I have seen surprisingly few posts on this philosophy to which I adhere which is starting to make me think it might have some gaping logical hole somewhere that I'm not seeing. I am open to having my mind changed in any way (God, inherent meaning in objects, cosmic Consciousness, etc) so present your best arguments against this philosophy.

Quick definition: The belief that an objective value/knowledge/morality is non existent — khaled

Here's what I think a good retort to that position. First, if you understand the 'objective' in sufficiently absolute terms, then, indeed, nothing is objective. Or nothing worth talking about. Let's say that your position decides to define 'black' the complete absence of light waves in the visible spectrum. How often will anyone see your 'true' black? Maybe never. So now your position can decide that all the ordinary talk of blackness is mistaken. It has a hole in it.

But this forgets how and why we started using 'black' in the first place. Similarly, a 'true' or 'perfect' objectivity that doesn't actually exists has little to do with how and why people tend to use 'objective,' except as an exaggeration for a particular purpose, which might in retrospect seem to be a silly purpose.

Then there's the performative contradiction of reasonably defending the impossibility or absence of 'true' or 'objective' reason or meaning. You might say that you are just imposing your will with sophistry that knows itself to be sophistry, but that sacrifices the persuasive force that you need in the first place. A more 'living' understanding of objectivity might be in terms of persuasive force applied to skeptics like yourself. For instance, science assumes a kind of metaphysical skepticism, and therefore leaves itself naked and vulnerable to falsification. It self-consciously offers fragile rules-for-action couched in terms of patterns of public and repeatable experience. While radical skeptics can ask for a further minimization of error-risk, they aren't likely to get it. And since life demands that we act, we do indeed act always in a smog of some uncertainty. We all 'know' this with the 'sight' of action, no matter what we merely say in a certain mood or within a certain game. Lots of useful, skeptical philosophy boils down to: Talk is cheap. Look to action.

While you may find a few 'metaphysical prigs' who also take the 'purely' objective seriously, your position can easily look like the accusation that others naively believe in a kind of ghost. A few do (when and while they wear their metaphysical or religious hats), but many don't, or at least not in that one. All along, that pure, exaggerated notion of objective knowledge/certainty/morality looks like the ghost from the perspective I am defending. IMV, the dominant ghost in philosophy (or on forums) is an unquestioned conception of language that leads many into selling 'profundities' with no real weight. Of course Wittgenstein is the face of this kind of critique.

In my view, your position makes the most sense as an exaggeration that understands itself as an exaggeration, as an ultimately reasonable skepticism spiced with click-bait.

Wittgenstein addresses this in his 'Brown' book, and I agree with his interpretation of the disagreement. Some prefer that 'thought' only be applied to what others would call 'conscious thought.' It's a question of grammar. (He connects this to an understanding of solipsism that makes it automatically true by redefining ordinary words). Is there any disagreement deeper than this cosmetic preference?

Implied is neither good nor will have meaning on their own. Is that what you meant? — tim wood

Roughly, yes. IMO, there is a great interdependence between the 'atomic meanings' of words. To overstate, there is only one meaning or one embodied concept system. And more specifically, I think abstractions like the good in general ultimately have their ground in what humans automatically value (food, warmth, love, etc.) Similarly 'will' depends on more specified desires. What we gain in flexibility of application (in generality), we sacrifice in knowing what we are actually talking about. When we take a very general word out of context and a do kind of physics on it, I think the results are usually not worth the trouble. I associate this kind of insight with the spirit of Kant's CPR.

However, if that were really the case, why isn't the dog-eat-dog morality one of our morals? — Play-doh

The genius of humans is their ability to work together. What a waste our relatively massive brains would be if we didn't network them with language (language 'is' that network in some sense), which requires moralities that make that network possible by encouraging cooperation. One simple way to see the advantage of networks is to consider specialization. A community that protects individuals in their variety allows individuals to explore a vast space of imaginative and technical possibility only to return with their rare finds and make them common property. We can ask ourselves what any of us would be without our inherited technology, linguistic and traditional. And we can also ask ourselves why we consciously strive to survive. For most I think the answer is enjoyable relationships. This is not at all to deny our aggressive potential, but this is often directed so as to protect our community from its uglier forms (literal aggression as opposed to defensive violence.)

