Perhaps we disagree on something so fundamental that neither of us can see it!

If there were you should have to think on both sides of it.

I think, and correct me if I am wrong, you read the OP and thought that I was referring to 'meaning' by 'definition'; and therefrom arises the disagreement. Am I on the right track? — Bob Ross

I think that's on the right track. Thank you for the help.

My OP, I see now, is a bit ambiguous: I did not make any distinction between the meaning of a concept and its definition. I don't think that simple concepts are themselves circular and unknowable in meaning but, rather, what I was referring to by 'definable' is the explication of meaning. — Bob Ross

I believe I also think of explication differently. As in, someone might learn what "is" means - and thus gain an understanding of what it means to be - through standard use of the word, and I'd count that as an explication of "is" and an explication of what it means to be. Though neither of those explications is an attempt to be as exhaustive or wide ranging as offering a definition might be.

I suppose when I read "explication", from you, I was reading it like expression. As in, "the cat is on the mat" and "there is a cup on that table" are both expressions/explications of "is", even though both senses of "is" are different but related in both. If instead you meant explication as a type of speech act, like offering a definition, or illustrating use, I think I was going off kilter.

I would also disagree with the latter use of explication with regard to fundamental concepts, but for a different reason.

Thanks again! I appreciate the continued thought on the matter.

Are you suggesting that deaf and illiterate mutes don't see colours (or see everything to be the same colour)? — Michael

Nope!

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask here. — Michael

Ah well.

Those with 3 channel colour vision and those with 12 channel colour vision will agree that some object reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm, but they will see it to have a different colour appearance. — Michael

You could end up with a statement like:

(Shrimp) Mantis Shrimp Human sees X as P(X) and calls it "P(X)" if and only if human sees X as Q(X) and calls it "Q(X)".

Predicating of the distal object X now makes sense because we've reintroduced the idea that properties of distal objects influence the kinds they are seen and labelled as.

Do you think you need a numerical identity between the state of being that Mantis Shrimp Human has when they count X as P(X) and the human's that counts X as Q(X) even when P and Q have the same extension?

I don't particularly like my own formulation of (Shrimp) btw, as it bifurcates seeing as a perceptual act and classification as a linguistic one, whereas there's evidence that the two are reciprocally related - both predictively/inferentially/causally and phenomenologically (citation needed).

What defines them as being indirect realists is in believing that we have direct knowledge only of a mental representation. Direct realists believe that we have direct knowledge of the distal object because nothing like a mental representation exists (the bottom drawing of direct realism). — Michael

Another possibility was outlined by Pierre-Normand below.

In contrast, a direct realist posits no such intermediate representations at all. For the direct realist, the act of representing the world is a capacity that the human subject exercises in directly perceiving distal objects. On this view, phenomenology is concerned with describing and analyzing the appearances of those objects themselves, not the appearances of some internal "representations" of them (which would make them, strangely enough, appearances of appearances). — Pierre-Normand

The distinction between "no such intermediate representation" and "nothing like a mental representation exists". The other realist alternative is that the perceptual relationship itself is a representation relationship. IE, there is no intermediate representation between distal object (or cause) of a perceptual object. But that would not be because there is no representation - or an appearance even - , but because there is no intermediate object or relation between the distal object/cause and the perceiver.

In terms of the diagram, you'd label the lines in the bottom left "representation".

For illustrative purposes anyway, an enactivist would hate the diagrams focussing on vision, or labelling those arrows as representation relationships in the first place!

How do you conceptualise a distal object in the second construal of indirect realism? It looks to me like there's an intermediary perceptual object in a representation relationship with distal objects in only the upper indirect realist's portrayal. In the lower indirect realist's account there doesn't seem to be a distal object of a perceptual act, and thus no relation with one, and thus no representation relationship with one.

Thank you very much.

Right now I am at -2 on the mood scale. Have you ever experienced what it is like to be at -2 or -5 or +5? I have. I have to take 600 mg of Quetiapine XL per night to get to -2 on the mood scale. If I didn't take it, I would be stuck at -5. Have you ever had hallucinations? If you haven't, you won't understand how scary and confusing it is to have one's reality warped by things that are not really there. — Truth Seeker

That's rough.

I will read Hume and Kant if I ever get to either 0 or +1 on the mood scale. Thank you for the recommendations. — Truth Seeker

I find secondary literature easier in the pit. Hope things get a bit more okay for you soon.

