A newly minted category must have been created by an individual initially, no? Or even if it was first thought by a number of individual...simultaneously? It's possible, I guess, but scarcely plausible that the idea could have occurred to everyone at once.

In any case, it doesn't affect the argument that the judgement that constitutes the category was initially private, and remained so until made public. And even then a new idea has to command wide assent in order to become canonized and part of the public store of judgements, even if only among a significantly sizeable groups. How large would the group have to be to be considered significant, do you think?

You don't form a sentence first, then say it. It doesn't exist in your mind prior to being spoken (or going through the motions). It's created as it's being said. — Isaac

I haven't said that sentences are preformulated; that has nothing to do with what I have been arguing. I've been arguing that categories are initially created by individuals who first imagine them, and that they are , in that sense, private until communicated publicly.

OK, but you said that we have a private understanding of the concept 'exists' and your argument seems to be that mental activity is private. — Isaac

Don't you agree that mental activity can be thought of as private in the sense that I can be thinking or imagining a whole plethora of things and not tell anyone about it. Take that sentence I just wrote; it's perhaps plausible that that precise sentence has never previously been uttered. And in that case, that precise thought, formulated in precisely the way it is in that sentence would be private. I'm not denying that much, or at least some, of our thinking relies on a public language to make it possible. But the fact that a private(ly formulated) language is impossible doesn't logically entail that experience,judgement, thought and understanding are public (although as I said, of course they can be).

On what grounds do you claims a private understanding of 'exists'? — Isaac

I have my own understanding of what it means and you won't know what that is unless I tell you. Of course in telling you my understanding will be made public, even if only to a limited audience

How would you know that? Or even suspect that? I can't see any link at all from saying that mental activity is private to saying that the categorisation of mental activity is private. — Isaac

I haven't said that categorization is necessarily private, although of course it can be. Initially it is individuals who categorize things in the ways imaginable, and other individuals who follow such seminal categorization, and thus render them conventional. Note, seminal understandings have already become public once the seminal understanding has been communicated for the first time.

.

How did you ask me why I asked you what it means to exist if existence isn't a public concept? — Pie

From the fact that 'existence' is a public word it does not follow that existence is a public concept. We each have our own range of associations, intuitive feelings and idiosyncratic understandings of the meaning of the word. What is a concept if it is not understood? And who understands concepts? Individuals.

It seems we are similarly constituted beings, so why would we not share, in the sense of, at a minimum, "find understandable", the understandings others have of concepts? You seem to be conflating understanding, which is of the individual, and private in the sense that no one will know what it is unless she tells them, and use, which is obviously public.

There is a certain limited number of ways of imagining what existence could be. and it seems to me plausible that that is likely to be the determining factor that establishes the range of publicly manifested interpretations, and maybe some others we haven't heard of because those who imagined existence that way didn't speak about it (make it public). Your claims seem to be deploying a very strange interpretation of "public", although it is not one I haven't heard before. :wink:

If I can be mistaken that it is I who am doubting, thinking, feeling; then I can be mistaken that there is doubting, thinking and feeling. I feel my own presence more certainly than I know whether I am doubting.

↪Janus
That he existed was something he found he couldn't doubt, so that was precisely the thing he did not need to prove. He built the world back up again on that foundation, with God and proofs. — Jamal

Yes, he arrived, after doubting everything he thought he could, at the cogito as the purportedly indubitable, and then (unfortunately not indubitably) built everything back up again on that foundation. So, his project. as I said, was to prove, at least to his satisfaction. that he existed. Whether or not he already had that indubitably of his existence in mind from the start is another question. I think he was correct that the knowledge of our own existence is, of all knowledge, the most certain.

I don't think Descartes advocated solipsism, did he? — Tate

Right. Descartes' project was to prove that "I" exist", not to prove that others don't exist.

Yes, true that would be better since we are speaking about proof. On the other hand, evidence can be proof, or proof enough, as I note below.

