The survivors, lacking the overarching context, attempt to reconstruct science using these remnants. — Wayfarer

I read that book a million years ago and forgot he does this. Does he mention that this whole scenario is borrowed from A Canticle for Leibowitz?

Well, there's a lot here, and I won't address remotely all of it.

But I have a simple question. Is this real?

For example, there's this quote from Robert Wallace:

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

There's plenty here that sounds plausible, and it's nice to see it put in somewhat practical-sounding terms.

But are the terms used here ― "depression" for instance ― only practical-sounding? There is a unity of psychology and philosophy here that may have much to recommend it, but is it based on the study of human beings? Is it based on therapeutic experience? Is it real, or are terms like "rational self-governance" counters in a game of philosophy?

I really don't mean these questions rhetorically, or as an indirect way to say "What a load of crap."

But I do worry that the "person" here is not a real thing at all, not someone you could meet, or could be, but a fiction. For a direct comparison: I never studied economics in school, and the sort of stuff I would gather from the news was the usual macro-economic guesswork that economists provide journalists. When I first glanced at economic theory, I was genuinely surprised that an enormous amount of economics is not empirical at all, but pure theory. (And it turns out many economists noticed the same thing and decided that maybe they should try doing actual research.) And famously much of that theory revolves around a fictional being called homo economicus. Which is not to say it's useless ― it's a model, an idealization, and interesting and useful in the ways such things are. But it's not descriptive of the behavior of human beings under scarcity, or of human beings making decisions under uncertainty. For that, you have to do actual research.

Look how confidently Wallace uses the indicative: rational self-governance brings into being, it integrates; a unified person is more real, is present, and so on. Are these observations or stipulations?

A great deal of the history of philosophy makes it into your post in one way or another, and I envy your command of the tradition. But is any of what you quote or analyze based on anything at all like research? And if not, what kind of knowledge is this?

Hence, man is, of the sensible things we know, the most able to become unified, precisely because man has access to transcendent aims — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you reach such conclusions by reason alone, do you not worry that it all just hangs in the air, that it's like an economics theorem circa 1950, true within the game being played, but without any empirical grounding and without the genuine possibility of any practical application?

A sign or symbol has an identity that transcends the material constituents from which it is composed. — Wayfarer

Ah, well it's my fault then for picking a well-known geometric shape. I only meant that the sticks are arranged in such a way that they make up a thing, temporarily anyway.

Arrangements of things into other things is, in some circles, a core problem of metaphysics. And it's something a little different from the problem of collections, which is why I mentioned them both.

And it does raise questions of hierarchy in a straightforward way. Each of the sticks is a part of the triangular whole. I didn't want to rehearse all the usual arguments here (triangles of Theseus, and so on), but just see what we might say about hierarchy, since that's our topic.

It's basically levels of ontological dependence (whether per se or per accidens). — Leontiskos

Go ahead and explain that. Some of us are uneducated.

Or, in pastiche of Berkeley, everything exists in the mind of God. And then what? Does He care more about some of His thoughts than others? Find some more interesting? Forget some?

There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think.

If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..."

What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? — fdrake

Quick note: some of what you say about Spinoza suggests "is God" or maybe "is like God" as an interesting predicate, and then you get @Wayfarer's great chain of being by asking of each entity "How close to being God are you? How much of God is manifested in you?" something like that. One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being

Oh I never got nearly that far!

It's an old question. I think he mentions it in connection with negation because there's an argument (attributed there to Geach, I think) that we pick Socrates as the subject and mortality as the predicate because mortality can be negated but Socrates cannot. Which is a stupid argument, and also entirely misses Frege's point about force.

But that's a sideline of a sideline.

Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects?

It is curious that the substance/mode or subject/predicate thing somehow gets tangled up with an historically somewhat religious question about whether there is some deeper, truer reality behind the reality we experience. And it's hard not to associate that tangling with Plato, and whatever cultural currents Plato was in touch with. (It comes up in Kimhi, I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.)

