I have my copy of the Investigations ready.

Who wants to lead this reading group? — Posty McPostface

I will have a new copy soon (old one vanished in the hurly-burly of life.)

Do we need a leader? If so, why not you?

And all of that stuff can be very dynamic, quickly changing, it can be pretty fuzzy, various things both in succession and simultaneous, with various acts of association while all of that stuff is present mentally, ¤ and § and Ç and so on. — Terrapin Station

I like that you also see this fuzzy, dynamic process. To break it into discrete acts helps us say what we hand in mind, but I do wonder if it's not even fuzzier and more dynamic than that.

(a) meaning is inherently mental and can't be "made into something else"--so I can't literally type a meaning — Terrapin Station

I agree, more or less, but can we say what the mental is? what meaning is? You say 'making an association.' That sounds roughly right to me. But what is 'making an association'? It's not that I expect a simple answer. I'm just pointing to the chase of the 'what meaning is' through a chain of synonyms. Seems to me that we have to assume that the other is just generally 'there' in language with us.

The associations we make that are meanings aren't necessarily simple or just one thing, especially for things that we're very familiar with. — Terrapin Station

I agree, and I think this also points at dependence on context. How do sentences fit words together into meanings? It is not a simple horizontal addition, nor does this 'addition' move only forward in time.

And then they'll have something in mind for a phrase like "is on the," which wouldn't be unusual to treat as "one thing," so that you're making a mental association, ¶, with the whole phrase, and you're associating it with something like your concept of the relation, or perhaps you're picturing the relation or whatever. — Terrapin Station

I think this is roughly right too, but it might still be too 'atomic' to catch all of the fluidity of the meaning experience.

* Again, insofar as an individual does NOT assign meaning to a word, a phrase, or even the entire sentence, it does not have a meaning. — Terrapin Station

Sure, I agree. We can experience sounds or written words as unknown. In the right context we will interpret them as unknown words and not just symbols or noises. We might grasp at the vaguest sense of meaning from context. But I mostly agree.

Or in other words, no one can be wrong about any meaning, any association they make. They can be more or less conventional, but it's not wrong to be unconventional. — Terrapin Station

I agree, and I'd even say being unconventional is how language evolves. We use our tokens in new ways to create new meanings. I phrase this within the strong dichotomy of meanings and tokens which I find problematic. At least most of the time I think we experience meaning 'through' the tokens.

Meaning is still the stuff going on in individuals' heads. It's just that those individuals are obviously not in vacuums with respect to each other. They interact and influence each other and so on. — Terrapin Station

Yes I agree. I don't think this is the last word, and I have tried to point out a phenomenon that complicates this, but yes: meaning is subjective in an important sense. What you maybe neglect is the meaning of 'in individual's heads.' This is view from outside, that sees air-gapped skulls. It downplays what-it-is-liked-to-be-networked 'in' those heads. In everyday experience and language use, we experience the sense of being directly plugged in to a 'meaning field.' We don't see a string of symbols first and then experience sense-making. Meaning is grasped 'through' the symbols almost instantaneously. Nor do we hear sounds and then experience those sounds becoming meaningful. They are initially meaningful. Our issue here only seems to be that you want to approach what makes sense from outside the skull and I am trying to do a kind of phenomenology of meaning. The 'shared space of meaning' is for me nothing 'magical.' * Far from it. It is a 'first-person' description. I scare-quote 'first-person' because phenomenologically this phrase doesn't get the experience right. We aren't primary trapped in our skulls translating marks and noises into elusive meaning-stuff. Meaning shines 'through' these marks and noises. And 'meanings' also slightly betray the first-person experience of a continuous meaning-field (an atomization for practical purposes that should not obscure the phenomenon.)

*In case it's clarifying, I'd say that the 'spiritual' is radically 'subjective.' The postulation of objects like 'God' or etc. as making possible some kind of theology-as-science is counter to my grasp. Experience is 'only' concepts, feelings, sensations. This trinity of concept, feeling, and sensation slightly betrays a living unity moving in existential-phenomenological time in order to get a point across that nothing 'magical' is involved. The only 'objectivity' we might find is a strong sense (never allowing for proof) that it is roughly the same for all of us to be in love, be terrified, etc. We read one another's expressions and immediately read emotion 'through' these expressions, which is not to say that we can't consciously re-evaluate such an experience of reading-through.This 'going-back' is a significant aspect of our experience.

I have taught the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.

