just like my bubble. So Kant could magically talk about my bubble from within his. ]

Indeed. A brute fact then of the human world? It's necessary to our discourse. It's necessary probably to our social life. — unenlightened

:up:

I'd say we only have 'practical fictions' (reductive maps) within the normative lifeworld that abstract/ignore this normative dimension. We tend to forget ourselves, lose ourselves in the object, become transparent as subjectivity.

I read Husserl's bracketing as an attempt to remind us of the way the objects are given, so that we can see [notice] our seeing of them. But we are still seeing the world and not the inside of the bubblescreen. We lose the way in the what, because the what is more practical.

Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule. — Joshs

I'll grant there are limits to what might be synchronic fictions approximations. But I'm only accepting a social-structural conception of meaning as a constraint and not a foundation. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure.

Did you notice I was trying to show the limits of a structuralist (rulebased) approach ? Inferential role semantics gets something right, but I think it leaves something out.

Can I can personally refer to what I call red ? Within the 'Wittgensteinian' public constraints of the use of red ?

Do I mean by 'red' what a bornblind person means by 'red' ? This is also about the relation of meaning and knowledge, and the relation of individual subjects to public concepts ---or the undeniable public aspects of concepts.

Truth is primarily a function of logic for me, it's not "that which is in accordance with reality", we're on the same page about that, right? — Judaka

Yes, true statements refer correctly to states of the world, that's what truth is. — Judaka

?

Also, you could just reject the claim as vague, since without guessing what I'm referring to, there's not enough information to go on. — Judaka

Sure, but didn't you yourself stress the dependence of meaning on context ? I have a rough idea of what you meant. The point is your intention to articulate the truth. God is love is also vague, but people who say it are trying to tell me about the world (in particular about God.)

I would love to hear an example that doesn't involve sense data, — Judaka

$\sqrt{2} \notin \Bbb Q$

Yes, true statements refer correctly to states of the world, that's what truth is. — Judaka

That's not pragmatism or truth-as-utility. That's truth as truth.

"If a human being has less than 10 fingers then they're a 0d0f0fj, and all 0d0f0fj should receive 1000 dollars from the government every week", then whether you're a 0d0f0fj or not is simple, we check how many fingers you've got. It wouldn't be true that I'm a 0d0f0fj, there's no arguing about it, I don't meet the prerequisites, since I've got 10 fingers. It's part of "truth" now, but it's also a useful (or not very useful) fiction. — Judaka

It's not a fiction. A fiction is a claim, a story. It's just a created category or status. It exists in the world like being-married and being-baptized.

One need not post mind as having an ‘inside’ that can be distinguished from an outside. — Joshs

:up:

Or else this whole thread amounts to no more than 'we have to talk in language, get used to it.' And that certainly does not rule out afterlives and much else, except procedurally and dictatorially. — unenlightened

That's a very strange reduction. Respectfully, I think you are reading it only for what interests you at the moment.

Let me summarize it:

The very idea or project of [critical / rational] ontology already tacitly involves some nonobvious ontological commitments. The ontologist as such does not start with a blank slate. This constrains any skepticism that 'earnestly' justifies itself through claims about the knowing subject --- through ontological claims, which are typically performative contradictions.

A different skeptic 'wins' by not playing the game. One does not reason against reason except as a troll perhaps. Or a zen clown.

This project might not interest you. But reading about Husserl's critique of psychologism got me thinking. When does humility become false ? When is 'Kant' a paradoxical dogmatist about what others can and can't know ? And the deeper motive is an aspiration toward integrity, toward the coherence of my personality, in particular in the conceptual dimension of the claims I make about the world.

Is it so shocking to recognize humans as conceptmongers ? Have you looked into Husserl ? I used to try to reduce concepts to language, bu

You already have assumed both the body, and a moral and rational robe. And these garments cannot then be reduced to bodily functions, on pain of ceasing to be fundamental and disappearing into epiphenomena. So it looks like you need a non-physical realm, of forms, if not of gods and angels. — unenlightened

I think I've went out of my way in many posts to stress the irreducibility (for philosophers) of normativity. For any such reduction must be justified.