I would consider direct observation to be proof (proof enough anyway, even though we can always get radically skeptical and doubt anything we like). So, I'm thinking in the empirical context, not in the formal logic context. For example catching my wife in bed with another man would be proof that she is being promiscuous. I can look at any appropriate map I like to prove that Sydney is in Australia or live there or go there. There are countless examples.like this,

The problem I see with the notion of justification is that it is not crystal clear what constitutes it in the various situations we might find ourselves in.

Anyway my point was that if we accept JTB, it can be the case that we know things without knowing that we know them (because we cannot be sure what counts as justification and we don't always know if this or that is true), or not know things when we think we do.

"Justified", or "warranted", are the usual the terms used, rather than proven.

Here's my point again, just to be clear: Even if there is no proof of other minds, it does not follow that they do not exist. — Banno

It seems to me that under the JTB definition of knowledge, even assuming that there are real criteria concerning what counts as justification, that we can know things, but we cannot be certain that we know them, unless what we know is proven. Is anything other than a tautology ever proven? Perhaps in mathematics?

That said, I agree with your point that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I think this is a difficult area to speak about and as I understand it I agree with everything as you've written it there, and right now I can't think of anything to add. :up:

Do you think that things must be proved in order to be true?

Or are there things that are true yet unproven? — Banno

Things must be proven to be known to be true, which is all that is important when it comes to truth. What could it matter that something be true if it were not known, or knowable as such?

Improvising: it's basically a version of the 'ghost story.' 'Pure' meanings glow for it, infinitely intimate, unsoiled by the particularity and historicity of (social, worldly) experience. Presence. I'll find a good Derrida quote on this. But here's an historical source. (This is what Derrida quotes in Of Grammatology. ) — Pie

I don't know what you intend by "pure meanings". I don't find that notion in the phenomenological works I am most familiar with (mainly Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry).

Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. — Ari

Of course I don't agree that the "mental experiences" are the same for all, although I would say there are enough commonalities to make mutual understanding possible. So, I'm not sure what you think we are arguing about.

In my opinion, this tempts us to think of a set of universal, pre-given, immaterial concepts... — Pie

It might tempt you to think of such things, but not me; the idea seems incoherent to me.

Here's some of Derrida's response to the quote above. Note that the critique of phonocentrism (putting the voice closes to meaning than writing) is driven by a critique of the ghost. — Pie

I don't find much clarity or insight in Derrida, I do find, ironically, a similar absolutizing tendency in his writing that he o critique. The idea that the voice has been privileged over the written word I have never found convincing, since the age of the oral tradition has long since passed. One advantage of dialogue, whether spoken or written, over books, is that the speaker can be questioned on the spot as to their meaning.

I don't see how that passage is a "critique of the ghost"; are you claiming that Derrida thought of it as such or merely that you have interpreted to fit into your current preoccupations?

His meaning is right there, glowing and present and perfect, independent of the network of other public concepts. Is Derrida not making a Hegelian point that everything is mediated, mediated, mediated, or a Brandomian point that awareness is linguistic ? For we who are not thermostats? — Pie

I really have no idea what you are talking about here. Of course I agree that not everything, not all, but much of our experience, is mediated. I certainly don't agree that awareness is linguistic: animals are aware and they don't have language. No idea what you mean by "thermostats".

I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you are indeed a great poetic soul, too cool for anal discussions of epistemology, then...good for you, sir ! But I'd believe it more readily if you weren't wasting your time with an even greater triviality like indulging in hackneyed 'defenses' of The Poetic Soul, as if your the only one among your peers that's ever had a finger in. — Pie

I haven't said or implied that I am a "great poetic soul", and I'm not indulging in defenses of it, hackneyed or otherwise. It seems you've totally misunderstood what I've been saying. To reiterate, I've been saying that I don't accept that there is no private experience, and I don't accept that the most important aspect of (my) life is justifying my ideas to others, or others justifying their ideas to me. To me this would be the realm of the machine people.

When it comes to philosophy, I value ideas insofar as they offer me inspiration and insight, not insofar as I think they are "correct" or "justified". I see a whole spectrum of ways to think about things some more insightful and inspiring than others, and more or less so to various people. And all I'm trying to convey is how I think about these things, and all I've got from you is strawman attacks and defensiveness.

.

