Comments

  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    Mind may no longer be conceived as a self-contained field, substantially differentiated from body (dualism), nor as the primary condition of unilateral subjective mediation of external objects or events (idealism). Thus all real distinctions (mind and body, God and matter, interiority and exteriority, etc.) are collapsed or flattened into an even consistency or plane, namely immanence itself, that is, immanence without opposition.
    http://faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Plane%20of%20immanence%20-%20Wikipedia,%20the%20free%20encyclopedia.htm

    To me this falls out of something like Brandom's inferentialism and Hegel's holism. The finite entity has no genuine being --- a mere superstition or useful fiction (map, model). The normative communal subject does turn out to be central, but such a subject is only intelligible when embodied within a world (though the details are left to be determined by that community.)

    We automatically understand all entities at once systematically, relationally. A disconnected entity is an empty entity, a meaningless entity. Your nostalgia or lumbago is in my world too (our world) because we can both include it in the justification and challenging of claims. Quaternions are as real as swans, existing on/from the same network. Promises and termites and forgotten umbrellas. The reality-bestowing reality-acknowledging vortex at the center is the rational discussion ---which was always tacitly central as legislator but often misunderstood itself as peeping in the from the outside.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    The real is rational and the rational is real. That's the 'faith' of philosophyplaque flag

    Just want to say that I'm giving this famous aphorism a slightly different meaning in its new context. Here it's not about history but attitude and belief.

    The real is rational. We meet it courageously as something we can and ought to make sense of. There's what Nietzsche might call Socratic optimism in this. Our 'Socrates' here might admit that this is the unjustified existential decision-- the getting on the ladder.

    The rational is real. We accept as real only what we can make sense of. We exclude unjustified claims from our relatively settled beliefs. This doesn't mean we aren't forced privileged to live in a 'field of possibility.'
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    From the dawn of philosophy through Kant's noumena, we see a strong tendency to posit a distinction between the word we live in and something more real, and naive realism itself posits an external world that is distinct from us.Count Timothy von Icarus

    For me there's a semantic issue here. What can we mean by 'more real' ? Doesn't experience give our words meaning ?
  • Kant's Notions of Space and Time
    ‘Tis vain hope, I must say, although you are nonetheless welcome to take that point.Mww

    :up:

    Philosophy gets us clearer on empirical reality perhaps, and I think that is the only reality that plaque flag allows.Janus

    You nailed it. I'm with Hegel on this issue, in spirit if not to the letter. I'm not saying that I can't or won't be surprised, but to me that's just incomplete knowledge of the only Reality worth acknowledging as such, the Reality that I can't help but know as a central participant -- a protagonist who didn't ask for the part but found himself in the costume, condemned to clarify the script in front of live studio audience.
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    But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit.

    Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it.
  • Hidden Dualism
    Prima facie, it doesn’t. However, upon investigation, there are strong inductive arguments for our (1) at least our representative faculties using logic and (2) I would go so far as to say that reality has logic, as a Platonic form, which conditions the universal mind. The ‘realm of appearance’ is informationally-accurate (enough for survival purposes) and, consequently, is an indirect window into the world-in-itself.Bob Ross

    I feel like you are using logic to prove that you should be allowed to use logic ?

    How do you know that it is good enough for survival purposes ? If the real you and real everything is hidden, you may be doing very badly down there. What's going on 'up here' in representation might be a escapist daydream from starvation down there. Or maybe down there everything is immortal.

    As far as I can tell, there's no possible evidence for any kind of relationship --and so no material with which to make progress one step at a time. It seems to me that indirect realism puts all evidence out of reach.
  • Hidden Dualism
    First what?Bob Ross

    I was asking whether you were the real Bob Ross himself or just Bob Ross for Bob Ross.
  • Hidden Dualism

    Another little thing to consider is Popper's idea of basic statements --where the rubber meets the road. He skipped over the metaphysical strangeness of the witnessing of a measurement and went right to the 'politics' of what a community will fallibly accept as a report. Seems like a good vector of attack or illumination.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions

    Granted that transcendent arguments are tricky, what in mine works or does not in your views ?
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    We couldn't recognise a conceptual scheme that was radically different to ur own, as a conceptual scheme.Banno

    My thinking to. Hence one logic.
  • Hidden Dualism

    I guess the tricky part is already lower in the animal kingdom. Are ants a point of view on the world ?Are bacteria ? I feel strongly that cats and dogs are (and so on), but they don't know they are. They recognize entities but not being itself.