This is lovely too. The idea for me is that words are a ladder to a state beyond words, or a state beyond any particular words. The 'point' of the particular words is that they can teach us the unimportance of the particular words used to get this point. It's like Kafa's Castle. For each man a door just for him, the ladder of his own strange and crooked life. And the particular words are therefore tangled up with the petty self that insists on its conceptual idols--usually in an attempt to control others, which reduces the spiritual to the political just as others would reduce it to science (which may really just be politics, a claim on the Real to ground political claims.)This is not to say that politics or science becomes wrong but only to open the possibility that we maintain in ourselves a sense of something higher than either (a mode of being that comes and goes, open to sinners and fools in other moments) . Those who reject that something can be higher than either already have their sacred on hand, whichever one they've picked.

*This is just the way I'm currently seeing things. I don't want to sound dogmatic. I just want to get it out in a clear way.

Nice points. I always loved the ending part of the TLP, never really grokked the complicated stuff leading up to it, maybe because I had read criticisms of those details.

I think (as you imply) that he was attacking the idea that the highest things could be subject to a science. The 'unwritten' part of the TLP (passed over in conspicuous silence) was dearest to him, as I understand it. Only Wittgenstein could get away with talking 'nonsense' to Carnap.

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation. — Carnap

It's interesting how positivism etc. can function as a kind of primer for negative theology. In its pursuit of a certain kind of purity, it actually abandons the 'spiritual' in a way that gives it space.

For Carnap, talk of God that claims to mean something non-empirical must refer to images and feelings and therefore have no meaning. This identification of meaning with the empirical has a kind of massive stupidity. What does Carnap himself mean by 'feeling' here? If reference to feeling has no meaning? As often happens, the flight from meaning within meaning collapses into absurdity.

https://philarchive.org/archive/TEOv1

I wonder how much we can agree on a few issues. What do you make of the idea that intelligibility itself is the fundamental mystery? an intelligible life-world? Also, to what degree would you limit the spiritual to the realm of feeling, concept, and sensation? In other ways, to a way of existing. Would you grant that the spiritual is maybe 'only' 'ordinary' life lived in a certain way? With no quasi-scientific claims to make but only reports of 'internal' experience? This 'internal' is tricky, because the higher thoughts and feelings have a universality in my view. All explicit formulations fail or have their blindspots, like every attempt to count the real numbers one by one.

And of course the ladder is beautiful. One way I like to interpret it is earnest conceptual analysis that finally leads to an aporia. Again and again perhaps until one has a grasp on something like semantic holism --and the grasp of the mystery of this 'thing' we are, a space for interpretation. Such a space requires an 'existential' in which things are articulated and clarified non-instantaneously.

I know you've never been that open to Nietzsche, but what of this portrait of Christ? So far no one has told me they are moved by it or find anything in it. But I think it captures a behindness-of-langauge that I relate to in high moments.

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. — N

I think climbing the ladder of concept allows one to see something about the relationship between concepts and life. In this case the 'pure' ignorance would be a learned ignorance.
We see the 'destructive' or critical mind work through positive theologies one by one, climaxing in a negative theology of 'life' or 'light.'

.Here's some Wittgenstein on Heidegger:

I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists [das etwas existiert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only,a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language.

Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics.

I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values [ob es Werte gebe , whether the Good can be defined, etc.

In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give as a definition of the Good – it is always only a misunderstanding to suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means (Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy Augustine already knew this when he said: “What, you scoundrel, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense – it doesn’t matter!" — W

I thought you'd dig that. Philosophy as ultimate. I think that starts to do it justice. If something could grasp it from the outside correctly, then it wouldn't be philosophy in the strong sense.

The "nonexistent" adjective applies to the question of whether they also occur as something in the world external-to-minds. — Terrapin Station

I agree that some kind of externality is at play, but maybe it's best frame as external to the individual imagination. Does the white house exist? If we strip away everything mental, piece by piece, then I think we are left with nothing. Anything you could say we were left with would still be intelligible or mental. Bunch of waves and particles? What are they but concepts and mathematics, very mental. 'External-to-minds' is parasitic upon the idea of junk in our absence which still has a shape, a boundary, some border that cuts it out from its background.

In short, 'external-to-mind' is sensible in its vagueness but breaks down as we really follow its logic. Saying that everything is in a particular mind also breaks down, so it's not about opposing one such position to another but lighting up the aporia that results from any sharp naming of our situation.

*I do agree that whatever we talk about exists in some sense, which I think you hint at in some of your posts above. In certain contexts people mean only physics junk or public junk 'exists.'