This is one of the most irrationalist assertions I've ever seen on a philosophy forum (if you mean the typical role of ideas in social life, Mr. Anti-Up-My-Arse ) or the tritest (if you mean that the checkout girl at Costco doesn't care about the books I've read.) — Pie

Seems a bit presumptuous, the checkout girl at Costco might have read more books than you, for all you know. I don't seek to deny that ideas in the various practical fields such as politics and economics are argued over in the marketplace; I'm referring to purely "philosophical" ideas that don't have any practical consequences, such as whether there is a mind-independent external world, or whether or not there is a mental substance ( I don't think there is, but I don't care if others do, since it isn't something which can be established empirically). Anyway, it seems obvious to me you're becoming increasingly defensive, so perhaps it's best to leave it there.

To me they all fit together. Brandom and Sellars are great, both arguably 'fixing' Hegel, removing the mystic bluster, keeping the crucial insight into the sociality and autonomy of reason. I take early Derrida to be a Husserl scholar making quasi-Rylean points against the core of phenomenological version of the myth of the given, but from more of an historical angle, tracing the superstition back to Aristotle, for instance. — Pie

That's interesting. What do you understand to be the "phenomenological version of the myth of the given"? And how do you see it relating back to Aristotle?

As to 'dissappearing up one's own arse,' avoiding this is one motive against theories of the private mind that would make up-our-own-arses the only safe hiding place from doubt. Some would build a little world up there, with exactly one citizen, speaking a language made just for him, within which concepts always conveniently mean just what he thinks they mean. Is this not a bunker metaphysics ? Not even the NSA can peek in. And the only things allowed in are those I can't be wrong about. — Pie

I don't see doubt as having anything to do with it. If you have no belief that it is possible to give a discursive account of "reality", as opposed to one's own experience, if you don't buy into the realism vs idealism or anti-realism debates, then what is there left to doubt?

I realize now that I misspoke regarding analytical philosophy causing one to disappear up one's own arse; this is not correct at all; it causes one to disappear up the public arse, a far nastier place to be. You don't have to, unless you feel insecure, justify your ideas to anyone. I don't expect there will ever be consensus when it comes to philosophical ideas, and it would be a horrible world indeed if there were.

So there is concrete perception and concrete feeling , abstract verbal thought and abstract social feeling. Instrumental music , dance and painting are slightly less definitive modes of abstract symbolizarion than verbal conceptualization, but considerably more abstract than concrete perception, given that they produce a wealth of social emotions. — Joshs

I think we are coming from very different definitions of terms, so we are going to talk past one another. For me what is concrete is what has immediate affective impact phenomenologically speaking, what affects us predominately in terms of being a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a bodily sensation, regardless of whatever story we might tell about the underlying machinery. I agree it's not black and white; that there is a continuum from what might be thought to be purely abstract to what is concrete. And of course I'm not denying that abstract thinking includes affectivity; as embodied beings there are always nuances of feeling and association going on.

Does this mean I don't have to read and try to understand Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger now? :razz: :cool: — Tom Storm

:wink: You never had to; so it just depends on whether you're interested in discovering the greater depths or not.

I'd rather preserve my mental resources for more creative, poetic pursuits, in the interest of intensifying the richness of the stream of imagery that is my phenomenal life. — Janus


it's just too anal. — Janus


:up: — Pie

I'm glad you approve. It'll be good for your soul to return to your your Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida etc. :wink: : analytic philosophy is too anal, and if one keeps at it too long one disappears up one's own arse.

So it's a bad theory that serves no purpose, hackneyed poetry basically, 'describing ' the world by denying it ... — Pie

This is not phenomenology you are purporting to characterize. Phenomenology doesn't deny the world, in fact quite the opposite "Back to the things", "being in the world", "flesh of the world", etc.

Phenomenology is not a "ghost story": you've been (mis)reading too much Ryle, it seems. Don't get me wrong: Ryle is alright; I read and enjoyed Concept of Mind 20 or so years ago; it's good for dispelling "container" analogies for the relation between the body and mind.

