Part of this relates to a topic you and I touched on earlier, as to whether there can be more than one consistent account of some state of affairs. This amounts to little more than that we might well have more than one true description of the same thing.

Davidson might have it that there can be at most one description. He resists the relativism of multiple, equally valid but irreducible worldviews. There's a tension here for my own views, since I would side with Davidson while maintaining that there can be different descriptions. I think it can be managed.

In Davidson's triangulation we have the speaker, the interpreter, and the world. While the conclusion from "On the very idea..." is the rejection of a gap between scheme and content, this does not imply that we could not have more than one description of the very same state of affairs.

Multiple true descriptions can emerge, provided that they are mutually interpretable and answerable to the same worldly constraints. That preserves both Davidson’s realism and the possibility of plural, non-relativistic perspectives.

And @frank, this is not unlike the way in which intentional states vary depending on the description given - after Anscombe as well as Davidson. Turning on the light and alerting the burglar as different intentional interpretations of the very same act.

So we might describe a chair variously as constructed from multiple pieces of wood, or as a collection of gluons and forces, and yet have both descriptions as equally true, but differing in intent.

And the vase as polycrystalline with have amorphous (glassy) phases, or as ochres, umbers and intentionally rough instantiation of wabi-sabi. Both may be true.

We can go on in this vein, if you like.

But there remains the issue I've now raised several times, to which I would like to see your response.

Can you set out what practical difference you see resulting from the view of aesthetics that you defend?

I've made the claim that aesthetic assessments are a construct of human culture, built by an interaction between the object, the speaker and those in the community.

How are assessments made, in a world that features your "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos"?

My hands are open: If your assessments in your account are made in the same way as are assessments in my account, then deciding if something matches the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" is a construct of human culture.

If so, like Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box, , the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" drops out as irrelevant. a placeholder for something that makes no practical difference in our shared practices of judgment.

...you seem to think that God made the world in discrete pieces ready for the Greeks to name. — Banno

Another ridiculous strawman mixed with bigotry. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It was an obvious joke.

However your use of "straw man" might be telling. It's not uncommon for accusations of committing the straw man fallacy to come from folk who have not set out their account as clearly as they think.

The topic here is aesthetics, not metaphysics. You emphatically wish to shift the ground. Why is that?

And why insist on attributing arguments to me that I have not made? I would not use "actuality of things" any more happily than "grasp of being". Nor does it follow, from what I said, that language can be used "any which way".

There is straw in your house as well.

The question is: can animals know anything? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why is that the question? The topic here is aesthetics, not animal psychology.

Look at the question: can animals know anything? Giving an answer presumes we have a grasp of what "know" means. What conditions make it intelligible to attribute knowledge in the first place?

After the dog chases the possum up a tree, we might say that the dog knows where the possum is. It shows that it knows which tree the possum went up by circling the trunk and looking up. If knowledge is taken to be justified true belief, then there is the problem that the dog cannot provide a justification for it's knowledge, nor make any knowledge claims. Nor can the dog give reasons, represent its belief or its justification to others, or doubt or reflect on whether it was mistaken.

The question "can animals know anything?" is as much about how we ought use the word "know" as it is about animal psychology. It is equally a question about how we ought to use the word "know," and what background conditions make such a concept meaningful. Without clarifying that, we risk treating what is a conceptual issue as if it were merely empirical.

I'll happily attribute knowledge to the dog, so long as we recognise that knowledge is not monolithic.

The verbage of "grasping being" is yours Banno. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Tim, in this discussion between us, "being" is first used by you here: , several times in your extended quotes concerning Plato. A quick flick through the subsequent posts shows that you used it a dozen times before I used it, , in responding to a direct quote from you.

From this search, we see you use

grasp of being — Count Timothy von Icarus

first, and again,

grasp on being — Count Timothy von Icarus

before I quote your use.

It's not a term I use happily. It's yours. It pleases me that you would disown it, perhaps you see now that it isn't of much help.

Sure. Why are you telling us this?

