I understand that you're aiming at saying that slaves can't march in protest. That's true. Neither can sexually/physically abused children, 19th Century American women who were treated like whores because they'd been left by their husbands, Lakota children who were taken from their parents to be raised white... and on .. and on... and on...

Exactly

The relevant part of the OP is this:

2. Factual legitimacy is in part a function of how much these institutions avoid producing outcomes that are factually 'intolerable' (and thus not tolerated) for this population.

What does 'factually' intolerable mean? It means that people don't tolerate it.

How do people demonstrate that they don't tolerate something?

So (first) you disagree with the OP on the most essential level, then (second) opine that the stuff other people have posted has no real bearing on the OP (which you disagree with), then (third) when people explain why the stuff they posted does have bearing on the OP, you respond by saying you don't agree with the OP anyway?

What a mess.

But you're right, idk how they/we could have eliminated slavery in 1776, or poverty now. I really don't.

Yes, exactly. There seems to be broad agreement here so far, that education involves indoctrination and liberation together. The point I am trying to get to by making the distinction is not that one should be pursued and the other neglected, but that one is measurable, testable, and predictable, and the other is not.

One cannot have a qualification, a competition, a hierarchy, of liberation; it isn't that sort of thing. And this means that this aspect of education is not amenable to science and scientific psychology. It is quite close to the problem of defining the value of philosophy, which philosophy professors' inability to articulate led to the closure of several departments in my country. No product, no funding.

And so there is a strong tendency, amongst politicians particularly, to neglect what cannot be measured, or fitted into a neat slogan. There is much talk here of 'failing schools'. And failure is failure in the measurable, in the grasp of language, mathematics, etc. Failure to bring forth the potential in other ways does not register.

It's easy to register a complaint. What do you want to do about it?

About as well as our present system works for inner cities.

So are you saying our present system should change, or that it should stay the same, bc it works as well as Georgian slavery did, and slavery worked fine for Georgia?

My impression is that neither you nor un actually read the OP.

I can't speak for Un, but I did (& I think Un did too, since his response explicitly drew from it.)

Slavery worked fine for Georgia.

& for Georgian slaves too?

God you're fucking jerk.

Do you find this situation intolerable?

Whereas I hadn't read him in a long time and had a relatively favorable opinion of him from my student days, but rereading this essay now, I've decided that he can't write for shit. For one, I can't imagine that he possibly revised anything in this paper, it had to be a stream-of-consciousness first draft. And he seems to be a completely disorganized, chaotic thinker. — terrapin

Yeah, no shit, as if there was some doubt about you being unjustifiably arrogant and patronizing. You'd probably find conversations furthered better without that attitude. — terrapin

I'd apply myself to addressing that if I thought you were really interested.

Oh stahhhp. Your post was contrarian and you know it. I'm as interested as you are.

What's worked in the past is likely to work in the future.

....like slavery.

And that's it? Or are you cherry-picking a definition? It doesn't have definitions such as "firmly decide" or simply "decide," "make up one's mind," "choose" etc.? That would make the OED kind of suck if it doesn't have those other definitions. Use a dictionary that better captures all of the common nuances of a term.

OED is kind of the gold standard, isn't it? I didn't cherry-pick, that was literally the first definition I looked up. I appreciate that you don't like the definition, but then, I guess the burden is on you to show that your non-standard definition is the right one.

No part of what you quoted from Sellars after this amounts to "realizing that they were wrong and saying that they can guarantee veridicality," does it?

No? It seems clear to me.

So I like the calculus metaphor. I first encountered in about 8 years ago, and I can't say I totally understand it, but I think I get what it's driving at, and its been useful to me (my math isn't great, but I think, if I had the time, I could mount a passable post about how I understand it.) The problem I see with academic Deleuzeianism is that it has no telos, at all. There are some gestures toward its emancipatory potential, politically, but they're bullshit. It takes everything fun and actually useful about Deleuze and turns it into a complex system of shibboleths (immanence!) and taboos (transcendence! as in: "your post is nothing but old religious ideas, in a new register") you can use to identify outsiders.