The passage you quoted from Ryle is too black and white; more of a caricature than an accurate depiction. Of course we do have private experience, but it is also true that our experience is conditioned by being socialized. We cannot always accurately describe what we are experiencing, and that is where poetry fills the gap left by propositional discourse or literal description. We have no reason to assume, since we are all human and similarly constituted, that our diverse experience is without its similarities, so poetic language can evoke common kinds of experience effectively enough, without being literally descriptive.

I dispute that. Only normative rationality and shared premises could support such a bold claim, yet you make the existence of anything outside your dream a mere hypothesis. — Pie

You're really good at misunderstanding! I said we have very good reason to think the external world exists, but it cannot be for us, anything more than an inference to what seems to be the most plausible explanation for the repetition and commonality of experience. It's a very potenet inference; one we really have no reason to doubt, so I ask myself why I should bpother thinking about it? What difference could the absolute existence or lack of existence of something I know only via images and sensations, and which exists as such for me, (and I have every reason to think, everyone else) whether I like it or not, make to my life?

My whole point has been that it doesn't matter anyway: we are all, in our everyday lives, naive realists; we have been conditioned that way. I am just not that interested in the kind of ourobouric pursuit of normative justification for facts and propositions, when the whole conventional machinery is already firmly in place. I'd rather preserve my mental resources for more creative, poetic pursuits, in the interest of intensifying the richness of the stream of imagery that is my phenomenal life.

I've read McDowell and Brandom, and I find their approach to be (for me) a waste of time and energy; it's just too anal.

Touché mon ami! — Agent Smith

:smile: :cool:

The part where you said that ? The part that I quoted? — Pie

You mean this:

I don't deny that sense organs are affected, ... But that whole story is abstracted from the more primordial experience of being in the world ... a world of images, sounds and bodily sensations. — Janus

Where in that have I said the external world is the work of our organs? The world of experience is a world of images, sounds and bodily sensations, but I haven't said that the external world consists in images, sounds and bodily sensations. The external world, for us, is an inferential extrapolation from the repetition and commonality of experiences of everyday things. We have very good reason to think that it exists, but we only know what it is for our inferential imaginations, nothing beyond that.

Right you are! Good job! — Agent Smith

Phenomenology, intelligently practiced, is always a good thing. Anything at all unintelligently practiced, is not a good thing; so there's little of substance, and much of the bleeding obvious, there.

That's not always a good thing ! — Pie

Not if you don't like it. For me it;s the best guide to what living is for us.

Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs—?

You're tilting at straw windmills; I haven't said that the external world is the work of our organs; what on Earth made you think that? :roll:

:lol: Pax. — 180 Proof

:rofl: You mean Pussy. I don't kiss tablets.

Yes. You keep making claims about the private minds of others, which should not be possible, unless the entities in those minds are part of the usual explanatory nexus. — Pie

I know my life is such, and I have no reason to think it is different in form for others, although the content would obviously be different, though not without enough commonality

to enable the conventional co-creation of stable objects I have been going on about.

So you claim, but this is metaphysical theory, which could only be defended or justified in terms of universal rational norms. — Pie

It's not a metaphysical theory, but a phenomenological fact about my own experience, and again I see no reason to think it different for others.

We don't know this. — Pie

I know this in my own case; it's simple phenomenology. I also have confirmed this with many of my friends from philosophy classes at university..I don't deny that sense organs are affected, or any of the whole story of science. But that whole story is abstracted from the more primordial experience of being in the world (to reference Heidegger); a world of images, sounds and bodily sensations.

You're misunderstanding what I've said. I've said that our lives, phenomenologically speaking, consists in images. Out of the repetition of these images we fabricate world of stable objects. But day to day, we do not experience stable objects; we experience a flux of imagery.

So, the objects are mental creations; purely conventional. And that's what science deals with. Nothing wrong with that and it obviously has practical uses, but that is not where life, experience and poetry are to be found.

You seem to be justifying the unimportance of establishing how justification how works by declaring it to be impossible in terms of an authority that's uncheckable even in principle. You also refer to our lives, without it being clear how a ghost trapped in its own private imagery could make trustworthy claims about other ghosts...if trustworthy makes any sense is this world of dreams without contrast. — Pie

Again this shows you've totally misunderstood what I'm saying. We know our observations and judgements are justified. or not, within the conventional co-creation of the world of stable facts and things. We know that it is the more primordial experience of imagery that makes this co-creation possible. So, why would we need to bother further with justification? Life does not consist in observation and judgement, even if discursive thought does.

