I think there was something that historians (and maybe anthropologists) used to call the "intellectual fallacy," which was supposed to be overstating the importance of culture and beliefs relative to the material conditions of life. There's the stuff Marvin Harris did in anthropology, for instance. (I had forgotten this one, but Wikipedia says he argued that Aztec cannibalism can be explained by protein deficiency instead of religion!)

Yes, so long as you distinguish syntax and semantics:

Gödel specifically cites Richard's paradox and the liar paradox as semantical analogues to his syntactical incompleteness result in the introductory section of "On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I". — Wikipedia

Grice speaks of 'the belief-types' and 'the beliefs of particular peoples'. Isn't that use of 'the' the equivalent in his nomenclature to Frege's 'the sense'? — mcdoodle

Maybe? But why go through the type business at all? Why not just say, as Frege does, that we each have the belief that such-and-such?

As for Grice - isn't his argument a form of psychologism? — Wayfarer

Maybe? But the main problem with psychologism is just that Frege has such a strong argument against it.

Compare the example of phonemes (or cheremes) which are explicitly defined as equivalence classes of sounds (or gestures). You could think of propositions, for instance, as equivalence classes of utterances, thus utterance-types, and thoughts as equivalence classes of psychological states, e.g. belief-types.

One question is, how do you get these equivalence classes rolling? What is required to be able to take something as a member of a class, or as a token of a type?

But where we want to start is the observation that, in uttering an allophone (within my speech community) for /a/, you are taken to have uttered the phoneme /a/. It might be helpful to put off the question of universals for a little while and look at how that transaction works.

Even if you start from the idea that individuals make their own choices based (or not) on their beliefs, it might be that in the aggregate you can make predictions or offer explanations that treat beliefs as conditions or causes like anything else. That's not completely crazy.

Say you do a study and find that 70% of your subjects choose X given information A, but only 20% choose X given B. If you then want to guess the behaviour of 100,000 people you know have information A, you'll figure most of them will choose X. Each decides individually but you get an aggregate result. (You would have to do a whole lot more work than my little sketch here though.)

Since you don't want to personify the crowd-- it doesn't think this or that, decide this or that. So you end up giving the usual, vaguely causal explanations.

1.) It is one thing to say "I had this belief, B, and B caused me to do action A".

2.). It is another thing to say, "I had this belief, B. I had to decide what to do. I decided, based on B, to respond with action A".


1.) is passive.

2.) is active. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Right. I think folk psychology endorses (2) and (1) is just a sloppy attempt to express (2) in most cases.

I couldn't tell you what the scientific support for (2) is. Certainly there are studies that address how people's attitudes and choices vary depending on the information you provide them. There are also studies that show reasons aren't everything, that people make choices that differ from what you'd predict given their self-identified reasons.

I can think of a bunch of other ways to put this too. Suppose I believe you are an armed and dangerous intruder in my home, and I shoot you. I could say I shot you because I believed that you were ..., that my belief was a or the reason I shot you, that it was a contributing factor in my shooting you. I think we would only say it was a or the cause of my shooting you or that the belief caused me to shoot you if we were speaking very loosely indeed.

What if, instead of saying your beliefs caused your actions, I said only that you had acted on your beliefs, or acted with your beliefs in mind? Would you still object?

If it is wrong to procreate, is it also wrong to allow others to procreate?

How do you feel about the suffering of non-human animals capable of feeling pain? Is it wrong for them to procreate?

Depends on how "can" is interpreted, whether that means in principle or in fact. Depends on how "connection" is taken, whether that means there's some response, either possible, again in principle or in fact, or actual.

It looks a little creepy to me. Even if you're going to allow we can care about people we have never and will never meet, it looks like it could rule out caring about people in a coma, caring about an unborn child, caring about people with certain mental disorders. That's if "emotional connection" is taken to imply some reciprocity.

Most people recognize caring to be an asymmetrical relationship. I can care about you whether you do or even could care about me. It looks like your definition is designed to undercut people who claim to care about things you think they really don't or shouldn't. (E.g., you can't care about a tree.)

Here's a list:

1.) An idea: A as manifested in your mind.
2.) A physical embodiment of A outside of your mind.