Does it apply 10 years before the civil war? Or did it never apply? And if didn't apply, ever, then why didn't the slaves emancipate themselves earlier? And if it did apply at some point, then slavery was justified at that point.

I sincerely don't see the path you seem to see out of this deadlock.

Is it?

It is reasonable to think that habits and strategies that have worked in the past will work in the future.

Do you agree this applies to the US plantation system before emancipation?

I'm not sure why you think a governmental institution has to be immortal in order to meet the needs of its citizens. Could you explain that?

It doesn't need to be immortal. A comet could hit earth.

I'm guessing that capitalisation makes some really big difference that is over my head. You are going all Platonic in response to my un-capitalised pragmatism?

You do understand that a process metaphysics is happy with the modesty of self-organising emergence. It doesn't believe in transcendent being?

Yes, I do understand that. What I'm saying is that what makes Ollie Ollie is not that the Necessary and the Accidental have produced this very being. Caps bc they're principles (or aren't they?). If everything's the necessary and the accidental, then to say ollie, this cat (hey this cat) is the intersection of the two, is to say nothing, at all, about ollie. You could be talking about a star or a cell or a neutron. That's self-evident. Isn't it?

As it is, they aren't helpless as the history of slave revolt testifies.

But all of history testifies to no set of institutions ever remaining stable, because things are intolerable, and the argument fails all over again.

I did not expect to like him this much at all. tbh, when I started this thread, before I started reading (beyond the first section) I saw him more as an irksome figure I wanted to know from inside, so I could dismiss him free from any charge of ignorance. But nah, he's great. And I think talking him out with others aids comprehension a lot - Very few philosophers have so much packed into so little space. And you don't necessarily realize how much is packed in until you talk it out. (And then you realize his precise phrasing indexes his own thoroughly dialectical thought. He's speaking so precisely, because he's done the back-and-forth himself. Or it seems like that.) Any one of these sections could be a stand-alone essay.

Know I'm replying late, but:

You are basically saying that my metaphysical model doesn't accord with your belief about the thing in itself - the thing in itself not being allowed to bootstrap ... because that then is in conflict with your own metaphysical logic.

I'm not saying that though. I feel like the thing-in-itself would have to bootstrap at some level. What I'm saying is that you keep measuring the ideas of others against your system, because they doen't satisfy criteria central to your system, but your system itself rests on a brute absolute, exempted from its own criteria. So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong. It's like you've taken a whole bunch of great insights and turned them into one big parlor trick (or, super-secure self-sealing knowledge edifice, if one wants to get psychoanalytic, which I usually do.)

(I'll add that that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. It just means the criticisms you've been levying against street/deleuze don't boil down to anything but: I have a different view.)

The post-truth era of Trump is just what Nietzsche predicted. — Headline

Fake News

My issue is not so much that we actually do what the marketers want us to do but that they plug into a part of us that works in ways we are not fully aware of with consequences we don't fully understand.

I don't disagree with that, I just don't necessarily buy that Advertising's subconscious plugging-in has deeply amplified dissatisfaction. ( Because I think that to be human is be plugged into in ways we're not fully aware of with consequences we don't fully understand. Life is made of a million fleeting inner conflicts. In other words: I don't think that that distinguishes advertising from most things. So, for instance, we may take a class about advertising and not internalize the things the professor hopes we do, yet we'll still be plugged into etc etc )

But literally everything he says has been said often in many other places in public, in the form of talking points of a broad political cluster.

It really does read like an impressionistic mash-up of cliche talking points.

"But all you need now is an iPhone. Everyone can publish their opinion."

"The world changed after 2008"

"The whole post-truth phenomenon is about, 'My opinion is worth more than the facts.' It's about how I feel about things. It's terribly narcissistic. "

"There are some really uncomfortable parallels with the 1930s"


Doesn't mean he's wrong, necessarily, just means he doesn't have much to offer in the way of insight.

Well, thats a huge difference though. Re guarantees we're talking about certainty. That's not the case with "determine."