I'm deviating; but, are intents hidden from the sunlight? — Posty McPostface

I'm saying that language-as-a-hole or the 'operating system' lies coiled in the dark place from which we listen and speak. Since the operating system is purring in the background, doing its job, what you speak and hear makes since to you. These words make some kind of sense. What is hidden from the sunlight is the sun itself. That which makes visible/intelligible is itself in darkness. The thought of mind is not the mind itself, and 'mind' is a misleading word that already over-specifies by neglecting the essential sharedness of language. Or we can say that mind is surprisingly social, given our air-gapped skulls. On the other hand, the whole point of meaning would seem to be for humans to work together. We are so deeply social that we live in a kind of sense-making 'fluid' that we can only imperfectly make sense of. What whatever we say about this 'fluid' is said 'by' or 'within' this 'fluid.'

It may sound mystical, but it's just phenomenological. It's just this space we share as we converse. We tend to take it for granted, use it without looking at it.

The world is the totality of facts, not things. What do "facts" mean to you? There's nothing dark or mysterious about 'facts' is there? — Posty McPostface

I think so. Facts are intelligible.The mystery is meaning itself. What facts versus things gets right is a nexus of relations, the world as a kind of object-networked field of meaning. I'd say just look at the world as you live in it. Remember how it is for you when you weren't thinking of yourself as a philosopher.

No, "noesis" is indicative of illuminating light (originating from the sun) according to Plato. — Posty McPostface

Surely not the literal sun. The question is what is this thing that illuminates everything else and yet itself recedes? I can't speak for Plato's intentions, but the sun reveals things. The sun comes up and the landscape is there in all its detail.

I'm taking it that you aren't thinking of "more important" as "they like it/value it a lot more," but something else? — Terrapin Station

No, that's it. They like some stuff more than others, sometimes a lot more. Ask yourself which artists/musicians/philosophers you would most regret never having discovered. I'm just saying something simple. We understand that 'great' applies to what most deeply moves us.

Yeah, I like that. Noesis seems to be pointing at that dark place from where we listen. It makes sense that the brain is doing some kind of assembly. And that supports the non-instantaneous nature of meaning. It also supports the 'time' of meaning. Our eyes scan from left to right, with memory and expectation. There are spaces between the words, but I don't think reading-for-us is actually jagged like that. Meaning is continuous. A sentence is a musical whole.

Yes! It's almost as if I have to break down the puzzle and reassemble it in my own way to be able to understand what you mean. What do you think about this 'breaking down "process"'? — Posty McPostface

That does sound more like it. But why breaking down? Why not building up? We somehow assemble a sequence of words and end up with a complete thought. In most cases (away from philosophy, right) it is as easy as breathing.

I'd love to reply, but I have no idea what you are talking about. I can't see what you are doing right now. But assuming I could understand you, I do wonder how you grokked this beetle in a box argument. Did Wittgenstein dance like a bee to communicate it? And I thought he had left us long since.

(I'm joking with you, but maybe you see my concern. )

So, how is intent discerned apart from behavior? Is there any way to prove this as true? — Posty McPostface

At some point the demand for proof is artificial. It's like asking me to prove that you can ask questions. While it's hard to pin down what we mean by meaning or thinking, we are there all the time. What is it, I wonder, that allows us to grasp a proof as a proof? What are proofs made of if not of meaning?
What is reasoning if not meaning? You are almost asking me to prove that you have language, that you are not just a machine. 'Consciousness doesn't not exist.' Well who or what is talking there and to whom or what? 'Consciousness' is a word that points to the fundamental intelligibility of the world. You share meaning as you ask proof for it. You impose on this space we share where words signify to demand a proof that could only be more signification. See what I mean?

Insofar as I can use it, yes. — Terrapin Station

Hmm. I think you know what I am getting at. In so far as you can use ---without having it all present to consciousness --is what I am pointing at. RAM is random access memory, 'random' in the sense of arbitrary. I think listening is palpably more passive and reactive than that. Words summon a know-how from where it sleeps in the background.

It wouldn't be instantaneous. You don't use it all at once. You have something in mind as you use it, though. — Terrapin Station

OK. Yes, I agree. We don't use it all at once. It lies coiled. That which lies coiled is what I mean by the dark place from which we listen. We can't fit all that we know into explicit consciousness. And much of what we know seems sub-theoretical. We never quite make it explicit without problems when we try.

Sure, because I can assign meanings to all of the terms in a manner that's coherent, consistent from my perspective. — Terrapin Station

Granted. But I don't the mind carefully assigns meaning to the terms one-by-one. The meaning is grasped as a whole. Afterward we can expand on this or that term 'from' that grasp as a whole.

