How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t it require interpretation? It may seem as though it is in the nature of proof that it be absolutely transparent to anyone who understands mathematical proof, but hasn’t there been a lot written over the past 70 years or so (I believe Ian Hacking had some interesting things to say about proof) ‘relativizing’ its very nature?

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here — Olento

I think you’ll find that the most interesting pomo analyses of mathematics are neither strictly about power or politics, although these are never absent . Rather, they reveal the historical and philosophical origins and significance of the concepts of objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness that is peculiar to mathematical logic. That is to say, they don’t deny that mathematics contributes these qualities, what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondaryto and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way.

that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibnitz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibnitz are among the most important mathematicians in history. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Indeed they are. I was suggesting that even though pomo philosophers have not contributed specifically mathematical innovations, the best of them have as deep an understanding of the underpinnings of math as did Descartes and Leibnitz.

In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t this depend on how one interprets the significance of performing a mathematical proof? Are you familiar with what Wittgenstein had to say about what it is we are doing when we construct a mathematical proof?

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career — Count Timothy von Icarus

One problem here is the impossibility of coming up with a one-size-fits-all definition of what it means to be left or right wing. So much depends on the issue. I have my own peculiar way of thinking about the conservative-liberal binary, which is easy to poke holes in, but at least it gives some basis for discussion. It resembles in some respects the attempts by Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff to provide a profile of a personality type which gravitates to one pole or another of this binary. But whereas their analysis was based on psychological disposition, I view this binary as a developmental spectrum paralleling the history of philosophical eras. For me conservatism is equivalent to traditionalism, and philosophical traditionalism, from the vantage of writers like Deleuze, supports hard categorical distinctions that lead to the placement of particular genders , ethnicities, races, within rigid, opposed boxes, and organized hierarchically. This is of course a gross simplification , but hopefully you get the idea. Deleuze’s approach, by contrast, abandons hierarchical , categorical thinking for endless differences upon differences both within and between, that blur and entangle the boundaries between distinctions that place individuals and groups either exclusively inside or outside.

Nick Land is an unusual personality, to say the least, so it may be impossible to place his thinking within any familiar political category, but to the extent that he embraces any significant features of Deleuze’s thinking, I would have to say that he doesnt see the world the way that traditionalists do, based on the way I have characterized philosophical conservatism.

. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true if left and right stand for nothing besides mindless reactions against whatever the other side does.
But if you entertain my view of the binary as correlated with stages of a historical intellectual development, it matters what one is challenging the foundations of power and dogma in favor of. If Land subverts the establishment’s norms because he truly believes in rigid boundaries of gender, racial, class or whatever, and their strict hierarchization , then this places him by my reckoning on the philosophical right. If , on the other hand, his aim is to anarchically tear down all extant hierarchies and stratifications , with no desire to replace them with new ones,( I’m reminded of Zizek endorsing Trump in order to blow up the whole political order in preparation for his Marxist utopia), then I’d place him on the philosophical left regardless of how violent and disruptive the results.

The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness. — Tom Storm

What’s amusing about this is Peterson doesn’t realize that thinkers he mentions as card-carrying postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault offer ideas directly counter to marxist dialectics. Postmodernism arose in opposition to, not as an elaboration of Marxism.

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions — Tom Storm

You’re right to see maths as a central concern of pomo thinkers. They recognize that the essence of modern science is the marriage of the pure mathematical idealizations invented by Greek and pre-Greek cultures and observation of the empirical world. The peculiar notion of exactitude which is the goal of scientific description has its origin in this pairing.

But I was unable to review the critique, as I do not have a NYT subscription. And there is a paywall in front of the article. — Bret Bernhoft

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World:

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)

Would-be corporate monarchs, having consolidated power even beyond their vast riches, have already persuaded much of the rest of the population to more or less go along with it.


As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.

Neoreactionary thought contends that the world would operate much better in the hands of a few tech-savvy elites in a quasi-feudal system. Mr. Andreessen, through this lens, believes that advancing technology is the most virtuous thing one can do. This strain of thinking is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions (a free press, for example) that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making. It argues for an extreme acceleration of technological advancement regardless of consequences, in a way that makes “move fast and break things” seem modest.

If this all sounds creepy and far-right in nature, it is. Mr. Andreessen claims to be against authoritarianism, but really, it’s a matter of choosing the authoritarian — and the neoreactionary authoritarian of choice is a C.E.O. who operates as king. (One high-profile neoreactionary, Curtis Yarvin, nominated Steve Jobs to rule California.)

There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.
It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.

When Mr. Andreessen says “we” are being lied to, he includes himself, and when he names the liars, they’re those in “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview,” who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

His depiction of academics of course sounds a lot like — well, like tech overlords, who are often insulated from the real-world consequences of their inventions, including but not limited to promoting disinformation, facilitating fraud and enabling genocidal regimes.