You ask what if it is determined that there is no 2.).

Okay, let's delete 2.) and update the list.

Here is the updated list:

1.) An idea: A as manifested in your mind.


We still have A. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Fine. It's an idea. What is it an idea of?

Some of this comes down just to avoiding implied onlies and merelies. Once science is in fight for it's very existence, defending science is also a cultural move, but not only or merely that. Similarly, opposition to science is by and large, in my country anyway, not only or merely a cultural move, but also religious. It needn't be; some people oppose science for political-theoretical reasons, and that can lead to some nastiness within the walls of academia, but the main fight is outside.

Cool. We're not on the clock here.

In Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Kenneth R. Miller shows that the Intelligent Design movement is not about evolution. The Intelligent Design movement, he shows, uses evolution as a smokescreen to hide their actual agenda: changing the definition of science and in the process subjugating or destroying science. If I recall correctly, it all started with a small meeting in the home of Michael Behe.

Again, it is not about truth, spiritual well-being, improving the human condition, etc. It is various interests struggling to gain and maintain power. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

If you have a group of people trying to find the truth as best they can, and another group of people who oppose the first groups efforts for political or ideological or religious reasons, it doesn't follow that what the first group was doing was motivated by political or ideological or religious reasons. It also doesn't follow that what the second group says is false; only that their methodology was designed with some purpose other than finding the truth in mind.

I think for now, contrary to my last post, we'll have to focus after all just on reports of emotional experience, just to keep this manageable.

I have a few more thoughts. I think it may be difficult to sustain the distinction between propositional and non-propositional reports or to assign priority to one over the other. For one thing, explanation can go either way:

"How did you feel?"
"I felt angry."
"What does that mean?"
"I felt like hitting someone."

"How did you feel?"
"I felt like someone was staring at me."
"What does that mean?"
"I felt nervous, uncomfortable."

I'm not sure there's a clear choice here. It's at least intelligible to look at either the propositional or the non-propositional as more descriptive or explanatory.

I'm not sure raw emotions are separable. Anger is very often anger at someone and/or about something. It's my understanding that people who suffer from PTSD may experience rage that they cannot understand at all, that is unconnected with people and events around them. That might provide some reason to think that you can distill the raw emotion of anger present in an episode of being angry at someone about something.

But can you say that the anger is something we have direct access to while the rest was interpretive? That in such a report the reliable part is only that you were angry, not that you were angry about something or at someone? I don't think that would match most people's experience. What's more, it's not hard to find a psychologist who would tell you that when you think you were angry at me for not calling, you were actually hurt that I didn't call. So it's at least intelligible to claim that even applying a label like "anger" is an interpretive step.

Note, I'm not saying you said it wasn't. We're still just trying to sort out what part of a report of an emotional experience-- originally the experience of the presence of God-- is interpretive, and requiring justification, and which part isn't. It's still not clear to me.

Have you looked at this?

I'm afraid we're just going to keep taking past each other, Harry, so I'll take my leave. Happy philosophizing.

Have another look at my post. You'll notice some numbered propositions and a question about them.

You didn't.

So you're not going defend your claim that "and" has same reference as "the addition of other things"?

What context means in this context.

Thanks for playing along here.

(1) Is there a candidate for a general rule here, that if the content is propositional, it involves more interpretation than candid reports that don't?

(2) What do we say now about the report "I felt like someone was staring at me"? We accept that there was some 'underlying' feeling, I take it. If the person who had the experience can think of no other way to describe it, are we forced to refer to it as "the feeling you describe as feeling like you are being stared at"? Is there anything else we can say?

(3) Do we require more justification for the description of the experience if it is more interpretive? Would we say any of the following? "That's not what you feel." "You feel something, but not that." "What you describe isn't a feeling." What kind of justification for describing the feeling in this way could someone conceivably provide?

I don't want to restrict this just to feelings, though. If I report that I am right now watching my brother eat the cake, that's propositional. Similarly if I report that I remember seeing him eat the cake. Is there any reason yet to think we need to treat reports of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and so on, differently from reports of feelings?

So would you say that "I felt like someone was staring at me" contains more interpretation of the experience than "I felt angry"?

