Asking a question doesn't determine anything as response to it. Invites? Sure. Does not cause any response, I don't think.

If I ask someone "what is the capital of Florida?" and they respond "Tallahassee," would they have uttered the word Tallahassee if I hadn't asked the question? It seems not. Would this not seem to imply that the question plays a causal role in the second utterance?

This can be reduced to absurdity. Can we really have it that a man who charges into a victim's house, threatens them, and then requests sexual acts from them hasn't committed sexual assault because there is no way for a request to cause a response?

The definition is sort of besides the point, I was just trying to express what I intended to you. Although for future reference you might consider reviewing how Popper himself grounds his theory and consider if it is inapplicable to formal expressions and logic, or if rather the entire edifice relies on precisely the fact that it is applicable to logical statements. Because when I was reading it, it seemed like the application to logic was what all the methodological considerations were based around, i.e. an empirical theory is falsified when observations contradict it.

But the real question is: Does your negative ontology "eliminate the impossible," or does it simply eliminate "what is impossible given certain unquestioned and taken-for-granted presuppositions?" Can it only ever say what is impossible from within a given framework and are all frameworks equally valid? Is it a problem for "impossible" or contradictory claims to be considered equally valid?

Because the issue I see with Joshs' arguments, which do have parts of them with plenty of merit, is not the fallibalism or circularity, but rather the total relativism. And the problems related to relativism seem particularly acute when claims about "how the world is," "how experience is," etc. are brought in to bolster the arguments, since, even if I agree with these claims, it doesn't seem I can allow that they are "as valid as any others," and then use them to justify my beliefs. If every position is valid, then we appear to have lost something very important.

So what would Thompson consider to be the difference between his valid thematic and Augustine’s valid approach? It can’t simply be that they contradict each other, since everything exists in a state of contradiction with respect to everything else.

He might say that Augustine’s self-contradicting thematic approach unfolds more slowly and ploddingly than his own, and he prefers approaches that transgress into new territory more aggressively since they bring him pleasure and a richer sense of meaning. We could say Thompson swaps out the ethical notions of refutation , truth and falsity for fast vs slow speeds of transformation.

Again, he might say it, but he'd have no justification for it. For it would be equally valid to say that it is Augustine's approach that unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space. But presumably, in choosing to advance his interpretation, and in choosing to label it "pragmatism," Thompson does not think his speculations are simply equally pragmatic and unpragmatic, worthwhile and not worthwhile, when compared to all other possibilities.

Yes, I am aware of how ways in which Popper specifies the term "falsification" vis-a-vis scientific theories (although in The Logic of Scientific Discovery he is still talking about/grounding the concept in logical contradiction). Hence, "broadly speaking," i.e. the dictionary definition of falsify: "to disprove or remove justification for," since the point I was making has nothing to do with Popper's particular definitions re the logical versus the methodological sides of falsifiability.

The methodological side of Popper's project is based on the fact that "all swans are white," (universal claim) is contradicted by "there is at least one black swan." The second premise would contradict the first (falsify it, remove justification for it, etc.). The rest is a methodological bridge to take advantage of this in the empirical sciences

No. It's a logical expression, not a scientific claim.

And only scientific claims can be falsified? The claim "the Goldbach Conjecture is false," wouldn't be falsified by a successful mathematical proof demonstrating the Goldbach Conjecture?

I don't see how eliminating a metaphysical claim "because it is impossible," wouldn't amount to falsification of that claim under the broad definition of falsification as "to disprove" or "remove justification for."

But then all the semantic meaning of the word bachelor isn't derived from (Male(x) & Adult(x) & ~Married(x)). If it were, you wouldn't need multiple unique integers to encode its multiple distinct meanings.

Made me think of an interesting question though. The unique encoding for each meaning seems like it would resolve the need to distinguish between equivocal and univocal predication. But how would it deal with analogical predication? E.g. "Jake is a snake," meaning "Jake is slippery and devious." Trying to reduce analogy to unique encodings seems like it might be a limit, rather than a benefit for intelligence.

The indirect realism* which the empirical sciences confirm—

Do they? It seems to me like intentionality theory was developed precisely because indirect realism makes naturalists uncomfortable. That is, it's a modification to help exorcise the specter of the Cartesian theater that indirect realism often finds haunting it.

In any event, might Aristotle or Aquinas not hew closer to the modern cognitive sciences, given the dominance of computational theories of mind and information theory? In Aristotle's telling, it is the form of objects that is communicated to us, e.g. the patterns in light waves corresponding to the image a tree (Aquinas' conception of "intentions in the media," is probably the better analogy here). This synchs up pretty well with information theoretic explanations of communications and data processing re sensory systems.

These explanations might also be worked into an indirect realist account, but in their original form I don't think they'd fall under that definition. For Aristotle, we experience the form of the objects experienced, the matter is not communicated, but it is precisely the form that makes an object what it is. It is the intelligibility of the object, whereas the matter is grounding potential. Re essence, form trumps matter, and experiencing objects' intelligibility, even if incompletely, is to experience the object.

But I suppose the bigger difference would be in framing: "we experience representations" versus "representation of communicated form is how things are experienced." I am not sure how much help the empirical sciences will be in resolving this distinction. Likewise, phenominalism or subjective idealism, while certainly not being popular with practicing scientists (or more generally) seem like they could still be formulated such that they are empirically identical with realism or indirect realism.

So, a bachelor's degree is equivalent to an "unmarried man's degree?" But then how do married men and women have bachelor's degrees? It seems like the semantic meaning of the term bachelor is modified by the context here.

I would just consider that the question of analyticity was more focused on if facts could be analytic simpliciter. The fact that, if something is defined as true, then given that definition it is true, is trivial.

We have had a great many threads on this topic. In general, I think your line of reasoning works. However, proponents of uncaused existence generally argue that they do not need to claim that something ever "came from nothing." Rather, they must simply posit that something began to exist, or if positing eternal entities, that "something exists (without beginning or end)." Beginning to exist, uncaused, does not imply "coming" from nothing. It implies that something began to exist, and that prior to its existence it did not exist.

There are some interesting issues re uncaused existence, but they are not the same as claims about "something from nothing."

I am only saying that the agent is the sole discretionary and causative force behind his own actions.

If agent's actions were actually determined by "nothing outside the agent," then it should be the case that agent's actions have no relation to the world. You seem to be engaged in a strange sort of variation of Ryle's Regress.

It depends on the kind of censorship, but wherever one is removing words from the world he is stealing from their creator in particular and from posterity in general

So, if someone spray paints "eat shit," across the front of your house and you paint over it, you are "stealing"?

and violating a number of human rights while doing so. It is both a theft and a vandalism of a sort.

Why is sharing words a human right? Not everything is a human right. Presumably, access to water is a human right because people suffer and die without water. The same is true for food, or being free from summary execution. But what would make the ability to share words a human right? Words, if they do nothing, seem completely irrelevant to human flourishing, so I can hardly see why we must have a right to them.

Further, since words cannot motivate action, and neither can threats, I still don't see how the state telling people not to speak about certain topics, or threatening them, can have any bearing on as to whether people speak about those topics. So, is censorship only bad when it erases words, but fine if it limits itself to telling people not to say certain things and threatening them?