As a child gains language skills and begins to master the application of word labels to everyday concepts, the technique of conceptualisation in the mind grows and develops. It is only when a child knows what ‘I’ means, plus what ‘you’ means, and what ‘am’ means that Descartes’ words: ‘I think, therefore I am’ become meaningful. Or: ‘I think, therefore I realise I am’ in this context. With this realisation consciousness is born, and the self can start to be constructed around the kernel. The improving ability to reason and communicate using the constructs of language is what allows its birth and growth. — Tim3003

I agree with you, except that I would say that self-consciousness is born with language. But this is just a preference with respect to the use of 'consciousness.' I do like the idea of the self as a castle built with bricks of concepts. All I would add is the extreme interdependence of concepts. In my view, there mere fact that we build sentences from single words encourages us to infer that meanings are built from concepts as molecules are built from atoms. Why do I resist this view? If we examine a concept and try to define it, we are immediately dragging other concepts to be defined with still other concepts. In a specific sense there is only one concept (which we might call a concept system). And I think this system is softer and more liquid than it is crystalline or web-like. The system as a whole processes not only sentences as a whole or paragraphs as a whole but personalities and lifetimes of communication as a whole.

The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. — apokrisis

I like the theme of seeing as, which suggests a unity of sensation and imagination. I see the dirt and what I can do with it more or less simultaneously, so that the possible and the actual are experienced together. Since accurately seeing promise and danger are of the utmost importance, it makes sense that we would evolve to perceive a meaning-rich or sign-spangled environment. And then it also makes sense that the meaning or signs that jut out are those most relevant at the moment to the moment's needs. To reduce the search space, it is vital that many objects in the environment are habitually or unconsciously eliminated. It's my understanding that illusionists play on such habits, by steering such unconscious filtering with false leads.

It seems to me that it's hard to decide whether a will is good without thinking in terms of the goodness or value of certain objects in the world and actions related to those objects. Does someone who feeds the hungry manifest good will? I think so, but I think that's because food is good in the context of hunger.

And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution. — apokrisis

I agree, and what fascinates me is how so much of these unthinking habits function as a sort of dark foundation for habits that still require thinking. Using language, for instance, seems to be mostly automatic. Philosophers often get tangled up by trying to establish single meanings for words removed from context. While clarification is sometimes useful, the attempt to clarify often just creates a mess where habit or blind know-how was/is working just fine.

It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. — apokrisis

I like this. I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently.

They are ways we have organised our experience so as to make the best kind of sense of the world ... when construed as a host of constructive possibilities we might exploit. — apokrisis

I share this general perspective. To be human is largely to be a theater of possibility which is organized by hope and fear (among other things). We search the space of the possible for application to the actual. And both the possible and the actual have an intelligibility/structure that is almost irreducible (active here in this conversation), especially given an holistic conception of meaning.

Hi. When it comes to the meaning of 'meaning,' I'd say context, context, context. Or just holism. Just as there is no single piece of equipment, there is no single meaning (IMO.) The 'unit' of meaning is intelligible existence itself. Yes, we can focus on the use of particular words, and we can write dictionaries that are useful, but I think there's always a certain 'violence' involved, an abstraction or yanking-out of a plant that kills it. Or we can think of pinned butterflies. They tell something about living butterflies, but they are dead.

As far as 'the meaning of life' goes, I personally think I know 'what' is meant, if we want to call it a what. No one would deny that their ordinary experience is intelligible. I think what some fear to be missing is a kind of central thread. In some ways, the thirst for meaning is a desire to be dominated, to have a master and thereby to escape from freedom. On the other hand, there is the desire to identify with this master, and to speak commands and truths in its name. I think of a moth that would like to finally be burned in a flame and become the flame, drawing in other moths.

I'm thinking about branching off of this topic and beginning a new one that focuses upon what all is involved with language acquisition. Care to join me? — creativesoul

Sure, I'll join you. I'm only occasionally available at the moment though.

However, Witt never seemed to properly account for that which exists in it's entirety prior to our account of it. Philosophy proper hasn't either so. Witt wrote, on more than one occasion, that much of his project involved whether or not there was such a thing as a priori knowledge and if so how we could attain/obtain it(how could we know). That starts off on the wrong foot to begin with, so to speak, by adopting an inherently inadequate framework. — creativesoul

I think I've found a phrase I like for my take on all of this: meaning holism.

