If you think about it, historically, the most common form of organization has been empires wherein the people who inhabitated a given territory were of diverse cultures, religions, and ethnicity. With this said, it does not come to me as intuitively obvious that the default form of political organization should be nation states, it seems rather arbitrary doesnt it? The answer to this question puts the legitimacy of all countries' existence on the line.

Historically, the longest period of relative peace on earth was during Pax Romana which lasted 206 years. The facade of a representational form of government with an absolute strong man. The Romans introduced rules for citizens, civil law. Latin which formed the basis for the romance languages, law, western culture in general, can be traced back to the Romans. Was this the best form of government? Or was it the best form of government for its time.

I think it is the latter. Societies change over time, and governments must also change or they will decline. (I think the Soviet Union's demise is an example) There is no "default form of political organization", only that organization which best suits a specific time and place.

With this said, given that the basis for a political philosophy lies in establishing moral claims about how individuals should behave, and given that we have no utterly precise system of morality to establish ethical truths reliably, there is no way to determine a correct political philosophy.

Leo Strauss called Aristotle "the founder of political science because he is the discoverer of moral virtue". The City/Society, which is natural to man (as a defense against the rest of nature), enables the practice 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;"

Rousseau thought that virtue is the means by which an individual's will conforms to the general will, which is achieved by love of country and its laws. So while a precise science of political philosophy might not be possible, there is a direction, a description and a goal.

Love and hate are emotions, and emotion all have intensities, some greater than others.

We live immersed in language and thought, there is no path to the great outdoors.

Interpretations are not all equal. Some are more probability than others. All we can know is what we as a species agree can be known or knowable, and what is known or knowable is in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. The noumenal can't be known., some say it can't even be thought..

(Y)

Yea, well "the dude abides", even in the inversion of social construction.

In my opinion Picasso's Cubism was more his reaction to Cezanne's art works.

I agree that artists and scientists are a product of their times, just as much as we are products of our time. But while science progresses, the arts movement is dialectical.

I disagree with your dating of the Renaissance. I think it started at the end of 15th century around the time of Copernicus say 1500, and was over by the end of the 17th century.. Michelangelo's Mythic Monumentalism melted away into Caravaggio's scientific realism.

Surrealism developed out of DaDa, the only scientific analogue I can poke fun at is "Dark Matter"...ha,ha.

Not sure on the science, but I think Du Champ was the 1st (?) self referential artist...'It is art, because I say it is art.' Of course he was right, but...

ps. welcome to TPF!

OK, back in FL

I think we perceive more than just raw impression, that the world is structured in a 'natural' order, which is understood and intuited by us inductively. Language is a good starting place. You said:

If learning the rules of language requires only using language correctly, then there is no issue with Chomsky's claim that children learn the rules with seemingly little effort. I'm not so sure that correct use equals learning the rules. As a matter of fact, that equivalency is highly suspect, on my view.

Yes, I agree, I misspoke. The child does not know the rules, they only learn them latter. The child is mimicking the the sounds it hears, putting them together, constructing sounds that produce effects in their care-givers. It is not belief yet, it is trial and error (A Gopnick's Theory, Theory....a built in Bayesian function). She admits (with Chomsky) that grammar is not learned, it is picked up in the child's process of learning about the world about it. Our organic structures have evolved to the point that they provide structured information which we then process.

I keep thinking about how an Osprey can spot a fish from a great distance dive at a fantastic rate of speed and automatically (they are successful 1 in 4 dives avg!) compensating for the differences in refractive indexes. They must possess biologic structures than don't require thought/belief that are built in, that enable such feats of perception.

While we are not Osprey's, I think we also possess certain biologic structures that enable us to perceive automatically and that the quality of the information is already structured prior to our awareness of it. Language is structured, the child mimics and manipulates that sound design features it hears, producing results it considers significant when it gets the attention of others.

"The world must be romanticized"

Interesting, I didn't know about that. I was reading a book review and the author pointed to this quote. I am interested in the imagination, which seems to me to be a sort of 'work-space' where we flex (romanticize) the images of perception and memory into our flow of thought. Thinking about it in regard to another thread.

I think he was trying to say that we must imagine (romanticize) answers to questions that may have no answer.

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg )

"The world must be romanticized"

Hey Creative, thanks I am still considering what you said, but I am traveling, dead tired right now,

It is I think self-evident that we are not merely material beings. This is because of many reasons but mostly do to the fact that we actually have analytic proofs for the soul. for example: There are things that are true of me but are not true of my brain and body. So "I" am not identical with my body and thus I must be non-material substance called the soul.

Well I am not so sure that it is self-evident what is meant by "material beings". It seems clear that we share a very close affiliation with our material aspect. I think all life differs from inert material, yet all life evolves out of material. I think that life, spirituality and "soul" must be possible states of matter. States which can become actual, a kind of panpsychism. Not as a theory of universal consciousness attributable to all matter, but as a property of matter that has been configured by evolution in a certain manner, so it can be a separate, self replicating, and mortal being.

If you grew up in Germany in the mid 1930s would subugating Jews, Gypsies and others not benefit you.