I don't think that it's science's job to either establish or disconfirm this thesis. I think the mind/body problem, the so-called hard-problem of consciousness and radical skepticism stem from distinctive philosophical outlooks regarding the disconnect between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" that Wilfrid Sellars identified as "idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it." On my view, it's entirely a philosophical problem although neuroscience and psychology do present cases that are illustrative of (and sometimes affected by) the competing philosophical theses being discussed in this thread. — Pierre-Normand

I had been wanting to make a thread on precisely this line of argument. That the hard problem of consciousness appears only when you expect an isomorphism between the structures of experience posited by the manifest image of humanity and those posited by its scientific image. Do you have any citations for it? Or is it a personal belief of yours? I'm very sympathetic to it, by the by.

I think ‘using’ a concept is more generic than ‘presupposing it’: both are ‘using’ it, the former is just what it means to ‘use’ generally, and the latter is to leave it unexplicated. — Bob Ross

I think I see what you mean. Though it strikes me as very difficult to be able to say which concepts are presupposed by which understandings. Could you take the statement "the cat is on the mat" and spell out all of its presupposed concepts, and the underlying fundamental concepts which are implicit in those presuppositions?

You are absolutely right that one can learn a concept through merely interacting with it or observing other people discuss about it, without its exact definition being clarified. I just don’t see how this negates my position, I guess. — Bob Ross

I've not been too explicit in spelling out how I disagree with you. I think we do disagree, but I don't know exactly where. I think we're getting close though.

If we want to be really technical, then I would say that we first, in our early years, learn notions; then we (tend to) refine them in our young adulthood into ideas; then we (tend to) refine them more in our older years into concepts. I just mean to convey that we sort of grasp the ‘idea’ behind a thing slowly (usually) through experience (whether that be of other people conversing or interacting with something pertaining to the ‘idea’); and I sometimes convey this by noting a sort of linear progression of clarity behind an ‘idea’ with notion → idea → concept. It isn’t a super clean schema, but you get the point.

I think I get the point. The prospect of cleanliness strikes me as an illusion though? I don't believe concepts have a linear progression of articulation like that, especially in discrete stages of clarity. That seems to me to make a concept very fixed while its articulation and understanding highly varies. I don't doubt that people can "aim their understandings" at a common concept while wrestling with it, even explicitly.

A good example of this is Eulerian polygon in Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations. People offered many definitions of Eulerian polygons over the years. But people came up with "counterexamples" to those - things which obviously were not Eulerian polygons -intensionally- but were Eulerian polyhedron -extensionally- in terms of the definition.

That history illustrates two things, in my view, that definition is in some sense derivative of communally negotiated understanding -even of intensionally fixed analysands like the concept of the Eulerian polyhedron -, and that communal articulation changes such conceptions.

Out in the wild, away from concepts which can be relatively well explicated in a formal language, things are both much fuzzier analytically and much more concrete pragmatically+semantically, I believe. Understanding what a chair is must include the act of sitting upon it, not just the words "something you can sit on" - which includes the floor and rocks. And there are no speech acts which are behaviourally equivalent to the act of sitting, since that's not what words do, they don't sit down.

Because the majority of the concepts we enjoy in our lives are more analytically fuzzy, their "full" explication, something maximally clear, cashes out in a pragmatic - perhaps even phenomenological - understanding rather than explicating word strings. Even if that pragmatic understanding must be accompanied by the appropriate words. eg "I sit down in my chair", and I am sitting, I illustrate this by sitting down.

That strikes me as most concepts must, thus, be fundamental. If they are constituted by being unable to be explicated. Since I cannot explicate sitting down with words alone. And if such explication is broadened to speech acts, then I can sit down while saying "this is sitting down", and explication becomes part of the fuzzy world of communally negotiated - social - understandings. In which clarity turns out to be grasping pragmatics and context.

Flowers for Algernon - very insightful about how emotions are conceptualised. Some brutally incisive depictions of growing up a working class guy in a poor family - with added learning disability. This book is heartrending from start to finish.

I didn’t understand this question: can you re-phrase it? — Bob Ross

Apologies. You answered my question already.

To use a concept, is to deploy it; and to presuppose a concept is to use a concept in a manner whereof one does not explicate its meaning (but, rather, uses it implicitly in their analysis). — Bob Ross

I'd very much like to see an example of this. I'm not saying I don't understand or have any idea of what you mean, I'd just like to see where you're coming from with this distinction between deploying a concept and explicating its meaning. I can imagine a world in which deploying a concept is an instance of explicating a meaning, regardless of whether a definition is offered.

