They have much different critical postures toward philosophy. Both of them think philosophers spend their time asking the wrong questions, and these errors in questions asked derive from the way philosophers approach questioning itself.

Wittgenstein thought that the errors in these questioning strategies derived from insufficient attention payed to the context of philosophical language - with philosophy being particularly unmoored and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a dead, beached whale, mourn and then forget.

In contrast, Heidegger thought that errors in these questioning strategies derived from people paying insufficient attention to the context of philosophical language - with philosophy being particularly moored on ossified, unnoticed framing devices and thus occlusive. Philosophy as a still living, beached whale, and gotta save that whale.

Wittgenstein is an undertaker for the living, Heidegger is a necromancer for those that never died.

How do feelings arise? — Eugen

You'd do well to read SEP's article on Spinoza. There's also a whole second article on his theory of emotion!

1. In his view, every element possesses an infinite of attributes, including consciousness. So every atom that you contain is somehow alive. “all [individual things], though in different — Eugen

I agree with you that "every atom would somehow be alive" would generate no ends of problems for Spinoza's account, but I don't think he's committed to the background of concepts you've used to pin the claim on him.

By my reckoning what you're saying would equivocate, per Spinoza, on what it means for an element to "possess an infinity of attributes" and what it would mean for nature to possess that infinity of attributes. I've made some remarks on a similar theme here. The bottom line, I think, is if you're trying to criticise Spinoza, you miss your target if you treat him like he believes predicating a property of a mode is the same mechanism as substance possessing an attribute.

It may turn out that making the distinction between mode properties and attributes isn't worthwhile, but if that's the source of your dispute with him, it's worth articulating in those terms.

Btw, if it feels like I'm contradicting @180 Proof here, go with his exegesis, he's done years and years more legwork on Spinoza than I have!

You're saying that all people in a country are conscious, but the country isn't. Why not? — Eugen

I thought we'd be able to take it for granted that something which emerges from a collective of agents isn't necessarily conscious - like countries weren't. If you need more examples to block the syllogism, a handshake of agreement emerges from the actions of two agents, but is not conscious. Is that a clearer example?

If you want a historical angle on it, I think in context the big problems he's speaking about are the mind body problem, God's relationship to substance, God's freedom, good and evil, and whether God's an agent - in historical/political context I think he's as much a radical Jewish theologian and political activist as a metaphysician.

1. As I understand, Spinoza was a panpsychist, so does his metaphysics encounter the combination problem? — Eugen

1. It's arguable whether he does or not, I think. If the combination problem consists of how do little proto-consciousnesses come together to form a big consciousness like ours, I don't think Spinoza's troubled by it since modes like feelings and modes like microphysical events don't have causal contact or constitutive part-whole style relationships with each other to begin with. The conceptual framework in which the combination problem makes sense seems to me a category error when viewing it from (my terrible misreading of) Spinoza's perspective.

2. In his view, God is nature, it possesses infinite consciousness (plus other infinite attributes), but it is not conscious and it has no will. Isn't this self-contradictory? — Eugen

2. Not self contradictory at face value. An analogy; nature consists in the myriad of attributes, a crowd consists of people, what the crowd's made of are all conscious, that doesn't mean the crowd is conscious. If you want to think of Spinoza's "mind" attribute in its entirety as a mind of an agent, it requires distorting the notion of an agent. That god has neither a mind nor a body in the sense an agent does, minds and bodies are (edit: immanent) manifestations of it.

3. Causation: these attributes don't interact with each other. So a rock hitting you doesn't cause you to think ''Damn rock! I'm hurt...", but a previous thought does. How could someone defend this statement? — Eugen

3. By construing the relationship between the rock impact and the person's flesh as mirroring the relationship between the person's perception of the rock's impact and the person's sensation of pain. There's the sequence of physical causes and the sequence of ideas.