Do you want your life, your thinking, to be creative, passionate and interesting, or merely normatively justified. I couldn't give a toss about normative justification, to be honest.

What? — 180 Proof

Life is in the imagery, not in the propositions about hypostatized things, how to justify those propositions, facts about things, or logic. I'm not saying those things are worthless, but that they are worth less. But that's just my feeling about it.

5.621 The world and life are one.

I'm not confused; I simply don't agree. In any case there is this:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so.

So, perhaps it is Wittgenstein who is confused, or your reading of him.

It doesn't matter anyway; we don't have to follow Wittgenstein or anyone else; there is more value in thinking for yourself, anything less than that lacks creativity.

Because that is where the life lives.

That's where ↪Janus
becomes confused. — Banno

What do you think I'm confused about?

You're missing the point, though.Our whole lives consist in streams of imagery, a unique stream to each person. From out of those concrete streams we abstract the fictive things which remain timelessly the same, which make up the world of familiar objects, about only which is it possible to derive a world of facts, a world consisting totally of facts, a world that is the totality of facts. But this world is never experienced; it is a lifeless attenuated world of the mind.

There is nothing interesting in that pedantic world of facts except the science and math it makes possible. For me there is nothing interesting in chasing your tail trying to establish how our propositions are to be justified; because they can never be justified by the rich streams of imagery which constitute our actual lives. So, for me the best course for those who love science and math is to "shut up and calculate" and enjoy the richness and artistry of math and science (which logic totally lacks).

I understand what you are trying to defend, and I'm not trying to deny the soul. I'm saying there's a way of talking about it that's nonobviously confused.

We can't rationally discuss concepts that aren't public. I think you and Micheal are trying to use both sides of the coin at once, the 'pure' ghost and the more ordinary mind that is indeed part of the usual causal/explanatory nexus. It's almost tautological that there's nothing to be said about the radically private mind (even saying that there is one such mind or kind of mind is arguably nonsense, except metaphysicians have created a mystified X that rides on the back of ordinary mind.) (I'm just leaning on Ryle here, and you might want to refer above to the quote to see where I'm coming from.) — Pie

I'm not trying to "defend" anything; I just give priority to the poetic mind over the intellectual or discursive mind. And even though the rich imagery of the poetic mind cannot be spoken about, other than to signal its existence and importance, it can be spoken from and we can also speak about the fact that it can be spoken from, so there is actually much to be said, just not so much in dry propositional terms.

— Pie

The mind that matters, the mind that figures in reasoning and explanation, is not and cannot be radically private. — Pie

Just to clear I'm not referring to "raw feels", The mind that matters, the mind that experiences life as an endless succession of rich and unique imagery, is radically private, while also being shared.

Broadly, I'm trying to show that the metaphysical version of the private mind is broken (or at least useless), despite its initial plausibility. — Pie

There is nothing public that can be pointed to, but from that it does not follow that there is no private mind. We all have our mental privacy, so we all naturally recognize that there is a private dimension to the mind.

He meant that also with regard to issues about which empirical confirmation can be found. And in the case of the relation between affect and abstract conceptualization, a wide range of contemporary approaches in psychology and other social sciences has arrived at a model which they have confirmed empirically. — Joshs

For me empirical confirmation consists in unequivocal observation. In those matters there are truths, not merely perspectives, but of course those truths are contextual and always to some degree approximations. For example, at sea level water boils at 100 degrees C, the Earth is (roughly) spherical (at scale more perfectly so than a billiard ball). There are countless such empirical truths; truths of bare observation and measurement. Scientific theories, though, are never confirmed to be true empirically, but merely proven to be or not to be predictively successful, and this applies to theories in the social sciences even more so (or should it be less so :wink: ),in my opinion.