I've also stressed that disembodied subjectivity makes no sense.

I give, as a 'phenomenologist' who wants to describe more than speculate, a dramaturgical ontology with enworlded conceptmongering flesh at its center. The world has a conceptual aspect. It's just there, presumably because we are, given the ways of rabbits and insects.

If you are trying to get me to say I am not a physicalist, I've explicitly rejected scientific realism. The pure object is as semantically questionable as the pure subject. But it doesn't matter practically. Philosophers are fools who care more than worldlywise people about keeping their stories straight. They are the oracular-poetic cousins of the pure mathematicians.

Whatever rationality is going to be in the scheme of things, if you want a monism, it is going to be problematic. — unenlightened

I could have called what I'm about a radical pluralism. I admit every kind of entity with every kind of access to that entity. Even round squares. I merely point out that as philosophers we have to grab these entities by their inferential roles. So I am not celebrating the glories of rationality (except that I must do so implicitly in my friendly critical discussion with you) so much as (re-)presenting a stage of reason's self-explication. I'm probably just catching up with Hegel.

Tornados and mother's love and the axiom of choice and the ghost of William James in a story by a a fictional author are all very different 'intentional objects' that are equally welcome in my ontology. Your memory of a toothache is welcome, even though it's your toothache, because maybe you use it to make a case for some thesis. Even the ghost or purple alien somebody swears they saw is welcome, thought the nature or style or character of its existence is up for debate.

For Plato, that world is analogised as the cave wall, a realm of shadows that is the illusory world of matter and bodies, as distinct from the real world of forms, the concern of the philosopher. Your project, as I understand it through many threads, is to marry the two worlds. — unenlightened

But they are always already married. I'm with Husserl on categorial intuition. I'm anti-philosophical in the sense that I insist on the naked reality of the Lifeworld. I have to call the ordinary world the lifeworld just to avoid confusing philosophers who assume from the beginning that they are in unbreakable bubbles of magical sensation stuff.

Think Plato's cave, since you seem to have an allergic reaction to religion. — unenlightened

I don't know about that. I think we agree that philosophy is mythic and oracular. It's all religion in that sense. But is it a private esoteric brutal religion or a self-consciously open self-modifying religion ?

Humanism is an optimistic transformation of Christianity. I'm a bit of a pessimistic gnostic describing it from the outside to some degree, not exactly not a transrational mystic myself. The myth of the creator god publicly executed on a cross as an enemy of god (of himself) is sublime. It's a deep truth if properly understood. Humanism is the (recognition of ) Incarnation. The ideal communication community is Christ in a world that mostly belongs to Moloch. All that is beautiful and holy is hopelessly entangled with all that is cruel and disgusting. The cross is the matrix is the devouring mother.

For example, my claim about "systems must never rely on the goodwill of the powerful", what would make that true? Explain it. — Judaka

Assertion is irreducible. That statement would be true if indeed systems must never rely on the goodwill of the powerful.

Famously, 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is [actually] white.

That's the issue of meaning. Irreducible, no ? If I say it's true that the sky is blue, I just mean that the sky is blue. The articulation of reality is so fundamental that I'm not sure what else can be said, for whatever I say will also be an articulation of reality.

To be fair, more conceptual statements get more ambiguous, but I don't think that changes their reality-articulating intention.

Another issue is that of justification.

A dog is a dog, that's true, I don't believe it's true because it's useful, it's merely true. But what's a dog? That's just made up, a useful fiction. — Judaka

It's one thing to point out the historical contingency of concepts, but I think you are assuming a radical split between human concepts and some 'pure' preconceptualized world. But that itself is 'just made up' --- a classic philosophers' fiction or thesis. Just look around the room you are in. You see familiar objects, the tools of life. This is what's truly given, not sense-data, etc. The concept of the dog is just part of our recognition of a dog as such and of course of our justifications of claims involving dogs.