Oh, I think I understand where your are heading; so let me clarify: by claiming ‘being’, or any absolutely simple concept, is unanalyzable and primitive, I DO NOT mean to convey that we cannot come to know what they are. I mean that we can’t come to know them through conceptual analysis: they remain forever notions, which are acquired via pure intuitions (about reality). — Bob Ross

I think I see what you mean. Though I think you're relying on a strict distinction between regular acts of speech and the analysis of concepts. I can certainly see that there is a distinction between them. What we're doing right now is a very analytical use of language. But you do pick up and refine concepts just by listening and chatting.

If we classify it as such, it would no longer fit OP's criterion of "not want to be a person who does it". We don't do diseases. — Lionino

It's an odd disease then, where how you act both gives you it and keeps it going. It strikes me as something like football. You don't do football, but you are a football player. Which isn't quite being an instance of football...

Regardless, the original post's sense of immoral applies to person types and persons.

With this in mind do you think there things that aren’t immoral but you still shouldn’t want to be the kind of person that does them even if you’re the only person affected? — Captain Homicide

In fact the question is about that dynamic. If immorality only applies to acts, then we can end the discussion. The question remains open if you can consider a type of person immoral.

You may bring up the example of touching a hot pan, — Lionino

Good catch. I think it was sticking a hand in the fire? I had in mind a kid touching a hot thing intentionally. Foolish, I think, not immoral.

↪Fooloso4 Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? I doubt that Midgley would have disagreed with your account of Descartes. — Banno

It'll depend on how much of Midgley's point depends upon misconstruing Descartes. The article springboards against Descartes' alleged solipsistic starting point and methodology, even if he's not an outright solipsist. @Fooloso4 is substantively disagreeing with the article's construal of Descartes. Specifically how it construes his method as solitary and solipsistic.

So even if you end up agreeing with Midgley's conclusion, you can criticise how she gets there by (perhaps uncharitably) criticising Descartes.The dude was a mathematician and a natural scientist surrounded by all kinds of scholasticism and dogma, his methodological withdrawal thus could be construed as inspired by his mathematical inclination - as a means of cutting through what he couldn't outright say was ill thought out bullshit.

I hold that some concepts are primitive and absolutely simple, and as such cannot be defined without circular reference (to itself). I am curious as to how many people hold a similar view, and how many completely reject such an idea. — Bob Ross

I reject it.

I will give the best example I have: being (viz., ‘to be’, ‘existence’, ‘to exist’, etc.). When trying to define or describe being, it is impossible not to use it—and I don’t mean just in the sense of a linguistic limitation: it is impossible to give a conceptual account without presupposing its meaning in the first place.

Under what conditions do you believe a concept presupposed in an act of speech? Can you distinguish presupposing a concept from using a concept? Or needing to learn a concept before deploying it? These aren't rhetorical questions.

So, do you agree that some concepts are absolutely simple, and thusly unanalyzable and incapable of non-circular definitions, but yet still valid; or do these so-called, alleged, primitive concepts need to be either (1) capable of non-circular definition or (2) thrown out?

I'd call a concept X presupposed by another concept Y iff any judgement or act which articulated or used Y could not be understood without understanding X. An example, try to imagine riding a bike ( Y ) without understanding what a bike is ( X ).

I'd call a concept fundamental if it is presupposed by types of judgement or acts. Like truth for my claim that it's windy outside.

That concept of presupposition yields a puzzle. How would someone learn any derivative concept of any fundamental concept? Imagine for a moment that "bike" was fundamental, then no one could learn to speak about riding a bike until they understood what a bike is. That sits at odds with how omnipresent fundamental concepts may be construed to be - being, the meaning of "is", experience, quality, quantity, truth and so on. How could you come to understand what a bike is without understanding what "is" means? The same analysis would hold for any practice which involved an object - any activity. But we live in a world where plenty of people know how to ride bikes, so they must understand riding bikes, so must understand what a bike is.

So it seems we live in a world where either people understand none of what we do, or fundamental concepts are rarely if ever employed for understanding anything.

Which would mean either that fundamental concepts are not used in the understanding or judgement of almost anything, or that understanding and judgement can be done without understanding presupposed concepts in the sense I outlined. Note "can" there won't apply to every act, just some acts.

Conversely, we live in a world in which people understand how to ride bikes and pick up trash, but not what existence means. So it would seem to me that fundamental concepts require everyday concepts to be in place before fundamental concepts themselves are understood.

However, I don't mean to construe thinking about fundamental concepts as useless. When people change how they think and act about something fundamental, it can have widespread effects. For example, whether people consider agents worthy of moral consideration defined by the presence of a soul, or indeed whether they need be human at all.

Fundamental concepts thus play a regulative role inferentially and analytically upon that which they impact. Even if their understanding is not presupposed in the articulation or judgement of what they inferentially and analytically constrain.