Yes. Goes back a hundred years if my memory serves. Sometimes it's very easy. For example, here is a linear fractional transformation written in terms of fixed points and multiplier.(I'm working on a theorem right now involving this). I think a more general case was dealt with in the discipline of functional equations. Can't recall the work offhand. — jgill

Thanks!

Look up Shota Kojima and infinite compositions. A lot of stuff out there on fractals and simple iteration, but composing different functions endlessly not very much, especially if one considers complex functions that are not holomorphic, which I have done. They are far more interesting IMO. — jgill

Kinda off topic, but have you ever seen a generalisation of the iterated composition operator to non-natural indexes? Like... does the following notion make sense in general:

Let's say we have $g=f \circ f$, does it make sense to think of $f$ as like half an application of $g$?

Are there analogous constructs for an $f$ which is $\frac{1}{\pi}$ applications of $g$?

fdrake missed out rivers and the nitrogen cycle — bert1

Sir, this is a stretched metaphor, not A Thousand Plateaus.

You can answer the big questions before the little questions of which they are composed? Well, good for you. — Banno

Not at all. It's not either or: if you attempt to tackle a big question, you discover a lot of little ones. If you attempt to tackle a little one, you find a lot of big questions in the background. The terrain of every problemscape has mountains, grounds, horizons, and from another's perspective the ground one stands on can be a plateau on a mountain. It's a big world of conceptual problems, and it's easy to get lost.

In some respects you get lost as soon as you started. But there's no exterior to declare that from, it's always a declaration from within - getting lost is still finding a new path, or carving one by walking. You play the game of joyfully finding your way, or you refuse to.

Sometimes there is no mountain. Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's a molehill.

You say it like it was a bad thing. — Banno

Oh absolutely it is. If you grant that the most important thing philosophy does is reveal instances of mere philosophy ("language running idle"), the philosophical question of what mere philosophy is becomes the most important one you can ask - a kind of demarcation problem. Absent general principles that will inform on a case by case basis whether something is mere philosophy or not; which the approach rightly rejects as overly high minded and acontextual; the appropriate response is to go and look.

Not to stop looking.

↪fdrake Answering big questions is easy - as I showed above: — Banno

You're artificially limiting the scope of big questions. Eg. "How does perception work?" Trivialising the attempt at generality.

...and what comes next might best be silence. Unless you have something else in mind? — Banno

Another offering: failure to resolve big questions is inevitable but still worthwhile to try.

... if you start asking smaller questions, you will perhaps get better answers.

Yes. And perhaps by attempting as big answers as you can, you will find how the questions inter relate.

...and what comes next might best be silence. Unless you have something else in mind? — Banno

If you stop hoping for big answers, you start asking smaller questions.

To my eye it would be the explication of the distinction between saying and showing. — Banno

It shows up in other ways too.

That what one sees depends on how one looks crops up in all kind of places. The distinction doesn't need to be drawn in terms of language either, surely. It isn't just a linguistic issue that an interface between two ontological regimes - like language and world, representation and reality, framework and what's studied - can be a distortion as well as a connection.

Acknowledging that there are such interfaces and distorting connections without undermining the access they grant seems the new realist space of problems. "Thank you critical tradition, yes there are access problems, and..."

Realising that you could talk proximally about things again, but with caveats, was a good step.

What is a dimensional analysis?

“ Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)” — Joshs

For @Isaac, translation of the as structure and highlighting an issue. The as-structure is a component of active perception that takes a thing as a thing. That configuration over there? That's seen as a bird. It is a bird. Maybe an analogy for it is if we think of perception as an object classification task, the "as" is the classifier sorting the environment into perceptual categories. Classifiers are (arguably) representations though; the predictors on the right of the equation prescribe the classifier value for the thing on the left of the equation. The as structure is sort of how the sensorium counts as the world, but the elements of the as structure are not applied on like "paint" to indifferent objects, it's more like a negotiation - you've learned to see stuff as stuff by interacting with it, so the world impresses upon the sensorium just as the sensorium impresses upon the world - to the extent even that there's no point making a strict distinction between them in all contexts, what I'm typing on counts as a keyboard -> what I'm tying on is a keyboard.