And indeed I agree with both of those ideas. Meaning can not be shared and value is not at all objective. — Terrapin Station

I understand that, but I still think you are insisting using the terms in your way. So far I don't think you have even granted what someone might mean by shared meaning. Nevertheless we've been doing it all along, call it what you will. Insisting on the 'right' terms seems like something we do when we play a certain game. That game is fine. Making a 'spiderweb' might even require the (attempted) fixing of terms. But talking with others who aren't immersed in that same project requires that we learn their language. We do it all the time. I don't have an explicit theory of shared meaning, exactly since I think all explicit theories have problems. The point is to acknowledge the phenomenon 'behind' such formulations --in its vagueness.

"Subject" in the sense of "subjective"? It's mind. Mind exists as a subset of brain function. The definition/basic workings of meaning I gave to you earlier (a few days ago)--it's the act of (an individual) making mental associations. Truth I gave you my definition/basic account of a while ago, too . . .. it just seems to me kinda like quickly jumping around from topic to topic, though. — Terrapin Station

I can see why you think I am jumping around from topic to topic, but that's maybe because you don't see these as all aspects of the same issue as I do.

It sucks, but I have to get some work done. I would rather talk philosophy, of course. I will check in later.

I'm thinking more along the lines of a behavioral solipsist that inferrs wrongly that intent is wholly shown through behavior. Wittgenstein talks about this a lot in the Investigations. — Posty McPostface

Oh, OK. I think I know what you mean. For me this is related to fixed notions of the subject and meaning. One such notion would be that meaning is a lightning bug in our skull. If we try to give a context-independent description of meaning, we are going to run into the same old meaning-atomists problems.

So, have you developed a meta-philosophy due to semantic-holism? — Posty McPostface

As the foregoing sketch begins to suggest, three very general metaphilosophical questions are (1) What is philosophy? (2) What is, or what should be, the point of philosophy? (3) How should one do philosophy? — IEP

An improvised sketch:

(1) Something like the self-clarification of existence in conceptual terms.

(2) A clarification that results in a richer, more joyful existence, along with a kind of wonder and even the preservation of the inner child.

(3) Assuming holism, one should try to grasp things as a whole, make sense of all of existence, and not get tangled up any more than necessary in local issues that aren't really helping with (2.) Or, better, we don't really have a choice. This is actually what we already do. But we can embrace it.

What about intent? How do you address that finiky problem? — Posty McPostface

Intentionality? That is what is consciously 'lit up.' If we talk about consciousness, we feel forced by grammar to talk about consciousness of something. And indeed we are all familiar with focusing on something. Is that what you had in mind?

Yes, I have. I like Husserl a lot. He got me into phenomenology. There's so much ambiguity that I see, everywhere around me, in regards to intentionality and affect. I don't know if you care to talk about this. — Posty McPostface

I have mostly read about Husserl in the context of reading about Heidegger. I think Husserl (a mathematician too) focused on 'eternal' phenomena. Heidegger saw something like the historical component living in our perception and very much addressed affect ('attunement'). For Heidegger we are like care that is stretched in time between the future and the past. Think about driving a car or riding a bike. How does time exist for us? We have memory, action, and anticipation in a living unity. I anticipate in terms of what I remember. I remember in terms of what I anticipate. How actually does the present fit into this ? Is there a 'pure' present? Is there an 'instant' where we are all 'collected'? If we look at the clock, we are tempted to say yes. If we assume that clock time is 'real' time (despite having invented clocks because we care and wanted to organize our actions), then somehow the real must be perfectly present. Reality exists in the freeze-frame. But this is a metaphysical abstraction, a theory that may get in the way of the naked facts that we mostly don't notice. We don't notice simply because we are so good at ordinary things. We don't need to notice. The dancer doesn't notice she has legs. She is her legs. The philosopher doesn't notice semantic holism. He is this holism.

Yeah, it's interesting to think of the different ways in which painting, for example, can capture flow; life, movement, intensity; very different than mathematics! — Janus

Indeed. We have this theme of becoming in philosophy, mathematics, painting, music. Music is maybe supreme at this.