Thus, I view fundamental concepts as central strands in our collective web of thoughts and judgements. You can't make the web without having them there, but the web needs to be made at the same time as them. They are fundamental in terms of the scope of change their modification can bring, but not presupposed for understanding everything their change would impact.

Reading The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Strongly recommend.

I'm not sure what your intention is in saying a person 'who wants to be an alcoholic'. Do you mean this literally, or do you take it as the implication of their behavior? Many problem drinkers don't want to be this way and others don't even know they are problem drinkers. But I get your boarder point. — Tom Storm

I mean it literally. As it's all that is required from the OP - find a thing which isn't immoral but we shouldn't want to be. I realise that it's absurd. I think that's a strength of what I'm saying - no one gonna wanna be an alcoholic, no one who has any understanding of addiction gonna think it's immoral. It could very well sound like I'm being discriminatory against alcoholics, or saying somehow that alcoholics want to be alcoholics... I'm not. I'm saying that someone who would aspire to be an alcoholic would be being a fool (and thus shouldn't want it). But wouldn't be doing anything immoral by being an alcoholic.

That's an interesting one. What do you mean by alcoholism? Alcohol use disorder includes a broad range of behaviours. — Tom Storm

I'll just go by a dictionary definition for the purposes of the thread since I don't think it matters. Only one thing matters to me really - finding an example of a something which isn't immoral but you shouldn't want to be the kind of person who does it. In my case, alcoholism and being an alcoholic.

Referring to "alcohol use disorder" as "alcoholism". So I'm making the claim that having alcohol use disorder isn't immoral, but simultaneously someone should not want to be an alcoholic.

a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by alcohol abuse or dependence, as compulsive use of alcoholic beverages, the development of physical or psychological symptoms upon reducing or ceasing intake, and decreased ability to function socially and professionally. — Dictionary.com, alcohol use disorder

Instead of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for being immoral, or for "a kind of person you should not be", I just want to demonstrate that you can be one but not the other. In order to do that I think it suffices to show they're not the same concept. Principally, an act can be immoral and a person can be said to be immoral. But only a person can be an example of a type of person which you should not be. There is thus a sense (in the OP) of immorality which may apply to acts, as well as another (not necessarily distinct) one which applies to persons.

( A1 ) Alcoholism is an illness.
( A2 ) A person who has any illness is not immoral on that basis alone.
( A3 ) Any alcoholic is not immoral on the basis of their alcoholism alone (from A1, A2)

The sense of "shouldn't" in the OP is also worth examining. As there are things we shouldn't do which aren't immoral - they may instead be foolish, irresponsible and other nice words for things which we shouldn't do for some reason. For example, sticking your hand in a fire, misplacing your wallet, never cleaning your house, walking out of the house without putting a shirt on when it's -1 Celcius outside...

I'm just going to assert without argument that an alcoholic behaving in a manner that sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol is very irresponsible. And for now assert without argument that people shouldn't want to do anything which is very irresponsible. Also assert without argument that someone will be an alcoholic if and only if they act in a manner which sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol.

That would give you:

(B1) Behaving in a manner that intentionally sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol is very irresponsible.
(B2) A person who wants to be an alcoholic behaves in a manner that intentionally sustains and potentiates their dependence on alcohol.
(B3) You shouldn't want to do anything very irresponsible.
(B4) You shouldn't want to behave in a manner that sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol. (from B1,B4)
(B5) You shouldn't want to be an alcoholic (from B2, B4)

( A3 ) and ( B5 ) taken together give you a sense in which someone shouldn't want to be an alcoholic (the type of person that an alcoholic is...someone with alcoholism), but that alcoholism isn't immoral.

The crux of this is really a distinction between the "should" of immorality (a thou shalt not!) and the gentle "should" that we shouldn't wish to behave foolishly. Is it immoral to want to be an alcoholic? No, but it is a rather silly aspiration. A supportive parent would not want their child to have that as their profession.

With this in mind do you think there things that aren’t immoral but you still shouldn’t want to be the kind of person that does them even if you’re the only person affected? — Captain Homicide

Yes. Alcoholism.

That's why I called it a hopeless task. — keystone

It gives your paradox a much easier angle of angle of attack than the unexpected hanging has. You can point out the error in the formulation. That "an adjacent pair of real numbers" doesn't exist.

I also wouldn't like to call it a sequel to the unexpected hanging because your riddle isn't (at least at face value) anything to do with induction (the mathematical reasoning concept) or self reference.