I disagree. Determine is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: "Ascertain or establish exactly by research or calculation" & Ascertain is defined by the OED thus: "Find (something) out for certain; make sure of:"

how are we getting to the idea that some sense data theorists "realize that they were wrong" and say that they can guarantee veridicality? What the quote that you pasted says is that "there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical." — Terrapin

This is just a matter of reading the first section.

So: After the section I'd already quoted, Sellars continues, describing how the sense-data theorists come to the conclusion "Therefore, given that the foundation of empirical knowledge cannot consist of the veridical members of a class not all the members of which are veridical, and from which the non-veridical members cannot be weeded out by 'inspection,' this foundation cannot consist of such items as seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular."

In other words, this is the sense data theorist following his conclusion about 'there being no inspectible [sic] hallmark' to the bitter end (one which Sellars claims he cannot but be dissatisfied with.) But Then!

The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack. To begin with, the grammatical similarity of 'sensation of a red triangle' to "thought of a celestial city" is interpreted to mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition, that sensations belong to the same general pigeonhole as thoughts -- in short, are cognitive facts. Then, it is noticed that sensations are ex hypothesi far more intimately related to mental processes than external physical objects. It would seem easier to "get at" a red triangle of which we are having a sensation, than to "get at" a red and triangular physical surface. But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers, though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical. — Sellars

The phrase "The idea springs to mind" with which this passage opens signals that a new thought, has occurred, one which appears to offer a way out of the deadlock: Sensations cannot be unveridical.

Not equation but seeing guarantee as a necessary condition of determining - but I'm glad to drop determine and replace it with guarantee.

He says it at the end of the first section (An Ambiguity in Sense Data Theories.) It's the 'unfortunate, but familiar, line of thought' + the paragraph after it.

why would a sense data theorist begin with the idea that no experiences can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical? — Terrapin

Answer:

The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical; and there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical. — Sellars, speaking as the sense data theorist

Ok, got you.

This is why I think it's not a contradiction (while bracketing the legitimate questions of whether there are other problems with the account or whether there even really are theorists who hold these views)

So the view of Sellars' purported sense theorist is not both that there are no experiences which we can be certain are veridical and also that there are some which necessarily are. I agree that this would be absurd, and it's very difficult to imagine someone holding this position. What he's saying instead is that the sense data theorist begins with the idea that no experiences ('ostensible seeings") can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical, but then, upon discovering the idea of a class of necessarily veridical experiences (sensations, sense-data) realizes he was wrong. There are some experiences which are necessarily veridical.

How does that differ from what I posted, which you said is not what you meant?

Yeah, I understand that you're skeptical, but I'm trying to understand why you're skeptical. I provided my interepretation of why, based on what you'd written, you'd think that claim is bullshit. But you said that's not what you meant. So I'm trying to understand what you meant.

That's not what I was saying

Could you point to where I'm misreading you, or possibly re-phrase what you were saying? I'm just trying to pinpoint the exact source of our disagreement.

That's fine - I too could do with some citations or examples early on - but I think he provides ample historical evidence to support his claims (about the claims of others) as the essay progresses.

In any case, I just want to make sure I understand how you understand the claims Sellars imputes to the 'sense-data-theorist.' Was I reading you right?

I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant? — csalisbury

Right. Hence when we talk about veridical and non-veridical "seeing a red and triangular object" we're talking about veridical and non-veridical sense data when we're talking about sense data theorists.

Before going further, I want to back up to the beginning of this thread of argumentation:

It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty — Terrapin

I want to make sure I understand what you were saying here. I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?

Yes, I agree that idealism is not solipsism. There are all sorts of ways to bring other minds in.

Yeah? if every phenomenon is unilaterally determined by the experiencer, how does another experiencer intervene?

@Baden So I hear you on the freudian tit-for-tat. My point, though, is that, if any one us wants to see ourselves as not enchained to simplistic psychological profiling, then we have to also ditch the idea of ourselves as passive receptaclesof ads that inexorably hit their mark. (and I'd add that I'm more liberal than conservative - I'm just suspicious of the grand visions of both)

Freud may not be taught to marketers but he also isnt taught to psychiatrists (except for a few desultory historical notes; or occasionally one whole desultory unit; in rare cases maybe even one quixotic course) But that doesn't mean the DSM isn't deeply indebted to him (it is).