Jason De León's book — Srap Tasmaner

Last night won the National Book Award for Non-fiction.

Moral: “real” doesn’t have any single meaning whose correct application you can argue about. — J

Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though.

I've taken two approaches so far: one is to see if I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else, and I can imagine this being so, although it's a little weird; the other is examining what @Wayfarer in particular might find interesting about it, as he understands it, beyond it being something people used to think.

If it's just a marker of the difference between religious and secular worldviews, it is not interesting in itself. But if it is, at least in part, constitutive of that difference -- that is, if it makes more sense to say you're religious because you have such a belief than to say you have such a belief because you're religious -- then the idea has independent interest and could conceivably find a place in a hybrid worldview, or even in a secular one. But if it can't be made sense of without the support of religious conviction, I don't know that there's much to talk about. Philosophically.

Maybe. But there is a certain sort of discourse that says things only appear to be a certain way, but are actually another way, but says so non-lazily, offering an explanation for why things appear to be a way they aren't really. It gives a bit of 'substance' to the appearance itself, doesn't treat it as just a mistake. (Which is an option for everyday cases of taking an illusory view of something ― you're mistaken, indefensibly so.) The only reason I thought you might settle on degrees here ― rather than just appearance/reality ― is if you make this move more than once, so there are layers.

It's not important. Insofar as it's just a manner of speaking, it's probably not independently interesting but borrowing from our culture's religious conceptual inheritance. I guess.

And therein lies a considerable proportion of semiotics, among other things. — Wayfarer

Could you spell this out a bit?

I can make no sense at all of "degrees of reality". Reality is not something that can be measured, the idea 'real' is the binary opposition to 'iimaginary' or 'artificial'. Something cannot be partly real and partly imaginary or artificial in its wholeness. — Janus

Same for truth, right? A statement is true or false. And yet, there's an idiom that rarely finds its way into philosophy: "There's some truth in what you say." I find it pretty interesting that people sometimes assign a degree of truth to what someone says, rather than following the binary, all-or-nothing model typical in philosophy.

Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't.

Most of the time, we're talking about an aggregate of statements, a whole story, for instance. We can go with (a) and count the individual statements that make up the story as true or false, and the 'degree of truth' would be something like a ratio. I just want to note, first, that there's a pronounced atomism to this approach, so if you have any objection to atomism, you ought to be a little uncomfortable with that. Besides which, this is not how philosophy usually treats aggregates of statements: we and them all together, and if any one of them is false, the story as a whole is false. ― At least that's how we're used to dealing with arguments. Even if it's defensible there, it looks pretty bone-headed for dealing with anything but deductive arguments. Admitting that a story can fall somewhere on a spectrum between true and false, as people often do, is clearly more sensible.

And then there's (b), where you've gotten some of the truth, but not the whole truth. Obviously this doesn't mean treating every speech as an account of the entire universe; it's usually a judgment that something importantly relevant has been left out. "Yes, I did all the things you say, just as you said, but you don't know why, so your story is incomplete in a way that makes a difference." Something like that.

I think this is, to some degree, central to @Wayfarer's approach. A materialistic account of life or consciousness, for instance, is fine so far as it goes, but it leaves out something important. This is what @Wayfarer says about science broadly, that it leaves out the first-person perspective and this is no incidental omission. There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out.

So that's a defense of the idea of 'degrees of truth'. My previous post attempted to straightforwardly apply the idea, and forthrightly say there's more or less reality in an account or a discussion, and I think that would work in both the (a) and (b) senses.

It doesn't seem to have much to do with the hierarchical ontology @Wayfarer is talking about, but I wanted to see if I could find a use on my own for something we might call "degrees of reality".

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.)

Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. Or at least have that capacity. Some can leave the cave of this reality and experience a higher or a deeper reality, and some can't. Most Christians seem to believe something a bit like this: we're only in this reality temporarily, and this whole reality is itself temporary; rocks and plants don't have an afterlife ahead of them, but we do, and we're not sure if Fido does. Entities here are of different 'ranks' because they have a different relationship to the deeper reality.