The "as" is also not necessarily derivative of perceptual information, it's conceived of as a component part of perception - like how old perceptual features are priors for new ones. It's a component of an ongoing "lived flow", it's the name for the feature that chunks it into meaningful bits.

You can suppress that basic meaningfulness through an intellectual/practical act in a restricted way, as you might while considering unclassified objects in the classification task (hiding what the objects are classified as, what labels they have and so on), but it's a suppression of a basic functioning in a restricted way - stuff still counts as stuff elsewhere in the act.

As I've read @Isaac's points, he was talking about spatial and temporal aspects of objects; boundaries, relative positions, evaluations of where, the kind of low level object recognition stuff our brain does. What "counts as" an object in this regime is more like spatiotemporal locale than a contextualised role. To use the classic example, Heidegger's hammer includes its for-hammering as a component of what it counts as (a hammer), the ecological affordance of hammering is part of the hammer, whereas for the object recognition stuff Isaac was talking about, it's much more about the object as a "object in space and time", a spatiotemporal locale, a solid trajectory through spacetime, boundaries, edges, that kind of thing.

It seems to me the relevant dispute regarding perception is whether, when you functionally split off those low level things from the upper level things, do you render the account which uses that functional distinction inaccurate, since "upstream", higher in model's hierarchy, the two are actually integrated interactive processes? There's doubtlessly contextual questions; to what degree can you split them? To what degree can you split them in what contexts? What is lost/gained from considering things like that?

I suppose one could take a much broader view of 'task', where a task might be to determine shape, or distinguish background from foreground - in which case I'd agree these can be task oriented, but From the quotes I've been given, that doesn't seem to be what the phenomenologists are on about. You'll know much better than I though, I may have gotten the wrong impression. — Isaac

I don't really know how Heidegger would deal with objects showing themselves out of a background mechanically, certainly don't recall anything about it. The mechanics, so to speak, aren't the kind of thing a Heideggerian often wants to talk about. So I don't know if you've gotten the wrong impression or not. Perhaps @Joshs knows better regarding what produces the particular "objectivities of the objects" for a Heideggerian so to speak.

Only that tasks (in the sense I think the phenomenologists meant it - 'doing the shopping', eating a sandwich'...) are modelled by areas of the brain several steps removed from the primary visual cortices. They'll have an influence by virtue of several stages of signal suppression, but it will be so watered down by that point that I wouldn't necessarily see it as a pragmatic influence. — Isaac

That seems to be within task, like within "eating a sandwich", do you think previous task information is blocked from influencing the current task? Or, in other words, does the task unfold along with the doing, so to speak? I get that you can partition off the regulatory signals once you've fixed a task you're describing, and it becomes somewhat post hoc, but can you partition of the regulatory signals in the agent's history from informing them what the current task is?

I agree so far as object recognition is concerned, but this comes back to the point I made to Joshs about the features of perception being more fundamental that objects. active inference begins to work at things like edge recognition, contrast detection...and I just don't see how those sorts of things could be task oriented. — Isaac

What makes you believe they're not task oriented? Or in other words - what makes the sensible default hypotheses non-task relativeness for edge recognition and contrast detection; or whatever broader category they lay in; when the rest of the procedure is task-relative?

I don't think this is the case, but I get that I'm straying away from the core of active inference in saying so. I don't think the chunks have to be meaningful. In fact I think they often aren't. I think 'meaning' is a post hoc activity of higher models to try and minimise surprise from the lower models. I don't see any use for it in the act of perceptions. I think it's sue comes in reviewing that act seconds later for efficient recall, or conversion into things like speech acts or object-oriented actions. Obviously the meaning-infused recall will then figure heavily in the next saccade, but only as one of many signals, not as an overarching control. — Isaac

So I can agree that it looks like the things we end up saying are meaningful upon reflection are post hoc constructions, but I do think there's another flavour of meaningful information which is embedded in the functionality. The type of semantic information being that perceptual features are foraged under some model of hypothetical cause; the hypothetical causal structure ascribes an explanatory space of meanings/reasons consistent with the act. EG, when someone's perceptually exploring a face, they look at the bits of the face which are most informative regarding its global structure assuming it were a face, you can see the general model of faces at work when looking at someone's scan paths over faces. As for why it maybe counts as semantic, it's like like instructional information.