    One of the problems of correlationism is making sense of the ancestral world. Emergence looks tempting, despite its problems and complexities. But I really don't know.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    If the pre-cognitive world is at worst altogether non-existent and at best totally "dark" and totally blind, what if we and the other animals are expressions, manifestations of that darkness, blindness and ignorance as much as we are the expressions, manifestations of newborn knowledge (in every sense of the word)?Janus

    Well that's one of the more beautiful myths/hypothesis I've heard in a while. Nice !

    I want to add that I've often heard it said the we humans are the world coming to know itself, and in that sense, it didn't exist until it came to be known by us. But then what about the other animals, whose cognitive umwelts are (mostly) hidden from us?Janus

    I like the idea of all the sentient creatures as different kinds of 'eyes.' Humans are the grand conceptual eyes, but eagles actually see better and more. What is it to hear like an owl ? To smell like a bloodhound ? I do love animals. Their umwelts are entities we are forced to see from the outside. I totally admit them as entities. Like someone else's dream : it exists in my world (the one world we all share), but not in the same manner as it does for the dreamer. Differential access in a direct realist context.
  • Hidden Dualism

    I'm sympathetic in general but I think mental and physical events are palpably in the same inferential nexus. [ See my latest OP for more on that. ] Is explanation the right word ? Is conscious stuff or merely being from a perspective --- with being ONLY so far as we know given perspectively ? I reject scientific realism (the independent object) on semantic and empirical grounds. I don't know anything about anything apart from this living brain...it's a lamp I've never dared to unplug. No one who ever told stuff about the world did either, not before they were done talking. I think trying to put the scientific image 'behind' appearance is wacky. My frustration is all the to-me-credulous semantic atomism --- as if stuff just keeps on making sense completely out of context.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    I there has to be a conception of levels or modes or domains of being.Quixodian

    I should add that it's only flat in the sense that nothing is stacked on anything else. It's given as an entire blanket. Entities and categories get their meaning structurally, relationally. People still value things differently. But this need not appear in the logical structure. I'm intentionally leaving the details unspecified. I want to give only the skeleton, leave out everything that's contingent.

    Any postulated higher beings would have to be justified in the rational conversation. Basically rationality itself is god in this basically humanist conception. But what humans are is largely what they determine themselves to be.
  • Rationalism's Flat Ontology
    No, I don't think so. I there has to be a conception of levels or modes or domains of being. Traditionally that was cast in terms of the chain of being, but it survived even into the 17th Century:Quixodian

    Note that I place rationality at the center. One might want to call this 'mind,' but the rational community is embodied and share a world of entities that they understand inferentially. This understanding just is the dynamic negotiated conceptual structure/aspect of the lifeworld. So it's more like a reason that's the glue of the world, the articulated spine of reality.The normativity of giving and asking for reasons is central, for this community is indeed a necessary being ---implicit in the very idea of 'serious' 'ambitious' 'scientific' philosophy. The real is rational and the rational is real. That's the 'faith' of philosophy or the sigil on its banners.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    I love the "divine ignorance" of humanity as much as I love its knowledge. Divine ignorance is the dialectical counterpart of knowledge and a profound source of creativity.Janus
    :up:
    I can relate. And even knowledge is almost a byproduct of joyful exploration, joyful creativity. To play at ontology is to play seriously a science. Nonfiction is the goal, but it's also a constraint like the form of a sonnet.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    but it seems reasonable to think that they somehow do exist independently of humans grasping and recognizing them as mountains.Janus
    :up:
    It seems reasonable. But I could only project experience based on a combination of my own living brain and other worldly objects. I've got no experience of a world apart from this brain. It's a bit like a lamp that I've never switched off.