It’s an old trick and a good one. When Donald Trump, an Ivy-educated New York billionaire, positions himself against American elites, with their fancy educations and coastal palaces, his supporters overlook the fact that he embodies what he claims to oppose. “We are told that technology takes our jobs,” Mr. Andreessen writes, “reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.” Who is doing the telling here, and who is being told? It’s not technology (a term so broad it encompasses almost everything) that’s reducing wages and increasing inequality — it’s the ultrawealthy, people like Mr. Andrees.

It’s important not to be fooled by this deflection, or what Elon Musk does when he posts childish memes to X to demonstrate that he’s railing against the establishment he in fact belongs to. The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy — and ultimately, humanity.
In a darker, perhaps sadder sense, the neoreactionary project suggests that the billionaire classes of Silicon Valley are frustrated that they cannot just accelerate their way into the future, one in which they can become human/technological hybrids and live forever in a colony on Mars. In pursuit of this accelerated post-Singularity future, any harm they’ve done to the planet or to other people is necessary collateral damage. It’s the delusion of people who’ve been able to buy their way out of everything uncomfortable, inconvenient or painful, and don’t accept the fact that they cannot buy their way out of death.

Which is another reason why I'm a techno-optimist — Bret Bernhoft

Are you supportive of Mark Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto?

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Or do you agree with this critique of Andreesen?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/marc-andreessen-manifesto-techno-optimism.html

I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me. — javra

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? You wrote earlier that we all “consciously or unconsciously cling to some form of what Mircea Eliade termed an axis mundi”. Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’?

This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nick Land is not a relativist in the pomo sense of the term; he is not simply reformulating but missing the essential features of ideas by Deleuze , Derrida and others. If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point? I agree with you it is inevitable that any complex, difficult to understand new ideas will be misread in ways diametrically opposed to the intent of the author, but I sense that , given the fact that your own thinking differs from the ideas of figures like Kuhn, Derrida and Deleuze, you see unproductive elements in what you call pomo ‘relativism’ and therefore you dont think they’re being entirely misread by people like Nick Land.

↪Tom Storm There was the famous Sokol affair, where a postmodern journal published an article arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct.

Unbeknownst to the publishers it was satire, exposing the lack of scientific rigor of the postmodernist.

Not sure they've fully recovered from that — Hanover

Pomo was never in high regard among the general population , so there was nothing to recover from. Those who have a rigorous , scholarly understanding of the best works in this area of philosophy know that Sokal never bothered to do his homework, having failed to show an adequate comprehension of the arguments involved.

↪Joshs I respect many of your views, but:

But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. [...] They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.
— Joshs

How is that not blatantly incongruous (this in non-dialetheistic systems, if it needs to be said)? — javra

I didn’t mean that I believe , or postmodernists believe, that
the far right ignores or distorts facts. I meant that those more moderate than the far right who share with the right a rejection of pomo relativism believe that the right is ignoring or distorting facts. In other words, both the non-pomo left and the far right believe in the non-relativist objectivity of scientific truth. They just disagree on what constitutes the proper scientific method for attaining objective truth. Postmodernists, on the other hand , disagree with both of these groups on the coherence of their various ideas of objective truth.

↪Joshs
As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.
— Joshs

Yeah, what would mathematicians know about maths — Banno

What would philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz or Avicenna know about maths? Don’t be fooled by the fact that recent philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl didn’t contribute innovations that would be considered mathematical within a conventional criterion of maths. Their work was intimately engaged with and reflected a profound understanding of the deepest foundations of mathematics and logic, every bit as much as predecessors like Leibnitz.

The article I shared was about as sympathetic as you might expect, and more than I expected. It takes an example from the literature,
Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct
— White 2009,
...and points out that
First of all, cultural relativism is out of context in this setting. When postmodernists claim that a mathematical truth is never absolute, they mean it is to be interpreted relative to a background. Certainly 2 x 5 = 1 is true in mod (3) arithmetic. No sane mathematician or educator would go around redefining addition or any other mathematical construct because his or her “personal situation” requires it to be correct. — Banno

This article is as ignorant of and unengaged with the actual arguments of key pomo figures like Deleuze and Derrida as is Sokal’s. None of the philosophers I follow claim that 2+2 can equal anything other than 4. They recognize that it is precisely the nature of numeric calculation that it abstracts away all meaningful contexts associated with what is counted, leaving only the repetition of ‘same thing, different time’. Derrida writes:

“I can manipulate symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification…Numbers, as numbers, have no meaning; they can squarely be said to have no meaning, not even plural meaning. …Numbers have no present or signified content. And, afortiori, no absolute referent. This is why they don't show anything, don't tell anything, don't represent anything, aren't trying to say anything. Or more precisely, the moment of present meaning, of “content,” is only a surface effect.”

The contentlessness of numeration leads to the fascinating fact that its components originate at different times and in different parts of the world as a human construction designed for certain purposes . And yet, even though these constructions emerged as contingent historical skills, their empty core of the identical ‘again and again’ allows them to be universally understood.