I'm quite enjoying this thread. Aesthetics is not something we discuss as often as we perhaps might, but that can bring out quite profound differences in our approaches to philosophy more generally. I hope you are reading along.

I came into this thread in my heavy handed way, voicing objections to objectivity. Too esoteric to be of much use.

We agree that how good a book is, is not related to how many people like it. But on the other hand, it would be mere snobbery to reject something becasue it is popular. Popularity must count for something.

I'd suggest that the quality of a book, and of any item, is seen in the stories that accompany it. If this is so, then the value of a piece is not so much in the piece itself as in what we do and say about it.

And popularity is part of that story.

Of course what we do and say varies with our emotional response to a piece, and so also becomes a part of its story. It's not a mistake to think in terms of the emotions elicited, but it's one part of a complex.

If we were to come up with a "standard" by which to judge the quality of a book, wouldn't that just set a challenge for an intrepid writer to produce something that fails to meet that standard, brilliantly?

Setting a standard runs the danger of freezing creativity.

All of this talk of "standards" and "stories" could be made more sophisticated, defended and critiqued at length. The core here is that aesthetics is not a found thing with rules, but a process that promises no end.

Don't you ever think of getting involved in Australian politics actively? — javi2541997

Presumptuous, to supose that we are not... :wink:

We don't grasp being at all with the senses prior to language acquisition? So infants have no grasp of being? Animals as well? The disabled who cannot speak? — Count Timothy von Icarus

To my eye, and I'd supose to the eye of many who have given it some thought, this use of "being" is fraught. The question as posed seems to depend on a very specific and perhaps equivocal sense of "grasping being," without clarifying what that would amount to. As such much of what you say here has a merely rhetorical quality.

That is, you seem to have missed the point entirely.

Now It's clear that the picture you see before you makes sense to you. Uncharitably, you seem to think that God made the world in discrete pieces ready for the Greeks to name.

But that's a very suspect view.

You would have me respond to sentences such as that quoted above, but "being" is not a term I would choose to use, let alone defend. That we "grasp being" strikes me as verging on a nonsense expression. That I use the term at all is by way of showing how problematic it is.

All this to say I will not be joining you in the metaphysician's chamber. It's a waste of time.

I'll instead insist on a path I set for us earlier. I'll change it a bit, to see if it can elicit a reply. If there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos", and also a nice ceramic before us, how would we go about deciding if this particular ceramic is in line with the "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos", in order to evaluate it aesthetically?

Now I suggest that we settle such things by engaging in a conversation involving the pot, discussing glazes, inclusions, differing firings and clays, workmanship and provenance. We make up a story.

And I suggest that we would here have common ground, regardless of whether there is a "sui generis source of beauty" or it's something that we decide for ourselves.

And here's the rub: it is this way becasue even if there were a "sui generis source of beauty" it is we who would still have to decide how the pot exemplifies that beauty.

Man is the measure of all things — because it is always human beings who determine what counts as a thing to be measured, and by what standard.

All in all, watching AI do Ordinary Language Philosophy kills a part of my soul... — Antony Nickles

What it is doing here looks to me to be more like a calculator doing a few additions. it's just saving me time in listing groups of words. That and by handing the task over to an automation I might be rid of accusations of bias.

But I see your point, and agree that doing the task is the largest and most important bit. It's putting such a diagram together oneself that instructs about how these words relate.

I put this out there because I hold belief is not about facts, not in contrast to knowledge; they are not part of how belief works. — Antony Nickles

Surely this is too strong? At the least some beliefs are about facts - I believed it was warm outside, but it was still below zero...

So while "there is no occurrence, or instance (existence) of something (an emotion) that is “believing”in every case, it's not that there are no cases of of something that is “believing”.

The diagram is certainly a confabulation. The double up of "Hunch", "Attitude", "Creedence" and "Feeling" shows a lack if diligence, perhaps - but "Feuth"? Did it misspell "faith" or did it intend "fullness"? But of course it has neither diligence nor intent...