    For me the phenomenologically (and spiritually) important thing is precisely our not knowing. If we knew everything, or even in principle could know everything, then there would be real mystery, only things yet to be known, and thus no room for faith.Janus

    I will join you in celebrating the inexhaustible infinity of the world. I want very much for there to always be something around the corner, something at least a little new. I want more to learn and the same old good stuff to further clarify. I had a bout of religion in my youth, but I think I'm wired for immanence. I never looked much at the stars in the sky. Always stuck on people. Beauty and wit and kindness. When the conditions are right down here, it's everything I want. Paradise would be renewed youth, friends lovers philosophy and music, sunny days, cool 55 degree air. But I'm pretty happy even without everything on that wish list anyway. I know it can't last, but that too I try to forget or forgive.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity

    I'd say my view is built from several pieces that work together all at the same time.

    It's a form of rationalism in that it puts us as reasoners as the undeniable center of reality. We cannot rationality doubt our own rational community, for we demand justifications for claims, and any such justification assumes that very community. So the community is given and undeniable. The details of the world and even of rationality itself can be debated endlessly.

    It's a form of direct realism because in rational conversations we almost always care about the public object. As Husserl saw, I intend the coffee table or London Bridge and not some picture of it in my mind ---though we can also intend what's on our mind if we want. Note that my direct realism doesn't exclude mental entities. Your daydream exists in my world, because we can reason about it. But you have special access to it, while I have to trust your reports. Access to numbers is also different than access to chairs. But we intend (usually) the public number and the public chair.

    Related to this, I think the subject and object are interpendent. There is no world except 'for' or 'through' subjects, but there are no subjects who aren't in this world. Like my Klein bottle icon. Or like a donut and a donut hole. Or the right and left hand. My argument for this is empirical, semantic, and holist. But it's in the OP, so I'll stop there.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    Nonetheless, if I wanted to find a nuance that allowed me to avoid the performative contradiction, it would be doubtless easy. Such is the fickle nature of logic and reason, after all.Judaka

    Ah, but if logic was indeed too fickle, I don't think it would be easy, because whether you avoided the performative contradiction wouldn't be definite or stable. You are even using the proposed 'fickle nature of logic and reason' to support a claim, right ? Let me reiterate that I intend no rudeness. I'm just interested in only apparently skeptical performative contradictions that function by making grand ontological claims .
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    didn't take myself to be articulating the structure of reality there... I had imagined something broader, something closer to the "whole truth", as you say. Something overarching. Was I wrong?Judaka

    When I say 'structure of reality,' I mean the whole truth in essence, because there's an infinity of facts. I also emphasize what's atemporal in reality, as is typical with philosophical knowledge (we want our truths to stay true.) Does that help ?
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    Surely the dog is what it is absent the concept or more precisely name, "dog".Janus

    I don't think it's that simple. Of course I see why one would say so. But are mountains mountains in the same way without us grasping them as mountains with all that that entails ? I'm serious about my anthropormorphic ontology. The independent object (the pure dog untainted by being grasped as a dog by a cultural being) is a useful fiction --so useful that it seems silly to call it a fiction. Yet the concept dog evolved (and so therefore did the lifeworld), and that's another complexity worth discussing.
    ***
    Consider also the difference between a rare tool seen by someone who knows what it's for as opposed to someone else who only guesses it's a tool.
  • Hidden Dualism
    that is all that is required (i.e., an objective world being represented) to prove that there is a 'brain-in-itself'.Bob Ross

    But you only associate representing with brains due to what you've seen in mere appearance. It's circular, perhaps a slipknot, seems to me. You are smuggling in common sense. That's my fundamental objection to indirect realism. The whole game depends on direct realism in the background. Brains and eyes and apples and their causal relationships. Seeing others see with eyes. And so on.
  • Hidden Dualism
    But, regardless, the brain is a informationally adequate representation of a vital aspect of oneself, as a product of oneself representation an aspect of oneself to oneself.Bob Ross

    The classic problem is that you are trapped on the side of appearance with no way to compare. You end up with (at best, IMO) a kind of instrumentalism or 'coping' pragmatism/irrationalism.
  • Hidden Dualism
    Oh I see: are you arguing that the only thing one can directly know is the result of their brain’s processes (and thusly are immersed in ideas)? If so, then I would say that is epistemic idealism and not a form of solipsism; but I could be misunderstanding you.Bob Ross

    I'm a direct realist. I quoted Hume to give an example of what I oppose. What I finally escaped !
  • Hidden Dualism