God then proposes a challenge: "If you're so convinced about the unfairness surrounding your demise, prove to me that you know the precise moment the noose first made contact with your neck. To aid you, I'll illuminate this light green for any instant you enter where the noose is in contact with your neck, or red if not." — keystone

This phrasing of the problem is effectively "a person will be guessing a finite or countable list of real numbers, they need to guess the exact start and/or end point of an interval of real numbers, why can't they?"

And that's got a few answers everyone would agree to. Countable sets ( the list of guesses ) are measure 0 in the reals, and moreover as @Pierre-Normand highlighted the reals are "dense" - there aren't adjacent numbers. So you can't detect the exact points a step change in a function ([0,1]->red,green) would occur by putting in any countable list - at least your guesses have probability 0 of being right if God's not been too human about it.

In that respect the kind of ambiguities in the framing are already solved problems, and it's a riddle about something completely different from the unexpected hanging.

For example, in practice belief is often used as qualitatively identical to knowledge, just less certain. Your understanding seems to exclude this common meaning of belief. — Leontiskos

Throw it in! That's absolutely part of knowledge and belief's relationship. The things I've said are also part of it.

I will point out that in 2) and 3)... 2) doesn't reference a statement, it instead references "something" and in 3) it references the conviction and "the reality" as well as a statement. The "especially" qualifier in 3) is an admission that there's a way of using the word belief in a context regarding the examination of evidence - in that regard someone's statement of belief is treated as a claim to knowledge, or the kind of thing which could be suspect tested for knowledge. Contrast that to declarative knowledge - which only references a statement, and is thus more related to 3 than 2!

Tellingly, knowledge is not a listed synonym of belief. If the dictionary sufficed, you can end the thread here.

For reference - I am doing this because another JTB discussion seems more boring to me than the alternative clusterfuck I'm trying to introduce.

Yes, there are different kinds of knowing. There is 'knowing how', there is the knowing of familiarity and there is 'knowing that'. I think the salient question in this thread concerns only 'knowing that' or propositional knowing, because the other two categories do not necessarily involve belief. — Janus

I don't think I've seen a propositional knowledge out in the wild though. I have seen the others I referenced. I can perhaps see a propositional knowledge out in the wild if I put a particular kind of retrospective goggles on. But if you insist...

Someone says "I believe" to register something they accept but are not certain of, or to express conviction in the face of reality, or faith. "I believe in you", "I believe things will turn out alright". That expresses a conviction, but in a declarative fashion, expressing the conviction is more important than the justification for it. Much more affective than deliberative.

A belief is something you can feel when you put your mind to it. By that I mean there's a sensation and inner perceptual profile to an intense conviction. You need not establish your beliefs, other than that you can state what they are upon an appropriate act of recall (or self creation).That is, to count as a belief, it needs not be established in principle, it just needs to be expressed sincerely. Often that belief corresponds to an articulable fact.

You can ask someone how they know something, you can't ask someone how they believe something and expect to receive the same flavour of answer. For knowledge, someone tends to be able to give you an answer - "I've seen it", "here's my reasoning", "I was taught it in school", "I saw it on the news". The kind of answer someone gives for belief (yes I have tried) is about the sensation profile - how you believe something? Intensely, casually, fundamentally... "I just do", "It's part of who I am".

In that regard statements of knowledge reference a tacit, communal consensus in reference to which - and idiosyncratically - your claim to knowledge can be assessed as knowledge. However most of the time people just trust or are indifferent to "I know" statements. Your claim to belief cannot be assessed in the same way - what you express with "I believe" counts as a belief, all that can be doubted is your sincerity plus your degree and quality of conviction.

One cannot know intensely, but one can believe intensely. That you believe can be examined as whether you are telling the truth about yourself, that you know can be examined as whether you are telling the truth about the world.

To understand an idea, look at how the word is used.

People say "I know" to signal agreement. To know is to agree.
People say "I know" to signal acceptance" To know is to accept.
People say "I know" to express conviction. To know is to devote yourself to an idea.
People say "I know" to rebuke falsehoods. To know is to undermine what is seen as untrue.
People say "I know I should..." to signal acceptance of a necessity while suspending acting upon it. To know is to entertain as an abstraction.
People say "I know" to signal that an adequate justification is believed to exist for a belief or practice. To say one knows is to say one is justified.

Knowledge, then, is multifaceted. Since to agree, to accept and to devote have different truth conditions - or none at all, like a devotion. One can say one knows in different senses. Knowledge isn't one kind of thing, and an item of knowledge need not be a statement. And knowing as conviction may not be itemizable at all.