(minor edits for consistency with previous posts)

There's something I never see come up in these discussions, and I wonder if it's because I have this completely wrong. (Here's where I admit not bothering to research the issue, because I'm not that motivated to at the moment.)

I remember learning years ago that the law is just the observed regularity in our observations, and the theory is the explanation for why those regularities occur. So, massive bodies do predictably behave in a certain way, which we can describe mathematically, and we call that description the the law of gravitation. It's nothing like an explanation for why massive bodies behave this way, just a description. General relativity would be a theory that attempts to explain why massive bodies behave the way they do.

Do I have that distinction wrong? Or is there some other way people talk about this now?

There's the person reporting their experience, interested third parties judging that report, and then there's theory.

A person might very well distinguish, within their own thought, between a part that is reliable and a part that isn't: "I saw something, but it was hard to tell what at that distance, might've been a man." They might also distinguish between a part that requires justification and a part that doesn't: "He was standing right in front of me. I knew exactly who it was because I had just seen him at the diner and he had that same tie on." It might be a little harder to distinguish what is interpretive and what isn't, because language, but sometimes people will resort to a sort of homegrown phenomenalism: "I could see a patch of dark red on the carpet, it was shiny, and appeared to be spreading." That's interpretive insofar as it's English, but minimally so, I would say.

How an interested third party would determine whether someone's report is credible might be very different from the process of making the report with the intent to be truthful. An individual may have sole access to their own experience, but there are things others can see clearly about a person that they can't. If I'm a confabulist, it could be everyone knows it but me. I could be doing it right now!

I think for the purpose of developing a theory of "eyewitness accounts" or of self-reported experience we want to be able to take in both the perspective of the one making the report and those interested parties who might judge its credibility, and we might draw the boundaries differently from either of them. We might, for instance, claim that everything about self-reported experience requires justification, but the part people often think doesn't is just the part for which they usually do have justification. ("He was standing right in front of me" could be taken either as needing no justification or as the sort of case where justification comes readily to hand.)

Back to our example. You said of the feeling that I am being stared at:

It doesn't strike me as being quite like anger, for example, which is more instantaneous and recognisable. The feeling you describe seems to be fundamentally something more basic, a funny feeling, which is then interpreted to be something more specific, more complex. — Sapientia

I'm going to say that "I felt like someone was staring at me" is as complete and honest a description of my experience as I can give. If you ask, "What does it feel like to have someone staring at you?" I will not know what to say; this is just what it feels like. I may know perfectly well that having this feeling is not evidence that someone is staring at me, but that doesn't matter. If I have a neurological condition and one of the symptoms is this feeling, which patients with this condition often report, then my neurologist doesn't care whether anyone was staring at me. He'll be satisfied by my report. If something I consider embarrassing just happened and I had this feeling, I would say that's why I had the feeling, but that doesn't affect my description of the feeling at all.

None of that is theory; that's just the data. How do you see the boundary here between what is interpretive and what is more basic, the inchoate funny feeling?

If I understand you correctly, I think what you want is a definite description.

You've done some math? You know how in many proofs there is the existence component and the uniqueness component? That's how definite descriptions work, at least according to Russell.

You could formalize the idea something like this:

∃x [ Perception(x) & Pippen's(x) & ∀y ( Perception(y) & Pippen's(y) → y = x ) ]

That says that there is something that is a perception and it's Pippen's (existence) and anything else that is a perception and Pippen's is the same as that thing (uniqueness).

Don't think of this as a proof though. It's just one way of formalizing what ordinary language expresses by means of definite articles like "the".

"My nose" is probably a definite description because usually I only have one of those; "my shoulder" probably isn't because usually I have more than one and you need context to determine whether I meant either or meant one specifically. You would still have to argue that a perception of the world is the sort of thing you can only have one of (at a time?). Formalizing that, as above, at best clarifies what you need to provide arguments for. (Philosophy rarely deals in incontrovertible proof.)

Suppose I have the thought that Earth might have another moon, call it "Luna2." If I determine that there is no celestial object that actually qualifies to be called a moon of Earth, I'll say, "Luna2 does not exist."