And so the question remains ― and I suppose this is for you, @Wayfarer ― whether the great chain of being and related ontologies are inherently religious in nature.

I've sketched some pretty mundane uses for 'degrees of truth' or 'degrees of reality'. Is there anything in between, any use for the idea that isn't religious or logico-linguistic?

Thanks. (I was at work when I asked, so not chasing links.)

It sounds so very much like subject & predicate, the small, boring result of a long and tangled history, I'm sure.

There is a sort of example that comes to mind that only fits this paradigm in a particular way.

Say I have three pretty straight sticks, and I arrange them to make a pretty good triangle on the ground. Does the triangle exist? Surely. Does it exist in the same way the sticks do? ― Apparently not. The sticks can be arranged in other ways, and remain relatively invariant throughout the process of arranging them, but the triangle ― well, the triangle only exists just so. It is apparently somewhat more ephemeral than the sticks.

One other point about this "arrangement of things" sort of example: no matter how they are arranged, not one of the sticks can bear the predicate "triangular". You might say that a given stick "becomes" an edge, or an edge of a triangle, something like that, and that's interesting. (What happens to the edges when you pick up the sticks?) But to get something that "is a triangle" you have to first take the collection of sticks altogether; you have to grant that "these three sticks" is the sort of thing that can take predicates like "make up a triangle". And what kind of reality does "these three sticks" have?

So shall we say that the collection of sticks and the triangle made from them have less reality than the individual sticks do? I could see it. It's hard for me to see why I'd want to say it, rather than make the specific spatial and temporal distinctions I can make, but there's something to it.

Anyway, none of this is about modes or predicates and what sort of existence they might have. Collections and arrangements have a different shadowy sort of existence. But they're all clearly related too.

When I dream of something — Moliere

(There's a thread over there about non-existent objects, but I haven't looked at it. ― No, there's two of them.)

Sometimes workbooks for children have a kind of puzzle in them, where you're given a little group of pictures and are told to put them in order to make a story. They often rely on thermodynamics ― you're supposed to know that broken pieces of a vase don't rise from the ground (defying gravity as well) and assemble themselves into a vase on the table.

Let's call the world where that sort of thing doesn't happen "the real world." If you tend to tell yourself and others stories where that sort of thing does happen, then I'd be tempted to say your world is "less real" than mine. And insofar as people's beliefs are real, or at least a useful way of categorizing their behavior, and insofar as their behavior has consequences in the real world, I'd be tempted to say that people are capable of increasing or decreasing the reality of situations they are involved in. (It's like the response to "facts are theory-laden": let's make sure our theories are fact-laden.)

If we start with social groups and their behavior ― instead of starting with epistemology or cognitive science, and whatever conclusions we draw from that ― why shouldn't we make good use of words like "realistic" and "unrealistic"? Some people bring more reality to our discussions and our decisions; some people sap reality from our deliberations, lead us step by step into a fantasy world that is just less real, even though the actions we take in our fantasy world ― taking a stand against the baddies ― may have counterparts in the real world, like locking up real Japanese-Americans.

I also have in mind the sort of thing you can see in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, where the characters begin to slip back and forth between the real world and their own fantasy world. We all do a bit of this, and it seems quite natural to put how much we do it on a scale. Mistaking a windmill on the horizon for a grain elevator is one thing; mistaking it for a dragon is another. At least grain elevators are real, and windmills and grain elevators are both members of "rural towers". But dragons ...

Is this Socrates as variously encountered through Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes (probably not the latter I assume), and then "reconstructed?" Or the Socrates of the Platonic corpus? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's a mythical Socrates that suits my purpose here. Long tradition of that.

And possibly also it's Socrates stating his creed about how wisdom is to found: in dialectic, not in armchair inquiry. — J

I don't know that Socrates would say that any wisdom emerged from those conversations, not as a product of them, not as "we talked about justice for a few hours and together we figured it out." But if you have all these conversations and nothing comes of them, you can reach some kind of conclusion based on that experience ... Different thing.

