None of this is much more mysterious than having your mood and thus your behaviour changed by a piece of music. You may be perfectly aware of the process but it hardly matters, it doesn't work on the on that level (unlike a "con"). Does that mean music has a "quantity of conditioning power that is beamed through the sense organs"? Well, if you want to put it colourfully, it does. At a higher level a hypnotist can put you in an extremely suggestible state against which incredulity at his powers is not necessarily a defense. And advertising falls somewhere in between. No claims of magic here; it's a science, if an inexact one...

...Think Pavlov/Skinner not Freud. The traditional basis of advertising psychology isn't all that exotic. For example:

So let's take Pavlov. You take a stimulus that elicits some reaction and place it in conjunction with something else. Food and a bell. The dog is always going to salivate at food. Now what do people most deeply want, what do advertisers usually play to: Belonging, respect, love, inclusion (to be a loser is to not belong, not be respected, not be loved, not be included etc.) Thus the stimulus has to somehow elicit the idea/feeling of belonging/respect/love/inclusion (or the fear of lacking any of those). And then the bell's your product. The problem here is how you elicit the idea/feeling of those things, or their lack, at a level as immediate as the dog's desire for the food. If your super hip everyone's happy and in on the party vision doesn't move someone, they're not going to associate pepsi with belonging or not drinking pepsi with not-belonging. You can also go a step further and notice that people these days seem feel 'included' when they're making fun of commercials and how dumb the super hip everyone's happy and in on the party vision in those commercials is. Then you can start making ironic commercials, making fun of the very idea of commercials. And, in doing so, associate pepsi with the feeling of being included among the people who wouldn't fall for yesterday's pepsi's commercials. But if this post-vision vision doesn't move someone, you get nowhere. All of which is to say: if you want to use Pavlovian techniques (without using bodily pain and pleasure)to immiserate or goad humans you have to have recourse to the freudian stuff: desire, the superego, love etc.

The very fact that advertisers seem drawn to ironic anti-commercial commercials is proof enough that you can beam whatever at a passive subject. If the old stuff worked, no matter what people thought of it, then just keep doing that right? No, if people see through, then you have to work in that seeing-through, which advertisers do, everywhere (think of how popular tongue-in-cheek campaigns like Geico, Old Spice, Dos Equis etc are.) (I'll note that Un made a similar point above.)

So the Party Everyone's In On. The In-Group Too Cool To be Taken in By The Party. Here's one more Vision: The Evil And Nearly All-Powerful Media/Advertising Bloc that Makes Us Dissatisfied but Maybe We Can Stop Them And Become Satisfied) But what does the last vision sell? Well Banksy, for one. But it also subsidizes a whole lot of liberal arts programs. (here's a freudian/pavlovian analysis. Stimulus: The Bad Dad Trying To Control You And Make You Do Stuff When You Want to Remain Contented Hanging with Mom. Place in conjunction with People in Suits, The word 'media' or 'advertisting.' )

No one is claiming they invented [dissatisfaction and unhappiness]; but they promote it, and elicit it.

And that is undeniable; a contented man needs nothing. It is when the going gets tough that the tough go shopping. — un

But if there's no Fall in human history, as you agree, then : (Contented man - Advertisting & Discontent - Shopping) isn't a very useful way to think about things.

It'd be more like: Discontented man used to do y. Then advertising.

Well the fall as I read it happened a while before that, and was the fall from animal innocence. But please, there is no question but that science directed outwards to the world has been hugely effective and beneficial. My criticism is that it is ineffective and counter-productive when turned inwards to humanity itself. Experiment and manipulation works on stone and wood; it does not work on persons, but distorts rather than refines. — un

Ok, but nothing in the post you quoted has anything to do with whether applying the scientific method to the human psyche is effective, productive, or beneficial.All I said is that I think the lot of ppl in first world 21st century societies is better than the lot of most people in the past. And I do think that. I'm not sure how what you've said here responds to any of what you quoted.

@The Great Whatever

I don't know, why? I think it's a coherent position to say that there are no non-veridical experiences, even if there are veridical ones. We might draw certain inferences or get certain expectations from veridical experiences that are unlicensed, and so have our expectations disappointed, but the issue with non-veridicality seems to be that realist assumptions about perception engender their possibility, not that we learn about non-veridicality from experience and so project veridicality back onto it.