We speak from and listen with our entire soft network of interrelated concepts. And even the idea of an atomic or single concept is already a kind of useful but possibly misleading fiction. And it should be noted that 'meaning holism' applies to any description of meaning holism, so I can't analytically/atomically defend this approach. Pick on any particular word and pull and the tapestry unravels. But I think that's true for any position. In short, I think that any analytic approach (and I mean an approach that zooms on on individual words as if they were stand-ins for atomic concepts) is fundamentally misguided in a particular sense. On the other hand, analysis has its uses, so maybe I should just say that analysis has serious limitations, especially when trying to grasp the whole of reality.

If something exists in it's entirety prior to our conception thereof, then we do not make it a foundation. We discover the foundation that is already there. — creativesoul

Yes, I agree that we find a foundation that was already there, the same foundation we used in the first place in our hunt for yet another foundation (a groundless ground.) In my quote above, I was describing what I'd call the wrong approach. Basically there is a soft meaning of 'ego' that we 'know' or can use in ordinary language. Then some philosophers in a quest for absolute certainty or a theory of knowledge try to sharpen this concept into a kind of device. But the concept is only living as part of a network, and this network is more like a goo than a spiderweb. Meaning is distributed, so plucking words out of context and trying to cash them out as entities largely leads to confusion, though things like dictionaries do have some value. Words do have 'some' relative independent meaning (roughly speaking, as if I had a choice.)

What you've described above looks a lot like an example of language acquisition. — creativesoul

I think it goes that deep. What could someone mean by 'it is not the case that there is an external world.'? To whom are they talking? To deny the external world they need something like an external world. As I see it, there is a kind of embeddedness in a community that makes conversation possible in the first place. We are we before we are me. The me emerges from the we. Only after the concept of something like the ego has emerged can we go back and try to make it a foundation. In short, we have to have all kinds of semi-conscious beliefs/practices in common before we are even intelligible to one another. It seems like a hopeless task to try to go back and justify all of this shared understanding rigorously. Of course it's good to clarify here and there (wisely picking our battles.)

Ok. This notion of 'cognition of the object' conflates the object and our access. The phrase "the object as we have access to it" is loaded chock full of dubious presuppositions. You've duly noted an obvious one(indirect or mediated perception). — creativesoul

I agree that we can find lots of dubious presuppositions therein, but for me this is a problem with all discussions of this issue. We understand well enough what we mean in our everyday interactions. But then we want to hold some meaning in an exact position to build an argument with it. If the argument succeeds, then we've really only shown something about our artificial use of the word. The results depend on and apply only to some idiosyncratic semi-fixing of the meanings involved.

acrosoft I think the distinction between our experience, phenomenologically considered, and "artificial games" is a valid one, although questioning the validity of that distinction is part of the critique mounted by some of the detractors of the phenomenological approach; for example semiotic and "process and information" thinkers of various stripes. — Janus

I haven't looked deeply into critiques of the phenomenological approach. I'm sure arguments can be made against the phen. approach, but I suspect that I would find them artificial in the way they understood and employed the metalanguage (the one we're using right now.)

think we have some common ground on this, given that you seem to know what I mean by 'artificial games.' What I have in mind for 'artificial games' is a kind of philosophy/thinking that starts from an unconsidered and unrealistic sense of how language works. This kind of philosophy is a fly trapped in a bottle because it will only be talked out of the bottle in terms of that bottle. It wants a proof that it's inside the bottle (a move in the bottled game) rather than a fresh seeing of its most basic and therefore ignored situation.

What comes to my mind right away is that there is no neutral answer to this question. If I give you my favorite books, then I give you my own sense of the heroic and the profound.

That said, I personally would advise others to follow their own sincere response. It's pointless to read some famous book if it is not moving you and therefore changing you. If you find an author/book that moves you, it's a good bet that it is linked in an obvious way to other books/authors that will move you.

At the moment I'm thinking Groundless Grounds packs quite a punch. That kind of thinking helps keep the philosophically inclined from being seduced by artificial systems that would otherwise cut them off from a fuller vision of human reality.