    Wait a minute, are the Bob Ross -for Bob Ross or the Bob Ross -in itself ? Can you trust logic if you are the first ? Or why should a realm of appearance include trustworthy logic ? Weird things happen when you put illusion closer to you than reality as a matter of principle.
  • Hidden Dualism
    But the brain-for-us is not the brain-in-itself, exactly because it is a representation of it.Bob Ross

    Let's try this. What right do you (do we) have to believe in the brain-in-itself ? Why can't the hidden reality be 57 dimensional ? Why can't we all be made of purple homogenous hypergoo there ?
  • Hidden Dualism
    That's actually what I think. I think what David Chalmer tries to express rather awkwardly as 'what it is like to be...' is, really, just 'being'.Quixodian
    :up:

    Furthermore that we universally assume that we know what 'being' means when actually we don't.Quixodian
    :up:
    And possibly we can't. Maybe we can get clearer ? Or do we only ever keep reminding ourselves that it's not an entity, but that there is that entity or any entity in the first place ? But to experience the wonder seems important even if we can't. The 'world' or 'being' or the 'there' or the 'shining' of any and every tautology.

    The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.


    To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
    — Wittgenstein
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity

    I think you may have a 'naive' view of phenomenological direct realism. I went out of my way to spare you the confusion.

    Note that such direct realism doesn't pretend to infallibility or omniscience. Reality is profoundly horizonal (we know the mountain has another side, that we could definitely get clearer on Hegel, etc.) We can be wrong, confused, see things at different levels of clarity. The physicists sees the chair in the kitchen in ways that the child can't, for the physicist has learned to enrich the object by weaving it into the scientific image. A philosopher will also see the chair in more complex and complete way than the child.plaque flag

    Note also that my 'one-level' ontology includes hallucinations and toothaches and memories of apple pie. I hope that blows your hair back. Hallucinations and direct realism ? You betcha.
  • Hidden Dualism
    Is the hard problem of conscious just (or equivalently) the hard problem of being ? The being of the ashtray is ultimately mysterious, but we can't talk with the ashtray about it. We can talk to other humans who see/know that things are. We think that things must be for bats too, because of their shiny mammalian eyes. But bats probably can't get distance on this being. They are immersed in the object.

    We 'transcend' not only entities but the world / being as a whole.

    Can science explain that there is being in the first place ? As opposed to finding patterns in the movement of changes of entities ? Being is endlessly presupposed, so it's hard to say yes. Being is given perspectively, not to just any objects it seems, but is it not given as the same world to all ?We are thrown into wonder when we are ejected from immersion in the practical and see the strangeness in things existing.

    With the hard problem of conscious, our own consciousness is always presupposed, so it's always (especially?) the weirdness of not-mine-flesh being like me but not, also seeing being.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    So even a word like "truth", I don't think a dictionary definition helps that much, we need to ask, what does it mean to refer to something as truth, and what are the rules for it? What does it mean for something to be truth and how should we treat something upon knowing that it's the truth? All of these questions are relevant to understanding the word, though context can influence this greatly.Judaka

    Yes. And I for one think philosophy is largely about clarifying meaning, getting a better grip on our basic concepts...or getting a better on grip on why that's not possible...or figuring out whether it is possible...and so on.
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    That's far from a comprehensive explanation, and I could've written this much better but it should be enough that you understand my perspective, maybe.Judaka

    Your comments on language all seem quite reasonable to me. You might like these passages.
    A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…
    ...
    [T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant.
    — Robert Brandom
  • Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
    Do you associate subjective with unjustified? That would be unfortunate, it's sad how this word has been butchered.

    As I've already explained, and you seemingly agreed with, my argument is the result of my creative effort, it's got my biases, my choices, my views attached. "Articulation is inherently subjective", that's my understanding of articulation, my understanding of "inherently", my rules for applying "inherently", my understanding of "subjective" my rules for applying "subjective". I chose the words and not some other words. I sequenced them as they are. It's my creation, and its construction is tied to my thinking.
    Judaka

    Consider the larger context. You wrote : If you want to articulate the structure of reality, my view is that your aspiration is doomed from the start. My point is that you were doing what I'd call articulating the structure of reality in that very statement. Can we help but articulate the structure of reality ?