That's fair. Then realist assumptions themselves would be a reaction - a theoretical reaction - to disappointment. But, then, veridicality is meaningless without a minimal helping of realism. What does 'veridical' mean if not that the way things seem (or appear to be) coincide, in this case, with how they are.** If seeming and being are one and the same, then the very idea of veridicality is meaningless. (But then, to deal with the fact of disappointment, we would have to substitute a different kind of thinking, where the distinction would not be between seeming and being, but between valid expectations and invalid ones. And then, once again, my indisputably experiencing a red triangle would have no bearing on whether or not any corresponding expectations were valid or not.)

**Sellars, in a later section of this essay, gives an analysis of seeming/being that I find very satisfying.

Veridicality doesn't seem to hinge on this – what you see is what you get.

But the whole thing with veridicality is that what you see might not be what you get (i.e. you might be wrong.) If you can't be wrong, then you'll always get what you see, and you won't even comprehend the idea of that not happening.

Although I will say that the objection as Sellars outlines it -- that empirical knowledge can't rest on a secure foundation if it must come from a class of things that has non-veridical members that can't be distinguished surely by any mark -- presupposes that in order for knowledge to have a secure foundation, there must be a sure way of knowing that one knows in any particular case. But this just doesn't follow if we're interested in knowledge, not knowledge of that knowledge. It might be that we know all sorts of things, even if for any particular case we can't infallibly (or even reliably!) know that we know this.

But the reason we want to know that we know isn't that we're interested in any sort of meta claims. It's not even (at least not at first) a cartesian defense against an evil demon. It's that we thought we knew, but we turned out to be wrong. We thought we knew, but we didn't. So then: how do we know whether we really know? Of course, we'll never be wrong about having seen a red triangle, or experiencing an emotional or spiritual movement while listening to song x. But we may be wrong such that e.g. the rocket we engineered to get to the moon can't even get out of earth's atmosphere. In any case, Sellars is subtle (or at least cautious here.) As you've mentioned he's talking from the sense-datum theorist's point of view, and it's the sense-datum theorist who is hunting for something that we know that we know, and therefore honing in on this class. But even if we disagree with the conclusions of the sense-data theorist, I think one can see where they're coming from.

Also, by the by, I don't know how much everyone's read ahead, but Sellars is super clever (I think the dude's actually internalized his Hegel. Was anyone else doing that in his milieu?) This essay straight up blossoms and it blossoms just where you want it to (so, for instance, the illustration of the clerk in the neck-tie shop, or whatever, touches on exactly the issues we're all discussing now.)

Another way to put this is that the very idea of a necessarily veridical class can only be a backwards projection by someone who has experienced non-veridicality. If they had always remained within the purely veridical, they could never do this. It would be like the fish who doesn't know what water is.

Or, to use Hegelian language: the class of necessarily veridical experiences is only veridical for someone steeped in non-veridicality. In-itself (and it's precisely this in-itself the sense data theorist is trying to leverage) it's neither nor.

— The Great Whatever

]Hmm. Why does Sellars think this? — tgw

Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:

"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality. — Pneumenon

]That can't be right, though, because the sense datum theorist doesn't claim that all things of the form 'I had experience X' have no duality between veridicality and non-veridicality, only that there's a certain class of experiences that it makes no sense of to call non-veridical. — tgw

I think the key is to focus on why Sellars' sense theorist is honing in on this special class. For these theorists, its meant as an solution to a problem: If there is no way to determine whether an experience is veridical or non-veridical, then how can knowledge get off the ground? So a class is identified where it is possible to make such a determination. And so we have a foundation on which we can build.

But how can we can move from knowledge gained from necessarily veridical experience to knowledge involving potentially non-veridical experiences? That's the rub.

The experience of non-veridicality precedes the idea of veridicality. The very idea of veridicality would be meaningless if we hadn't already experienced being wrong. (it's an anstoss type of logic.)

The necessarily veridical class of experiences operates on a pre-having-experienced-being-wrong level. It doesn't leave that level because it can't leave that level. But, by that same token, it can't shed any light on anything outside its own class. The veridicality of experiencing e.g. a red triangle is a closed loop.

I think Pneumenon's analysis is more or less right. The sense datum-theorist does indeed hold on to the veridical/non-veridical distinction - but the logic of the class to which that distinction applies, simply does not apply to the class of the 'necessarily veridical.' Apples and oranges.