Anything that can't be proved in one order of logical can be proved or refuted in the next. A formal system having every order of logic cannot be incomplete. A formal system having only one order of logic is like the "C" volume of an encyclopedia only having articles that begin with the letter "C". — PL Olcott

I don't think this is true.

Every theorem of 0th order logic has a corresponding theorem in 1st order logic. Like P=>Q goes to For all X P ( X ) implies Q ( X )
Every theorem of 1st order logic has a corresponding theorem in 2nd order logic.

I'm fairly certain that generalises, but haven't come up with a proof sketch. i.e. nth order logic lets you express and prove all the things that are in (n-1)th order logic and more.

Now consider that you're taking the set of all provable statements of all logics up to the nth order. That will then be the set of provable statements of the nth order logic, due to the hierarchy.

You've stipulated that n>2, so your logic is strictly more expressive than 2nd order logic.

Incompleteness results apply to 2nd order logic, since you can axiomatise the natural numbers with + and * in it. That's more than enough arithmetic for Tarski and Godel.

So your big union of logics is one logic - of the highest order you designate. And so long as it contains 2nd order logic, you can derive incompleteness results for it.

Moreover, I think you're claiming that you end up axiomatising the (n-1)th's logic's metalanguage in the nth logic's syntax? But when you end up having such a tower of logics and take their the union, it isn't quite that you'd be taking the union of their metalanguages as well, there'd need to be a single unifying metalanguage in which the formulae of all the levels could be expressed. The truth and provability symbols in the metalanguage would thus apply for theorems applying to the big union logic, rather than having a plethora of distinct symbols in different metalanguages - though concepts like 1st order derivable could maybe be phrased in that expansive metalanguage for the union of the logics.

Similarly, there would need to be one type of object which would model all the formulas. I'd conjecture set theory would work for all of them. Reason being you can think of quantification of order n as ranging over a set which allows quantification over collections of sets (n-1) recursions deep. Like 0th order logic allows no quantification. 1st allows quantification over singletons, 2nd allows.... quantification over sets. 3rd allows... quantification over sets of sets, which is kinda just quantification over sets.

So it would surprise me if this giant logic wasn't a version of "set theory in disguise" (like second order logic was called by Quine), to which incompleteness results already apply.

I imagine Tarski's indefinability theorem would. AFAIK second order logic already has diagonalization results - so it's either inconsistent or incomplete. You don't need to go above first for it. So long as you put enough arithmetic in, you're going to get the self referential bullshit that sets up these paradoxes.

The other philosophers who are publicly known to have been sexists are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  For their reason for being sexists seem to be their personal experiences and situations with the opposite sex folks?  Just guessing. — Corvus

It might be ahistorical of me, but I'm going to read someone who believes women's natures are "devotion" and "submission" as a sexist. Regardless of why K believes it.

am not sure what the reason for breaking the promise was. — Corvus

Me neither!

Any particular reason for him had been so? — Corvus

I think you can speculate that he had resentment from romantic misfortune, with some evidence. But, at least in Sickness Unto Death, he finds women of a weaker spiritual constitution than men. He definitely was a kind of... advanced sexist... he had a theory for it.

Woman has neither the selfishly developed conception of the self nor the intellectuality of man, for all that she is his superior in tenderness and fineness of feeling. On the other hand, woman’s nature is devotion (Hengivenhead), submission {Hengivelse), and it is unwomanly if it is not so. Strangely enough, no one can be so pert (a word which language has expressly coined for woman), so almost cruelly particular as a woman—and yet her nature is devotion, and yet (here is the marvel) all this is really the expression for the fact that her nature is devotion For just because in her nature she carries the whole womanly devotion, nature has lovingly equipped her with an instinct, in comparison with which in point of delicacy the most eminently developed male reflection is as nothing. This devotion of woman, this (to speak as a Greek) divine dowry and riches, is too great a good to be thrown away blindly; and yet no clear-sighted manly reflection is capable of seeing sharply enough to be able to dispose of it rightly Hence nature has taken care of her instinctively she sees blindly with greater clarity than the most sharp-sighted reflection, instinctively she sees where it is she is to admire, what it is she ought to devote herself to. Devotion is the only thing woman has, therefore nature undertook to be her guardian. Hence it is too that womanliness first comes into existence through a metamorphosis; it comes into existence when the infinite pertness is transfigured in womanly devotion But the fact that devotion is woman’s nature comes again to evidence in despair. By devotion [the word literally means giving away] she has lost herself, and only thus is she happy, only thus is she herself, a woman who is happy without devotion, that is, without giving herself away (to whatever it may be she gives herself) is unwomanly. A man also devotes himself (gives himself away), and it is a poor sort of a man who does not do it, but his self is not devotion (this is the expression for womanly substantial devotion), nor does he acquire himself by devotion, as in another sense a woman does, he has himself, he gives himself away, but his self still remains behind as a sober consciousness of devotion, whereas woman, with genuine womanliness, plunges her self into that to which she devotes... — Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Edit: you can read that as a critic's regurgitation of gender norms at the time, but honestly I think we should hold our alleged Great Men to higher standards.