All I can say is that I think philosophy must be a sort of dialogue. We don't do research to test the ideas we come up with, on our own or in conversation, so it's not like the sciences, not even like mathematics. (An idea for a proof is not a proof.)

What that means exactly, I'm not sure, and whether that dialogue "produces results" is not clear to me.

But we have only each other to talk to. The animals listen, and they respond certainly, but you can't talk with them, not really. Many people pray, some even believe God speaks to them ― I don't know if people who have that experience consider it similar to the way we talk amongst ourselves.

There's an old story I love about two rabbis arguing over some point and God Himself appears and takes the side of one of them in the debate! The other objects, and tells God He's out-of-order, that this is for them to hash out. God agrees with him, more or less apologizes for butting in, and withdraws.

We have only each other to talk to, whether it leads it to anything, whether we hope it does, we're all the company we have.

One of the reasons I posted that, was that I've been mulling this over for the past few days:

Socratic philosophy is rooted in opinion. The examination of opinion does not mean the transcendence of opinion. — Fooloso4

And what you quoted from me was written with Socratic practice in mind.

Lots of us still do philosophy the older way, where the object is reality ... — Leontiskos

― So the pre-Socratics? Or ―

and not primarily the text of some dead guy.

have I completely mischaracterized Socrates, who swore up and down that he did not inquire into the heavens and the earth like some others, but only asked people questions?

Someone else out there has to do the mind numbing work on logic and language as well. — Tom Storm

Philosophy is a peculiar discipline: it's almost entirely conversation. It's not much like science, for the most part, because you don't do research. It's also not much like literature or the arts because people respond directly to you about your work and you're expected to answer those responses.

It's a strange thing, a field that mainly consists of people talking to each other, and the main thing they talk about is what they or someone else, not present at the moment, has already said.

Along the way, people got very picky, picky about exactly what someone said, or didn't say, picky about whether the different things people say are consistent, whether all the things someone says go together to make an argument, and so on. And people notice this, and then talk about it.

And there's no stopping, because we don't do anything about any of it, we just talk. Or I guess you could say, that's what we do.

It's all we've ever done, even before the sciences one after another left the nest. Now that they're gone, there are some topics we don't bring up much, because those were things we talked about when the kids were still at home. But we still sit around and talk, and a lot of it is rehashing the same old disagreements we've always had. When the kids visit, they're either bemused or bewildered that almost nothing has changed.

enthymeme — Leontiskos

Hmmm.

Do you make any distinction between premises and inference rules?

He is basically saying, "If a conclusion is inferentially reachable from the premises, then the argument is valid, even if the argument does not present the necessary inferences." — Leontiskos

I'm trying to understand this. Are you arguing against the cut rule?

In practice, we show only the inferential steps we don't assume the audience can fill in for themselves. The overwhelming majority of mathematical proofs are not "complete", don't show every single step. For good reason.

As a practical matter, if your audience can't fill in the missing steps, they may not find your argument persuasive. But if you can show them the missing steps on demand, you should be on the same page.

We've talked about the equivalence of P -> Q to ~P v Q, but it's often more intuitive I think to use another equivalence ~(P & ~Q), and to read this as "no P without Q" .

The short-circuiting is still the same. Once you have ~P in hand, you know that ~P v anything is true; you also know that P & anything is false. When you have ~P, no P without Q is true for every Q, because there are no P; you'll never find a P unaccompanied by Q, because you'll never find a P.

The other is to move from sound arguments to the soundness of the soul and sound judgment, in a word phronesis — Fooloso4

Yeah that really leaps out in the passage quoted. Socrates doesn't offer a distinction among types of arguments, but among people who hear them or make them.

Gadamer's word here, "hollowness", is really interesting.

It's reminiscent of that Wittgenstein quote about "working on yourself."

We spend so much time arguing about how strong particular arguments are -- are we missing something?