It just so happens that this particular term can be used in common parse to mean quite different things to different people. — I like sushi

that's not he point here so much as that this particular term can be used in common parse to mean quite different things to the very same people.

That is, we use the word to perform quite different actions.

That's where I come out too -- "private language" is a bizarre if useful thought experiment, whereas a reference may be private or not, depending. As you say, it's the difference between something that in principle would have to be unsharable, and something that just happens not to be shared. — J

Yep. Cool.

This might be the most common error made by folk attempting to critique private language - "But I do talk to myself privately!", and by mistaken defenders of private language arguments who supose that we cannot do something we indeed do.

What the argument shows is that the meaning of "red" is cannot be our private sensation of red, and that rather than looking for a meaning here as the thing that "red" refers to, we should look at how we use it to reach agreement on which apples we will purchase.

The puzzle is why the extension of "red" includes these apples and not those ones.

I erred in saying "individual variables" when I should have said "individual constants". So it should read "Giving an interpretation to a formal language involves assigning individuals to the individual constants involved.

But ostensive definition was thought at one time to be the way that language reaches out from the circle of words (as in definitions) to attach to the (non-linguistic) world. — Ludwig V

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly
moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was
called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. — Augustine

Do you have in mind something like this, from the first page of the Investigations?

Wittgenstein continues:

These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the
essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language
name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.——In this
picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word
has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the
object for which the word stands. — PI§1

It's a part of the story, not the whole of it. In particular that juxtaposition of a linguistic and non-linguisitic world needs some critique. The individual a and the individual constants "a" could not inhabit seperate worlds if we are going to do things with the one by using the other.

So it's not quiet that "predicates can play no part in assigning individuals to individual constants". We might assign "a" and "b" to a and b becasue we already assigned "a" and "b" to "f"; we might assign "sports car" and "sunset" to the sports car and to the sunset becasue those words were already predicated to "red". It makes no difference if we first assign names, then predicates, or if we first assign predicates and then names.

Nor are we restricted to only rigid designators. We also have at hand the individual variables x,y, and z, the indefinite noun phrases of a natural language that work with quantification. So we have "Something is red" and "Nothing is red" and so on.

But your general point carries here, in that the separation between syntax and semantics in a formal logic is deceptively simple, and so somewhat unlike the semantics of a natural language.

“Being” isn’t a content to be grasped outside language—it’s not in language, but we can only talk about it within language.

The idea of “stepping outside language” is incoherent, not because language limits being, but because thought and communication are what make talk of “being” meaningful in the first place.

The goal is not to deny reality, but to deny that we can talk about reality as it is apart from us in any meaningful way.

We are not going to achieve anything much here, so go back a bit. The claim you made was as follows:

I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). — Count Timothy von Icarus

The obvious response is, why should we supose that there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos" at all?

And go back a bit more, where I said

Aesthetic claims - that the roast lamb in the oven as we speak, slow cooked with six veg, to be served with greens - is better than a Big Mac, is not just an expressions of feeling nor statements of fact—but an interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, form, and reception. It arises as a triangulation of speaker, interpreter and dinner. It's not objective, but it's not relative, either. It is cultivated and critiqued, without requiring foundational aesthetic truths, because it is an integral part of a holistic web of taste that extends beyond the speaker and even beyond the interpreter into the world at large. Further, no such aesthetic scheme is incommensurable with other such schemes. — Banno

Supose that there is a "sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos". How do we mere humans identify it?

How would what you are suggesting differ in application to what I have suggested here?

Even if the metaphysics of beauty differ—whether it's mind-independent or constituted in interpretation—that makes no difference to how we actually respond to or deliberate about aesthetic judgments.
We still compare, critique, educate taste, appeal to tradition or innovation, and seek resonance with others. Whether beauty is discovered or constructed, the practice of aesthetic life—what we do in the face of a judgment—remains the same.

This process seems to me to assume that assigning properties to individuals presupposes the assignation of names to their references. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you are asking.