You will say that Luna2 does exist, as an idea. Okay, Luna2 is an idea. What sort of idea? Is Luna2 an idea of something? If so, what?

Found it. I'll give it a read soonish. Thanks!

I gave a clear illustration of what categorical non-existence would be like: Every modification of "A does not exist" is true. "A does not exist as an idea" is true. "A does not exist as a potential idea" is true. "A does not exist as a symbol representing something else" is true. And so on. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

This still just looks like the copula to me. "A is not an idea." "A is not a potential idea." "A is not a symbol representing something else."

There is weirdness here even Frege couldn't get around. Something that can be said to fall under or not fall under a concept is an object. What's a concept? Yuck. We have no choice sometimes but to talk about them as things, because grammar, but insofar as you talk about a concept this way, you're talking about it as an object, not as a concept. It doesn't really matter, so long as you get the knack of working with objects and concepts, and we all do.

So there is an "easy" answer to your question: Fregean concepts are predicated of objects but are not themselves objects and are not predicated of. They're never on the left-hand side of the copula, always on the right.

And the other easy answer is, everything that doesn't exist. I don't have a sister. The phrase "my sister" when spoken by me is a vacuous singular term. You can choose between saying all statements of the form "My sister is (not) ..." are false or not well-formed, as you like, but none of them will be true.

There is so much stuff that categorically doesn't exist, you couldn't begin to count it.

Again, a case could be made that in some way, shape, form, constitution, state, etc. the Empire State Building has a long existence--the beginning of which cannot be demarcated.
Somebody might say that the thing in the minds of business people, architects, etc. was the idea of the Empire State Building or the design of the Empire State Building, not the Empire State Building itself. At what point did that idea or design come into existence? I think that any attempt to answer that question is going to end up like the original question (at what point did the Empire State Building come into existence?). We get an infinite regression with no demarcation ever emerging, it seems. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Does it bother you that people often report the exact moment when an idea occurred to them?

Yes. At least we can readily understand that feeling and understand what it would mean for it be true that people are staring at you. That is not generally the case with when it comes to purported experiences of God. You get obscurity, you get confusion, you get speculation, you get descriptions of feelings. But feelings aren't God. — Sapientia

Suppose I candidly describe the experience I am having right now as the feeling that people are staring at me. That I am having some feeling, you would consider reliable, maybe even incorrigible. But do I also know that it is the kind of feeling that in the past has been correlated with people staring at me? It would be an additional step to say, because I'm having the feeling, people must be staring at me, but is there something you would call interpretation at the previous step, of identifying it as that sort of feeling? Do I interpret my feeling to be the one I think it is, and describe it as, or is this something I reliably, if imperfectly, know?

I'm still trying to figure out what part of a person's candid report of their experience they are expected to justify.

Anecdotal evidence is evidence, and not proof, so it is not absolutely reliable. — Sapientia

Sorry, I was unclear. I was thinking of "reliable" in a slightly different sense. A person might conceivably be mistaken, say, about being happy, but it seems unlikely; we might decide to treat candid reports of emotional states as reliable, in the sense that people are seldom wrong about their own emotional state. I'm not talking, yet, about how we treat their reports as evidence, but about how they describe their experience when they have the intent to describe it truthfully.

That I had an experience a moment ago is not something that requires interpretation. It is self-evident. That it was an experience of this or that may require some interpretation. There are plenty of cases in which it does involve some degree of interpretation, and this is perhaps most evident when we get things wrong. We can be adamant that it was thus and such, when it was otherwise. Sometimes we realise our mistakes, other times we're oblivious. Justification is especially required if it's not a minor detail, but something hugely controversial.

It isn't necessary to reason backwards as you describe. What I describe is about reasoning forwards from accumulated experience. — Sapientia

Are you saying that an individual learns how to judge her own descriptions of her own experience in a way similar to how someone else might? Maybe inductively, something like, almost every time in the past I've thought I was looking at a refrigerator, it turned out I was. Maybe there can be other guides too: I am having that feeling that people are staring at me, but I have learned from my therapist that's probably not true. Is this the idea?