OK, I'm not sure what you are going for then. You mean generalized forms likes cones, cubes, spheres and so on; or something else? — Janus

Sure, those are good geometric examples. We grasp what a perfect circle is, never having seen one. And there are also the intuitions that ground arithmetic. Let's get primitive (Hilbert and others did) and think of tally marks. I, II, III, IIII, IIIII, .... We happen to use a verticle line there, but we know that more than that is intended. We could also use o , oo, ooo, oooo, ... We have a basic grasp of 'pure unity,' of a kind of pure object that is nothing but this unity. Some mathematicians start from these tallies and try to catch the continuum by building the rationals and then the real numbers, the 'continuous' numbers. Others do it with set theory, so that one builds at an even lower level using the idea that one thing is contained in another (the bubbleverse.)

The term “meaning holism” is generally applied to views that treat the meanings of all of the words in a language as interdependent. Holism draws much of its appeal from the way in which the usage of all our words seems interconnected, and runs into many problems because the resultant view can seem to conflict with (among other things) the intuition that meanings are by and large shared and stable. — SEP

What's funny here is that 'meanings' continue to be talked about. The objects are that 'meanings' are shared and stable. I understand what is meant, but this still misses half of the point. The words don't have fixed, stable meanings apart from their living context. 'Meaning is one.' Roughly, the same words take on millions of so-called atomic meanings in millions of different contexts. Our semi-automatic ability to speak and hear is staggeringly sophisticated, just like a living cat. To miss this is to be blind to anything I am trying to say. Our theories of meaning are like the crayola sketches of a cat. Our 'use' or 'immersion' in meaning is like an actual cat in comparison.

Explicit accounts are like a 10-year old boy trying to make strong A.I. with a 9-volt, some wires ripped out of a toy truck, and a few Christmas-tree lights. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try. (I am trying in my own way to light up the question and task.) I am just saying look at the cat.

So this, for example, I think is obviously incorrect, especially the "not present for consciousness as we use it" part. — Terrapin Station

I am saying something pretty safe here, I think. Is your ability to use English there as a whole in your RAM? Can you survey all of this linguistic know-how instantaneously in consciousness? I presume you roughly understood that last sentence. It was automatic.

if you're using that term as simply a "less boring/more 'poetic'" way to refer to something like a simple distinction of subjective/objective. — Terrapin Station

Such a distinction would only have meaning within a system of distinctions. Your view on the subject and the object is going to be entangled with related views. For instance, if we are air-gapped subjects, then meaning cannot be shared. Value cannot be 'somewhat' objective. We strive for coherent accounts. We can't do much at the atomic level.

And then this seems to be another non-sequiturish jump to me, because truth theories and basic ontology are two different things that don't have a necessary connection to a subjective/objective distinction, which didn't have any clear connection to a general philosophy of language focusing on semiotics and semantics.

. . . and so on. — Terrapin Station

Hmm. I'm surprised you say that, because I think such connections are clear. What is the subject? How does it exist? And what do we mean by this or that explication of the subject, or of truth? I am perhaps blind to my own semantic holism. It's obvious to me (at this point), which may lead me to present does-not-follows for your perspective. Ontology and epistemology are meaningful and therefore also involve semantics. A good 'spiderweb' is coherent and meaningful. We fix them up when they are not, so that we have to extend them. They are still not quite right. So we mess with them some more. What is this process?

Wittgenstein isn't exactly a continentalist, though. I agree that he's a weird fit for the analytic "school," but he makes much more sense to lump in with the analytics than the continentalists, especially given his association with the Vienna Circle, which is hardcore analytic philosophy. — Terrapin Station

That's a good point. I guess I am lumping him with the continentals because of Groundless Grounds. He is making very Heideggerian points (and the reverse) at times. He does it all in a demystifying tone, like he is swatting a fly. Heidegger is grand and still believes in philosophy. But they are both pointing at a kind of ur-knowledge that can't be made perfectly explicit. To demystify this a bit, it's like the 'animal' foundation of thinking. We are mostly on auto-pilot, reacting to signs in the environment. We just 'do' understand language without and before giving an account of this. It's only when the flow is stopped by the theoretical gaze to question a single word that things get complicated.

What do you mean by that? — Posty McPostface

Have you looked into phenomenology? Grasping a phenomenon is just paying close attention to what experience is really like for you. It is trying to look 'around' the theories you already have about what it 'must' be. For instance, early Heidegger examines how we experience time and finds that physics time (which is modeled on space) doesn't fit with our experience. He is trying to make us aware of what we do almost automatically, of what we do without noticing we are doing. As far as I can tell, he invented 'deconstruction,' which is just trying to dismantle the stuff we think we know that gets in the way of a fresh look at what was there all along, even as we demanded proof for it.