@Corvus

How is the relationship God possible, if God is unknown? Does K defines what God is?

Just purely logically - and this isn't my interpretation of K speaking this is me. A relationship to a God is possible even if it is unknown. Like a relationship to pollen in the air is possible and unknown, until you notice the hay fever.

As for K, I'm sure he'd see this as the wrong question. "If God is unknown" - this construes the principal flavour of relation one could have toward as God as epistemic. Like if you don't know something exists, how could you relate to it. That's troubled for two reasons.

The first is that we aren't cognisant of most things we take for granted in our environments and, moreover, our lives - this is also a broader existentialist theme. That you take a lot of stuff for granted, that you're born into that state, and have to take responsibility for who you are in the mess regardless.

The second is that, for K, he has a critique of reason anyway. You can be reasonable and in a state of complete stasis, doing nothing. But in that state you're committed to some things anyway. You're not gonna question how reasonable your reason is - how could you, it's a performative contradiction! It's something that you've posited as a value, something to live your life by. "The unexamined life is not worth living" style of thing... But you can live an examined life by positing other premises for it. Like a God. Even if there's no fundamental reason for believing in a God over and above anything else. Another existentialist theme - the absurd.

There's absolutely contradictions in that account. But K also has a funny relationship with contradictions, he sees these contradictions - between reason for belief and self creation, the irrelevance of knowledge of God and practical service to Him in your life - as essential to the human condition. So for him, the weird shit you're seeing (rightly) in this space of beliefs isn't an error in his reasoning, it's also something he's describing accurately.

So what're you going to do with this absurd reality? K. believes.

I do think that he consoles himself with the theology of the soul and bible stories too much, which I think is an encroachment of reason into a thoroughly and proudly unreasonable philosophy (so he's less of a "knight of faith" and more of a LARPer of faith). So even he couldn't absolve himself of the need to salve his analytical capabilities from the cognitive dissonances in faith!

But I'm sure someone could come up with a better interpretation and criticism of his work than me, too. So take this uncited pile of nonsense as what it is, an athiest waxing lyrical about faith on the internet.

when K. writes man he definitely means men rather unfortunately.

Why "unfortunately"?

'cos he's sexist as hell.

How does his concept of God fit into existentialism? — Corvus

Where Kierkegaard intersects with existentialist themes is about man's relationship to God rather than about God. I feel the need to write, when talking about this, when K. writes man he definitely means men rather unfortunately.

Here's an inaccurate summary based off of reading Fear and Trembling many years ago and Sickness Unto Death in January.

You realise you've very small compared to God and depend upon Him for your salvation from the finitude you're condemned to. You are only welcomed into Heaven through the sustained affirmation of God in your life. Your choice to love God above all else must occur indifferently to reason, as a judgement to love God for a reason debases Him and your soul by confining them to the wretched vicissitudes of our concerns. If instead you embrace God, you don't confine yourself or the world into those horrible and false auspices of perspective.

Each of those sentences can be secularised if you feel like buggering poor K.

You're finite, and thrown into a world. You'll only find this world welcoming if you somehow affirm what is sacred in it as its highest value. You need to do this as an expression of your "essence" - your soul, which is also kinda sorta just saying that you are - you "exist" - as you were made. And you can come up with all kinds of copium for whatever.

Finitude. affirmation, essence=existence, authenticity and inauthenticity, absurd paradoxes in the heart of everything... the infinity of God, how very unreasonable that appears, and how nevertheless you must believe are the OG existentialist themes. Though Big K is a Trope Maker rather than Trope Codifier.

I don't think anyone in thread is claiming otherwise, but I need to say: it's also quite reductive to unify the existentialists as anything but a bunch of people who talk a lot about the fundamental aspects of being human from a humanised perspective. Kind of similar to saying that postmodernist philosophers all say the same thing.

@Michael

I'm not saying that we perceive the causal chain. I'm simply trying to explain the inconsistency in your position. You say that there are no intermediaries between visual percepts and some distal object, and yet there are; the odour molecules in the air are an intermediary between the visual percept and the cake in the oven. — Michael

There will probably be a distinction between there being a perceptual processing step which interfaces the body with the distal object of a perception [which could be construed as a mediating object] and if the resultant perception associated with that distal object is of the perceptual processing step. You seem you construe the perception as of an intermediary sensation which lays "between" the distal object and the perception, and thus perception is not of the distal object and thus is indirect.