    I realize that they are your words. I think you mostly had to conform to semantic norms that transcend you, because I understand you all too well otherwise. But surely those particular words are a function of you in particular as well.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    Only if they were a rationalistMoliere

    Yes, exactly ! But I'm assuming they are. And such rationalists are a weird little minority. I play one on TV myself, but I take off the costume now and then and play Uno instead.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    Though your mention of heroism is a point of difference between us. I've come to a place in my life where I don't want the heroes journey. I'm just me doing my things trying to be happy.Moliere

    I hear you, but I like to think of the hero concept as very flexible. Yang heroes, yin heros. Even anti-heros. What I have in mind is any relatively stable ideal toward which the self tends.

    And let me reiterate that I don't think people are existentially constrained by my proposed foundation. I'm just postulated that a certain role, optionally adopted, has certain implications.

    If X is a 'scientific' / 'rational' ontologist (metaphysician, philosopher), then X cannot deny [ stuff ].
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    I think I'd say that your expression is that embodiment, worldhood, and language are equiprimordial, to use some Heidegger.Moliere

    Yes, Heidegger is a huge influence, but it's fun to reach for synonyms, pull in Apel (who loves Peirce). I think Habermas is about this kind of thing too.

    That sits well with me. It's the foundationalism that I'm questioning more than the ontology.Moliere

    Well the foundation I'm aiming at is the minimal foundation that is already implied in the role of the philosopher. I'm making a transcendent argument as described here (it'll help me to quote.)

    As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

    So Y is 'I'm a philosopher,' and X is the stuff that makes Y intelligible -- basically what Apel said, but it's world, language, justification norms. Crucially, the details are left minimally specified. Because the foundation should be absolutely the least constraint that will work. Ontologists will fight over the details within that undeniable framework. [So I'm being Kantian in a way. ]
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    I'd side more Kant when it comes to the questions of ontology or metaphysics: knowledge requires a justification, and there are no justifications when it comes to ontology. Ontology presupposes its own justifications from the outset.Moliere

    To me, knowledge requires a justification is very much an ontological claim -- proposed as knowledge. (I'm not trying to be difficult, I swear.) Kant is precisely the kind of disavowed ontologist that I'm interested in. If he was quietly skeptical, no problem, but he did a weird super-metaphysics that looks very humble while making intense absolute ontological claims. Fascinating personality.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    Couldn't you do so from an emotive base?Moliere

    I think that'd basically be some version of mysticism. I love 'since feeling is first' from e.e. cummings, , for instance, but I couldn't justify it, I don't think, by appealing to my feelings. Now I don't have to justify unless I can't resist trying to be ontological. Think of 'transrational' mystics who (because of their consistency) never bother with philosophical debate. They 'win' the game by not playing.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    I'm tempted to become a parody of myself and just say "It's the ethical!" :D But I actually don't think rationality is an ethical matter. I think of it as instrumental to whatever it is the human heart wants.Moliere

    The 'special' rationality of the heroic philosopher is, in my view, exactly and particularly and essentially ethical. As philosopher (or scientist, basically the same ethic), 'I' hold myself to certain standards. I put on a costume and adopt an ethic.

    Though there's also the usual instrumental rationality.

    Above you might be (seem to be) collapsing the two. Now to me that'd be psychologism, which says that all rationality is really rationalization --- we are really just objects in the causal nexus, emitting adaptive concepts, with illusion of free will or responsibility, not to be trusted. But that would be (however tempting) the self-subverting false-skepticism that makes a profound ontological claim about the subject in order to disallow the authority of profound ontological claims.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    Possible objection, your honor. From what perspective can someone claim there are two rationalities ? Only (I think) from a higher and truer 'actual' synthesizing rationality.

    Can a unified subject believe in two, truly opposed 'rationalities' ? In opposed inferential norms ?
    plaque flag

    I think the member of one community would have to regard the member of another community with a sufficiently different logic as insane. @Banno could maybe add something about our inability to recognize a radically other conceptual scheme.
  • Parsimonious Foundationalism : Ontology's Enabling Assumptions
    (math is clear and certain, but knowing-how to play jazz piano is not as clear)Moliere

    :up:

    I take that as a worthy ontological insight. Different regions of entities play by different rules.