While the extent to which perceptual feature formation is saturated by meaning "all the way down" is likely to be largely a philosophical dispute; the fact that it is largely a philosophical dispute should give us some pause.

Yeah, that seems like a valid criticism. Perhaps it reflects the limits of a scientific approach. I can see the problems, but not necessarily the solutions in the lab. It may be time to let us wishy-washy psychologists loose on the subject, something more like Feldman Barrett is doing with emotion? — Isaac

I dunno how to evaluate this!

I don't see where to disagree with you. Therefore, I agree, I think. — EusebiusLevi

:up:

Then I'm glad we both agree. Perhaps I'm responding more to the act of highlighting bare minimum standards than the content of those standards. There's only so much impact they can have. Most lived hours aren't Court of Reason hours.

I wouldn't call it a ritual. I would call it good practice. ;-) — EusebiusLevi

Highlighting that you're performing a bad practice bias for the purposes of a rhetorical deflection doesn't make it any less of a deflection! From personal experience, the only times I particularly engage the Best Practices Of Reason that I'm aware of are when a claim is sufficiently surprising and emotionally ladened, or it comes from a trusted source and is in conflict with what I believe.

I think part of best practices also come down to a recognition of constant fallibility and error (pace @Possibility), I think that should only be suppressed while engaging in a dynamic of power.

But, for important issues, ones where the truth matters, going through those steps will be handy. — EusebiusLevi

:up:

Is there a meta ritual which helps someone know when to go through the rationality ritual?

In general, the more you explain phenomenological approaches to me, the more impressed I am by the way they presaged active inference approaches. Which, although not your objective, I'm very grateful for. But I'm certainly not seeing any divergence. Quite the opposite. — Isaac

:up:

Also @Josh.

That's my take too, active embodied inference resonates very well with phenomenology. The nexus of conflicts between the two approaches; at least from the phenomenological side; seems to be the notion of perception as a representation. Heideggerians don't like representational accounts of perception very much for reasons of the task relativeness of representations, for reasons of alleged over reliance on cognitive categories and lastly for the Heideggerian commitment to holism. I'll write a little on those, though it is a hot take. The three are related.

Task relativeness: representations are typically construed as accurate/less accurate, purposiveness doesn't fit % accuracy, % accuracy instead is evaluable relative to a purpose - an analogy there might be the relationship of a salience map of the face to a face classification task.

Holism: that task relativeness is also a context sensitivity, and finding ourselves in the right context + recognising that we're in the right context for our acts is a meaning imbueing/discovering activity. Representation construed in terms of efficiency and accuracy alone can allegedly create a drought of semantic information; something has to make perceptual features and actions meaningful chunks of body+environment, not just accurate and task fit.

Over reliance on cognitive categories: a representation is theorised as a state vector tuned to be fit for a task, but there's little work on the vector comes to having moving parts - what work is done specialises on what parts of the brain are specialised for what task, not what parts of the active inference machine cotton onto meaningful causal structures. The over reliance on cognitive categories is that we end up feeding enough context into the active inference machine for it to work in a domain; like Friston's saccade experiments facial recognition study; but we don't learn how to evaluate which domain we're in using the same procedure. So we've fed in a cognitively demarcated context without paying attention to the demarcation of contexts, and we end up manipulating representations within a domain rather than tuning a representation generator that varies over domains - like what long term Friston's free energy approach aims to do but hasn't yet (@VagabondSpectre for central pattern generators being another framework).