Hell, even if the state shot someone over speaking, it would seem that, since the sole causative force behind actions can never lie outside the agent, the victim's falling to the ground afterwards could not be attributed to the state. Or perhaps this only applies to intentional actions? Even still, if that's the case, then the state torturing someone can never cause them to avoid speaking about certain things. This being the case, it's unclear if most forms censorship are even possible.

And, we certainly can't blame dictators for atrocities carried out by the states they run. After all, they only use words to ask that those atrocities be carried out, and such words cannot cause actions.

Is the "elimination of the impossible," or discovery of "ways the world necessarily could not have been or cannot be described," not, broadly speaking, a form of falsification?

I was bringing up your post as an example of why the Joshs' claim that "we no more falsify a metaphysics than an organism falsifies its environmental niche," itself would seem to invalidate some views re metaphysics.

One could say that Thompson’s position subsumes and enriches Augustine’s without invalidating it.

One could say it, but whether or not they would nonetheless be contradicting Augustine's standpoint is another matter. If I claim that "truth is absolute," and you in turn claim that "yes, truth can be absolute, but only ever relatively," this seems more like negating my claim than "subsuming" it. Further, the claim that "truth can be absolute, but it is only ever absolute in relative terms, based on presuppositions that are taken-for-granted, and people can always accept multiple equally valid, but different presuppositions," itself appears to be an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth." So aside from contradicting the position it claims to still affirm, it also refutes itself.

They are equally valid, but not at the same time and in the same context.

This does not work vis-a-vis absolute statements. If one claim is that something is absolute and inviolable, then a contrary claim that this "absoluteness" is actually relative is not affirming the original claim. The second claim is saying that the "absolute" in the first claim is, in fact, merely contextual. If the claim is that the first claim is both "absolute" and "relative," or that both claims are equally valid (the first claim, and its contradiction) then it seems that we are left in a state where both claims are both true and false, valid and invalid, or neither. But if claims are equally valid in this way, then there is no reason to advance one over the other.

Perhaps some claims are like this, neither true nor false. But were it the case that all claims are like this, there would be no reason for believing it.

That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

The statement that reality does not exist simpliciter, or that there can be no canonical representation of reality as it exists simpliciter, advances both metaphysical and epistemic claims. Given that Thompson claims that this defines what is truly the "task of the philosopher," it would seem to me that these claims are not intended to be taken as being "equally valid/accurate/true/demonstrable, etc." as contradictory claims to the effect of: "The task of the philosopher is to discover the nature of uncorrupted reality and figure out how to accurately represent it."

Or, at the very least, if we are to embrace a position like Thompson's we must have some way of determining between it and Saint Augustine's formulation that "truth is equivalent with being; what is true is, and what is false is not." To say that Thompson is right is to say that Augustine is wrong. To say that they are both right, is still to say that Augustine is wrong.

Further, if we're to have any faith that one understanding should be held in higher regard than the other, then we must have some non-arbitrary means for judging between them. The invocation of pragmatism itself implies some sort of yardstick by which the plurality of positions to be considered are vetted. To be pragmatic is to judge things based on practical concerns. Pragmatism requires that there be a non-arbitrary way to decide if a theory under consideration actually furthers practical interests. If there is no basis for such judgements, or if all metrics by which theories might be judged are equally valid, then pragmatism is not possible. Every position can be said to equally advance or fail to advance practical interests.

Likewise:

Our attempt to make our way around a constantly changing world is not fundamentally a matter of belief, but of engaged coping. Engaged coping has nothing to do with conceptual representation. It is more like intuiting the next move in a dance as it contextually unfolds.

We no more falsify a metaphysics than an organism falsifies its environmental niche.

These statements appear to make/be based on particular assertions about the nature of human experience, anthropology, and metaphysics. I might agree that they are accurate assertions, but in virtue of what would they be considered accurate? If they can only be considered accurate in terms of arbitrary presuppositions, then their contraries are equally valid.

Claims about the falsifiability of metaphysical claims seem to themselves make metaphysical, or at least epistemic claims. We could consider 180 Proof's earlier comment here:

My jam is negative ontology (i.e. a deductive process of elimination of the impossibie, or ways the world necessarily could not have been or cannot be described), a rationalist near-analogue of negative theology. :smirk: — 180 Proof

All validation cannot depend on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn necessarily be based on unquestionable presuppositions we take for granted. If this were the case, then all judgements re validation/truth/accuracy etc. would be equally valid, merely a matter of which presuppositions we have embraced.

I am confused by this interchange. Is your claim that words cannot play a causal role in people's actions or that this would amount to magic?





The assertion that a person pointing a gun at another person and threatening them plays no causal role in their state of mind or actions would be bizarre. Does sense perception ever play a determining role in behavior or belief? If so, why are threats or words different? If not, how does this not entail that communication is impossible, the external world irrelevant, and solipsism?

How do you explain cars stopping at red lights if what is communicated by the red light cannot play a determining role in their behavior? But if sense perception can determine behavior, and words are experienced through sense perception, I fail to see what the difference is.

In particular, here the confusion seems to come from the idea that if a threat has not totally determined the threatened's actions and state of mind, it cannot play any role in determining their actions and state of mind.

A counterfactual analysis might be helpful here. Would the bank teller have been afraid and given the robber the money if the robber had not threatened them and demanded the money?

dynamics of persuasion has it backwards and a belief in it only leads to censorship, violence, and tyranny.

Why is censorship bad? If words cannot be responsible for how anyone acts or how they feel, then what does censorship change about the world? How does censorship even work? If the state says, "do not speak about the merits of communism or we will shoot you," according to your claims, it is solely the threatened populace who is responsible for any actions or feelings vis-á-vis these threats. If the bank robber isn't responsible for the bank teller's fear or for their handing the money over to them, then I hardly see how the state's censorship efforts could be responsible for people not talking or writing about banned subjects.

It would seem your claims about the inefficacious nature of language, and communication more generally, along with your claims about were responsibility rests for actions, undermine your claims re censorship.

Perhaps my stance appears to be an unquestioning taking for granted because it appears so alien to your way of thinking. But I continually question everything about my philosophy.

It doesn't seem unquestioning at all. I was referring back to your statement that: "only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive."

I am having trouble understanding how validation, proof, evidence, demonstration, etc. can rest only on what is taken-for-granted. If this was true, I don't get how radical relativism and skepticism wouldn't follow. Epistemology can be circular and falliblist, but it cannot be arbitrary without epistemic pessimism seeming to take hold.

There are many theories of truth, and our situation would be hopeless if we could only decide between them based on arbitrary criteria, or if we had to adopt one to vet the others. Yet it seems reasonable that might agree that all such theories to date are unsatisfactory in some ways, and yet still allow that particularly poor theories of truth don't hold water. For example, determining that it is not credible that truth is "whatever Sally proclaims to be true," does not require that one endorse any particular theory of truth, particularly if Sally has made the utterance "everything I say is false."

Perhaps I am misreading the use of the term "definitive" here? Is it supposed to refer to some sort of formalized, absolute definition of what constitutes validation, as opposed to simply being decisive vis-á-vis determining beliefs?

I am personally not a fan of deflationary theories of truth that attempt to reduce the concept to the domain of formal systems alone. Human beings cannot help but have beliefs about what is or is not the case, and "truth," is simply the most common word used to refer to this essential element of human experience. We could not act if it were otherwise. So it seems like some primitive conception of veracity is something that needs to be explained, and deflationary theories sequester truth rather than explain it (or sequester it in order that they might explain it).