One example is the 'solipsist' who visits this forum to tell us about his solipsism. He knows there are others as he tries to prove to them that maybe they aren't there. Or we can imagine the person who is trying to tell us there is no such thing as objective truth. They appeal to a pre-theoretical sense of 'objective truth' (some kind of vague truth-for-us) as they deny its possibility. What such arguments miss is the inexplicit 'knowledge' that makes them intelligible or worth pursuing.

I'm just difficult. Even my favorite philosophers I don't agree with even 50% of the time. — Terrapin Station

I respect that. I concur.

Re continentalism, I really, really hate continental philosophers' style(s) of writing/approach to expressing their views--starting with Kant, at least. I don't always disagree with their views, but I just can't stand the way they write. — Terrapin Station

I hate lots of it. I have never really liked the more recent French philosophers in this regard. But late Wittgenstein is very clear, though he is saying something strange. Nietzsche is beautifully translated, IMO. Same with Feuerbach, the proto-Nietzsche.

Hegel can be clear at times. Heidegger becomes clear (and is very clear and thorough in his lectures.)

I like the analytic style a lot. So even when I don't agree with analytic philosophers (which is quite often if even my favorites have averages that look like MLB batting averages), I enjoy reading them much more than continental authors. — Terrapin Station

I don't know AP all that well. Does Rorty count? He is clear like Hume. Hume is another favorite.

the more I read it, the more I really haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about or "trying to say." — Terrapin Station

Such meaning generates problems because the fantasy is that one can create a explicit system that does not break down. We are trying to capture our capturing itself. We are tying to trap a mist in a spiderweb. This mist is trying to trap itself in a spiderweb. This spiderweb is a small set of words ripped out of their living context and somewhat naively interpreted as little containers of exact meaning with which we can do 'math.' — macrosoft

I'm saying (in other words) : Meanings exist systematically. The semantic unit is not the individual word but rather the entire language which is mostly not present for consciousness as we use it. The 'spiderwebs' are theories of the subject and the object, for instance. They are theories about what it is for something to be true or for something to exist. Most accounts capture something about what it is to be true or for something to exist. But they tend to unravel as we zoom in on this or that term and find a weak point in the system. To make the system explicit and clear, we have to ignore that language is a living system of meaning.

We especially have to ignore the phenomenon of 'ur-knowledge.' This is what Wittgenstein is trying to talk about in OC. I don't know that I have hands when I reach for my coffee. I don't need to ask myself if I have hands. I am my hands. I also don't need to ask if anyone is really out there. I know this. Language is already in a pre-notion of the world. It is already directed at a pre-notion of the others who can understand me. Such phenomena are what explicit accounts of the subject, object, meaning, truth, and existence aim at. But explicit accounts often ignore these inconspicuous pre-notions, presupposing that only what is explicit is real. We might call approach this a visual, object-inspired approach. That which is real is like medium-sized dry goods. So we ourselves, if we are real, must be like rocks to which thinking is 'stapled on.' Meaning is air-gapped, somehow jumping through space to other brains. Reality is junk on which we must somehow project value. This approach does make sense if we try to zoom in from an atoms-and-void perspective, at least initially. But it is far from being problem-free or the only approach...

Well, I understand him. I feel we're being a tad bit judgemental here. Sure, macrosoft can maybe engage in more atomistic approaches to language; but, it's an online forum, so no need to get pissy. — Posty McPostface

Thanks for the kind words, Posty. I really don't mind TS's honesty, since it wasn't rude.

I must correct you on one point. My approach is anti-atomistic to the extreme. Semantic holism is my jam.

I don't want to keep saying this, and I've mostly tried not to, because I hate harping on the same thing all the time, but pretty much anything you write, at least when it's more than 30-40 words or whatever, is something where the more I read it, the more I really haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about or "trying to say." I don't expect you to change your style because of this, but if the goal is to convey any ideas, to get folks to think in different ways, etc., it might be worth noting that at least for some of us, your approach isn't at all working. — Terrapin Station

I've noticed that you don't really get where I am coming from. I really am trying to find the words. But you say you don't like Wittgenstein. And I don't know if you like Heidegger. And you are turned off by Hegel. Do you like Nietzsche? How about Feuerbach? I love German philosophy. The whole enterprise is haunted by organ music. It tries to grasp the whole situation. It tries to grab that grasping itself. If none of them speak to you, then I might just have no chance with you. I'm pretty much paraphrasing/synthesizing what I've learned from them. I will keep trying to find better words.

i imagine mathematics is an abolsutly rigid, crystalline formal structure, and so it would seem to be a very poor tool for capturing the dynamism of reality. It seems to me that in its applied dimension it renders the dynamic organic as static, mechanical for the purposes of measuring, calculation and prediction. Not denying that it might have a kind of fascinating, crystalline beauty for its disciples, though. — Janus

You are right about that formal structure. What is fascinating is the attempt to capture flow in that formal structure. This attempt gave rise to a crisis in the foundations of math, a real schism. Related to the capture of flow was the creation or discovery of a 'new' infinity, that of the continuum. The same types of proof (diagonal proofs) were also used to show the theoretical limits of computation. This stuff is only meaningful or informative to the degree that it's not just symbols being moved around like chess pieces. Understanding them changes what one would bother try to do or would expect from a computer.