That is why I believe a process, a method, with some essential steps to go through is required. I think that the steps I proposed are the bare minimum. — EusebiusLevi

I don't think the bare minimum you've presented is a practical bare minimum. I don't think that is your fault however.

I agree with you in principle that all the steps you've provided are very helpful in evaluating how sensible a claim is, and that it's useful to be able to force oneself through such a ritual. What I wonder about is the contamination effects of proposing this bare minimum when it is combined with the fact that the basic standards of rationality and evincing are rarely used when forming beliefs - even for the proponents of these standards!

Let's say we propose a bare minimum of rationality that every claimed fact must have a citation. If we propose that an account which does not satisfy the bare minimum should thereby fail to change someone's mind, then we'd end up colouring most inferences people make as unpersuasive. That's fine in principle, I think it's pretty clear that most beliefs are not formed in an idealised "court of reason". But if we take it as a fact that most beliefs are not formed in an idealised court of reason, that problematises the use of any bare minimum standard. So:

Let's further propose that, in practice, the person who had that account of the bare minimum couldn't consistently apply it. So if they did not behave in accordance with the bare minimum at all times, the bare minimum could be used to selectively reject things the person was disinclined to believe anyway. The problem of all claims being equal de jure but not de facto; since not all claims are checked. In that case, the observed function of this bare minimum standard would often be to support beliefs already held regardless of how justified they are.

Try to explain this without recourse to markov blankets but unsung a more fundamental language. — Joshs

Also @Isaac.

I think that's a good challenge. Do you believe it relates to the point about cognitivism+internalism from the paper I elaborated on here? In which the state collection the Markov blanket is computed for is tacitly identified with the body (fine) and the causal paths which bodily processes mediate are thus construed as internal to the body (not fine simpliciter, but consistent), and the environment is then construed as "outside". I think it's a question of whether you see the coupled system of body and environment as shot through with causal chains that penetrate right through the body and go out the other side; being neither in it nor out it, vs whether you see it strictly in terms of the partition into bodily and environmental (and locale) states. The latter is an internalist construal (models inside the body = content inside the body), the former is an outside without an inside style externalism (undermining the existence of the inside, models inside the body = stages of already environmental relations).

The apparent paradox comes from equating volume as defined by an integral with volume as defined by a concrete, physical enclosed region. Minimally, the infinity of the shape breaks the correspondence between the two ideas.

There are other examples, like the Cantor set, which is dispersed throughout the interval (0,1) - like being completely dissolved in a fluid - but nevertheless has no volume whatsoever.

Physical volume and mathematical volume don't have to correspond!

Hoo boy we're far from the OP. Nevermind. Completely merciless jargon use follows.

I particularly like their point that the use of Markov blankets and Bayesian theory in a psychological model is mot in itself problematic , the issue is HOW they are used. — Joshs

I think this point in the linked paper is worth throwing some words at.

, any claim that the sensory-effector system is (must be) any organism's Markov boundary depends on having already defined the knowing self, or agent, as whatever is Markov-bounded by the sensory-effector system. This both makes the argument circular, and introduces a highly problematic notion of the knowing self. It is at least a step in the direction of supposing a homuncular self in the Cartesian theater (Dennett & Kinsbourne 1992), and is weirdly reductive insofar as it supposes the agent to have fewer parts than the organism. Even so, it may be true that to know the state of a brain it is sufficient to know its initial state, internal dynamics, and the states of its sensory and motor systems (although we note that we are, scientifically, extremely far from this possibility, so assuming its truth is a very generous stipulation). But assuming the brain to be the appropriate target worth knowing already places the enquiry within the traditional neo-Kantian cognitivist frame. In contrast, from the EEE perspective—at least one strain of which is influenced by the phenomenological critique of Kant (Kaufer & Chemero 2015)—it might be equally worth knowing about the state of one’s hand, the Markov boundary for which almost certainly includes items outside of the body. It also might be worth knowing the state of the tool one is wielding, which is physically external, but in at least some cases epistemically internal (i.e. phenomenally transparent) to the agent9

I'm gonna try and summarise the argument in my own terms.