Plus it leads to the regrettable tendency in 20th century philosophy to suppose that if we cannot yet adequately explain something it simply must be a pseudo problem or else something to be eliminated, a tendency that reaches comic heights in the move to solve the problem of explaining conciousness by denying that it exists.

A metaphysics is the basis of the intelligibility of truth and falsity, not the product of empirical ascertainment of truth and falsity.

But at any rate, I would still disagree with this. One might find metaphysics to be a confusing mess and accept no metaphysical theory, and yet still find statements about truth and falsehood intelligible and use them effectively in their daily lives.

I don't want to sound like a broken record, but my reading on emergence has caused me to question if the concept might be fundamentally broken. It takes as its starting point a substance metaphysics of things as primary (substance in Aristotle's use of the term, where primary substances are individual objects). Due to problems highlighted by Hume re extrinsic "laws of nature," and Kripke's widely popular essentialist response to these issues, we end up with a starting point where the universe is a collection of individual things that "do what they do because of what they are."

If you start from this position, and allow for the empirical finding that larger things appear to be "made up of," or "composed of," smaller things, then you're going to have problems explaining emergence. It is a problem not unlike Hume's Guillotine. Strong emergence of the sort that would seem to resolve all the problems posed by consciousness seems to be precluded by our starting axioms.

In general, I think the empirical support for reductionism is weak, and this should make us question starting points that would seem to lead us to posit it as essential. For example, chemistry is a mature science, but it has yet to be reduced. There all all sorts of questions about "what actually constitutes reduction," but in general it seems that actual reductions are quite rare. Unifications seem far more common, but unifications point in the other direction. They represent the ability to explain disparate phenomena in terms of more general and universal principles, rather than in terms of component parts. Often, such general principles act on multiple levels of scale in a sort of fractal recurrence, and the presupposition that the smaller scale in more ontologically primary seems unwarranted.

There is no prima facie reason why wholes must be definable in terms of parts rather than vice versa. Emergence presupposes that it is exactly this sort of explanation that is required though, that the parts must explain the behavior of the whole, even if the properties of the whole cannot be known from the parts. Is this setting us up for faliure? Can one declare that we must find a means of describing how it is that wholes can have properties entirely missing from parts, and then hope for success in finding an explanation where an analysis of parts explains this phenomena?

Grand unification is normally thought of in terms of leaving us with "one type of thing." But it seems like it could as well be thought of as getting us to just "one thing." It's the difference between "things act as they do because of what they are," and "the entire world does what it does because of what it is."

If we ever get down to a unification where there can be said to only be one "type of stuff," then things doing what they do because of "what they are," ceases to do any explanatory lifting. All explanation ends up coming from change — process — and empirically, all process appears to bleed across the defining lines of "things." This, to my mind, would reveal "parts" to be abstractions, and thinking of properties as "emerging from parts," to simply be a misleading paradigm, a bad starting point. It might be more correct to say that "parts emerge from abstraction," and the thing to explain is how we lose properties as we chop things up, how deficit emerges, not new properties.

It doesn't always suppose multiple different acts. I've seen it framed as a single act preforming multiple "functions." Other schemes are more categorical. You could think of speech as a genus of activity, and within that there are declarative statements, interrogative statements, etc.

TBH, I don't recall anyone I've read taking up the question of "how many acts is it?" People mention speech as "involving multiple acts," but this isn't analyzed in the context you seem to be thinking of it in. It's more of a way of saying, "the act is composite and serves multiple ends." This isn't unique to language, you could argue even something like a baseball pitch can serve multiple functions (e.g. throwing from the stretch as a signal to deter stealing, brush backs, etc.) and involves multiple acts (e.g. the wind up, release, etc.).

I can sort of see why it's unexamined. How would it be relevant? If we were talking about the metaphysics of "events," I could see how it might be relevant for there to be "multiple events," that supervene on a single act, or something of that nature. However, when it comes to speech I think the idea that it can be used for simultaneously disparate ends is sort of taken for granted.

For example, re declarative sentences versus informational ones, the defining feature of the former is said to be that it includes the assertion of the speaker as an agent, and thus someone responsible for their own veracity. Is this act of assertion a different act than the vocalization itself? It seems to me like this is akin to asking if your individual fingers' movements while playing a song on the guitar represent their own acts or if it is all part of "playing a song." The process is decomposable, although you lose elements of it, but whether or not it is worth decomposing depends on what sort of question you're asking. Which is all to say, I can't think of anything in philosophy of language that hinges on "how many acts are being performed when x."

But you could probably make a case for defining it either way.

Gotcha. If imagine = visualize, it makes sense. Although I think it might make it sort of trivial in that it would seem to hold for the essential elements of all the senses. Can one imagine a sound without any volume or pitch? Can we imagine a smell without odor? It would seem not. But does this mean we don't learn about pitch through experience? And do smells necessarily have extension in space?

It seems to me like our imagining being unable to transcend the essential qualities of each sense could as well be taken as evidence that we must only learn about these things through experience, since we seem unable to fathom our way around the essential elements of each sense. Having never seen without our eyes or heard without our ears, we are stuck imagining only permutations of what has come before, bound by their limitations.

The question of time being a necessary component of imagining is very interesting though. It gets to the inherently processual nature of experience, which, as a fan of process metaphysics, I find underappreciated. Aristotle actually gets at this in the Posterior Analytics and De Anima, but he doesn't do too much with it.

I have considered before if an even more process-centered approach might dissolve some of the issues that crop up in Kant. If the noumenal causes the phenomenal, and the phenomenal causes us to act in certain ways (thus affecting the noumenal), then it would seem like we really don't have two distinct processes at all. The two would be continually bleeding into one another. But if we begin with "things," then it does seem like we cannot have one sort of thing "turning into" another. Granted, this wouldn't really apply to readings of Kant as a full subjective idealist.

In fact, as I write this, I realize this is part of Hegel and Houlgate's critique of Kant. There is, on the one hand, the charge that the presupposition that experiences are of objects is dogmatic. But there also seems to also be an undercurrent of critique that the "things" presupposed are essentially things, as opposed to process as well.

Kant points out in the Transcendental Aesthetic that we can't imagine an object that doesn't have spacial or temporal extension. He's borrowing the form of Hume's Bundle Theory argument. If you can't conceive of objects without spacial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway.

Is this true though? I feel like I have a pretty easy time imagining abstract objects without having to attribute extension to them. I don't know if I buy theories that involve propositions as abstract, eternal objects, but I've never really had a problem of conceptualizing them.

I would agree that humans have a conception of validation and invalidation,

Right, and this is validation of what? Validation that something is or is not the case. Or in more fallibilist terms, that something appears or does not appear to be the case. But what is broadly meant by "appears true or false" is precisely that something appears to be the case. This difference just seems like semantics.

Do I claim that my theory of validation is true? I can only say that it is the way that my experience of events makes sense to me in this moment.

But is such "making sense" necessarily based on unquestionable presuppositions that must be taken for granted? Fallibilism, allowing for uncertainty, is not self-refuting, but the statement that all claims are ultimately arbitrary appears to be. I couldn't really tell which you were advancing here. Is "all [you] can say is that [your] way of construing matters has continued to be relatively consistent," because the only thing that can be known is the contents of your own past experiences (in which case, why even trust your own memory?) Or is this simply a claim about how we can always be surprised by the future?