Giving an interpretation to a formal language involves assigning individuals to the individual variables (names, in a natural language) involved. a to "a", b to 'b" in the exemplary case.

Properties, or more properly predicates, are not something apart from those individuals, but sets of individuals. f={a,b,c} or whatever.

Of course, that's not a problem if we are simply using natural language as opposed to constructing one. — Ludwig V

Not sure you can seperate these. For example, Wittgenstein points out that ostension is already a part of the language. One has to understand the activity of pointing to follow a pointer.

...parasitic reference... — Srap Tasmaner

It's not at all clear to me what sort of act a "parasitic reference' might be; I can think of a few possibilities: repeating a name without knowing the referent, ironic, fictive, or pretend speech; quoting someone else's use.

What do you have in mind?

My question to Banno focused on something a little different. If we say that reference, as a matter of fact, requires triangulation, then it would follow that whatever it is I'm doing, privately, is not an example of referring. That's one way of setting it out conceptually. The second way would be to say that the question is not a factual one at all. We have a term, "reference," and we're considering how best to use it in order to carve up the conceptual territory. So it might be that we want to reserve "reference" for the cases where triangulation is involved. In that case, we need another term to describe what I'm doing, privately. I was asking Banno which of these outlooks he favors -- hope that makes sense. — J

This plays well on my dithering between Davidson, Austin and Wittgenstein.

Referring as a speech act is public and communal, as are all speech acts. If we are to make sense of thinking about something to oneself, we might well do so as a back construction, a re-application of the public act to the equivocal "private" world.

One argument for this is that the "private" discussion might be made public - you can tell someone what you are thinking. The act of thinking about something to oneself is not inherently private in the radical sense; it can be translated back into the public domain. That's what distinguishes it from the kind of "private" experience Wittgenstein critiques in the private language argument. So it's not private in the way that the sensation "S" is for Wittgenstein.

In answer to your question, I don't see that we must either deny that a referring to something unvoiced is not a reference proper, because it well might be made public.

The private language argument shows the incoherence of a language that in principle cannot be shared. It remains that something – a reference – may be in fact unshared yet not unsharable.

So I do not think I am caught in the dilemma of having to choose to rule some references as not references.

Cheers, all. Some excellent input.

I take it that we are much agreed that a belief is not, shall we say, present in the mind in the way being angry or being ecstatic are, and that this to some degree counts against their being considered as emotions.

I played with ChatGPT a bit, asking for examples of common ways "belief" is used, and asking for an analysis after the style of Austin. LLP AI would seem to be appropriate for such tasks. HEre's aprt of the result:

1. Common Uses of “Belief” in Ordinary Language
Here are some typical examples:
• “I believe it’s going to rain today.”
• “She holds a strong belief in democracy.”
• “That’s just your belief.”
• “He acted on the belief that she was in danger.”
• “It’s hard to change someone’s beliefs.”
• “Do you believe in ghosts?”
• “I don’t believe you.”
• “He lost his belief in God.”

These examples show that “belief” functions in a range of settings:
• Everyday judgment or opinion: “I believe it’s going to rain.”
• Doctrinal or ideological commitment: “Her belief in democracy.”
• Disagreement or challenge: “That’s just your belief.”
• Motivating reasons: “He acted on the belief...”
• Existential or religious questions: “Do you believe in ghosts/God?”

2. Observations from Usage
• Belief can be tentative or firm: “I believe it’s raining” is open to correction, whereas “Her belief in democracy” implies stability.
• Belief is not always knowledge: Saying “I believe” often marks uncertainty or lack of certainty—unlike “I know”.
• Belief often contrasts with evidence: “That’s just your belief” can suggest a lack of rational grounding.
• Beliefs can be held unconsciously or unreflectively: “She never questioned her beliefs.”
• Belief is frequently used in both personal and impersonal contexts: from the mundane (“I believe the shop is open”) to the doctrinal (“belief in the resurrection”). — ChatGPT

In a simialr vein i asked for words proximal to believe, and then for words proximal to those words, and had those diagramed. Not all that neat, but here is the result:



Perhaps if nothing else this exercise shows how ill chosen an approach to the analysis of "belief" that presumes it refers to the one thing might be.