So what's the brain being the appropriate target for this Markov-blanketing operation doing? It's placing the brain-body system inside a Markov blanket; and what that means is that the brain-body system has sensory inputs from the environment and the body, and effector outputs - your actions are the outputs, they are proposed relative to the inputs and the current task. That might seem like a theoretically inert operation, but it's very easy to go from this interpretation of the Markov blanketing device to an internalist+representationalist conception of the mind. What makes this suggestive?

Imagine this chain of states:

S->M->R->S->M->R

With latent inputs:
H1->S

And latent outputs
H2<-R


Where S is a vector of sensory states, M is a vector of mediating states and R is a vector of output response states. H1 can be thought of as the hidden states of the environment + body insofar as they impact sensory foraging, H2 can be thought of as the hidden states of the environment insofar as they are causally impacted by the agent's responses R.

The "internalist/cognitivist" interpretation thinks of the M states as constitutive of the agent, so the "Markov boundary" of the M states is the sensory states+the response states, and the equation of the agent with the M states then yields the "sensory veil" hypothesis and vulnerability to skepticism.

How to get around this?

Increasingly, evidence is pointing to the importance of the braingut connection, for instance (Cryan & Dinan 2012). In an additional illustration of the difficulty of drawing neat inner/outer distinctions, it may well be that to know about one’s brain one also needs to know something about one’s gut biome—which is biologically inside, but topologically and epistemically outside. Reflect on such examples for a while and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that epistemic internalism is not the conclusion of an argument based on neutral premises, but is in fact a hidden premise of the starting point.

Instead, while still granting the chain as an adequate description, which states are thought of as the agent are changed from only M states to M states + some S states and some R states, the directness of contact is restored, and the "Markov boundary" of the agent comes to include some H1 and H2 states.

Edit: effectively, that internalism seems to follow from the fact that M states have S and R states as their blanket turns on the proposal that the agent consists only of M states, whereas the model is also consistent with interpreting some S and R states as part of the agent.

By no means do I consider myself a "philosopher". I am just a layman with a few thoughts. — EusebiusLevi

That's most of us. People who have any qualification in philosophy at all are rare on here.

4.- Don’t judge me just because I’m biased — EusebiusLevi

5.- Steps for countering bias when evaluating evidence — EusebiusLevi

Just so you know, usually posts like your OP get removed for advertising, I would've removed it myself but I'm pretty sure you're here to discuss things and not to advertise your work.

I read both of the essays that I quoted the titles of. I've thought along similar lines before. I think you've done a good job of clearly stating biases and some amelioration methods for them, I was wondering if you'd indulge me by answering this question I struggle with.

If you're really aware of biases and how prevalent they are in our reasoning, that means you can see them everywhere. If the idea of their prevalence is correct, most accounts of things are informed by biases. Something I wonder about might be termed bias-presence bias. In which the ability to detect bias in an account inappropriately adjusts their plausibility down relative to the ideas you already hold. I have bias, they have bias, my bias is largely unobserved by me, theirs is observed; so I take theirs into account without taking my own into account... What to do? How much does an awareness of cognitive biases actually entrench opinion?

Fallacy Man in existential comics does something analogous - he can reject any argument for any claim by showing the fallacies used in it. He could well be accompanied by Cognitive Bias Man, which the comic does later.

Math is also not dependent on being shared. — frank

I quite disagree with that; when applied to mathematics in total. It looks too much like the specialised language of a type of inquiry for me to think mathematics itself is not dependent upon being shared.

Would you call it objective?

Yes, if I wasn't splitting hairs like in this thread I'd have no bother calling it objective. It's not objective in the way you can "go out and look" at a ball's behaviour, say, but you can go "out and look" to see if a proof works. The autonomy of mathematical objects seems to derive from the fact that whether a statement implies another given its assumptions does not depend on who checks.