You seem to be missing my point, which is that experiences of truth and falsity are (initially) prephilosophical. Every human has some conception of truth or falsity, even if they have never spent much time pondering metaphysics. There is a naive sense of true and false that is endemic to the human experience.

So, you might consider that this...

You might counter that i. the case of Grug and Ugg, their breakdown in trust doesn’t negate that there is a basic fact at stake, but I would argue that even the seemingly simplest and most straightforward example of a factual situation involves a change of the sense of meaning of what is at stake , and thus a change in the interpretation of what is the case. This is what the later Wittgenstein was trying to teach us about how language doesn’t just act as a connector better subject and object, but always refreshes the sense of what an object is in the very act of using words.

...is a particular theory of truth, grounded in metaphysical assumptions. It is an attempt to explain something we already know to exist in experience. But you could as well argue that the truth and falsity are best explained by the ways our language instantiates propositions (eternal, abstract objects). These propositions are "made true," iff a truth maker exists for them in the world, and a statement is true when it expresses a true proposition.

These are competing narratives of truth, attempts to explain what is already before us. But how are we to compare between these if they are essentially based on unquestioned (and thus unquestionable/arbitrary?) presuppositions? That you advance one theory of truth over another seems to presuppose that they are not all equally arbitrary, equally grounded in nothing.

We will only ever know reality as constraints and affordances that are responsive to our schemes

This is, likewise, a particular claim about metaphysics, anthropology, and epistemology. Is this true? It seems to me you could as well claim that this is simply a flawed paradigm. It seems to make it so that we can only know things about our cognitive schemes, and yet no human being actually lives like their assertions of veracity only refer to their individual cognitive schemes. At the very least, they think their claims apply to other's cognitive schemes, else there would be no point in communicating.

The flaw in the paradigm would be to see cognitive schemes as a barrier between man and the world, as opposed to "the means by which the world is grasped." That is, it would be akin to arguing that man cannot see because he needs eyes to do so, or cannot write because he needs something to write with.

But again, these are attempts to explain basic facets of the human experience. And the question returns: by what metric are these explanations judged? Why assert one over the other?

If such explanations aren't said to be true, but are rather "invitations to try on for size a particular way of thinking about matters," why should anyone accept such invitations? If such explanations are always grounded in what is unquestionable, then it seems like any way of "thinking about things," is arbitrary, in which case, why care about how others think about things? Appeals to creativity, avoiding fascism, pragmatism, etc. all presuppose that, in point of fact, there is some external metric by which these explanations can truly be said to be more or less (insert criteria here).

This seems in a similar vein to your assertion that every scholar "reads different Nietzsches." If, when we read a text, everyone reads a different text, and no one's version of the text is subject to correction, then it seems like communication will become impossible. If my version of Nietzsche is totally divorced from others' interpretation of Nietzsche, if there is no grounds for judging between them re veracity, then we are left with each text having an infinite number of valid meanings, and no message is truly communicated.

This seems mistaken to me. We can allow that there is no "one objective reading" of a text, and yet still allow that interpretations can be inaccurate. If someone were to claim that their reading of Plato reveals that he is a nominalist philosopher who thinks that the apparently shared traits of different objects are just names we have come up with for similar phenomena in sense perception, they would simply be reading Plato backwards. A sign that says "closed," on a store cannot be rightly interpreted as the merchant inviting people to come in.

To my mind, the mistake here is to think that, because ideas of truth are bound up in conceptual schemes, that it reduces to nothing else. Further, it's a mistake to think conceptual schemes are arbitrary. If this were the case, knowledge would be impossible. We would live in entirely different worlds if there was not something external to us to make our conceptual schemes synch up (and thus something to judge such schemes by). More importantly, our reasons for thinking we are correct about this even being the case would be equally arbitrary.

Edit: you might also consider that people can voice propositions about other people's mental states. But it seems impossible to deny some sort of non-arbitrary, prephilosophical reality that obtains as respects statements like "you aren't in pain," or "you think this tastes wonderful." To say that these are completely malleable statements, that "we can both be right depending on our starting principles," as to whether something causes you to experience pain, is essentially to erase the truth of other minds.

It's just a comment on methodology in the field writ large. I was thinking this makes it, in certain respects, quite different from apophatic theology, since there will still be a focus on the definite and empirical sense data. Placing "a cloud of forgetting," and a "cloud of unknowing," between the soul and all things might be a strategy for contemplating the truly infinite and divine, but it won't seem to do for giving an accounting of metaphysics. The methodology of the apophatic theologians, such as Saint John of the Cross, tends to focus on separating from all sense data and concepts, whereas, in some respects, metaphysics seems to require these even if the goal is of the discipline would be defined in negative terms.

I mean that all makes sense, although my understanding was that the question of whether or not space-time is infinitely divisible was an open one. I know there are a lot of physicists who claim that the universe must be computable, in which case it cannot truly require the reals to represent it, and space cannot be truly infinitely divisible. But from what I understand, experiments to support this idea have been wholly inconclusive. There are also folks like Gisin who argue that intuitionist mathematics is the better structure for representing physics, but they are a small minority (albeit seemingly a growing one). But there certainly do seem to be contrary voices who argue that mathematics based on true continuities, infinite points between any two points, works best for predicting empirical results precisely because it does represent the world. That is, perhaps not all elements of the world are infinitely divisible, but some, like space-time, would be.

I know Paul Davies claims to have an experiment that might settle this issue but it's currently impossible to actually perform, involving an insane number of beam splitters and accuracy. Other experiments looking at how light travels from distant stars have made predictions about how it must travel if space conforms to a finitist model, but the data ended up supporting a continuity, although from what I understand, these are no way definitive experiments. And then we can consider that certain discrete limits, like the Landauer Limit, appear in experimentation to turn out not to exist.

So, part of the problem might be that there seems to be informed disagreement on what represents truth here. Although, I do agree that it is problematic when a position becomes the "default" through inertia, despite not having strong evidence for it being the case over the contrary position. I would say reductionism is a strong example of this, where actual empirical support would seem to leave the question undecided, but it remains the default anyhow.

I find the intuitionist view fascinating because it would seem to allow for potential infinites of division, but not actual ones, a sort of near reintroduction of Aristotle.

The issue of betrayed trust is sort of besides the point. A person can utter an obvious falsehood without intending any deception, and our senses can also deceive us. The point is that notions of truth and falsity are prephilosophical. Obviously, such things are context dependent. One cannot be told false statements outside of some sort of social contact, but that broad context is also universal to the human experience.

But again, I'd ask:

So the truth of what you just wrote only holds within the context of taken-for-granted, unquestioned presuppositions?

Ah, I think I see the confusion. I meant "metaphysics," as in the entire discipline, not a particular metaphysics. It's much easier to locate the set of impossibilities if people are kind enough to posit them.

As much as some philosophers try to be an exception to this (Hegel's logic for instance, tries to be "presuppositionless"), authors are invariably influenced by the ideas that have come before them. After all, what would be the point of doing metaphysics if you thought someone else had adequately explained the entire topic?

Only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive. A metaphysics is the basis of the intelligibility of truth and falsity, not the product of empirical ascertainment of truth and falsity.

So the truth of what you just wrote only holds within the context of taken-for-granted, unquestioned presuppositions?

Why must all presuppositions be "taken-for-granted" and "unquestionable?" First principles seem eminently questionable. It also seems eminently possible to put forth first principles that can clash with reality. E.g., the claim that all things are essentially composed of fire, water, air, and earth doesn't seem to jive with these being decomposable into smaller constituent parts.