I only meant that there's the natural world, and then a particular part of it, people like us, and then there's a particular thing we do, engage in discourse.

ethical motivation for arguing properly — J

There's that, but there's another meaning here too. If physics is the philosophy (or science) of the natural world, ethics the philosophy (or science) of human behavior, and logic the philosophy (or science) of discourse, then there's increasing specificity, in terms of subject matter.

But that arrangement doesn't preclude other relations among those three.

Wow, that is spot on.

The last couple days I kept finding myself thinking about the Phaedo, because there's a passage there about losing faith in arguments. The way I remembered it was something like Socrates saying, don't let my death cause you to lose faith in discussion and argument ― and I remembered it was something like this rather than "philosophy". But that's not what he says exactly, although it may be the subtext here. (Why bring this up now?)

Here's the whole passage:

there is a certain experience we must be careful to avoid.

What is that? I asked.

That we should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes. [d] There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. Misology and misanthropy arise in the same way. Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards he finds him to be wicked and unreliable, and then this happens in another case; when one has frequently had that experience, especially with those whom one believed to be one’s closest [e] friends, then, in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all. Have you not seen this happen?

I surely have, I said.

This is a shameful state of affairs, he said, and obviously due to an attempt to have human relations without any skill in human affairs, for such skill would lead one to believe, what is in fact true, that the very [90] good and the very wicked are both quite rare, and that most men are between those extremes.

How do you mean? said I.

The same as with the very tall and the very short, he said. Do you think anything is rarer than to find an extremely tall man or an extremely short one? Or a dog or anything else whatever? Or again, one extremely swift or extremely slow, ugly or beautiful, white or black? Are you not aware that in all those cases the most extreme at either end are rare and few, but those in between are many and plentiful?

Certainly, I said.

[ b ] Therefore, he said, if a contest of wickedness were established, there too the winners, you think, would be very few?

That is likely, said I.

Likely indeed, he said, but arguments are not like men in this particular. I was merely following your lead just now. The similarity lies rather in this: it is as when one who lacks skill in arguments puts his trust in an argument as being true, then shortly afterwards believes it to be false—as sometimes it is and sometimes it is not—and so with another argument and then another. You know how those in particular who spend their time [c] studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument, but that all that exists simply fluctuates up and down as if it were in the Euripus and does not remain in the same place for any time at all.

What you say, I said, is certainly true.

It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, when there is a true and reliable argument and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with [d] such arguments as appear at one time true, at another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality.

Yes, by Zeus, I said, that would be pitiable indeed.

[e] This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, [91] you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. — Phaedo 89c-91a

I think it's only later that Greek philosophy settles on the tripartite scheme of physics, ethics, and logic as together making up philosophy. Socrates is talking about what would become logic, plainly, but maybe it's noteworthy that this passage occurs in the middle of a discussion of the nature of the soul, and the question of immortality (because Socrates is about to find out). Argument and discourse are only issues for those beings that have souls ― logic arises in the context of ethics.

I'm tempted now to say that the "trap" that science (or "physics") must avoid falling into is not philosophy but sophistry, and that it's better to see science also as a type of ongoing reasoned discussion (or "logic"). (Talking about the lab and the field, as I did, might be just an intuition pump, suggesting that scientists need only share the knowledge they acquired using their special techniques, rather than seeing science as a type of discussion.)

Which means science is only in the same position as philosophy.

Insinuating what? That I'm not really a player but a spectator? — Janus

Yeah.

You indicated to @goremand that you've already reached some conclusions. You indicated to me that there are a number of issues you think are a matter of personal preference. So yeah, it must all be just a matter of curiosity for you, and there aren't really any stakes.

I don't see why someone couldn't or shouldn't feel that way. Why not just find philosophy interesting?

I'd like to say that if you don't have skin in the game, you can't really understand it, but in your case, since you've already invested considerable time and effort into settling on particular views, it's more like you've retired and like to keep your hand in. Slightly different thing.

Because it is interesting? — Janus

So you're like - I don't know - a tourist?