I don't know if that autonomy is more like the autonomy of nature or the autonomy of language, but I'd suspect it's closer to the latter; the moves humans make in logical+deductive inference games can be quite well modelled by a syntax of production rules.

Our talk about the word is conjured into being by use engaging in conversation — Banno

That's like sewing the form of life and nature into language, "our talk of the world is conjured into being by engaging in conversation", I stub my toe and scream "Ow!" - I refute it thus.

I am really asking just how significant the results of any experiment need to be above chance before it is meaningful? — TiredThinker

The ritualistic answer: p<0.05, p<0.1 if you include the word "suggestive" in your discussion of the interpretation of the p-value.

The replication crisis answer: That's a how long is a piece of string kinda question. Commonly used significance thresh-holds are still consistent with a 30% replication rate. What is often interpreted as a 5% false discovery rate (1-alpha) can actually be closer to a 70% rate! And it might not even be that because the null hypothesis is usually false when interpreted literally.

The 1 million IQ play: spend your time designing an experiment in which it is impossible for people respond in a manner consistent with psi without the specific effect you're studying being present, make the measurement procedure impossible to influence through experimenter bias AND that your measurements of all variables of interest are precise. Lastly preregister the design, include in the pre-registration the calculations you'd do given data in that design, and the make sure to declare in advance the interpretations of statistical tests given the calculations. Ideally write the analysis program before you even see the data.

In parapsychology methods discussions, you'll often see a parapsychologist pointing out that usually a psychology/sociology/health etc researcher is proposing controls and analytic constraints that psychology/sociology/health etc researchers don't follow. And that accusation is right; it's just that the tu quoque is a pox on both their houses, and it's been very very hard to convince non-parapsychology researchers that this scientific crisis starts at home.

I would say nothing ensures a connection. — khaled

:up:

If the connection ensured that whatever happened in the object shows up in our conceptualisation of it, there wouldn't be error and irrelevancies. It seems right to say that the space of questions epistemology marks; what do we know? how do we know it?; and methodology marks; is this procedure adequate by that metric? does this fertiliser engender more yield for this crop than the other fertiliser; require that the connection is not ensured but can be studied. Prosaically, a concordance between thought and being is something being can be coaxed into in limited circumstances.

“More or less adequate”? I thought you were claiming that eventually we’d get an “exact picture” — khaled

Wasn't intendeding to. If I measure something and it's 15cm long with a ruler, is it exactly 15cm long? That kinda thing. The ruler measurement is a representation of the thing's length, it neither fits exactly nor doesn't fit at all.

I was just asking when we can know our representations of the world actually match it. — khaled

Domain specific thing. If I have an expectation of where my cup is, I can reach for it. If I think my cup is 15cm tall, I can measure it.

If you want a non-domain specific answer; an answer to the question of what ensures the connection between thought and being or mind and world; I dunno, I don't think that's relevant to the topic at hand.

I understand. But you said that intersubjective procedures can reveal the objective aspects of entities. I'm asking when we can know that we have successfully done this. That we "got it".

I'm asking when we can know our representations match reality, as you claim that by using these intersubjective procedures we can figure it out — khaled

I don't have a recipe for you. That looks to me to be a question regarding how knowledge works, rather than taking that knowledge works as an intersubjective/shared generation of concepts/theories/ideas about stuff which can be more or less adequate as a given.

If you're arguing in a socratic fashion towards the Kantian point that the objective cannot be separated intellectually from the intersubjectivity of representations, I'm not particularly interested in that discussion. I will tell you why though, I believe that equation/reduction undermines the behavioural autonomy of what representations target by construing their autonomy of production as our autonomy of representation (concept/sense/meaning generation) when dealing with them. It's a transcendental/pragmatic Stove's gem; the entities can't manifest as they are without their manifestation-in-language, therefore the entities can't manifest as they are without language. The only thing that makes this different from a conceptual idealism as Stove wrote is that "concept" is seen as mental furniture; instead we have the general subjectivity of language/discourse which does exactly the same thing, getting "in between" me and the oyster-in-itself when I try and eat the oyster, as it were. The separation between an agent and the world is no longer the problem of connection of mind and world, it's a problem of the connection of mind and world being always already there between mind and world. The transparent cage of the subject is no longer around one person's self, it's around the whole of human activity.