Edit: this also seems overly foundationalist. Truth is a prephilosophical concept. If Grug tells Ugg not to eat the last mammoth ribs, goes to get fire wood, comes back, finds the mammoth ribs gone and mammoth grease and bits of ribs hanging from Ugg's beard, and Ugg tells him "I did leave the ribs," Grugg's judgement that this is false doesn't rely on metaphysics. I would say rather than truth appears to be one of the things metaphysics and epistemology must explain. That statements might be true or false is a basic fact of the world to be explained.

I think, Count, Spinoza's Ethics exemplifies an exception to such a rule (pace Hegel).

Maybe; I was thinking more of the back and forth between different metaphysicians over history.

Ate you suggesting that a metaphysical scheme is the kind of thing that can be proven true or false?

I mean, this really depends on what you mean by "proven." Certainly, some metaphysical theories might be shown to be contradictory via actual proofs, but in general they get shot down in a more abductive manner. You can't prove that Ayn Rand's Objectivism isn't good metaphysics with an abacus, but you can certainly make very good arguments that it's fatally flawed.

That's an interesting post. I've seen a few arguments that the success of eternalism in physics, to the extent that many popular physics texts openly suggest "eternalism is what physics says is true," largely flows from similar assumptions in mathematics. That is, it's a similar case of "this is how we think of mathematics, so this is how the world must be."

I am not sure if this is so much a problem with mathematics though as it is with how it gets applied to the sciences and philosophy. It seems to me that infinite divisibility might be worth investigating even if it doesn't accurately reflect "how things are."

i.e. What does "esoterica" significantly add (or subtract) that "exoterica" is missing in philosophy?

I was actually going to make a thread on just this subject. I think that, as we try to get more precise and definite in our language, we can begin to lose our grasp on a description. In part, I think this has to do with our cognitive limitations. There is only so much information we can consume at once. We rely on compression to understand complex ideas, and this in turn means that we rely on a partially subconscious understanding of terms that we do not fully "unpack" in consciousness. E.g., if you have studied "Hegel's dialectical" you don't need to fully unpack what it entails to evaluate passages mentioning it.

What seems like obscurity, or poetry, then, can be a means of communicating a more dynamic message. We can communicate things that, if we tried to be more definite, would be lost in an avalanche of detail. For example, I could describe my son's water bottle to you as "orange and deep blue, with little sharks with space helmets on floating around in space on it." You don't have a great idea what it looks like, but you have the essentials. If I tried to describe it without referring to the dynamic whole, i.e. that it is a water bottle of such and such color, and rather turned to describing minutia,listing off the hex codes of the various colors used, etc. you might have no idea what sort of object I was even describing.

So much milage can be made out of obscure thinkers like Heraclitus because their poetic style is very dynamic. Similarly, Dante can communicate a wonderful picture of medieval philosophy that is enhanced by its poetic nature.

Heisenberg had a similar sort of intuition re language that he tried to set down.

As Heisenberg describes the basic problem in his 1942 manuscript, science translates reality into thought, and humans need language to think. Language, however, suffers from the same fundamental limitation that Heisenberg discovered in nature. We can focus our language down to highly objective degrees, where it becomes particularly well defined and hence useful for scientists studying the natural world. But to the extent we do so, we necessarily lose another essential aspect of words, namely, their ability to have multiple meanings depending on how we use them.

The first nature of language Heisenberg calls static, and the second, dynamic. While all humans use language at varying points along these spectrums, physicists exemplify the static use, while poets exemplify the dynamic use. Where scientists very much depend on the static quality of words for their ability to pin down exact descriptions of their objects of study, they do so at a cost: “What is sacrificed in ‘static’ description is that infinitely complex association among words and concepts without which we would lack any sense at all that we have understood anything of the infinite abundance of reality.” As a result, precisely insofar as perceiving and thinking about the world depend on coordinating both aspects of language, a “complete and exact depiction of reality can never be achieved.”

William Egginton - The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

I would just add that bandwidth is also an issue here. You can't hold a long description all in your mind at once. Poetics help with compression.

'Surround Russia's shores'? You are so out of your element that it is comical. Trident II has the range of 7500 km. Tomahawk's range is 2500 km. That is, a SLBM submarine, to reach the same targets as the Redzikowo base, needs to be... in the middle of Atlantic. In fact, SLBMs can reach the exact same targets from the OTHER side - while sailing around Alaska. Not to mention the Mediterranean Sea... Your fundamental mistake is that you are repeatedly doing 'analyses' based on your very limited knowledge of the facts.

This is sort of a red herring. The threat from Aegis Ashore is that it can shoot down Russia's ballistic missiles, not that the cells there could be used to launch an attack. Aegis interceptors have shot down SRBMs, IRBMS, and even ICBM targets in public tests. For intercepting Russian missiles, location is indeed incredibly important, and Aegis Ashore systems, be they in Poland or Korea, offer interception options that naval assets, being necessarily bound to the sea, can't offer. Plus, they don't have to go into port for maintenance.

You are right though that those sites do not worry Russia because of new US strike capabilities. The B-2 and B-21, which offer the possibility of a large, undetected, first strike, are far more dangerous in terms of decapitation/counter force attacks. The threat rather is that US ABM might become comprehensive enough that pounding the table and yelling about your mostly 40-year-old nuclear arsenal is no longer convincing. This is critical in that Russian behavior re Georgia or Ukraine would probably be dealt with the way the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was dealt with, but for their nuclear arsenal.

If anything, the Ukraine War has only made this threat more acute, as it has simultaneously shown the weakness of Russian conventional forces and destroyed Russia's vast supply of old Soviet assets. Not only this, but it certainly has to call into question the readiness of Russian nuclear assets, given the corruption and lack of preparation shown in the rest of the armed forces. After all, they are, on paper, maintaining an arsenal 33% larger than the US one on a budget less than 2% of the size. The US nuclear budget, which we know to have been quite inadequate for the upkeep for all the weapons allowed under current treaties, is about the size of the entire Russian defense budget prior to the war. Nuclear weapons are not cheap, and they also aren't the sort of thing you can stick on a shelf and expect to work at a moment's notice years later. Tritium-based weapons from the Cold War are highly unlikely to actually work (not that anyone should bank on that lol).

To answer your last question first since you're right, in my thinking, that is always implied. If any human (necessarily meaning humans with that seemingly unique human Consciousness) pursuit including expressions are necessarily Fictional, then so is This expression, and so on. But the so called liar's paradox, paradoxically affirms my hypothesis (and paradoxically, I have to assume my hypothesis is valid for this present point to work). It reveals a defect that (yes, I am necessarily also that defect, always implied) one would think doesn't belong in Truth. Paradoxes reveal a crack in the foundation...therefore of Fiction. Truth (if we are even qualified to address It, and, we're not) wouldn't have any cracks.

...and yet here you are, trying to argue for a view of what is true, or at least "what is the case." I don't think it can be otherwise. Even the thinkers most dedicated to negating the idea of truth, the unabashed solipsists, still feel the need to speak their conception of truth into the intersubjective space we all inhabit. To me, this bespeaks the essence of human person as an agent necessarily involved in veracity.