In recognizing that affectivity is the necessary underpinning for abstract cognition, you are in agreement with these new approaches. But you go on to characterize feeling as concrete and verbalization as abstract. By concrete , do you have in mind bodily sensations? — Joshs

By concrete I mean to refer to what appears immediate and tangible to us. Ideas are abstract, but they may embody concrete imagery; imagery of concrete things. I don't see music as abstract; although of course the underlying patterns of chord progression,. melodic line and rhythm are, as they can be symbolically represented and transposed into other keys and different instrumental mediums.

Actual music, what we actually listen to being performed, for me evokes; it does not represent, it presents. In this it has some commonality with poetry, which is more symbolic, but also manifests concrete musical elements and concrete imagery. Reading poetry and hearing it "performed" are of course different experiences.

But all of this is just "perspective" as Nietzsche would have it, and perspective depends very much on definition and context.

By concrete , do you have in mind bodily sensations? According to embodied approaches to affect, feeling isn't just directed toward the body, it is directed toward the world. It is the situation that feels bad, not our bodily sensations that are triggered by it. Feeling is world-directed and intentional. It involves appraisal and judgement concerning the relevance of situations to our goals. This is because feeling isn't simply an underpinning of verbal thought, it is so inseparably intertwined with it at all levels of abstraction that it makes no sense to try and tease out what aspect of our experience is felt and what is conceptualized. — Joshs

By "concrete" I have in mind what is experienced by us as immediate and tangible. By "abstract" I have in mind what is lacking such immediacy and tangibility, but may of course have associations, more or less attenuated, with the immediate and tangible. Some feeling, as you say, "involves appraisal and judgement concerning the relevance of situations to our goals", but by no means all feeling does, in my view.

I also agree that feeling is intertwined with verbal thought, but the point is that (coherent) verbal thoughts have determinate ranges of (literal) reference and meaning, whereas music and abstract art, for example do not. Why would we want to collapse everything into the same category of kind?

I don't agree with Gendlin that there is a determinable subjectively felt sense of what we mean when we speak, that our speaking refers to. I do agree that speaking, and all our activities are accompanied by subjectively felt senses, but I don't agree that these are as determinate, as the (literal) ranges of possible reference and meaning of coherent verbal thoughts.

I agree with what you say about texts, at least in regard to some texts.Other texts retain their evocative power, and even reveal new things on subsequent readings. At least that has been my experience, particularly with poetry.

I just don't consider that evocative, affective power that some music, literature and art possesses to be abstract; that just isn't the terminology I would use. For me it is feeling, and feeling is concrete; felt in the body, in the heart and mind.

When it comes to these kinds of issues, about which no empirical confirmation can be found, I remember something Nietzsche said: there are no truths, only perspectives.

Notes ARE special kinds of words , creating a kind of impressionistic variation of what verbal concepts do. — Joshs

Sure you could they are kinds of signs, but not symbols with determinate meanings.

Music consists in concrete auditory imagery (sounds). Music presents, evokes, it does not represent in my view. I also would not say music is a kind of reasoning, in that it does not provide reasons; but it is, one could reasonably say, a kind of thinking or grammar. But again, all of this is going to depend on how you define terms.

This assumption seems to repeat the traditional divide between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking.
Supposedly , only verbal cognition is rational , conceptual. Feeling is mere spice, coloration, window dressing. It’s an important motivator but does not produce ideas in and of itself. — Joshs

No, I wouldn't say that; feeling is basic, primal and indispensable. I also think that rational inference can be non-verbal; animals do it all the time. Conceptualizing is not only of the abstract kind, but also of the concrete kind; even animals see things as specific things. But abstract reasoning using symbols is something that I think only humans do. For example, you would not be able to think that last sentence I just wrote, without words, in other words.

The kind of reasoning animals may do, and humans also do pre-verbally or non-verbally is reasoning based on concrete visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and proprioceptive images. At least that's what I assume based on my own experience.

I actually think that verbal reasoning would be impossible without the affective underpinning of pre-verbal reasoning; and that the latter is more basic and more important; abstract reasoning would be vacuous without it.

To repeat, my point has only been that complex, discursive reasoning is impossible without language. I don't see why that would even be controversial. Unless I have misunderstood you, you say that even our perceptual experience is culturally constructed; well.human culture itself would be impossible without symbolic language.