Btw, I once heard Hugh Kenner talk about Chuck Jones, and he said Jones's favorite author was Mark Twain. Jones, he said, seemed very nearly to have Twain memorized, could quote at length from many of his books, etc. Ever since then, I've thought of Bugs as having Twain's sardonic worldview.

This doesn't answer your questions, but I can't pass up the opportunity to post it:

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

Almost definitely (b) with a few reservations (I could be wrong) and possibly (a). With regards to the latter, one cannot have an experience of God if, upon analysis, this makes no sense or implies a contradiction. And with regards to the former, how could one know that the experience is an experience of God and not an experience of something else? I'm not convinced that one could. One could of course be certain that it's the former, but that doesn't say much. I might be certain that my experience the other day was of ghosts, when it could in fact turn out to be just of a dim, candle lit, shadowy hallway, when I was tired, and in a heightened emotional state. Of course, I'd need to justify that it was of ghosts, but how?

Why wouldn't I take someone at their word when they give a description of their experience that doesn't contain anything controversial, like it being of God or ghosts or whatnot? That's being charitable, and it goes back to what I said in relation to anecdotal evidence. We know that people can and do have experiences which are profound or shocking or which they find remarkable in some way. It's quite natural and ordinary for someone to have such an experience or even multiple experiences of this kind in their lifetime. We also know that people can and do jump to the wrong conclusions after having certain experiences. I can relate both of these to my own experience. — Sapientia

There are (at least) two layers here:
(1) is there a reliable and and an unreliable part of a person's report of their own experiences?
(2) if (1) is true, is it only the unreliable part that is interpreted, and subject to standards of justification?

It stands to reason that if you believe part of a person's report can be rejected, then at least part of their report is unreliable. Perhaps you will hold that nothing in a person's report of their own experience is reliable, but perhaps you will hold (1), that there is a reliable part and an unreliable part. Then you would need to show how you are making that distinction.

It might seem that the distinction in (2) automatically matches up with the distinction in (1), but that is not so. It may be that all of the report involves interpretation, but the reliable part is interpreted in a way that meets our standards of justification.

Can you reason from the justification end backwards to distinguish which part of the report is reliable? That is, can you say, if part of the report is justified, that part was reliable; if part of the report is unjustified, then that was the unreliable part? I don't think so. It could still be that no part of the report is reliable.

(3) is just inconsistent with (1) and (2).

I understand that you're frustrated, because you're experiencing some of the weirdness of propositional logic for the first time.

I'll make it worse for you.
Let LH="Pippen has a left hand" and RH="Pippen has a right hand."
See if you can prove the following: (LH→RH) ∨ (RH→LH), with no other premises.

You want to say that having a left hand doesn't entail having a right hand and vice versa. While that's undoubtedly true, it's not really something material implication (→) all by itself is suited to express, as you should have just discovered. Happily ☐(P→Q)∨☐(Q→P) is not a tautology.

Material implication is odd, and takes some getting used to, because it is always true when the antecedent is false. That's useful for doing lots of things, but it's confusing when you're trying to express things like causal connections, for instance.

Here's one way (I learned from Michael Dummett) to think about it: material implication is more like a conditional command than a conditional bet.

Suppose you make the following wager: "If Brazil is in the finals, they will win the World Cup." If Brazil is beaten in the semi-finals, your bet never takes effect and you are not rewarded. (Analogous to False.)

On the other hand, if your mother tells you, "Do not leave the house without wearing a coat," you could rephrase that as "If you leave the house, wear a coat." In this case, not leaving the house counts as obeying the command. (Analogous to True.)

WIYF.

Non-referring words can have a meaning (e.g. the word "and"), and words can mean different things but refer to the same thing, e.g. "the father of Elizabeth II" and "the son of George V". — Michael

"and" refers to the addition of other things. — Harry Hindu

Does the phrase "the addition of other things" also refer to the addition of other things?

When expressions refer to the same thing, you should be able to substitute one expression for another salva veritate, in non-intensional contexts at least. So the following are equivalent in truth-value:

(1) The father of Elizabeth II was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death.

(2) The son of George V was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death.

You may not know those are equivalent in truth-value, but we'll leave that aside for now.