Further, living into veracity can clearly be done well (e.g. Socrates, Spinoza, etc.) or poorly (Plato's shameful Protagoras, or his nihilistic and unhappy Gorgias, although we must remember, for veracity's sake, that these are no more the real men than Euripides' Socrates in The Clouds). If we cannot live like our beliefs are true, it seems like we are in danger of living poorly.

Truth is slippery, but it also asserts itself in our lives. We can talk about scientific narratives as fictions all we want, and there might be a grain of truth in these critiques. However, at the end of the day techne, the ability to use a model of the world to enhance our casual powers (to cross continents in a day, create the internet, etc.) talks, bullshit walks. "The truth will set you free;" it allows you to do new things in ways falsity will not. Something is asserting itself when a flying machine based on the principles of lift and aerodynamics soars into the sky, while another based on different principles crashes to the ground. Techne is the proof of gnosis.

are you suggesting Language and, I would presume, Reason, pre-exist their emergence in the human experience?

Language pre-exists any individual human's experience, yes. Language is itself a species of communication, and so elements of it pre-exist humanity, or even the hominid genus. Aside from children who are locked away from the world, who, if they live, end up with profound disabilities, all humans are emersed in language from the very outset of their lives. Language itself is determined by the nature of human experience. How could it be otherwise? Such experience is necessarily, by nature, communal and intersubjective, and it is through this that predication and judgement become essential to human experience.

Reason can be defined in many ways. Animals have some aptitude for what we might call reason, and so reason would seem to pre-exist humanity. More importantly, reason qua human reason preexists any individual human, and we are immersed in it from birth.

Does "reason" exist "out there," prior to life? This seems to come down to how one defines reason. If we define it as necessarily involving awareness, first person subjective experience, then it would not appear to pre-exist life. But scientists have no problem referring to "the logic of thermodynamics," and we have no difficulty in applying the "tools of [our] reason" to the world. So, regardless of how we define reason, it seems that, if any knowledge of the world is possible, at least parts of the world must be intelligible. Intelligibility suggests a certain sort of reason, although I prefer the old term logos here in that it is less bound up in the subjective elements of rationality.

If intelligibility didn't exist "out there," we should have no reason to think that the intelligibility in our minds should be anything like that of other minds. If our reason is sui generis, unrelated to how the world is, then we cannot appeal to things like natural selection for explaining why different minds should view the same world. But if this is the case, then even if we allow for the possibility of other minds, we should be forever isolated from them.

There is a strong pragmatic argument against this sort of radical skepticism. Moreover, I'd argue that it's actually quite impossible for a human being to live as if this was true. Empirically, it also seems to have problems. If our world of intelligibility floats free of the world, what should cause it to be intelligible? Why shouldn't we live the way stroke victims describe their experiences, with a random stream of sensation, one second recognizing intelligibilities, the next unable to decipher text? The uncaused has no reason for being one way and not another; yet it surely seems like the structure of human experience has causes.

Anyhow, at the risk of being long winded, I will include Sokolowski's summary of how Husserl grounds predication and syntax in the essentials of human experience.

[Husserl] tries to show how the formal, logical structures of thinking arise from perception; the subtitle of Experience and Judgment is Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. The “genealogy” of logic is to be located not in something we are born with but in the way experience becomes transformed. Husserl describes the origin of syntactic form as follows.

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold. We do not focus on this identity; rather, we focus on some aspects or profiles, but all of them are experienced, not as isolated flashes or pressures, but as belonging to a single entity. As Husserl puts it, “An identification is performed, but no identity is meant.” The identity itself never shows up as one of these aspects or profiles; its way of being present is more implicit, but it does truly present itself. We do not have just color patches succeeding one another, but the blue and the gray of the object as we perceive it continuously. In fact, if we run into dissonances in the course of our experience – I saw the thing as green, and now the same area is showing up as blue – we recognize them as dissonant precisely because we assume that all the appearances belong to one and the same thing and that it cannot show up in such divergent ways if it is to remain identifiable as itself. [It's worth noting the experiments on animals show they are sensitive to these same sorts of dissonances].

[Such experience is pre-syntactical, nevertheless] such continuous perception can, however, become a platform for the constitution of syntax and logic. What happens, according to Husserl, is that the continuous perception can come to an arrest as one particular feature of the thing attracts our attention and holds it. We focus, say, on the color of the thing. When we do this, the identity of the object, as well as the totality of the other aspects and profiles, still remain in the background. At this point of arrest, we have not yet moved into categoriality and logic, but we are on the verge of doing so; we are balanced between perception and thinking. This is a philosophically interesting state. We feel the form about to come into play, but it is not there yet. Thinking is about to be born, and an assertion is about to be made…

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons. We achieve a proposition or a meaning, something that can be communicated and shared as the very same with other people (in contrast with a perception, which cannot be conveyed to others). We achieve something that can be confirmed, disconfirmed, adjusted, brought to greater distinctness, shown to be vague and contradictory, and the like. All the issues that logic deals with now come into play. According to Husserl, therefore, the proposition or the state of affairs, as a categorial object, does not come about when we impose an a priori form on experience; rather, it emerges from and within experience as a formal structure of parts and wholes...

This is how Husserl describes the genealogy of logic and logical form. He shows how logical and syntactic structures arise when things are presented to us. We are relatively passive when we perceive – but even in perception there is an active dimension, since we have to be alert, direct our attention this way and that, and perceive carefully. Just “being awake (Wachsein)” is a cognitive accomplishment of the ego. We are much more active, however, and active in a new way, when we rise to the level of categoriality, where we articulate a subject and predicate and state them publicly in a sentence. We are more engaged. We constitute something more energetically, and we take a position in the human conversation, a position for which we are responsible. At this point, a higher-level objectivity is established, which can remain an “abiding possession (ein bleibender Besitz).” It can be detached from this situation and made present again in others. It becomes something like a piece of property or real estate, which can be transferred from one owner to another. Correlatively, I become more actualized in my cognitive life and hence more real. I become something like a property owner (I was not elevated to that status by mere perception); I now have my own opinions and have been able to document the way things are, and these opinions can be communicated to others. This higher status is reached through “the active position-takings of the ego [die aktiven Stellungnahmen des Ich] in the act of predicative judgment.”

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us. Of course, neurological structures are necessary as a condition for this to happen, but these neural structures do not simply provide a template that we impose on the thing we are experiencing...

-Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person

Truth is necessarily something tied to the intersubjective sphere. Truth is contentless without the possibility of falsity, and falsity is only a possibility once subjectivity arrives on the scene. It's a mistake to think truth is impossible to grasp because it lies "out there" beyond the realm of subjectivity.

My jam is negative ontology (i.e. a deductive process of elimination of the impossibie, or ways the world necessarily could not have been or cannot be described), a rationalist near-analogue of negative theology. :smirk:

Would it be fair though to say that such a project requires positive metaphysical assertions that they might be either rejected or granted a stay of execution? It seems to me that metaphysics, like other disciplines, must be dialectical.

Nietzsche states that which is fundamental to the metaphysicians of all ages is the antitheses between values. So I conclude fundamentally metaphysics is a style of exploration of seemingly contrasting values, such as "mind and matter" or "substance and attribute" or "potentiality and actuality" or "good and evil." Metaphysics seems to me to be a dualist's reductionist vision of the world. That isn't to say benefits haven't been derived from metaphysics, but it's like dissecting abstracts thoughts.

This gets to the above point. Many metaphysicians have focused on promoting non-dualism, the unity of all things (e.g. Parmenides, Plotinus, etc.). And yet, to uncover what is meant by unity, one has to deal with an analysis of multiplicity. The process being dialectical, it seems it has to deal with such oppositions.