It's part attitude, part emotion, part intent, part disposition, but not wholly any or all or some grouping of these.

Cheers.

AI tells me it's in Ruth Barcan Marcus’s Modalities: Philosophical Essays (Oxford, 1993), especially in the early papers and appended discussions. I can only see a limited preview.

The limits of language are not the limits of being. Being is not something contained in language.. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are a long way apart in out views.

Of course being is not contained in language. Being is not contained in anything, and neither is language a container. Hence any any attempt to step outside of all language to describe being “as such” is suspect. But this seems to be what you would do - supposing that there are ants prior to "There are ants" being true; and not temporally prior, but logically prior, as if it were not sentences that are true or false. We can't stand outside of the interpretation that claims there are ants, in order to say there are ants outside of that interpretation...

And that's also why is loaded.

Truth doesn't reflect the mind's grasp of being, it is the minds grasp of being. “Prior” suggests an ontological gap that can’t be made coherent. We don’t grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.

I can't see how to make sense of your attempt to foreclose on this. You bold "Nothing about this priority requires any claim about stepping outside of all interpretations" only to then say " The truth itself is grounded in being, and hence is already actual prior to any interpretation." You appear to just be smuggling back in the scheme/content distinction you reject.

I'm at a loss to make sense of such an approach.

Part of the problem here is imagining belief or thinking as an “object” — Antony Nickles

Spot on.

I think you've put your finger on a problem with the article, in that one believes things – holds them to be true – while not holding them in mind; you presumably believe that there are bacteria in the bottom of your left shoe, or any other equal triviality, but until now hadn't given it much thought. Odd, then , to call such a belief an emption.

But it seems equally odd to call such a belief a disposition. A disposition to do what? To confirm certain statements about shoe bacteria?

Not sure where that leaves the discussion.

US AUKUS review could 'save Australia from itself', Keating says

He said in a Thursday statement that the Pentagon review was “subjecting the deal to the kind of scrutiny that should have been applied to Aukus in the first instance”, describing the deal as “hurriedly scribbled on the back of an envelope by Scott Morrison, along with the vacuous British blowhard Boris Johnson, and the confused president, Joe Biden – put together on an English beach, a world away from where Australia’s strategic interests primarily li — Gardian

Sorry - I meant the discussion between Marcus, Quine, and Kripke.

I thought you objected to making inferences about intent? — frank

I was noting that such inferences cannot result in certainty.

But it's important to note that this doesn't matter.

We don't need to fix the referent of "gavagai" with absolute certainty in order to get the stew, or go hunting rabbits.

So much of the conversation about fixing referents is unnecessary.

We are again in the territory of farce. — Srap Tasmaner

To that end we ought acknowledge the limits of finding a set of conventions or rules for fixing a reference, as set out by Davidson in "A nice derangement of epitaphs".

Of course, if reference is a product of triangulation, and I think it is, then it is not private.

You got the reference to Quine, but Srap didn't. Does that mean the reference was successful and unsuccessful at the same time? — frank

Yes!

Very interesting. Can you recall a reference for this?

Kripke does re-introduce the idea of essence, but in a form quite different to the classical approach, in being extensional rather than intensional.

That is,

I'm holding out for reference as a potentially private game. Talking, so often, is talking to ourselves, and we need all the apparatus of talking-with-others to do it. — J

seems to me to be mistaken, becasue we do not usually need any "apparatus" in order to check who it is we are thinking about. Indeed, the idea is odd.

Consider Did I know it was a picture of him?

True. But I still referred to the tree. I don't need your buy-in for that. — frank

I wouldn't quite accept your thinking, or even talking to yourself about the tree, as a bonafide reference. I am more incline to think the prime examples of reference involve a public shared speech act, and that such self-talk is secondary. This, becasue, one does not usually need to reassure oneself that the reference being made is correct, or question what it is your are thinking about. Not that we can rule that out, but it would seem to be unusual.

