I think I understand what you're saying: conception shapes perception, but a perception has to start somewhere and you suggest a 'raw' preconceptual experience, and I don't disagree with this to the extent that this "raw experience" is a simple claim. The simple claim that there is something there, which is being experienced. [very fast, under 200 milliseconds] This claim is 1st stage of perception and not yet to be assigned in our existing conceptual framework, simple awareness that there is something there.

Actually, if I am understanding you, I think this initial claim is where ontology meets epistemology, where what is in itself becomes the proper subject for knowledge, 'in itself' carrying no more information than that it is. This claim that there is something there, is infallible, even if I am hallucinating.

logical separation of thought and subject does seem problematic, especially if one is a physicalist and reduces thoughts to brain activity. We have this physical thing here which is the Sun and this physical thing here which is brain activity, but what is the relationship between the two such that the latter is a thought about the former? Is there a unique kind of physical connection between the two?

It's even more problematic when the thing thought of isn't the sort of thing that can be physically connected to brain activity, e.g. past, future, or distant things.

I just don't think that realism can provide a coherent account of reference (and so nor of truth).

Even though the subject of our thoughts might be conceptually distinct from thought (e.g. when I think about the Sun I'm not thinking about thoughts), it doesn't then follow that the subject is ontologically separate, just as even though the subject of a painting is conceptually distinct from paint (e.g. when I paint a unicorn I'm not painting paint), it doesn't then follow that the subject is ontologically separate (it's not that there's this painting of a unicorn and also that unicorn).

Meanwhile, I was still thinkin...

This is a problem for the Kantian position that holds that whatever is 'in itself' is unknowable, that all we really 'know' are the presumptions that make the reality we see possible. This is a problem because it means that 'knowledge' of what is real, is not about the real, it is about these presumptions---which are not concepts but the basis of the relationships between what we sense and our concepts.

Perhaps this is the wrong way to think about this. When we see a tree, we already have the concept of what a tree is, we are assigning what we see to what we know. There are two parts to this process. The claim that there is something there, and the assignment of what is there to our concepts.

The 'claim' is ontological, and it is either true or false in the 'thin' sense (the sense Quine outlines in "On what there is"), the assignment of concepts is epistemological and true in the 'thick' sense (K Fine "The Question of Ontology") and linguistic. The claim for existence only goes as far as stating a particular something exists, it is purely ontological and either true or false but thin. The assignment of meaning to the claim is epistemological, it is linguistic and true or false in the thick sense.

This move seems to abandon the gap between the appearance and the 'transcendental'. The scientist doing brain investigations are studying the ontic character of the brain. Neurons firing, may be how I come to see a tree, this process is responsible for the claim, but its the epistemologically assignment of meaning to what is sensed that provide me with knowledge.

Pope Francis also does not like fake news:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pope-blasts-sin-of-fake-news_us_58484584e4b08c82e8892eb2

Using precise psychological terms, [Pope Fancis] said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement

.

He went on to describe

... disinformation as the greatest harm the media can do because “it directs opinion in only one direction and omits the other part of the truth,”...

Profane phrasing for a Pope, Rome must be rubbing off on him.

Pantheism is the belief that all of reality is identical with divinity, How does "Deus sit ipsum esse subsistens." separate or differentiate itself from such a claim or does it?

I guess because God is good, existence must be good, but how do you show that God is good or that he is a personal God.

Meillassoux falls back on his argument for absolute contingency of everything that is thought, that epistemologically all we really know are the actualization of certain contingent possibilities, and that the real structure of the world is comprised by these possibilities. He calls his position speculative realism.

I have his book on order, just tracked it and found out it's going to previous address :(

Anyway, I've been reading the secondary literature. He also argues that the realists suggestion that objects exist separately from us ends in a contradiction. If objects are posited as existing separately from thought, it is still only through thought that they are posited. There is no way to determine if what is in itself, is isomorphic with its appearance, with what we know about the object, making knowledge itself problematic.

Suppose the drug in the water is strychnine and you die :’(
Can either the realist or the idealist conceptualize not thinking, I don't think it can't be done, what is non-thought. Thought itself is contingent, it ends, its horizon is death. So it is with all things, they necessarily exist contingently (contingency is necessary). Idealism seems want to be determinative of all that is, what ever is, is only by our conception of it (at least in some forms of idealism) that it is. This can't be if everything is contingent necessarily.

Working on Meillassoux's argument

WB Yeats "The Second Coming"

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(end of 1st stanza)

Why isn't time simply changes in position in space, consider, perhaps nature is indifferent to time's span? If motion is simply changes in configuration from some (I guess it has to be absolute, otherwise how could it be measured) point of view then what does time describe beyond changes in the configurations of points in space.