You are talking as if you can see around your own enculturation, as if you can strip dogs of their doghood without already understanding their doghood.

Usefulness is truth because it's true that it's useful. — Judaka

I think this is fascinating path. In my view, it requires a weird ironism. You have to become a kind of metaphysical zen clown, with your speech acts never completely earnest, aiming more at a mood than a stable theory.

Perhaps you can clear up how this:

I don't think P is true because it's useful to believe P either. I think whether P is true depends on whether it's correct to reference it as true, which depends on what it's being referenced as, and the rules of the reference. — Judaka

goes with:

I told you useful fictions and truth are one and the same, — Judaka

To me it's like you are saying the world makes statements true (true statements 'refer' correctly to states of the world? ) and then that truth is just useful fiction.

…it wasn’t clear. — Possibility

Fair enough. I'm trying though.

I believe philosophers should take this to heart, systems must never rely on the goodwill of the powerful. — Judaka

Is this true or just a useful fiction ? See the issue ? Surely you intend it as a deep truth about our shared reality. This is the problem with earnest pragmatism. It can't remember that it doesn't believe in truth.

I'm a nihilist and a pragmatist, I know very well. Had I sufficient power, so much of my philosophical ideals would lose their usefulness to me, and I would abandon them for that. — Judaka

Yes. And the Englightment is to some degree what happens when folks wake up to the lack of a god to make sure they behave. On a practical level, I'm outnumbered. So I have to make a case. I can't just give orders.

Would a god study pure mathematics ? You imply maybe not. But I'm not so sure. I think we like to SEE. We have lots of other motives, but we also desire to know, to understand.

Of course, I can prove the untrustworthiness of logic, it is easy. — Judaka

Is it now ?

I'm struggling when you start talking about "pragmatic versions of truth" because I still have no idea where we disagree on the topic of it. — Judaka

I'm not a pragmatist. P is not true because it's useful to believe P. Though it is often useful to believe the truth. To say that P is true is primarily (ignoring the metacognitive extras) just asserting P.

The plums are in the icebox $\ne$ it's useful to believe that the plums are in the icebox.

You haven't addressed my Husserlian approach yet.

You've brought up the truth a lot, so I respond, as befits my understanding, I don't really care about it. Truth is abundant, overwhelmingly so, I don't seek it, I'm interested in power, useful knowledge, and useful understanding. I think "seeking truth" is asinine, and anyone who says they are, always remains guided by biases that end up resulting in the search for power and utility. — Judaka

Yes. I have written many OPs from just such a perspective. That's what Trump believes too. If you are so smart, why aren't you a billionaire ? But I think this is an insincere pose, at least for those who aren't sociopaths. Part of me is Hearst in Deadwood. Part of me understands why the judge in Blood Meridian dresses in white. Let's throw in some brutal social Darwinism, esoteric elitist bloodrites, the mystic horn sigil, whatever you like. But fortunately for the community and my own survival as an outnumbered individual, easily put down by the local Leviathan, I'm mostly 'indifferent honest' like Hamlet.

But it's not only an insincere pose in my opinion: it's also self-cancelling. If we are all just rationalizing monkeys, then the claim that we are such rationalizers is itself a rationalization --- flattering the 'sophistication' of its confused or (best case) ironic purveyors. Please note that I don't intend rudeness. You are blunt, so I'm being blunt, but not out of a lack of respect. This is good conversation on a crucial topic.

Just a sense of "Yeah, that makes sense" would suffice for most. — Judaka

Hey that's just my OP. Only foolish philosophers wipe their asses till their assholes bleed.

I hope I haven't been rude. I'm trying to get you to admit that you too are a real boy. I'm challenging what I see as your psychologism (rationality is just rationalization) and your functionalism (your version seems to deny the qualitative aspect of experience). You mention your curiosity. Is that something you feel ? And do you not see color or feel pain ?