Well, yes of course, there is obviously always the experience of others. I think this is really Heidegger's point: he saw "being-in-the-world' as the most primordial aspect of Dasein. But the point remains that no proof, in any deductive sense, can be given for the existence of the world or of other — Janus

I'm inclined to agree that no proof can be given. I suppose that would depend on a conception of logic and a set of axioms. In any case, such a proof would take place in an artificial game.

As far as being-in-the-world-with-others-caring-about-projects, I agree. I think our metalanguage is a groundless ground (Lee Braver.) I don't think that this last assertion is proven in an artificial game. Instead ones just gets better at looking at the flow of experience, around an artificial game whose artificiality is easily concealed and/or taken for the obvious way to do philosophy.

I think the 'object in itself' is associated with something like inter-subjectivity. It's more like a distinction between the object for us and the object for me.

As far as not being able to compare our cognition with the object to the object itself, this is mostly a matter of language. By 'cognition of the object,' we seem to mean the object as we have access to it. What would be left over is then precisely that part of the object that we cannot access.

We we can do is observe how others talk and act in the context of objects we think are there. If their speech and action is appropriate (fits the object being there), then we are confirmed in our perception. For the most part this is so automatic that it never crosses the threshold of consciousness.

Is that the end result of the attitude that a philosopher ought to be is cynicism? If that's not true then, what ideal for a man or woman ought to be? — Posty McPostface

I sometimes think this is the genuine, burning question. Lots of the other answers seem to be functions of tentative answers to this one.

If the stakes of a belief are high, you should take arguments regarding that belief seriously. — Empedocles

But the stakes of the belief are a function of whether or not one believes. A belief has to already be genuinely plausible and not just logically possible.

I mean tool in a general sense. Something useful or enabling of any given task.
Ethics/morality are tools for us to get along with each other, to create well functioning societies/interactions and I would say in some sense to service our ownnhuman dignity, although I admit the last one is rather nebulous and perhaps idiosyncratic. — DingoJones

I agree. And also with the part about human dignity. Can we really get along very well without it? I'd put it near the center.

That's a tough imaginary situation. If logical rules strictly applied to human behavior, then we'd no longer be talking about humans as I understand them. If we remove the ambiguity from language, we are left with something like math or chess. And we could no longer say anything profound or silly.

Heidegger replies to the effect that the scandal is not so much that philosophy fails to prove the existence of the external world as that such proofs are expected and attempted over and over and over again. — Janus

For me the scandal/absurdity is just that arguing/proving already assumes an other to be convinced.

While we can't compare the object itself with our cognition of the object, we can and do compare our cognitions of objects with one another. In short the 'object itself' is closely related with a notion of maximal intersubjectivity. I don't want to reduce one to the other. A person alone on an island might be trying to solve a technical problem to get food. Then he would test his cognitions against the results of his attempts to get the food. And on the other end there is the desire for someone to 'get' one's more abstract feeling-tinged cosmic visions (talk about God and love.)

I do happen to hold to an attitude rather like Kantian idealism, in this sense - that what we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a completely detached and objective way. It’s something that is created moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the 'piecing together' according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience. But attempting to understand that process of 'putting together' is very difficult because the very effort of understanding it is also part of that process. That's the sense in which we can't get 'outside it'. — Wayfarer

Wow. Well put. This is my general view, too. We 'are' the sense-making, and this sense-making is 'tied' to a particular body and sees through particular eyes and seems to depend on a particular brain being lit up.

It is this cognitive dissonance that I am suspicious of. Is it a mood or an evaluation on life? Why is that evaluation bad or wrong? Perhaps it is accurate. — schopenhauer1

For me the issue is what accuracy can mean here. It's like grunge being more accurate than hair metal. 'Life is really X.' 'No, life is really Y.' How is either position going to be falsified? Like just about everyone (I assume), I've been up, down, and in between. In terrible moments, the uglier cosmic visions were more plausible. In good moments, the cheerier cosmic visions were more plausible. Of course our identities can get tangled up in one of the visions, and this may help lock us in. Or maybe the reverse is true. A largely constant mood may encourage a largely constant cosmic vision. In any case, we can't measure 'the thing itself' to see if our cosmic theory is correct. Or I don't see how we can.

Many topics revolve around defining something contrary or otherwise than the original definition. — Posty McPostface

I recently saw a sign advertising a philosophy club. It advertised philosophy terms of lots of (to me) annoying questions about the meaning of various common, important terms. What is truth? What is knowledge? And so on. Of course I also love these questions. If they are sincerely suffered, they actually urge one to usefully clarify the questions and even find good-enough answers to them.