Funny, I was thinking that Berkeley's God is similar to the Matrix, to the simulation of reality. We are really only Sims :)

Time is just change/motion, which is real/objective. From a particular reference point,

Where is that "reference point" ...is it in space? Are we that "reference point"? Or is that "reference point" more theoretic as part of a systematic system of knowledge, i.e., any point we name as the "reference point".

No, two aspects of the same reality, as far as I can figure...not a dualism. The subject-predicate structure of propositions means the world must be comprised of objects and properties.

I think his concept of sense dependence is meant to keep his epistemological notion from collapsing into Idealism. The concept of the world is not possible without the concept of thought and the concept of thought is not possible without the world.

I like that he bases his idea of truth, reality on epistemology and not ontology. I also like what I know of correalism (On order, expect to be receiving "After Finitude" latter this month).

As stated in OP

Robert Brandom distinguishes two types of dependency: sense dependency and reference dependency and claims that the world is only sense-dependent on thought, but not reference dependent on thought. In other words, you cannot understand the world without also understanding thought, but you can refer to the world (or parts of it) without referring to thought, and there is nothing more to ontological dependence than reference dependence. Therefore, the world is not ontologically dependent on thought.

Quine opts for deflationary realism he holds that there is nothing more to existence than existential quantification, he thinks only statements about existants can be truth apt. His concept of reality is thin, and ontological, Brandom's conception of reality is thick and epistemological. I am more inclined towards Brandom's view, which I am still working on.

I do like Quine's joke about Plato's beard dulling many of Occam's razors.

Perhaps I misunderstood the question. Does the OP want to know why societies have laws?

And laws obviously don't force people not to break them. People are free to break the law... last time I checked.

If you understand that without freedom morality is not possible and if society recognizes certain behaviors to be antithetical to its existence then I would expect that most members of society would pick up on this and they act in such a way as to demonstrate that they concur with societal rules. It induces them to think that they ought to act in a certain manner, which is the question of the OP in my estimation.

Politics is not for the virtue of the state, rather politics is to enable the virtue of its citizens, and what one ought to do is equivalent to how society believes one ought to act . Leo Strauss says that Aristotle is the founder of political science because hs is the discover of moral virtue.

The highest good of the city is the same as the highest good of the individual. The core of happiness is the practice of virtue and primarily moral virtue."

Sure people can break laws, and people can be immoral.

Have to take off, I'll get back to this latter. Tks.

I'm assuming that no one can force anyone to do anything.

Isn't that why society has laws, to force people to act in a certain manner, most laws prohibit actions and ascribe penalties to discourage certain actions. Most countries have laws that prohibit stealing and set certain penalties for transgression. The progressive movement of society is toward rule/order and not chaos or disorder. I think most people prefer order to disorder and they think that it points to the way society ought to be.

If the synthesis of the dialectical between being and non-being is becoming, then is this comparable to the synthesis between order(law-being) and disorder (chaos, non-being, breaking laws), and what is its synthesis? Maybe Patriotism or Love of country?

I've always found the dream argument interesting. The argument only seems feasible (to me) because we understand the difference between being awake and being asleep and in knowing this difference we can at the same time logically deny our ability to cognitively differentiate between these two forms of experience. Perhaps a fault in applying logic to experience, not logically incorrect but practically incoherent.

I think an ought arises from desire. A moral desire... a duty and desire all rolled into one volition/action in accordance with the laws one gives one's self.

I am not suggesting that we can escape the world, I am suggesting that the way the world is structured does not necessarily correspond to the structure of thought.

Sure the structure of thought is dependent on the structure of the world, but that does not mean there is an isomorphic correspondence, which is why I brought up the bias of evolution. I think unless we understand the structure of thought, we will never be able to understand the structure of the world. Epistemology, I think must drive ontology, and not the other way around.

Our concept of what is real is dependent upon our concept of the world, and I don't think that reality can be grasped without our epistemological understanding of our concept of the world.

how is that related to reality? If what we perceive, and how our perceptions become structured as thought are related to utility, to survival, then we are naturally inclined to actively seek adaptive cues in the environment, and they influence/bias the way we conceive the world for ourselves. I think this strengthens the claim that our conception of the world may not be isomorphic with what is the case.

Funny, slip of the tongue? or are you implying that that there is no guarantee, god died so he can't guarantee correspondence theory.