Stove's gem equally applies to the correlationist, the correlationist is just better at hiding it.

At what point do we know that our inter subjective understanding has evolved to objectivity? — khaled

Understanding doesn't evolve into being whenever (a collective) believing something doesn't make it so.

Objectivity isn't marked by the adequacy of a representation, it's marked by the behavioural autonomy of what the representation targets. In other words, objectivity is marked by the fact that an entity's being does not depend essentially upon ours; like our norms or regularities of perspective.

That lack of dependence is easy to conflate with invariance of perspective; the former entails the latter. Intersubjectivity doesn't change the behaviour of atoms, but the behaviour of atoms is not constituted by their theories' intersubjective invariance. The confusion between the first and the second conflates the direction of fit, as in:

Why shouldn't the sharing bring the aspect into being, — Banno

Makes the whole world be conjured into being by us inhabiting it together.

The objective aspects of an entity are those that depend only upon that entity's behaviours and properties. Those aspects do not existentially depend upon the behaviour of humans. They don't go away if everyone stops believing in them. Objective aspects chiefly concern the entity in question and the processes it is embedded in.

Intersubjective applies to a different regime, specifically it connotes the fact of (or nature of) group apprehension of phenomena. They are what everyone believes in; be it through a norm or a claim standing up to scrutiny. Intersubjective aspects chiefly concern the apprehension of the entity in question.

You will notice that objectivity talks about entities and intersubjectivity talks about the apprehension of entities. While intersubjective procedures (like inquiry, experiment, argument) can reveal the objective aspects of entities, the mechanism of revealing remains objective rather than intersubjective. The particle didn't move because it was in an experiment conceptualised like X, it moved because of how the experiment was set up.

Why shouldn't the sharing bring the aspect into being — Banno

Because the objective aspect generically is not dependent upon being shared. If the existence of the Earth depended upon being shared, you would expect intersubjectivity/sharing to be a factor in things like equations of motion and it just isn't. Like $\text{feelings}=ma$.

It doesn't work. I write from my mobile phone can these be a posibility because it doesn't work? Or I'm stupid :/ — Elegans

Software issues can make anyone feel stupid. If the extended mind thesis is right, perhaps software interfaces failing to work are rather like having a debilitating and undiagonised condition in a nervous tissue. Irritating, painful. To make matters worse, it is difficult to tell if something is the user's fault or a software issue until the problem is resolved. Irritating, painful, easy to construe as your fault/responsibility.

Only on this forum will you receive philosophy replies in a tech support/feedback discussion. ;)

What operating system does your phone use? And what browser are you trying to use for this?

You understand what I mean?:) — Elegans

I don't think so.



The above page is the page I'd get by clicking on your profile, name, etc, it's your user page. If I'd clicked on send message on the above screen. I'd get sent to this page:



Which would prompt me to send you a personal message. It would prompt me to send you the message because I clicked "send message" on your user/profile page.

Is your inquiry to do with this private messaging system? If so, try sending me a message to see if it works!

Can you please specify this problem more precisely?

That would be one of the middle two options, each of which considers there to be only one domain. But in that case I’m curious how one would characterize that domain, in a way more fundamentally descriptive, or prescriptive, in the senses of those terms used by those who distinguish the two. — Pfhorrest

I don't think it fits into the middle options. Those options are two ways of collapsing the distinction to one pole, rather than undermining the theoretical apparatus that would make the distinction in the first place. eg pragmatist considerations regarding what it means for something to be a fact containing behavioural commitments for that fact, a reciprocal co-constitution thesis like you might find from a Heideggerian, or Anscombe's virtue-ethical attacks on the distinction.