Let's just grant that your construal of a perceptual chain is correct for now Michael. Whereas @Luke

You say you don’t perceive the causal chain. The odour molecules are a part of that unperceived causal chain. According to indirect realism, the intermediary is something that is perceived. The perception one has is not of a causal chain but of a distal object. Otherwise, the perception is of an intermediary/representation of the distal object. Odour molecules are neither the distal object nor a representation of it. Odour molecules are part of the causal chain that you say you don't perceive. The perception you have is of the cake in the oven. — Luke

construes perception as direct because it's more appropriate to parse perception itself as the chain

→ proximal stimulus → sense receptor → sensation → rational awareness

which would make it "of" the object, but as a mapping of object behaviours to "rational awareness".

In that regard you also both disagree about what the perceptual object is. If the link between sensation and rational awareness is perception, then the perceptual object is a sensation. If the chain between distal object and rational awareness is perception, then the perceptual object is the distal object.

Would be nice if everyone wrote down what they thought a a perceptual intermediary was and why it matters!

The two have the same extensional definition, so there's a sense in which talk of one is talk of the other. — frank

Yes.

1. Mental states are identical to brain states.
2. From (1), talk of mental states is the same as talk of brain states. — RogueAI

Inference is invalid. Talk of Superman is not the same as talk of Clark Kent.

Maybe they’re like beliefs, only determined post-hoc. Does it make sense to say that in the moment I was enacting the concepts, such that they were not at that stage concepts at all? But I’d still want to maintain that I was thinking, for no more reason than it really felt like cognitive work. — Jamal

Yeah I think it makes sense. I was being tongue in cheek. I have the impression that rendering the phenomenology into statements is post hoc, and if words are in the phenomenology they arise as summaries and condensations of affects, without any natural language grammar. It's more appropriate to talk about such things as concepts and affects than as those concepts or affects' symbolising words! The emerging landscape of experience isn't all wordy is it, the words are rivers and troughs, signposts, swamps and rafts. Coordinative rather than principally determinative. Producing words like brow sweat.

So, sometimes images, sometimes words—and sometimes concepts. There are pure concepts in mind when a jazz musician is improvising (I know; I’ve done it), such as tension and release, growth and decay, entropy, yearning, etc. They may be in some sense linguistic, but they’re not mentally articulated in (mental) words (which was what I meant by “pure”). I think in these cases one only properly identifies them later, using mental words. — Jamal

What is it about those concepts which you could not state? (hashtag @Banno)

I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists. — Joshs

Aight! I'm glad. Apologies for misinterpreting the context.

Also at the thread in general.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one. The distinction between the two seems to turn on the type of relationship between the content of an intentional act and what that act concerns. And indeed whether there is a distinction between the intentional content of an act and what the act concerns in the first place.

To my reckoning - at least in terms of intentional content - the debate turns on the means by which an object informs the content of perceptual acts involving it. Like a direct realist might be committed to a claim like: "the frequencies of light reflected from an object partially determine how it is seen". There are forms with stronger dependence. An indirect realist might be committed to the claim "what is seen is never an object". There are forms which allow dependence upon the object.

At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants.

However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science.

Aye I read that book. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology right? I agree with him broadly. But I do think he ends up privileging the human a lot, and intentionally. You can go into the existential aspects of any mental illness you like phenomenologically, and it'll help clear up some things. Especially insofar as you have pre-theoretical concepts masquerading as neuroscientific or clinical ones (he's really good on this). His mode of analysis doesn't have much to say about those people who can be successfully medicated away from mental health conditions - which is a change in material substrate, a body, inducing a change in the phenomenology of embodiment. That isn't his concern principally, and he's very much fighting against (a perception of) a reduction of embodiment to body.

In quotes like that he does rather sound like the nth iteration of a Heideggerian critique of natural science, albeit one usually written without jargon. When he switches into that mode I think he loses what's really novel in his approach! A phenomenology with no primacy of the existential over the material. He absolutely uses that non-reductive connection elsewhere [correlating neurotransmitter activity with mood changes if I recall correctly in Experiences of Depression, but I'm not convinced my memory holds up there].

Basically it's good when he behaves like there really is no primacy of one style of inquiry over the other, and it frustrates me when he collapses back into the usual phenomenology tropes.

We could have a thread on this instead. I'm going to stop responding now.