I think the world has a structure and thought has a structure, I don't think there is necessarily an isomorphism between the two. There may be evolutionary reasons why we perceive the world in the way we do. If we can decide on the structure of thought shouldn't that drive our conclusions about what is real. Perhaps what is left over might be what is real..we make a claim about the tree, that claim is for something, the claim and what the claim is for are separate, and it allows for error.

If stress is the result of some stimulus then do you think pleasure can be stressful?

If you just take raw experience -- devoid of concept filters or object categories -- what presents is a continuous field of sensation.

Only the neonatal could possibly have "raw experience" as you have described it and I think that is also somewhat doubtful. If the world has a structure, then don't we perceive that structure regardless of whether or not we understand what it is we are perceiving. Many animals have significantly keener perceptual abilities, yet their cognitive abilities are limited when compared man and some other organisms.

Brings up Dr. Hoffman's studies and then shoots off in another direction. If I understand correctly Dr, Hoffman's work is based on the premise that perception is utility driven and the greatest utility is not always veridical (he emphasizes that they can match up, but that they need not). According to Dr. Hoffman utility is all that matters in evolution. His experiments suggest that that simple biological needs, such as the need for food, water and similar can outperform logical, synthetic inferences when it comes to survival.

Natural selection can send perfectly, or partially, true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions that use niche-specific interfaces which hide the truth in order to better represent utility. Fitness and access to truth are logically distinct properties. More truthful perceptions do not entail greater fitness.

This suggest to me that "the structure of the world" and the structuring of the world that we construct may not correspond isomorphically, that utility may have wider part play in it.

Gender like race are social constructions...not somatic delusions....fool!

Necessity here is reserved only for recollection. What would be interesting though is to rethink necessity on the basis of learning: that pedagogy imposes it's own necessity, as when, to go back to swimming, one is forced to 'learn', at every moment, the sway of the current and the way in which to compose oneself among it in order to stay afloat. In a formula, the idea would be to 'keep' the emphasis on necessity, but displace the the field of it's functioning: not knowledge already constituted (residing in some mythical past), but knowledge in the process of coming-into-being.

Thus, in an implicit critique of Plato, Deleuze, for example, will argue: "Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think." - One learns in relation to an encounter with that which must be learned from - the current of the wave, a language, the grain of wood out of which one sculpts, etc.

In the Meno the slave boy's lesson involves recollection, memory and images (to best of my knowledge it's the only place in 35 dialogues that Socrates writes anything). Socrates notes that the boy is in the right frame of mind to learn [unlike Anytus or Meno himself for that matter), and after going from one stage of the problem to the next the boy finds himself perplexed.
At 84d

"Now notice what, starting from this state of perplexity [aporia] he will discover by seeking the truth in company with me, though I simply ask him question without teaching him. Be ready to catch me if I give him any instructions or explanation instead of simply interrogating him on his opinions [doxa]"

Note how categorical Socrates is "...he will discover the truth" and note that Socrates uses the word 'doxa' (from my old notes) for the 1st time in this dialogue, which may tie into your statement that

In a formula, the idea would be to 'keep' the emphasis on necessity, but displace the the field of it's functioning: not knowledge already constituted (residing in some mythical past), but knowledge in the process of coming-into-being.

I think this is why math is the paradigm case for learning. It forces students to work their way through a series of steps in the course of a proof, to judge that what is concluded following from each step along the way. Where each step in itself is contingent (like the breath stroke vs the crawl) and taken as a whole, the truth of proof lies in understanding how these contingent steps lead to an noncontingent conclusion. What is very interesting here is that the proof Socrates choose as an example involves the square root of 2, which he would never be able to explain in speech to the boy.

Socrates implies that knowing starts with aporia and ends in knowledge and not true opinion, which is what the equally as famous last part of this dialogue discusses. So if I am following Deleuze, true opinions are contingent, it is only through our encounters in the world that we find what we must necessarily know, and it is only be working our way through the math or swimming that we can progress, getting somewhere.

Gota ya, my bad.

I am not talking about linguistic rules...?

Gravity works, its always worked, even though it was not conceptualized until 1687. A rule describes what we experience in the world, and it works regardless of whether or not anyone is available to witness it.

If rules apply, they apply regardless of whether anyone is around to observe. The tree that falls in the middle of the forest makes a sound even if no one is around to hear it.

The world doesn't exist separately from us, it just exists independently of us. We live in the world, and it is all around us. We are part of it, as you say. But we can't be both separate from it and part of it.

Much of what happens in the world does indeed happen regardless of our presence, and it would continue to do so without our presence. That's why idealism is wrong.

Not sure what you mean when you say that our viewpoint must be circular.