No, I don't think utility can be inherently good in itself. It must obtain moral direction.

What interested me about this article is the implication that habituation in perception enables the brain to skip its constructive thought/belief function as part of its normal ongoing processes. We see a laptop sitting on the table, we immediately understand what it is, there is no thought/belief construction, it is a laptop. Our perceptions are habituated to most ordinary experience, we don't have to think much, because we have already done the work, things generally fall into slots that we have already constructed.

I do not find that a strictly linear explanation is adequate when it concerns how thought/belief gains complexity, particularly after language acquisition begins in earnest. However, if we work from the premiss that at conception we are void of all thought/belief, the formation thereof must begin simply and gain in it's complexity. Thought/belief systems like our own aren't built in purely linear fashion, nor do they work that way.

I agree with what you said but this blank tablet, is biologically constructed such that language acquisition comes built-in, a la Chomsky, The structure of language, is complex yet a baby learns the complicated rules will seemly little effort. Chomsky thinks that this innate ability was due to a biological mutation that occurred between 60-100,000 years ago. He thinks this ability was acquired suddenly and it was passed on quickly because of the evolutionary, and revolutionary advantages it gave humans.

Yes, there is a long way to go, the fight is hard, but (and who knows what damage Trump can do) we seem have made some progress. Yes, blacks, minorities, women all the have legitimate right to scream about the treatment they continue to receive the hands of the majority, and I think the only way to get the numb majority to react is for these oppressed social groups to continue to push their cause in any manner they deem appropriate.

In spite of collective belief that blacks are equal to whites in America, blacks are -- by the stats -- treated worse than whites.

Would you say that blacks and other minorities are being treated better today than say 70 years ago. Isn't it a little quick to assume as in the case of the USA , that 350 years of social constructed prejudice is going to wiped off a cultures minds in one, two, three generations. Social constructs of prejudice are strong, long inbred systematic in our culture, yet we did elect a black president. Social constructs can change, in some cases more rapidly than others.

. In order to survive in any environment, you must learn how it works and what actions you take that either benefit you or don't.

Actions that "benefit or don't". I understand as being based on utility.

No. Utility is not morality

Pleasure can only be experienced in doing something such as watching a movie, it is never experienced on its own, it never an end in itself, it is always experienced along with something else which is the end. If you go to view a movie, you take pleasure in the story, its aesthetic, the actors and so on, it is only experienced as a means, never as an end in itself.

Does it not make it an end in its own right? People value safety. They are willing to spend more money on a car with safer features.

Perhaps life is an end in itself, and the biological necessities of life are then are means to that end, but they not ends in themselves.

Regarding duty, I agree with Kant's depiction of man as a member of the kingdom of ends, but that is not to say that I agree with his sterile, over rational, theory of moral duty.

I think there is a difference between observer dependent facts such as the value we assign to paper currency and observer independent facts such as the paper currency it is printed on. Trump the president, and Trump as a human being, ...

I don't see how duty can be reduced to a biologic fact or function. The actions we think we ought to do, are socially constructed. Their reality depends in our agreement, which changes over time, context, and the individual's historic development. Moral duty may rail against biologic functons.

↪Cavacava I take it as the clearest example I know of of the kind of thinking I disagree with.

Social reality isn't built out of intentional thought, even subliminally. We can change beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and so on, and yet the social carries on in spite of these things. This is true even collectively.

It's not what we think and believe as much as what we do and produce through collective activity that's important to making social products.

Searle talks about status functions as the product of collective intentionality in which we assign subjective reality to certain facts, such as money. It is only collective agreement that such values are facts.

So social constructs such as Justice, Freedom as ends

That's cheating. People are not "things"



I don't think pleasure can be an end in itself, it has to hold hands with something else to be experienced.
Maybe duty can be an end, but if the outcome of what duty commands is bad, then was the act moral?
Self preservation may also be an end, but it is a biological end, like birth, death and so on, so not so much so much value as a non-cognitive necessity.

(Y)

I Like Searle's concept of social vs objective ontology. Our ability to create reality by declaration, as a social function.

I agree, forget Jane.

Still trying to sort out your position regarding perception versus judgement/belief. How is the construction, the existentialist contingency developed, top down or bottom up, or...

The following from summary of a paper from Neuroscience News, written by Dr, A Newen, doctor of Philosophy.

The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view for core examples of social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding.

It's a funny situation, forgetting for a moment sense datum, just thinking about perception as a totality. If he is right then what we know, our skills, our empathy affect what we perceive ("cognitive penetration") but these are fundamental and automatically involved in our perception. Perhaps like typing without looking or realizing that someone is sad, mad, or whatever. These perceptions don't require any additional cognition.

This is not that far off your summary, at least as I read it.

Refutation of idealism?

The discussion is inane. Postmodernism describes a period.

I think either child would scream holler and cry.

Perhaps if we use your existential contingency process here.

I am mad a Jane, and something I would normally pass by and think nothing of, suddenly upsets me and sets me off on a tirade. The existential contingency of my getting overly upset by someone having knocked my hat off the rack where I put it is my anger with Jane.