Sorry man. Understanding what someone believes is not understanding why they believe it. If you don't already understand this, no one can explain it to you. I've had lots of good conversations with people on this board. If you don't like the patronizing, arrogant responses*, then step up your game, and I'll gladly meet you.

* is there anything more patronizing and arrogant then saying something like 'well in my view,this is false, so I disagree'? Without arguing for that view? You do this constantly.

Ok, sure, if you want to split absolutely inconsequential semantic hairs, I'll grant you that. This kind of thing doesn't further conversation whatsoever, but it seems important to you, and I want you to feel comfortable.

Not believing that facts are particulars doesn't entail believing any other one thing. All it means is believing 'facts are not particulars.' I'm sure you do understand 'facts are not particulars.' What I'm asking is: Do you understand why people would think that? [let me be entirely forthright: I don't you think you actually do understand the thought behind it. I think you're stalling. I think you have a very simple idea: 'All that there is is material things' & instead of engaging philosophically with anything, you just see how a sentence stands up against this pre-established idea. Basically, terrapin, I think you're very bad at philosophy and I think you're paticipating in this group in bad faith. But I'm willing to be proven wrong. Show me!)

Also, regarding Ollie. So yes, an intersection of the accidental and the necessary, sure. But, then (s)he isn't just the intersection of the Accidental and the Necessary. (S)he's precisely how the accidental and the necessary intersected in just this way. And that's the singular.

Ok, but even if you were speaking about metaphysical generality, I still don't understand what you're doing here:

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

Is the singular x everything - the totality, the cosmos, what is, the world etc. - or some particular thing? If it's everything, then what is this y which is a second singular which is the pure antithesis of everything taken as a whole?

That doesn't make any more sense to me than the pure antithesis of Ollie.

I would say it's not about whether you can resist it or not. That's a red herring. There is no resistance in the sense of being able to "see through". You can only try to avoid it. Seeing through advertising is relatively easy. If you did a poll to ask people whether they thought ads were honest, you would probably get a majority negative (but hook anyone up to an MRI machine and watch the effect of a given ad and I doubt you'd be able to tell the cynics from the pollyannas). In fact, thinking you can "see through" advertising is probably as good or a better result for the advertisers than knowing you can't if the former means you don't feel the need to reduce exposure.

Yeah, I have some sympathy for this view. Though I think you may have gone too far in the other direction in correcting the idea of seeing-through. It's not as though advertisements have a quantity of conditioning power that is beamed through the sense organs, affecting each purely passive body/soul equally, so that all we have can do is run from the beams etc.. You are right that it's sometimes easier to con the guy who thinks he can't be conned. But often it's easier to con people who don't have a sense of how cons work.

And what is it all the way up? Not all forms of socially organized shame-inducing are equal. If I must ingest a poison, I'll take sugar over cyanide. Emphasizing their chemical similarities isn't going to change my mind. It's not just advertising though, it's the whole media entertainment constellation which revolves around it. If it doesn't concern people that the only way this system can survive is through the creation of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, then it's done its job fantastically well, hasn't it?

I'd prefer sugar too. You have some? What is it?

I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that advertising and the media has created dissatisfaction and unhappiness. I think it's more likely that it only moulds it in certain ways. I think, by and large, people are most dissatisfied when they aren't given some direction on how to become satisfied. So another way to say this: I don't think that the natural state of people is relative satisfaction, then mad men who've read Freud come in and make people dissatisfied. Maybe that's because they've drilled down to my core, but I don't think so.

Would you mind expanding on that? I don't think I understand what a pre/post Fall view is, or how that relates to the consequent in the above.

So, I wrote that post in a fit of spleen. But what I mean by pre/post fall is the narrative that there was an idyllic period, then something bad happened (freud, madison ave, Bernays) and that led to our particularly dystopic present. My sense is that being a 21st century consumer in a first world country is a far better lot than 99% of all past lots. I mean, it's not that great. But it's a little less nasty, brutish and short.

Here you are talking of complex negentropic objects and not the metaphysical generality of existence itself

&

But it is confusing to now talk to individuation (or particularisation, or contingent being) as "singularity" when singularity was instead some kind of claim about monism over dualism or triadicism (who knows what SX really thought he meant).

I'm even more confused now. I can understand your thinking that I'd shifted the goalposts, if, earlier, we had both been speaking of singularity qua monism (rather than the singularity of any particular thing.)