We need to understand reference in the first instance by looking at fairly standard cases, then considering oddities.

I can't tell if you mean the whole thing, or the individual parts. How can I know? — frank

By answering both and seeing to which @Srap Tasmaner responds? Answering one, and seeing if the response fits that answer?

Generally, by moving the conversation on, and seeing what the result is, and then making an inference about Srap's intent.

But couldn't we get around that in the way I suggested earlier?:

We could rewrite "The man over there who I think has champagne in his glass" as follows: "The man over there about whom I say, 'He has champagne in his glass'."
— J

This way, it's a behavior, not a mental intention, and the speaker still can't be "wrong about the reference", because it doesn't depend on whether the man really has champagne, only on whether the speaker says he does. The man is being identified as the subject of a statement, not as a person with a drink in his glass. — J

Going back over this, it seems to me that the reference is now fixed by the indexical, "the man over there", and not by the description "He has champagne in his glass".

Pentagon launches review into AUKUS deal to ensure it meets Trump's 'America First' agenda

The Australian Embassy in Washington declined to comment when contacted by the ABC.


Review: After America: Australia and the new world order – Emma Shortis (Australia Institute Press), Hard New World: Our Post-American Future; Quarterly Essay 98 – Hugh White (Black Inc)

Recognising quite what an ill-conceived, ludicrously expensive, uncertain project AUKUS is, and just how unreliable a partner the US has become under Trump, might be a useful step on the path to national strategic self-awareness.

We really could stop the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza if Xi had a word with Putin and the US stopped supplying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the weapons and money to slaughter women and children. But climate change would still be coming to get us.

So talk about stipulation and teaching all you like, but it doesn't get you to that level of originary reference you're chasing, the intentionality you cannot be mistaken about. It relies on that; it doesn't explain it or even describe it. — Srap Tasmaner

This is good stuff. A couple of points.

The type of stipulation used would be a status function, a "counts as" Statement. There is a mutuality in the stipulation - we think of it as the adult teaching the child, but it's more like a joining in to a conversation - consider how we each learn a name. Sometimes a definite description is available, sometimes - often - not. Always, involves a community.

And there need be no "intentionality you cannot be mistaken about'. Back to the derangement of epitaphs. We can set rules up, as needed, but then they will fall, or be pushed.

Non of which detracts from what you said.

"Yes, you successfully referred to the tree because I agree that that is called a tree." — frank

On the other hand, if we do not have some such agreement, we might not be able to continue. There's adequacy between certainty and incomprehension.

If you want to teach someone "blork" means that thing, you have to already be able to successfully refer to that thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Consider "Let's agree that this thing is Blork". Who teaches who here? Isn't the choice to use "blork" an agreement, if not a commitment?

There's an indexical built in: "this". Indeed, can we have a language without such an ability? It would be a mere syntax, a string of letters or sounds.

Reference goes all the way down.

A well-rounded account. Of course deontology doesn't have to overlook 'the human practices of mistakes, reconsideration, excuses", and a deontology that can at least account for these might be an improvement.

The warning against treating beliefs as mental or brain states is well made, and part of what is being addressed somewhat obliquely in 's account. The neuroscience is not yet up to the task, and may never be.

I'm not sure I follow your idea of "lowering" a belief from a disposition to an emotion, although treating them as dispositions may overcome one objection to treating them as emotions - that an emotion is an occasional thing, I am angry now, and will calm down later...whereas a belief endures even when not considered. One still believes that the Earth is round, even when not giving it conscious consideration.

There’s probably a need to go deeper into this, partly as a way to address the ‘you can’t have values if there’s no external validation of the good’ — Tom Storm

And the question becomes, external to what? If the world is always, and already, in a context and a language, then there is nothing "external" to the interpretation.

Which brings us back, I think, to how it is that Tim can understand the divine, without thereby interpreting it.

So for Tim the world is already divided up. Whereas for me the division is something we do, and re-do, as our understanding progresses.