Sure, like any human generality it must have its affective dimension. It seems humans are often affected by particulars only insofar as they are generalized; 'it is normal to love one's parents' and so on, as we are conditioned; but I would say that the more potent affection is for the singularities of our experience; which cannot be generalized and may only be evoked by poetry and the arts. — Janus

I think you are missing my point. I'm not talking about feelings. I am talking about intuitions of 'pure form.' Or rather intuitions of almost pure form, since there is still some drag in material. We need the visual prop.

What's wrong with this pursuit? There's no other way to address the issue, then treating it explicitly. — Posty McPostface

Also I think you are missing out on something. I'm guessing all this knowing business is not making sense. But that's at the center. I won't make sense to you unless you grasp the basic idea --or rather phenomenon point at by the idea.

What's wrong with this pursuit? There's no other way to address the issue, then treating it explicitly. — Posty McPostface

There's nothing wrong with it. Indeed, I myself am trying to make the inexplicit more explicit --in its very resistance to being made explicit. I'm pretty sure this is what Witt was getting at in On Certainty, but I'll need to reread it to check my memory against what I didn't understand at the time.

It's not that different from Hegel's realization that thoughts tend to contain internal contradictions. Basically the same kind of thing is tried hundreds of ways (squaring the circle) until someone figures out why this is impossible. Even after that proof was available (that squaring the circle was indeed impossible), many kept trying, some mistakenly thinking they had done so. As I see it, W and H have truly advanced philosophy.

I have been told that the concept of having a "mind" in philosophy, generates more problems than it solves. What's your take on the Chinese Room Argument? — Posty McPostface

I think Searle is just pointing at meaning. Such meaning generates problems because the fantasy is that one can create a explicit system that does not break down. We are trying to capture our capturing itself. We are tying to trap a mist in a spiderweb. This mist is trying to trap itself in a spiderweb. This spiderweb is a small set of words ripped out of their living context and somewhat naively interpreted as little containers of exact meaning with which we can do 'math.' We can't say exactly what we mean by 'meaning,' but we 'are' this meaning and live in this meaning. We know that others live in this meaning in the same that we know that we have legs when we are walking. It is sub-knowledge, pre-knowledge, ur-knowledge, just like our knowledge that there is a world. This 'world' that we have ur-knowledge of is not explicit for theory. Every explicit account of it simultaneously depends on it and fails to capture it, hence the endless debate, since each account trips on its own atomic approach in relation to other atomic approaches. Theory speaks from a dark place that dimly assumes this world in which others are listening. The others too are not fundamentally explicit. 'I think therefore I am' is spoken from a dark place that 'primordially' under-stands itself to be hear-able. What is this 'I'? Does it not point at the dark place from which we speak and listen?

How can I prove such assertions? If they are true, you and anyone else must already have access to this knowledge. Just as we ignore our feet as we are walking across the street to meet a girl we are thinking about, so we mostly ignore our ur-knowledge, especially if we demand that experience fit an erotically charged method that assumes the real must exist sharply, as the output of an argument.

*I don't think it is impossible that a computer could somehow be made to experience meaning, but I think that humans doing so would be their most spectacular and eerie achievement. Lesser forms of AI (and I work with some) are really 'just' complex computable functions. A much more complex alien might say the same thing about us, but we can't sincerely do so, IMV. We have would to mean something in the saying of it.

My experience with people is actually that there's a really wide, really varied range of opinions about the same stuff, a range that doesn't at all resemble the consensus of communities like rateyourmusic users, or SteveHoffman regulars, or gearslutz regulars, etc., and each of those communities has very different consensuses, too. — Terrapin Station

Maybe I should lighten my thesis to this. I think individuals find some music more important than other music, and that they can grasp the idea of the continuum in this way.