But then what was this:

Think again about the reciprocal argument. Note the 1 that gets employed. We are saying in effect, whatever is the thing we have in mind, let's start by calling it a singular one, a pure standalone whole.

Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.

&

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

Weren't you talking, literally, about any thing at all? And wouldn't that include complex negentropic objects? & The problem with my discussion of singular objects is it that's not general enough [for what]? And the method-of-generating-complete-definitions of any thing at all we may have in mind - that doesn't work with complex negentropic objects?

Again, I get what the whole 1/x thing for Being/Becoming etc, but I still haven't the foggiest how it's being applied to singular things (which is especially troubling if, as you say, this is precisely how all natural scientists progress. I'd still love if you could sketch a quick example of how this plays out. Since, as you say, this kind of thing is ubiquitous, wouldn't it be easy to do this?)

(I'll respond to the second half of your post in another post)

Are you asking what the difference is between understanding that someone is wrong and understanding why they believe that wrong thing?

Ok, but what I asked was do you have a sense why they might believe that?

Do you have a sense of why others might think that facts aren't particulars?

Oh, ok, you probably won't get much from this paper then

Yeah, that's more or less how I take Sellars to understand the term too.

But so you consider facts to be concrete, spatiotemporal entities?

Huh, how would you define 'particular' (noun)?

Can someone tell me what the heck a "carrier of slabs" is????????

It's a reference to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. If you're not familiar with the Big Themes of that work, one central idea is that 'the meaning of a word is its use' and that 'to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.' To illustrate this idea, Wittgenstein imagines a very simple form of life - builders using 'slabs' to construct something - and a correspondingly simple language - 'slab' is used to request a slab from another worker etc.
Here's the text. Sections 1 & 2 are the relevant ones.

I hear you, but if you want a space free of moral and intellectual posturing, a philosophy forum is probably the worst possible place to look. Like m-theory said.

There's another point to be made: No reason a singularity has to be a 1. It can be a historical situation. Something crazy goes down, rewrites the coordinates, you walk outside, not knowing what's what anymore, then you try to act, in that.

Problem for the smart people who can resist advertising, by seeing through it, if they exist. Even if you can, others can't, and you can't always tell who can and who can't. So if your livelihood depends on working with others, and if it's a type of work where it matters what others think of you, then you either have to play the game too, or be conspicuous as someone who doesn't play the game - in which case you have to present yourself as a non-game-player in a way palatable to others. (One way out of this jam is to just be born with a lot of charisma, or money. If you look just pretty enough, you can also compensate by being (acting?) v kind (my strategy). If you don't, unfortunately, kindness becomes creepiness, unfair as that is. )

If you don't take a pre/post Fall view, then it's advertising and manipulation all the way down - just replace advertising with social organization based around shame. If the lion's share of our social behavior becomes consumption, then that's where the social organizers will focus (have focused, are focusing.) How do you get people to live together and work in concert without directing their behavior on a deep emotional level?

And more to the point: If you can't do that without this kind of thing, then do we have any more reason to gripe about it, then we do about the state's contractors fixing potholes a few weeks late? (Except of course that griping's good, because we get to let off steam, and not shoot-up the office, before going right back to it.) But really though, is the dream of not having anyone mould our shame and direct us to temporary respites a good one? Does anyone really want to try it out?

I don't follow. The only place we are is inbetween. My position is internalist.

And also - a further aspect of symmetry breaking - there is indeed a global directionality for becoming. That is what the vague~crisp distinction describes. Vagueness is the point of departure, crispness (the crispness of dichotomistic separation and hierarchically formed habit - are the terminus. At the end of time is when individuation has most fully happened.

Ok, the directionality bit is certainly different than Deleuze (tho I suppose there's a case to be made for focusing on local zig-zagging at the expense of global crisping, b/c in the long run we're all heat dead. On that note - & I'll admit thermodynamics isn't my wheelhouse -but how is the steady march of entropy an increase in crispness? My gut reaction has me seeing crispness as requiring a figure/ground thing, where something stands over and against some background. B/c my gut can't imagine something crisp that isn't foregrounded against something less crisp. Doesn't the possibility of that fade as the world grows cold and dispersed?)

It's still a strange thing, tho, if neither extreme (pure vagueness/pure crispness) can be fully realized, than we're always stretched out between two infinities (infinitely free, infinitely constrained), always have been, always will be.