How does this relate to what is quoted? There is tendency to 'answer' the wrong question, where the words of the question are reinterpreted so that the answer is no longer life-relevant. Profound questions are debased to opportunities to demonstrate cleverness. An industry of gossip about gossip about gossip is born. Meanwhile the real questions continue to be suffered and tentatively answered by words and deeds by everyone, most of whom never found the gossip industry relevant in the first place. And then some of us have a love/hate relationship with this gossip. We pan for gold in a muddy creek, having cataloged many shapes of pyrite, and therefore aware of how little gold there is in the torrent of gossip.

*By gossip I just mean talking always about what some famous person said about what some other famous person said about what some other famous person said in this or that jargon. This isn't always bad, but it can degenerate into a tedious game.

For something to be indispensable there has to be a difference in the lives of those effected, and no such causally-inert object can have causal powers to help the scientist or mathematician. Indispensability is intrinsically linked to causality. Thus causally inert objects are not indispensable, and therefore useless. — Purple Pond

I roughly agree with your attitude. Lots of philosophical debates seem cosmetic to me. 'I like to call what is usually called X a nice new name Y.' Or 'let's rename X, guys.' In other words, there's lots of discussion about some ideal object language, and yet we need the metalanguage we all share to discuss and institute this object language to begin with --suggesting that the metalanguage (ordinary, shared language) was good enough in the first place. (To be fair, the metalanguage is extended in best case scenarios.)

First you define nothing as no dimensions, matter or energy. Then its pretty clear that nothing can come from it; hence something (dimensions, matter or energy) must of always existed. — Devans99

I guess for me the problem with this is that is already understands nothingness in terms of a physical framework. It's (for me) an uncomfortable blend of physics and metaphysics. If it's physics, how can we set up an experiment? Can we find a piece of nothingness and see if anything develops? Even if we could, we'd have to make the leap from particular instances of nothing developing in finite spans of time to the impossibility of something springing from nothing. As I understand physics, we increase our confidence in various patterns, but we never get metaphysical certainty.

Huge brained profound philosopher grand thinker peeps like us often have problems with stories, because we tend to ask too much of them. — Jake

Again, well put. And I'd say philosophers in particular tell stories about how devoid of plot-holes the stories philosophers tell themselves (or ought to tell themselves) tend to be.

Nothing is much more natural: We start with nothing and end with nothing and nothing needs explanation; we have a completely logically consistent description of a (very dull) system/universe with no unanswered questions. — Devans99

I can see where you are coming from, but there is always already something if anyone is there to look for logical explanations of what is there.

I do think our presence is pretty mysterious when we aren't too busy to think about it.

Is infinity properly thought of as a number? Is it a quantity? Is that the same question? — frank

Is a bishop a religious guy with a cool hat? Or is a bishop a piece in a certain game that moves diagonally? There are connections between the hat-guy and the chess-piece, but they are different, and they both make pretty good sense in their context.

I think it's the same with infinity.

Its impossible for something to come from nothing, so base reality must of always existed. — Devans99

I must ask: how do we know this? Yeah, it applies to ordinary affairs, and it has an intuitive appeal. But I find it just a little bit iffy as a foundation/premise.

Can I really make sense of the idea of something that was always here? It stretches my imagination. But the idea of something popping out of nothing is also a stretch. I'd un-originally speculate that our minds were just not evolved to compute this kind of thing. So some metaphysical ideas are like QM, except QM is constrained by having to make predictions and tools that can be evaluated from within typical human experience.

Human beings typically require a story to live within. Sometimes finding a story we like can be challenging. But then things happen, and life goes on. Until it doesn't. Not so complex after all. — Jake

Well put. I guess the complexity is in that finding of a story.

we don't like the premises of life and go through it nonetheless dealing with it along the way. — schopenhauer1

Hi. Do you know the phrase: Life's a bitch and then you die ? And then in lots of comedy we get characters joking about the meaninglessness and terribleness of existence. My point is that this attitude is not generally repressed. Instead it's just part of a more complex vision of existence. To me the person who refuses to see the negative is similar to the person who refuses to see the positive. They want to dodge the complexity by ignoring half of it.