Psychologists have done experiments that suggest that our overall state of being affects what and how we sort out what we experience, We only perceive a selection from of what we sense, apparently what we are concerned about at the time, which is contingent on our over state of being at the time, which is contingent on our thoughts

X-)

I would disagree. Our access to that which appears is physiological sensory perception.

OK Creative but

That is likewise the case with linguistic thought/belief and non-linguistic thought/belief. The former consists in/of things(structures in this case) that the latter does not. The structure of the latter cannot be the same as the former, if it makes sense to say that non-linguistic thought/belief has structure at all. I find no reason at all to say that it can and/or does.

Yes, our access is physiological sensory perception, but I think it's two processes, which is kinda what I thought you were on about in what I quoted above. Sensing which is non- linguistic and mostly automatic, is an never ending process of maintaining coherence, and the processing of that information into recognizable concepts is an incredibly fast process. Initial sense datum recognized in 200 milliseconds (+/-} and processed in say 400 milliseconds, compare to animation speed at say 60 frames per second.

So when I said our only access to the 'great outdoors' is though thought, what I mean't was that our input into what we sense only occurs at the conceptual/linguistic level. Preexisting concepts and thoughts must affect the processing of incoming information, however that might be physically accomplished. Given the brains processing speed and its ability to handle multiple sense, it has plenty of time to shade additional information to match context, emotional mood, and so on.

So then Existential Contingency is an ontological concept, the existence of something is constructed out of other things, which are by implication simpler in construction. Does this process ever end...your example of water, being comprised of Oxygen & Hydrogen can be extended almost indefinitely, as we have seen in physics. The same question has to do with the meta-cognition concept, thinking about thinking, about thinking...the circle of correlation. How do you differentiate meta-cognition from recursion or do you think they are the same.

You indicated that you are a direct realist, so what is.. is perceived, no unknowable or unthinkable reality lurking in the background, behind the apparent. Yet your only access to the apparent is though thought. I think there's kind of a "transparent cage" made out of language and thought, from which neither realist nor idealist can escape.

You mention the meta function of written language and from the way you describe it, it almost sounds like written language is an abstraction from spoken language, which is itself our best shot at communication of our experiences with others. Why Plato wrote dialogues.

Just a few thoughts. I like the idea of non-cognitive pre-linguistic perception, and I agree with the general outline you provided on this.

Is polygamy morally bad. Apparently the majority of the world does not think so. [that being said it would be interesting to find out how many actually participate in non-monogamous relationships]

So then if we are discussing Western culture whose laws, practices and beliefs trace back to the Greco-Roman culture which was primarily monogamous and generated Christianity which gave religion an official status. Christianity does not go for non-monogamous relationships. It sets the foundation for thinking that non-monogamous relationships are bad which became the predominant meme in the West. Religions expect men to lead certain lifestyles which it proscribes and non-monogamous relationships are not found in many. The 'moral' understanding of what acts it considers good and bad are correlated with natural versus unnatural as it proscribes. This understanding is slowly being spun out of the law. The Feds repealed the Edmunds Act in 1983. All fifty of US states still have laws against polygamy, but these laws are noi holding in court...if a steady mistress is allowed then why the heck not allow polygamy.

Is monogamy bad? If by that you mean being trapped in a bad relationship which one cannot escape except by divorce, which may be against one's Christian beliefs, then yes, I think a bad faith marriage is not a good way to live.

About 78% of human societies are polygynous, in which some men marry more than one wife.Only 22% of societies are strictly monogamous. Almost no modern societies are polyandrous, in which one woman marries several husbands (although such societies have existed historically in the Canary Islands, the Himalayas, the Canadian Arctic, and possibly other places). Only 3% of mammal species in general are monogamous, although at least 15% of primate species are.
In historical terms, it is monogamy that is in need of explanation, not polygamy.[4]
—Janet Bennion, Women of Principle (1998)

Wikipedia

Only true in formal sense. There is no truth outside of our own determination and our agreement. The statement might be true formally but this may have no correspondence to reality, which is solely apparent. I don't believe it can be shown otherwise.

Third person: The cup is on the table.
First person:
I see that the cup is on the table
I believe that the cup is on the table
I know that the cup is on the table.

I think there are only two points of view, the first person subjective and the second person inter-subjective. If truth lies somewhere, my money is on the second person inter-subjective point of view. What we agreed on. 'The cup is on the table' is true if the consensus is that it is on the table.

The third person point of view is the view from nowhere, a merely formal point of view.

A fool suits both as a friend and as an enemy

So a fool can be a friend or an enemy. I don't think that's paradoxical. If there are two sets, a) the set of all friends and b) the set of all enemies then why can't a fool be a member of both sets

The principal of sufficient reason requires reasons why the laws that govern the universe are as they are and are not otherwise and even if such a reason is found it must account for this reason ad infinitum...to "a reason not conditioned by any other reason, and only the ontological argument is capable of uncovering". (Quentin Meillassoux AF pg.33).
At least one absolute being is absolutely necessity for the laws, of universe to be necessary if not, everything could be otherwise. Kant's refutation of the ontological argument ended dogmatic metaphysics.