And that brings me to 'cool' - 'cool' is a very complex feeling. For one, the very idea of cool is often tied to not "selling out" so that , in placing a product in conjunction with someone cool, the cool person can be drained of his coolness, and so become incapable of associating the product with coolness.

But in any case 'cool' runs up against all sort of psychological defenses so you cant simply beam cool+pepsi to any one who sees the ad. Tho of course you'll hit some targets, I never claimed everyone is invulnerable to every campaign.

My two cents is un's point demolishes the argument cited in the op entirely. There's nothing more to say. If i were to do a film treatment of The argument in the op, it would involve a drunk plantation owner at a bar trying to sway an unmoved bartender.

If each 'phenomenal world' is entirely dependent on its 'experiencer' then this kind of causal interaction is impossible.

And if each 'phenomenal world' isn't entirely dependent on its 'experiencer' then it isn't solipsism.

(I think you should explore the second option)

Can't an experience be foundational without being able to be known that they are in every (or even most) instances?

Yes, I think so, but then (if you're of a certain bent) it becomes a question of whether its a sturdy foundation. I think ultimately it actually is a cartesian question of certainty, I think terrapin might be right on that score (he just seems to confuse Sellars' view with the view of (Sellars understanding of) the sense data theorist.)

The latter. If someone believes that the very idea of non-veridicality is incoherent, they're not going to have the experience of being in error

right, but then the idea of veridicality is going to be incoherent as well - if you can't understand the one, you can't understand the other.

How is it as though one is seeing a red and triangular object to a sense data theorist if one is not having a sense or impression of a red and triangular object?

You wouldn't be able to, for the sense daa theorist. That's why the latter is claimed to be a necessary condition for the former.

Okay, but I said that it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. Hence that isn't Sellars point if he's making that dubious claim.

I don't know if I understand. It isn't Sellars' claim. It's what he claims the archetypal sense data theorist claims (or at least implicitly believes)

That's not what I'm addressing here by this though: "Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical."

What I'm saying is that it's a logical possibility that Joe, say, believes that sense data are necessarily veridical, where Joe is saying something about sense data correlating with existents that are not themselves sense data, and where Joe has a view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent. That's a logically possible stance for someone to have.

Sure, so long as he has a different explanation of what seems like non-veridical experience (e.g. perhaps he'll have an explanation like the one TGW mentioned earlier: unlicensed inferences/invalid expectations.) Unless you're asking to imagine someone who has literally never had the experience of being in error?

But wait though. Sellars says for example, "The first idea clearly arises in the attempt to explain the facts of sense perception in scientific style. How does it happen that people can have the experience which they describe by saying "It is as though I were seeing a red and triangular physical object" when either there is no physical object there at all, or, if there is, it is neither red nor triangular? The explanation, roughly, posits that in every case in which a person has an experience of this kind, whether veridical or not, he has what is called a 'sensation' or 'impression' 'of a red triangle.'"

The part I emphasized is a description of sense data. "Whether veridical or not," then, is about sense data in this passage (per the explanation of sense data theorists which he's going to be addressing). It's not an issue of veridical versus non-veridical seeings in the sense that Sellars is using that (namely, where a "seeing" is "S has come to believe that x is green").

But the part you emphasized isn't a description of sense data. It's saying (in the voice of the sese data theorist) that sense data is a necessary condition for both any experience of an object and any experience that seems as though its of an object. Note that 'whether veridical or not' refers not to 'a sensation or impression' but to ' an experience of this kind.' And 'experience of this kind' refers to those experiences where it's 'as though [one] were seeing a red and triangular object.'

The end of that paragraph of you quoted the beginning of makes all this very explicit:

The core idea is that the proximate cause of such a sensation is only for the most part brought about by the presence in the neighborhood of the perceiver of a red and triangular physical object; and that while a baby, say, can have the 'sensation of a red triangle' without either seeing or seeming to see that the facing side of a physical object is red and triangular, there usually looks, to adults, to be a physical object with a red and triangular facing surface, when they are caused to have a 'sensation of a red triangle'; while without such a sensation, no such experience can be had.