Once again, the singular here is the bare abductive guess. So I am agreeing - as is explicit in Peirce's epistemology - that Metaphysical conception would have to begin with some dimly grasped "something". We can call that - vaguely - some inkling of "whatever the hell it is". The principle of non contradiction does not yet apply because so far we might have a name for this guess - let's call it concept X - but we don't really understand it in any properly intelligible or counterfactual sense.

So the next step is to sharpen our definition so as to make it pragmatically measurable. And we can do that by seeking to define it in terms of its own inverse.

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

If this combinations of intuitions works out, we will find that the formula works. They will form the complementary limits on possibility. And we will wind up inside those limits in a way we can now directly measure.

My stumbling block right now is that I'm not sure what sort of analysis this is. Is it phenomenological and/or anthropological (i.e. is this how we observe ourselves or others coming to grips with a strange new 'something'?) Is it a methodological prescription? Is a description of an already practically exercised methodology?

It just doesn't look anything like any process I know. When we come up against a new something, we usually try to see what it can do, how it reacts, how it's similar to other things we already know etc. When do we ever try to determine the thing most antithetical to it? Or is it just that you think we can, in principle, define it by reference to that antithesis? Like what's the pure antithesis of my mother/Beethoven's 5th/this bottle in my room/'Swann's Way'/ ? I still don't really know what you mean. I understand the 1/x thing for big ol headliners like Being/Becoming Determinism/Chance etc. but I'd really need some concrete analysis of some singular thing to understand how it works at the level of singularity.

So the term - if it describes a limit - describes itself fully in saying that it has within it the least of the other. And the other term for the other limit does the same thing. So the reciprocality is mutual or reciprocal in itself. Non reciprocality is then the third thing of vagueness - vagueness being reciprocal with crispness in being the undifferentiated vs the fully dichotomised.

But isn't this just stipulating non-reciprocality (non-dialecticity?) as a fixed absolute in order to hold stable an equally absolute system of reciprocal/dialectal dichotomizing? "Everything has to be defined reciprocally EXCEPT reciprocity which exists in a non-reciprocal asymmetric relationship with non-reciprocity." Can't we use this same template and generate any number of metaphysical systems, depending on our tastes? Essentially what you've done is exempted your own model from the metaphysics of everything else, by carving a special metaphysical niche for it.

The only thinking is thinking again, thinking otherwise : ) Everything else is doxa.

Or at least that's the long-held consensus of everyone in the Deleuze Studies department ;)
Just kidding, sort of, I really do like Deleuze, but do you know what I mean?

What that in turn means is that even Being - that which we take to be fully and unambiguously actual - is itself (by logic) always still to some inifinitesimal degree in the act of becoming.

&

So when it comes to talking definitionally about a state of pure potential, we are having to define it terms of what it is not, while also, we have to remember that - like being - it must still be infinitesimally a bit like its other. The unbroken symmetry must already be broken ... to the least possible degree.

Alright, I believe I understand your broad portrait -

but then I don't understand what you're objecting to here:

[in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. — Deleuze

The origin and the destination, in your account, both stretch asymptotically away, so are we not ever in-between? What's wrong with the quote?

Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.

So that is the way that in Metaphysical conception, one deals with singularity. It is an abduction awaiting its proper deductive framing.

You lose me here though. A singularity is the limit for that which would limit it? Would you be willing to illustrate this by means of an example?

(also: If it's meaningless to provide a term unless you also provide that which reciprocally limits it, wouldn't reciprocity itself have to be reciprocally limited by non-reciprocity? But, if everything in your system deals in reciprocally limiting dichotomies, where is there room for non-reciprocity? )

Becoming can best be defined in terms of symmetry breaking - pure dichotomisation. So what gets left behind is the initial absolute lack of distinction - the symmetry of a pure and unbroken potential.

But what justifies [becoming as self-sufficient] when any one term can only have cogent definiteness or counterfactuality in terms of its "other"? You have to be able to say with certainty what your term is not otherwise your term is merely vague in not admitting to the principle of non-contradiction.

In arguing that absolute distinctionless potentiality is "left behind" musn't there be a time when there was no distinction? (bc otherwise what would 'left behind' mean?) But wouldn't that be then its own self-sufficient other-lacking term? So wouldn't it be more correct to say that pure poeteniality can only be a term 'after' the symmetry is broken (or that there is no pure symmetry that was broken, only one that has always already been broken?)