Well your phrasing is better than mine, yes we live in the world. It must be circular because we have no immediately knowable criterion, no way of standing outside the world. The problem is that in order to know the world we must know ourselves, in order to know ourselves, we must know the world.....

I think Plato's emphasis in his Meno is on the (necessary) relationship/roles between the teacher and the student. Is there really a choice in what the slave boy answers, only in the sense that he can submit or not submit to the necessities of his own thinking. I think this is what Plato means by recollection, the active search for the necessities that comprise thinking, it is unlike memory; Aristotle (I think) also makes this distinction.

We should really deny this assumption of "the world", until it is justified, and produced as a logical conclusion, rather than taken as an assumed premise. This means that we should go through all the evidence from all the various fields of science, and other forms of knowledge such as theological knowledge, then we can start to make conclusions about mind-independence. If this evidence produces a conclusion that there is a "world", then the assumption is justified. if not, then we move on to a new conception.

To deny the fact that there is a world that is the cause of what appears, which exist separate from us is not logical. You cannot treat the lion charging you as an assumed premise, it's real and it is about to kick your butt. You admit that we don't have complete knowledge of the world as it is, which is my point. We make a claim that the world is, but we have no, & logically cannot have, any direct unmediated knowledge of what the world is as it is, only what appears. The truths we derive from what appears are our best effort to say what could possibly be the case to allow for such appearances, but there is no guarantee that what we derive on this basis is what actually is.

Time compression

Also the Platonic view of logic is that what we really know are the 'objects of the rational mind', of which ordinary objects are mere instantiations; but the 'real intelligibles' are known by exactly that process of the intellect 'being united' with them.

I think Plato's Dialogues are some of the most sublime works ever crafted. I am not totally in agreement with what has been described as his Theory of Forms. He spends very little time in his 35 dialogues discussing them and in his Theaetetus where, if anywhere, one would expect the theory showcased, they are not mentioned. The problem with his depth of his thought lies in Socratic irony, a form of dissimulation. I think Plato was afraid that what happened to Socrates & Protagoras could happen to him as well, so he framed his thought in his dialogues to make it correspond to several possible levels of interpretation.

The circularity concerns our position with the world. We are particulars, contingent beings existing in a real, existing world, our ability to think is factually contingent in the world, it could have been otherwise.
This ability to think of ourself separately from the world, our ability to make the world our object enables us to construct a world that is meaningful, which contains truths. However, we have no objective position in this process, only a subjective (relative) position, and any truths we decide upon are for us (the circularity), since there is no guarantee that what is for us corresponds to what is in itself.

But "the world" is a construct, and the idea that what happens in the world happens regardless of our presence is a construct as well. So it's really not useful to take this type of realist position because it lacks in what we would call "truth". And once you dismiss this position as ill-founded, something which is commonly believed but not true, you no longer will see yourself as part of the world, but the world as part of yourself. The true territory is not external.

The world exists without us, we have the remains of previous life forms that inhabited the world for millions of years. The world does not contain truth in itself, it is factual. We construct 'a world', a view we share with others that is comprised of what we and others have learned.

The point is that this facticity, what is in-it-self, is different from what is for us. The existence of thought is contingent, the world exists without it. The factual world must have a structure which is independent of us, which exists even if we do not.

Truth is not in the factual world as such, it is a constuct we lay over the world to make it intelligible, but clearly there is no guarantee that our maps correspond to what the world is in itself.

The crucial thing is that minds form maps of the territory for themselves

Do you mean that we construct & share a worldview, the fact that it is shared, gives it reliable meaning, it has pragmatic use.

The triadic relationship. The noumena does not appear, but what does appear we symbolize into shared language which gives us its interpretation We have consciousness of an existent object, a tree for example, and we have a claim to knowledge of how it appears & how trees appear is part of our concept of a tree. So two separate claims: a) the thing is(we understand it is separate from us) & b) what that things is (how its concept epistemologically ties into its appearance).

The world exists separately from us, this is its facticity. What happens in the world happens regardless of our presence. Sure we can learn about it, study fossils, the cosmos, learn how the world works, but since we are also part of the world, our viewpoint has to be circular.

Numbers, some of the particles physicists presuppose, our concepts or ideas, are also part of reality, they are in the world in sofar as we too are in the world, but they are not factual part of it in the same manner as a tree. Part of the problem is that in saying 'a tree' we are using a general term (b) to specify a fact, a particular, which necessarily only points to the appearance and not (a), which is presupposed but not known, and we have no guarantee of the correctness of the correspondence between a & b except pragmatically.