:up:

I think what you've written is sophistic nonsense. Saying "thought requires words" means that thinking is impossible without words. Saying some thought requires words means that there are some thoughts which are impossible without using words. My claim was the latter, where "complex" substitutes for and specifies the "some".

Not seeing the relevance.

“Only feeling” is the very core of abstract meaning. It is an impressionistic kind of verbiage. Rather than describing feeling as indeterminate, I would say that the word puts into sharper focus what feeling already locates in a general way. Is feeling non-representational? Is music non-representational? Did you know that if you put a group of people in a room and ask them to draw images that are evoked by a piece of instrumental music played to the group, many would draw similar images? That sounds representational to me. Is a Haiku representational in the way that an instruction manual is? Are there not forms of modern poetry that are abstract in the way that abstract art is? Does metaphorical language represent or invent? — Joshs

I don't think feeling is essential to abstract meaning; abstract meaning consists in generalization. 'Tree" refers to whole class of concrete objects, whereas a class is an abstract object; a concept.

I didn't know that about people drawing similar images after listening to instrumental music. Can you cite references for that study? Does it work with all instrumental music or just some, like for example Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony?

In any case music is gentle, calm, slow, racing, violent, aggressive, chaotic, ordered, happy, sad, eerie, dark, light, and so on and these are all feeling tones, it seems to me. So, if the similarity in the drawings is on account of the feeling tones in them which echo the feeling tones in the music, that would not surprise me.

Haiku is a very "pictorial" genre of poetry; generally it evokes concrete images, the classic being Basho's best know haiku:

The ancient pond

A frog leaps in.

The sound of water.

I am not aware of poetry which is abstract like abstract art is. The Abstract Expressionists aimed to dispense with any representational associations with things of the world such as human figures or landscapes, under the influence of Clement Greenberg, they wanted to produce paintings emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the surface, which were to be judged in purely formal, compositional terms. Yet of course some of these paintings seem to evoke landscape such as Jackson Pollock's Autumn, Blue Poles and Lavender Mist.

So they skirt the edges between representing recognizable objects and evoking the feeling of natural textures: patterns of moss on walls, or the general fractal forms of foliage, rock-faces, clouds and so on. I suppose you could say that evoking generalized forms, as opposed to clearly representing particular objects, is a kind of abstraction, so maybe I'll rethink what I said earlier about "abstract" being an inappropriate label. But then maybe not, because again I think it comes down to evoking the feeling tones, and even representing or at resembling the patterns of these natural forms.

In any case, none of this changes my mind about whether it is possible to think complex discursive ideas without using language. As I said earlier my belief that it is not possible is based only on my own experience and the reports of some others I have put the question to. so I am not totally ruling out the possibility, but find it hard to see how I could be convinced, since any counterargument could only come in the form of reports by others who claim they can do it. So far only @Mww is the only one to have claimed to be able to do anything like this, and going by his descriptions I'm not sure we are even talking about the same thing.

I put it to you that whether or not experience is external, internal, and/or both is something that is not up to us any more than whether or not our biological machinery, the tree, leaves, and light are. Would you agree with that as well?
— creativesoul

No, I think it's just a matter of definition, nothing more.
— Janus

The toddler's experience is what it is regardless of how we define it.
— Janus — creativesoul


Okay. I've quoted the relevant portions of our exchange above. Where you claimed "No, I think it's just a matter of definition", what - exactly - are you referring to? What - exactly - is just a matter of definition? — creativesoul

Since you said that whether or not experience is external etc. is something that is not up to us, and I said I think it's a matter of definition, no more, I think it should have been obvious what "it" was. Anyway, I've already cleared it up in the previous post. so there's no need to go over it again I hope.

You've claimed that experience is a matter of definition and nothing more, and that experience is what it is regardless of how we define it. — creativesoul

No, I didn't claim that. I said that whether experience is thought of as internal or external etc,, is a matter of definition. If you can quote something I wrote that you think claims what you say then do so.

I'll have to respond later; it's 7.22 AM here and I'm off to work...