As Thomas Kuhn showed with respect to scientific knowledge, these larger relevance relations define what is recognized as evidence of the real , and informs all our observations. Such superordinate schemes of interpretation, or paradigms, are what contemporary philosophers mean by metaphysics.

That, or the claim is that such paradigms are the means by which metaphysics is understood. The claim that it's "paradigms all the way down," is itself a particular metaphysical claim that is often rejected.

This was the very first response in the discussion and it might still be the best one. It eschews a direct engagement with the OP's argument and instead offers a better conceptual framework (or paradigm or what have you), one that can replace the worn out assumptions of the early moderns. Philosophical advances tend to be made that way, rather than with direct point-by-point refutations.


The OP begins in the head. Vera is saying, let's begin in the world. My question is for everyone here: is there a serious problem with this?

:up: :100:

Agreed. As Steven Jensen says in his "The Human Person," if one begins in the "box" of the mind (or inside the "box" of language) one never gets back outside of it. The solution is "to not start out from inside the box in the first place." A paradigm shift is required. Ideas are not "what we experience," but rather "how we experience."

It is just like how we write using a computer. We do not say "we cannot write, it is impossible, because it is always a computer (or a pen, pencil, etc.) that does the writing, and a medium (computer, paper, mud, etc.) that receives the writing." We are the ones that write, the computer/pen/finger is the tool we use to perform this act, and the word processor/paper is the medium by which writing is recorded. To see the computer/pen as an insurmountable barrier between us and the capacity for writing is to fundementally misunderstand the relationships at work here.

It is a a fallacy of composition, the bad assumption being that things are infinitely decomposable, that one can take the whole of human action and break it down into "parts" without losing anything. The world is first removed from the analysis , and then we are shocked that the world is gone. It is, in a way, another one of the ways in which smallism, the dogma that all facts about larger wholes must be fully represented in facts about "smaller, and thus more essential," parts leads to a blind alley. "Neurons do not see, thus man is blind."

From the birth of semiotics, the study of meaning, as a distinct area of inquiry with Saint Augustine, we have seen the process represented in terms of a tripartite structure. There is the object known, the sign by which it is known, and that which interprets the sign. Getting stuck in the boxes of ideas or language requires presupposing that signs are an impermeable barrier between objects and interpretants, rather than the means connecting the two and transmitting the intelligibility of objects. The mistake lies in assuming that meaning must be totally reducible to just the interpretant (or in the case of positivism, that truth lies only in the object).


For me, a key realization was that the concerns over being stuck in such boxes are not remotely new. While these are often presented as horrible truths about the limits of knowledge that we stumbled upon after recognizing the "dogmas," of earlier ages, this is not the case. Radical skepticism, getting trapped in the box, the impossibility of communication, relativism — these all show up from the very birth of philosophy. They are in the Platonic Dialogues, and in the pre-Socratics as well. Aquinas comes up with Berkeley's position, but considers it to be a reductio ad absurdum.

They were effectively dealt with through philosophical anthropology, a field now unfortunately neglected. Human beings are essentially involved in veracity. The Sophists announcing the relativism of all concepts, the impossibility of communication or knowledge, the absence of anything that might be called "truth," nonetheless feels the need to convince others that these things "are true." Finding communication impossible, they strike out to communicate this to others. Finding truth impossible to grasp, they set out to make others grasp this truth.

In general, Socrates' strategy is to show how the Sophists don't even pretend to believe their own words. In their abandonment of veracity in principle, they come to stand on nothing, yet even still are spurred on by a vestigial sense of veracity in trying to convince others that "they are right that they cannot be right." The Sophists are generally not rebutted, rather they lapse into sullen silence after it is shown that, if they were right, they should not bother speaking, nor should they even trust in their own opinion.

Some scientists, for instance, may posit that they don't do metaphysics, but the notion that reality can be understood is a metaphysical presupposition.

Exactly. Not to mention that questions like "are virtual particles real?" or "are species real?" are ontological questions about "what truly exists."



My favorite philosophy book I've read recently is Robert Sokolowski's "The Phenomenology of the Human Person." It's a mashup of Husserl and Aristotle relying on a good deal of philosophy of language/linguistics work as well (making it a bit dry). It's interesting in that it starts grounding itself in Husserl and phenomenology, but ends up proceeding through Aristotle to a place very similar to Saint Aquinas.

Sokolowski's contention is that human beings are essentially (by nature) "agents of truth." The phenomenological experience of learning language and human communication entails the statement of truth and performance of veracity. Predication is built into the fabric of human intersubjectivity and is essential, hence man's being the "rational animal." So to, the ability to truly be "an agent," is also tied up in the pursuit of truth, as knowledge of the world is essential to effect change in it.

I would say then that metaphysics is the most general project in this attempt to become agents of truth. More specifically, we could say it's the type of work Aristotle does in the Metaphysics, but also the Categories and the Physics as well (at least re substance). It's an accounting of the most general intelligibilities within reality writ large.

Apologies that I cannot briefly do so. But to put it overly-simply, each of metaphysics (and ontology, for that matter), and the objects of its pursuit, and the person pushing are inescapably bound by (very simply) Language (Structures made of Signifiers stored in memory, operating under a system of rules, having an affect on the Body). It requires no proof here that Language isn't the "thing" it only re-presents the "thing." Thus, it is irredeemably alienated from the Truth at the instance of its manifestation or use. All human experiences, including the noblest pursuits in pure reflection, pure reason, metaphysics, are necessarily bound in Language, where the Truth is displaced (traditionally, "mediated") by what only pretends to be the Truth, or, Fiction.

And truth cannot be known through language? But from whence comes this sui generis language that floats completely free of the world?

It seems to me that language is grounded in human phenomenology. It is grounded in the intelligibility of the world. If human experience has "nothing to do" with truth that would be quite a problem indeed. We would be consigned to radical skepticism and solipsism, unable to know anything. And yet no one lives like this is true.

It seems similar to the problem dreamed up by Locke and Kant whereby we can only ever know ideas and not the mysterious "things in themselves." This seems to simply be looking at things the wrong way. An idea or sensation is something by which we know the world. Ideas are as the carpenter's saw is to a piece of wood. The same might be said of language, although it straddles the intersubjective sphere. The mistake is akin to saying "a carpenter cannot make a chest because only the saw ever cuts the wood."

Anyhow, given we accept the contents of your statement, isn't it then impossible for us to accept that anything you've said is true? It is, being language, rather irredeemably alienated from the truth.

Hegel is often seen as obscure and disregarded. However, his emphasis on 'spirit' in history may overcome the basic dualistic understanding inherent in ideas of mind and body; especially in relation to the idea of qualia and its relationship between science and materialism.

Yes, this is a key pillar of his thought. Hegel saw that it was a mistake to try to reduce all of being to the objective. He resisted the modern tendency to say that only what can be quantified truly exists, the reduction of all being to the language of mathematical physics. He also resisted the contrary tendency towards subjective idealism and relativism, seeing this as a path to solipsism and away from truth.

In Hegel, the objective and subjective, nature and mind, are just parts of a greater whole. Neither can be reduced to the other because neither fully exhausts the limits of being. Both are categories within the greater, all encompassing realm of the "Absolute."