Are (1) and (2) equivalent in truth-value to the following?

(3) The father of Elizabeth II was King of the United Kingdom the addition of other things the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death.

(4) The son of George V was King of the United Kingdom the addition of other things the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death.

If not, why not?

I said that if we are able to talk about something then it must exist in some form. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I get what you're talking about it here; I just don't think it's the best approach. You're thinking of existing "as an idea" or "as a concept" or "as a social construct" as the sort-of fall-back position for things that don't physically exist. So, Santa Claus and Harry Potter exist "as ideas," or something. And that seems to make sense, because how can you talk about something that doesn't exist?

I've focused so far on that last part, to try to nudge you in another direction. Let's talk about the first part.

Donald Trump does exist, and so do people's ideas about him. Does Donald Trump, besides just existing as himself, as a person, also exist as people's ideas about him? You could say that, but there's not much need to: you can just say people have ideas and some of those ideas are about Donald Trump. That seems to cover everything and there's little temptation to say he also exists as an idea. You can do everything you want--distinguish between what he's really like and what different people think he's like, for instance--without giving him an extra way of existing besides the one he's already doing.

But what about Santa Claus? Here we only have people's ideas about Santa Claus, people pretending to be Santa Claus who aren't (people who sit on a throne of lies), people talking about Santa Claus. Santa Claus does not exist as a person in just the same way that Donald Trump does. But here the temptation is strong to say that Santa Claus exists somehow, because otherwise what are people's ideas about? What do we talk about when we talk about Santa Claus? It's tempting to say he exists "as an idea."

But that doesn't really do what you want. Now that you have Santa existing as an idea, what do you do with that? Can you say what people's ideas about Santa are about? It doesn't look right to say people's ideas about Santa are ideas about Santa as an idea, no more than people's ideas about Donald Trump are ideas about Donald Trump as an idea. Children don't believe that the idea of Santa Claus comes down the chimney; they believe a person does that.

We also don't seem to feel this temptation in the same way when we're talking about things that really do exist in some non-physical or abstract way. The United States is a real thing, but it's not exactly physical. Social institutions are abstract. This again is not the same as being an idea, because someone's ideas about the United States are neither the United States itself, nor are they ideas about the United States as an idea. They are ideas about an abstract thing, the United States. The same goes for numbers. The same goes for voices, traditions, habits, migrations, wars. Those are real things, objects you can talk and think about, but still aren't physical things like a car or Donald Trump.

Is Santa Claus one of those sorts of things? Now we have language problems. If you believe, or if you pretend, that Santa Claus is a real person, you have a belief or a pretense, but those are not the thing you are believing or pretending. Those are still just what they are, your beliefs and pretenses. And those beliefs and pretenses are about a person, not something like a number or a concept or social construct. They are about a person who doesn't exist. His not existing does not change what the content of your thoughts and words is.

But in the case of Donald Trump, we want to say that the content of our ideas about Donald Trump come, however indirectly, from the object Donald Trump. Where could our ideas about Santa Claus come from, if what they're about doesn't exist? Of course, for most of us, our ideas about Santa and about Donald Trump come from other people, and we don't have direct access to the object. Some people do with Trump, but nobody does with Santa. What we really want to know is what the very first thought about Santa was about.

Which brings us back to Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling writes a whole book about someone she made up, with lots of other stuff in there she just made up. Fiction, pretending, imagining, hypothesis-- they're all on a spectrum that includes lying. All ways of saying something is so that isn't, or of talking as if something were the case, whether it is or not. I'm just going to point out that the content of a lie has to be exactly what it seems to be and not something else. If I tell you there's a tiger in the bushes, so I can swipe your dinner, I want you to have a belief that there is a tiger in the bushes. The content of that belief has to be [ tiger in the bushes ] for the lie to be successful.

So do you think you could manage an executive summary of the argument? I spotted bits of it here & there in your posts, but I couldn't possibly reconstruct it.

I think it might help make your position clearer. A change of scenery. Anti-reductionism is more or less a lemma for you, so maybe if you just presented the lemma separately, that would be tidier. (I was going to say something about people not having entrenched views about meteorology, but ...)