And so I again throw the question back to Tim, why should we accept that your divisions are the absolute ones?

And it seems to me that he can answer with an argument, or simply rely on faith. But his reliance on faith is not a reason for others to follow his account. So I think he needs to present some sort of argument.

I can't see how he can do so without thereby giving some sort of interpretation of how things are.

You might find some who would claim that interpretation is not an issue at the level of first philosophy, and that would be an important way of categorizing their method. — J

An interesting thought. I fond it hard to see how a first philosophy (again, a loaded term) might be articulated without being interpreted. But I supose that just marks my position on the issue.

(Tim) is well-read, a deep thinker and orients himself within the classical tradition, like some others here. — Tom Storm

Quite so. However I often find it difficult to see much argument in his posts. They read more like just-so stories—rich descriptions of how he pictures the world, but with little in the way of justification for that picture. It's one thing to affirm a vision; it's another to show why we should accept it.

Consider:

...this is different from saying that there is no truth prior to "interpretation within a context of belief, intention, tradition, and reception." To say that would be to say that nothing was true until man's communities arose. Yet the order of human discourse is not the order of being, the former is contained within the latter, not vice versa. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here's a false dilemma - that either there are truths prior (a loaded term) to humanity, or nothing was true until man's communities arose. Perhaps we can say truth is not invented by humans, but neither does it exist in some Platonic realm, independent of all interpretive conditions. Instead truths become available within human discourse—not arbitrarily, not as illusions, but as intelligible articulations of a world we are always already in relation with.

And notice the "might" in

A First Cause, First Principle, and First Mover might follow from the idea that explanations need to be intelligible and do not bottom out in "it just is" and the spontaneous movement of potency to actuality—that's another question however. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, a false dilemma. The “might” is doing slippery rhetorical work—it creates the appearance of modesty while still reinforcing the idea that unless you accept some First Cause, you're left with unintelligibility. There’s no reason to think that rejecting a First Cause commits one to irrationalism or incoherence.

And this admission:

It comes from the assumption that our language and judgements have causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

conflating causal explanation with justificatory structure. To move from “our judgments have causes” to “therefore they must be grounded in a First Cause” is to blur the line between what explains a belief’s origin and what justifies its content. It's precisely the kind of category mistake that thinkers like Davidson, Sellars, and Brandom have warned against.

One alternative is that aesthetic judgement is embedded in community and culture, tradition and workmanship, coherence and responsiveness, and is it learned and communicable, an aspect of human growth. Aesthetic judgements are part of the stories we tell each other about what it worthwhile. This view places aesthetics firmly in the human, not the divine.

Appealing to an absolute standard of the good doesn’t settle the issue, it merely relocates the disagreement to whose interpretation of that standard prevails. — Tom Storm

This is spot on. It marks the link here between Tim's approach to aesthetics and his comments against liberalism and in favour of elite education.

It would appear that Tim thinks he has understood the Devine.

But why should we take his word for it?

Shifting ground here.You started with

I am not more inclined to think that man, with our without his institutions and "games," is the sui generis source of beauty in the cosmos (or goodness, or truth for that matter). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now it's

I am saying something about the things judged good/beautiful must be prior to the act of judging/thinking itself, else the objects themselves would only be arbitrarily related to the judgement. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you are now saying only that the flower is prior to the flower being called pretty, then you have dropped your main gambit. But it does not follow that judging the flower to be pretty is arbitrary.

Anything could be judged any which way, because the properties of objects do not determine how they are judged. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"The properties of objects do not determine how they are judged" is rubbish. The flower is judged to be pretty because fo the properties it has.

That something is judged to be blue is dependent on the object judged. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's also dependent on the eyesight of the person doing the judging, together with the language they use and the community in which they use it.

So we are still at:

Why supose there is a "sui generis source of beauty ". Do you supose that that in order for beauty to be real, it must have a source, and that source must be outside human life? I don't agree. I'll throw the burden back to you to show that such a thing is needed. — Banno