The truth is the whole, encompassing both sides of the subjective/objective equation. The truth of the horrors of World War II or the sublimity of Dante's verse can't be summed up in a phase space map of "all the particles" involved in either. Neither is the truth of an oak tree simply an individual's experience of it. Both sides of being lie within the orbit of a greater whole.

But things are only known through mind, and mind is itself subject to greater world-historical tends. Individuals are the accidents of world historic institutions and movements. The universals that shape mind evolve overtime. E.g., the communism of Karl Marx in 1848 is not the communism of our modern era. Likewise, even out understanding of concrete universals like species and genus has evolved with time.

However, I wouldn't say that Hegel was particularly esoteric. He was obscure, to be sure, and at times a very unable communicator for his ideas, but his is still ultimately a philosophy of intelligibility and rationality, albeit one with a sympathy for the mystic.

---
To the original question in the thread, I don't think the mystics can be fully fathomed through philosophical analysis. Saint John of the Cross, Jacob Boheme, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton — these authors can be examined with the tools of philosophy, but ultimately there is a practical element in what they speak of that doesn't fit with what is generally termed "philosophy," (though this element was an essential part of ancient philosophy).

What they speak of can be understood, but not known. Saint John of the Cross talks of darkness needing to engulf reason that faith might light the apophatic way to divine emptiness. The anonymous English author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," states that a cloud of total forgetting must lie between the soul and all things to glimpse the divine "darkness above the light." These, writers, Pseudo Dionysius, etc. might be engaged with on a philosophical level, but that will only ever reveal half the story. A person who reads John of the Cross but who does not fast and reject comforts, who does not deny the self and grow "poor in spirit," is like a person who reads "The Freedom of the Hills," learns about the techniques of rappelling and building anchors, but has never scaled a single cliff or reached a single alpine summit. It seems to me like a "Mary's Room," type difference, the difference between "reading about," and doing, or of "knowing of," and "being."

Mystical literature is often written precisely to produce such experiences, to insert the experiences of the adept into the head of the reader. But this isn't successful if they are approached in a detached manner.

I do think it's important to distinguish between the obscure or purposely vague and the experiential though. "Esoteric" can refer to the vague as well, but it's a different sort of thing from the mystical.

I don't know if this makes a difference. The relationship the ball (physical) stands in to people (physical) has changed due to the death of all people (a physical change). It only looks different at first glance because physicalism itself tends to have a sort of cryptodualism built into it, such that mental events, which are presumably ultimately physical if physicalism is true, are seen as somehow "less real." Thus, concepts like ownership can seem "less real."

But I don't think this has to be a problem. Physicalism just needs to let go of the flawed idea that everything can be explained in a way similar to mathematical physics. This is a sort of synecdoche by which one aspect of reality, that which is subject to quantification, is taken to be the whole.

Mount Everest is the highest mountain. K2 is the second highest mountain. Mount Everest is destroyed. K2 is now the highest mountain. Something about K2 has changed even though nothing about K2 has physically changed.

This seems to highlight a problem with superveniance rather than a problem with physicalism more broadly. You have a similar sort of problem when a detective can tell that a cup of coffee has been recently prepared because its heat varies from that of the general environment. Information is essentially relational, it does not exist simpliciter.

K2 becoming the tallest mountain after Everest is hit with a meteor or atomic bomb seems like something that is certainly describable in "physical terms." The relationship of mountains' height to one another is a physical relationship, in the same way that a coffee cup having a higher temperature that the ambient environment is a physical relationship between the cup and the environment. The problem is with the idea of supervenience, and perhaps with the idea of discrete objects existing as fundemental ontological objects in the first place. In a universe composed of one universal process, it doesn't make sense to talk of superveniance.

That said, physicalism has commonly been defined in terms of superveniance and causal closure. If you remove these, particularly if you move to a process metaphysics, it starts to be unclear exactly what claims physicalism makes outside of the trivial "everything that exists is physical and only real things have real effects."




The conventions around what constitutes facts versus states of affairs versus events versus propositions in contemporary metaphysics involves a lot of hair splitting. In general though, facts are the bearers of truth values. They are not abstract entities like propositions, but are rather the concrete entities that propositions are "about."

So, a science text book would (hopefully) be full of true propositions that describe facts, states of affairs, and events. It wouldn't contain facts or events themselves, although obviously the way the word "fact" is often used would allow us to say such books are full of facts.

TBH, I am not sure if these distinctions are necessarily useful. How you define truth has a lot to do with how we might view propositions. If truth is conceived of in terms of "accuracy of a description" then truth = fact, since something is always a complete description of itself. Propositions are descriptions of facts, but there can also be facts about propositions.

Really, a modern Porphry needs to come along to write an Isagoge to sort this sort of thing out.

Ignore that anyhow, it's just work around and epicycles. This is the true solution.

Well, I mean, the US already forward deployed its biolabs to Kyiv to work on "Slav-killing super viruses" that would be dispersed into Russia via "bats and pigeons," so nuclear weapons makes perfect sense.

Somewhere in the narrative shuffle, the biolabs theme seems to have been lost though, although if you go back enough pages in this thread...

Seriously, do you really believe in everything those 'sources' and 'indexes' say? Don't you have a bit of criticism of Western metrics and propaganda? It will always be the same. Russia is corrupt and bad. Ukraine is nice and the son we all wish we had.

It might be helpful to look at how such indicies are developed. No methodology is perfect, but they tend to embody the methodological choices political science suggests for such an endeavor. Labeling them "propaganda" doesn't change this fact. Nor do they seem particularly good for fulfilling that function, since generally the leading stories re Freedom House and other publications have been about the decay and sliding rankings of prominent Western nations on a whole host of metrics, particularly the US (and France to some degree). Generally, when you invent an elaborate propaganda ruse to boost your regime, it's headline story isn't going to be your own failures year after year.

And yes, Russia always ranks very highly in corruption and low on political freedom. It also ranks very poorly in metrics that are less easy to massage, e.g., it's sky high HIV rate, it's low life expectancy, it's high levels of violent crime, etc. That indicies attempting to track political freedom or good governance tend to track quite well with these more "tangible," metrics is hardly surprising.

The part about Ukraine is simply not true though. Ukraine is one of the poorest nations in Europe and routinely rates among the worst for corruption and not particularly well on political freedom either. The most you could say about the difference between Ukraine and Russia is that the former has at least moved up, haltingly and with much backsliding, while the quality of Russian governance has mostly atrophied under Putin. Again, this agrees with more tangible metrics, like the very high rate of emigration out of Russia and into the OECD nations. That is, millions of people have packed up and left Russia for the "degenerate West," particularly younger, more educated residents, exactly the class you'd expect to be most frustrated by poor governance and corruption.

I've often considered this. Are we missing some sort of esoteric oral tradition that justifies Plato's claim that philosophers are not fully trained until age fifty, or is it all just obscurantism to add mystique to "philosopher king?" How important is geometry really? It seems like it might be more a sort of "barrier to entry," rather than anything else.

Well, it seems to me that shooting people for having the audacity to think they have the right to live on the land they were born on is part of the problem, not the solution to it.

I'm not even sure if removing the settlers is beneficial. Just as it is beneficial to have Arab-Israelis represent a sizeable part of the Israeli electorate, the same would be true for a Palestinian state. The minority element is a counterweight to radicalism and maximalist agendas. Of course, the settlers will want to be part of Israel, not a Palestinian state, but that's their problem.