Only once you have your preferred premise can rationality definitively enter the fray and it consists simply in being consistent with your premise in the elaboration of your thinking. — Janus

Why even bother?

a monopoly over violence — ssu

A monopoly over the *legitimate* use of violence, I believe.

The word you're looking for is "progress". People used to believe in it.

stop worrying about whether and how phil. and rationality overlap — J

I've thought of another way to think about it too.

Suppose we said that philosophy *aims to be* rational, but what that means continues to be in play. What I really wanted to resist was taking rationality as fully understood, as just given at this point, so that we could just glance at philosophy and say it is (or isn't), glance at religion and say it isn't (or is), and so on. That seems rather severely to underestimate philosophy's role in shaping rationality and shaping our understanding of it.

I was also particularly committed to not excluding ways of doing philosophy (much of Wittgenstein, phenomenology, a lot of other stuff) that may in some sense "present a case" but that aim at changing how you *see* and how you understand, rather than something that would obviously count as analysis and argument. I think there's something central to the philosophical turn of mind there, and I'm reluctant to see philosophy "reduced" to argumentation.

For all that, I do also have some considerable commitment to argumentation and to reason, which I may have given short shift to. I just want to situate reason within philosophy, rather than the other way around.

Better than the last thing I said:

Debating itself, the construction and use of arguments, what can be achieved with them and how, all of this is more stuff we get *from* philosophy.

In every case, I guess I'm just saying we should beware of letting the tail wag the dog. The old dog may have more tricks up its sleeve.

demonstrating, in the very act of obtaining this result, that this is the only way philosophy can proceed. — J

Is it?

phil. gives itself the (rational) law — J

Does it?

we have the result that "philosophy is rational." — J

Maybe. I have my doubts. But even if it is so, have we shown that this is *all* philosophy is?

Honestly, these questions are, let's say, the other kind of rhetorical question. While I think my intuitions lean the other way from yours, I don't feel inclined to give answers here, so I'm asking the kind of question intended just to prompt thinking, to make you wonder if the answer that comes immediately to mind is right, to make you pause and wonder what other answers might be available.

That sounds either dumb or condescending now that I've written it. I'm just saying, I don't think picking sides and debating will do much good here. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

On the rationality thing.

If philosophy takes up the question of whether philosophy is rational, and even if it judges that it is, this is merely a result. It may even be descriptive of philosophy's practice in reaching that very conclusion, but it cannot be constitutive of that practice.

Consider mathematics. Here, unlike with the other sciences, you can point to axiomatizations of the results of mathematics, so it all seems very tidy. Instead of saying mathematics is the study of shape and number, you might say mathematics is the study of sets. (And there are other things you could say.) But those are all wrong, because these are all results of mathematics, not mathematics itself ― that is, not mathematics as an activity, as a discipline or a practice, but only as a body of knowledge.

Mathematics as a way of thinking, as an approach to solving problems, is not even mentioned in the axioms, nor is it identical to its most famous tools, like number. It is the activity, the movement of mind, that invents numbers, shapes, transformations, all the rest.

Philosophy is the activity that invents, for its own use, the very idea of rationality, invents ― you can almost watch this happening in Plato ― "concepts" as something non-psychological, invents logic, and so on. You can use its inventions to pick it out, as their source and origin, but those inventions are not constitutive of it.

If an experiment demonstrated a theory conclusively, you might end up saying "The experiment demonstrated the theory" - which may be the final relevant word on the matter of justifying the claim if "The experiment demonstrated the theory" is justified by the standards of the discipline. — fdrake

This had occurred to me as well, that "justification" is not, as it seems we say around here now, univocal. So the question is, when philosophy demands of some science a justification, what does it get? Does it get a justification according to the standards of that science? Or something that would suit philosophy? I think the latter is never going to happen. Thus, even when agreeing to provide justification, a science that provides its kind of justification is still not venturing into philosophy.

And I want to say that's fine, not because I want to defend science from philosophy, but because philosophy shouldn't give a shit.

Philosophy has no business asking questions that can be answered by science. So it need have no interest in how science comes up with its answers.