It seems, by your own lights, like you're stuck with two options - either we can speak cogently of something self-sufficient, even if, in speaking of it, we have to oppose it to something else. Or there is ever only the dichotomous, and its quite right to say there's no origin, only an in-between.

i remember when i was just seven
and this hottie who called himself kevin
we were watching shrek 3
as he reached for my knee
and he whispered 'bush caused nine eleven'

there once was a lady named penis
who dreamt every night of a penis
she said 'what a prick
what a cock, what a dick
it reminds me of me, (my name's penis)'

So i experience not-suffering "happiness" - relief - more often than any other kind, by far. But there's also at least two other positive happinessess I sometimes experience. One's a kind of delight in things, a simple enjoyment that buoys me through the hours. The other is a kind of solemn, but serene sense of quiet majesty. They're rare states for me but they happen. The one thing i can see that they share is a kind of calmness.

My life, at least post-10 or 11 years old, has definitely consisted more of suffering than non-suffering, yet there have been many times where I've been happy. I can't make sense of the notion that there is nothing but suffering, any more than I can make sense of claims that there is no such thing as subjective experience. Happiness happens sometimes.

Humans don't always suffer tho (unless you pull some Kierkegaardian move where not knowing you're suffering is, in fact, its own type of suffering). I'd agree with what your'e saying, tho, if you replaced 'suffering' with 'undergoing'

Yeah, that's the paper! Thanks for the link. It can also be found here, handily formatted section by section: http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html

Cool, I'm glad there's interest. I've read about half of the paper and it's pretty dense, so I think reading maybe 2 sections a week would be a good pace.There's a lot to digest. I'd say three sections a week, but, in the first half of the paper at least, the sections are kind of organized into couplets. Reading three a week would throw off the rhythm of the paper.. I'd also prefer to do this as a free-form reading group without any leader (I'm also too lazy/busy to commit to holding that position.) So what do you all think, read the first two sections (An ambiguity in Sense Datum Theories & Another Language?) by next sunday?

perhaps more pertinent is: What is science? Science is doing a lot of work in the OP. Everything can be elucidated by science. So also what is 'explanation'. What is Science and what is Elucidation and what does it mean that Science can/will Elucidate everything?

@apokrisis Do you have a 'skeleton key' recommendation for the Peirce texts which matter most?

Haven't read all the other responses, I'll admit - but all I see in the OP is the sketch of an idea about what philosophy is. There's nothing in it to recommend - argue for, defend - that idea. Which makes it hard to argue for or against - all one can do is assess it on an theoretico-aesthetic level. As in: How's the idea feel, how satisfying is it?

It's alright, in terms of that second question, but, maybe ironically, feels like the classical account of Hegelianism (ideas that had to flourish in order to bring about that which supersedes them.) (Hegel's better than that, of course, but that's how ppl talk about him.)

No, that's just a transparent attempt at a tu quoque and ad hominem: people who talk about "post-truth" are themselves poopy-heads, and that being the case, anything they say is humbug. And that is, unfortunately, the way most political discussions go.

Eh, not really.

if the phenomenon of politically-driven fact-indifference is a perennial one

&

if a new term has been coined, to refer to this same perennial phenomenon as though it's unprecedented

&

if one is interested in what is new about this situation

then: the phenomenon in question is not 'post-truth' but 'a collection of groups claiming that there is an unprecedented event/era/atmosphere called post-truth'

And to understand that, you have to understand where those groups are coming from. So, while I could be wrong about some of my assumptions (your cynicism narrative has some truth to it, for instance), this isn't really a matter of calling other people poopy-heads, or painting others as childish which - tu quoque, bub! - is the kinda ad hominem yr doing rn. But, hey, fallacy-sniping tends to be sublimated poopy-head/I'm rubber you're glue 9 times out of 10 anyway.

I think this is a cool idea/interest, but - and I say this with compassion - you're unlikely to generate serious interest without a degree (not to say doctorate) in chemistry/botany/biology/etc and the published, peer-reviewed research to go with it.

Why not just experiment, for fun, with plants in your garden? (I know this seems like an unrelated topic, but you've mentioned struggles with self-esteem. It seems like you set yourself very high standards. And standards are good, but it can be bad for personal growth (speaking from experience) to only feel comfortable pursuing things that seem totally groundbreaking. It's a vicious superego that demands that and only that. And it can really break you down.)