I'd set up a very different system than that if I were king. Basically you would have a right to be employed, and businesses wouldn't hinge on direct patronage with money-for-goods-and-services exchanges. — Terrapin Station

I am open to ideas like that personally. Humans may need to try something very new in the next century. I feel especially undogmatic when it comes to politics. The polarization is a huge turn-off for me. I think that bubbles stupefy. And these are red bubbles or blue bubbles or purple bubbles. The 'truth' is often a synthesis of opposed viewpoints, or rather such a synthesis is closer to the 'truth,' which might just be an illumination of the question. Both sides tend to see what the other side refuses to see.

When we're talking about people reacting to music, visual works, etc. any arbitrary person could have any arbitrary response to any arbitrary work. So someone who does use "transcendent" to describe their aesthetic reaction to some works could feel that way about the Volkswagen fahrvergnugen jingle while they get basically nothing from Patti Smith — Terrapin Station

Sure. Anything is possible. But we know from experience that there is a vague spectrum. Just because our sense of the situation is vague does not mean it is absent. The demand that everything be clear is reasonable, but taken to extremes it excludes everything. We live most of our lives using language in an inexact way. There's something questionable about philosophers insisting on standards than they can't actually live by. It's not that they are lying but only that they take their theoretical mode for life itself. Within that theoretical mode they forget how it all usually goes down, lost in the 'ought.'

Well I think we agree that the self-righteous mob is not to be trusted. As far as losing a job goes, this is quite complicated. We don't have a right to be employed, and business owners do have a right to appeal to the possibly irrational attitude of the mob.

But I'm basically uninterested in the ought that comes with talk of politics, and even the quote above was in the context of giving that attitude its due (as a form of empathetic listening.)

Here's a nice line or two, ripped from a larger context that I don't feel like typing out (wish it was online.)

Perhaps [philosophy] cannot be determined as something else, but can be determined only from out of itself and as itself -- comparable with nothing else in terms of which it could be positively determined. In that case philosophy is something that stands on its own, something ultimate.
...
We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world...This is where we are driven in homesickness. Our very being is this restlessness. We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or better, we are always already on the way to it. ...We ourselves are this underway, this transition, this 'neither the one nor the other.'
...
Rather this urge to be at home everywhere is at the same time a seeking of those ways which open the right path for these questions. For this, in turn, we turn to the hammer of conceptual comprehension, we require those concepts which can open such a path. We are dealing with a conceptual comprehension and with concepts of a primordial kind. Metaphysical concepts remain eternally closed off from any inherently indifferent and noncommittal scientific acumen.
...
Above all...we shall have never have comprehended these concepts and their conceptual rigor unless we have first been gripped by whatever they are supposed to comprehend. All such being gripped comes from and remains in an attunement.
...
We ask anew: What is man? A transition, a direction, a storm sweeping over the planet, a recurrence or vexation for the gods? We do not know. Yet we have seen that in the essence of this mysterious being, philosophy happens. — Heidegger

from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

This Whitey needs his damn rap :) — Jonah Tobias

Ha. I cleaned up my post to play it safe. For me I go through rap phases and get temporarily burnt out.

I love Dave Chappelle (Not because he's black). His point about the metoo movement. When you reject and kick out everyone who's done wrong- it just keeps them underground and hiding. They need to be confronted and given the chance to change. — Jonah Tobias

Yeah, Dave is legit. Comedy goes right to the line. That's it's genius. Some real philosohy happens there, the deep stuff, minimally pretentious.

Violators should be confronted, but what turns me off is the hypocrisy of the mob. I don't believe the atoms of the mob are innocent themselves. Some of them are envious of fame and just take a cruel delight in self-righteousness. I'm wary of the word 'should,' because I am afraid of becoming absorbed by the energy of politics.

As far as actual general differences, that's plausible. But I think it's very hard to separate culture and self-conceptualization from that which is innate. Who are offered as childhood heroes? That seems like a big question to me. Being raised white and seeing all those white presidents, scientists, poets, etc. An endless parade of white male heroes. And many of them are indeed heroes. It becomes very easy to understand white identity as a kind of pseudo-universality. Especially with scientific heroes foremost in mind. Do we (without thinking much about it) tend to give whiteness credit for technology? We may 'know' that it wasn't the skin color that mattered, but maybe those pictures in grammar school classrooms speak louder than conceptual considerations. Recently I heard or read somewhere something like :'all white people think they are superior.' Is there a pride in whiteness that is mostly unconscious? Experienced as a kind of neutral pride in one's own self but dependent somehow on skin color? It seems plausible. If people with more pigment in their skin had by chance ended up in the same position, I think it would be the same for them.