That would make this whole discussion a little wrong-headed, although it is compatible with some of the observations we've made along the way.

Philosophy should be orthogonal to science, and to literature, and to any other form of discourse, if it's to be a distinct thing at all.

(I don't know if the same is true of other fields. I can see both sides.)

One of @J's first moves in the OP was to take philosophy and the sciences (and maybe history, I don't know) all together as "rational discourses," or something like that. I don't think that will work. I don't think philosophy can allow itself to be defined by some external perspective ― or, at least, it need take such a definition no more seriously than it takes philosophy's Library of Congress classification.

(Such a move is even more untenable if you think of "rationality" as one of the areas philosophy is concerned with, and perhaps is authoritative on. Presumably then it would be up to philosophy to decide whether philosophy falls within its own purview, to decide whether this discourse is rational ― but not if it's already defined as "rational".)

So, just as philosophy ought to leave science alone, it also needn't go begging to science. Science has nothing philosophy needs.

So yes what @J noticed, of philosophy setting its own agenda and sticking to it ― there's something to that, but it has nothing to do with philosophy being "higher" than any other discourse, just different, just a question of philosophy being itself.

It had occurred to me.

Not that I'm happy with the choices I've made, but I have been choosing which cans of worms to open.

Well that's certainly clearer.

We're not on different pages, we're in different books. — Leontiskos

And that does make fruitful conversation difficult, but it also raises the ceiling of what we can attempt to do, I think: even if every participant brings their own presuppositions, the discussion itself has none.

For myself, I feel like I have a foot in every camp. I say the things I say, but I could as well say other things. I'm almost never happy with anything I post. I always want to start over and try something completely different, not just tinker and fix up what I've already said. In happy moments, I see this restlessness as philosophical.

I participate in discussions like this one, in some part, in hopes of figuring out what hold philosophy has on me, why I keep doing it, what it is I'm doing.

What?

I think a lot of people were more interested in shooting down other planes than trying to fly their own. — Leontiskos

It is hardly outside the mainstream to think philosophy's mission might be principally if not exclusively critical. Starts with a guy called 'Socrates' ...

But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? — J

I strongly take issue with OLP not being nuanced. My God, read "A Plea for Excuses." Subtlety, maybe that's a little harder to say. Certainly OLP doesn't usually leave points implicit, or make them only indirectly. But if a subtle point is a small and easily overlooked one, that too is in OLP's wheelhouse.

One funny thing about all this is that you included the word "discourse" in the title. Every time I was writing "philosophical discourse" I wondered whether I couldn't just say "philosophy".

But that's part of the issue here. We want to look at how philosophy *talks* to other disciplines, and how we interrogate that splits: we can look at *how* that works, and @fdrake and I followed your lead there a bit; but we can also look at *why* philosophy talks this way.

The why question also offers two natural courses: this is something philosophy does in reaction to other disciplines; or this kind of interaction is just a natural consequence of philosophy doing what it does, a sort of side effect.

If you want to know what philosophy is, you could just look at philosophy. You would only look at how philosophy interacts with other disciplines if you believed, or hoped, that something about philosophy is clearer in such interactions, maybe something that is hard to see by just examining philosophy directly. (There is a third option, which is the typical sort of comparison, without interaction: philosophy is more abstract, more general, blah blah blah.) And then you look at how philosophy talks to other disciplines to understand how it interacts with them.

You could carry this out without a plan, just to see what you get, but then it's hard to know what you're getting. (Am I looking at a feature specifically of philosophy's interactions with other disciplines, or a feature of philosophy proper? Among other questions.)

I think it might be better to ask first why we might thing the interaction of philosophy and other discipline might be particularly revelatory. What do we expect an examination of those interactions to show?

Heh, more preliminaries!

if he did intend it to be a justificaiton for a state, then it is a rubbish one. — Clearbury

Well, I haven't read him, so I can't fill in the argument, if there is one.

I suppose, though, if you're going to talk about rules at all, then the natural question is whether and how those rules are enforced.