It's not clear to me how you're using "seeing" there so that it's different than "sensations of red triangles" by the way.

You mean how Sellars is using 'seeing' there? That's a quote from Sellars, not me.

Then why would we be talking about it as if anyone is saying that?

It's claimed by Sellars that sense data theorists do say that, or at least make implicit use of the idea.

Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical.

I think the answer to this is pretty straightforward. They've experienced something that seemed to be one way, but was actually another. Non-veridicality is coherent precisely because we understand the difference between seeming and being. A sense datum, on the other hand, would be necessarily veridical because its seeming is its being (but, again, this would seem to make the veridical/non-veridical distinction itself inappropriate to it.)

That was my immediate thought in response to that, too, but then this struck me: why couldn't it be the case for an idealist (an idealist who adheres to a sense data view in this case) to believe that their sense data could fail to correspond with ideal existents? The only thing that a veridicality/non-veridicality dichotomy requires, logically, is that one's sense data (or one's phenomenal experiences on a view like mine) (a) don't exhaust the world ontologically, and (b) ostensibly have some sort of correlation to things that aren't one's sense data or phenomenal experiences.

Sure, but, with that kind of idealism, we'd have to posit a bigger mind (like God's) that grounds the objects we, finite minds, only see through a glass darkly. This kind of idealism isn't ultimately all that different from realism - both deal with objects 'out there' we have limited access to.

It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty.

But it's not veridical and non-veridical sense data - it's veridical and non-veridical seeings. Or seeings and ostensible seeings. (this is the same point you made above, to Pneumenon "The idea is that sense data are getting something else--whatever is causing them, where we're not directly aware of what's causing them--right or wrong."

So, then, the story goes, the Sense data theorist moves on to this:

The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack. — Sellars, outlining the sense data theorist's course of thought

---------------

Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. — Terrapin

Right, that's Sellars point!

they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical — Sellars

It seems to me that the most obvious way to get this result is to say that the experience in question is identical to the belief. My belief that I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle must be that experience.

Yes, I think Sellars says something similar.

Now it might seem that when confronted by this choice, the sense-datum theorist seeks to have his cake and eat it. For he characteristically insists both that sensing is a knowing and that it is particulars which are sensed. Yet his position is by no means as hopeless as this formulation suggests. For the 'having' and the 'eating' can be combined without logical nonsense provided that he uses the word know and, correspondingly, the word given in two senses. He must say something like the following:

The non-inferential knowing on which our world picture rests is the knowing that certain items, e.g. red sense contents, are of a certain character, e.g. red. When such a fact is non-inferentially known about a sense content, I will say that the sense content is sensed as being, e.g. red. I will then say that a sense content is sensed (full stop) if it is sensed as being of a certain character, e.g. red. Finally, I will say of a sense content that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact. — Sellars

To sense a red triangle is to know that triangle as red.

This stipulated use of know would, however, receive aid and comfort from the fact there is, in ordinary usage, a sense of know in which it is followed by a noun or descriptive phrase which refers to a particular, thus

Do you know John?
Do you know the President?
Because these questions are equivalent to "Are you acquainted with John?" and "Are you acquainted with the President?" the phrase "knowledge by acquaintance" recommends itself as a useful metaphor for this stipulated sense of know and, like other useful metaphors, has congealed into a technical term. — Sellars

Any way you slice it, the 'figure' of the sense-datum theorist, in Sellars' essay, is seeking foundational experiences - experiences which, unlike other experiences, can be determined to be veridical (whereas the others have no 'inspectable hallmark'). The point of this 'figure' is represent a way of thinking which Sellars is going to go on to criticize. (And, without saying I agree with it, I think 'knowing that we know' is an understandable approach, tho I'm not familiar with the literature on the 'kk' principle.)

But maybe we're on the same page here, and I misread your intent in raising the point about knowledge of knowledge.