But the later Wittgenstein complicates matters here. Maths may have at its core empty repetition of the same, but its evolution plugs this into operations, rules and procedures that don’t guarantee in advance the persisting identity of their sense. As Lee Braver interprets him,

Wittgenstein’s early conception of meaning and his commitment to Logi­cal Stoicism drove him to rid the arena of truth and logic of all human interference, which required that the states-of-affairs asserted or denied by a proposition be completely delineated, as we saw with the questions con­cerning whether the book was still on the table under all possible circum­stances. He gave up this dream when he recognized our ineliminable role in
applying the rules. No matter how assiduously we strive to passively obey a rule, we still need to make the phronetic judgment call as to whether this state-of-affairs counts as an instance of the rule: “if calculating looks to us like the action of a machine, it is the human being doing the calculation that is the machine.”

We feel that all possibilities are settled in advance because we rarely step outside the normal circumstances where our footing is so sure we imag­ine it to be perfect. Wittgenstein spends considerable time constructing scenarios that throw our intuitions out of whack and leave us uncertain about what to say. This doesn’t expose a disturbing, problematic gap in our everyday usage, but rather shows that we get along fine without the propo­sitional omniscience he had previously found necessary. Without meaning-objects’ applications coiled up, as it were, within words or the mind like a retractable measuring tape, Wittgenstein now sees each application as metaphysically unguaranteed by past instances.

“We must not suppose that with the rule we have given the infinite extension of its application. Every new step in a calculation is a fresh step. . . . It is not in the nature of 23 and 18 to give 414 when multiplied, nor even in the nature of the rules. We do it that way, that is all.”

No matter how clearly the world seems to take us by the hand and lead us, it is always up to us to recognize its authority and interpret its commands; neither past usage nor reality forces us to go on in one particular way. We will never get to the other side of the ellipsis of “and so on . . .”—not because of our all-too­-human limitations, but because there is no other side; that’s the point of an ellipsis.

Since the notion of infinite extensions occurs paradigmatically in math­ematics, Wittgenstein spends a great deal of time on this subject, origi­nally planning part II of the Philosophical Investigations to focus on it. Just
as linguistic meaning occurs in our use of it, so mathematics only exists in our calculations, which means that
“there is nothing there for a higher intelligence to know—except what future generations will do. We know as much as God does in mathematics.”

Mathematics and grammar are inventions, not discoveries. As Simon Glendinning writes, each new application of a rule “is ungrounded or structurally abyssal. That is, it is logically prior to a determined rationality (or irrationality).”Without timeless mathematical truths, the notion that humanity has always followed a rule incorrectly is simply incoherent: how we follow it is the right way. “The point is that we all make the SAME use of it. To know its meaning is to use it in the same way as other people do. ‘In the right way’ means nothing.”This seems to entail the worrying possibil­ity that if everyone began, say, adding differently—getting “6” from “2 + 3,” for example—then that “wrong” practice would become “right”, but this concern hasn’t followed the argument all the way out.

If we see this “new” way as maintaining the same rule of addition we have always used, then it isn’t new at all. If no one (except a few cranks) judges a change to have occurred then we have no ground to say that a change
has occurred. It isn’t so much that our notion of green may turn out to be grue as that, if we all “change” from green to grue without noticing it then no change has taken place—and scare quotes proliferate. If a tree changes color in the forest and no one realizes it, then who exactly is claiming that it changed? We imagine God sadly shaking his head at our chromatic apos­tasy, but the only way for this picture have an effect would be for Him to make His displeasure known—which would mean, in turn, that someone did notice. Alluding to the most famous modern discussion of skepticism, Wittgenstein asks:

“is no demon deceiving us at present? Well, if he is, it doesn’t matter. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

A deception, carried out perfectly, becomes truth.

Maybe there is a post-modern argument to be made that these social or historical factors shouldn't be ignored as much as they are (that said, historical analysis of mathematical concepts seems quite common in mathematics books I've read). But we aren't fixing anything with its own axioms, we are studying what happens, given we provisionally accept some axioms. This to me seems like a distinct difference. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not just a matter of avoiding fixing our axioms.
Axiomization itself, and the propositional logic it is grounded in, are deconstructed by writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze.

Then, finally, a huge swath of the public did start taking their critiques seriously, but it tended to largely be the far-right of the political spectrum who did this. "Who funds this research? Who stands to gain financially? What are the power relations in the field? What are the socio-historical factors influencing theory?"

These finally became areas of core focus, but ironically the goal of the critiques became things like denying climate change and denying that vaccines were beneficial. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The only thing the far right took seriously from pomo critiques of science was the fact that they were questioning science. They never had the slightest understanding of exactly what pomo was questioning about science, and so didn’t realize that pomo was not so much interested in rejecting the value or legitimacy of established scientific assertions, but instead wanted to bring to light its unexamined presuppositions so that it could be dethroned from its authoritarian pedestal. The far right, by contrast , maintains science on a pedestal of extreme authority, and specifically rejects scientific conclusions when they are derived using methods that are too ‘relativistic’ for the right, such as climate science.

Many have gotten the idea that the far right in the U.S. believes truth is something made up, and they blame pomo for this. But it is one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. I've heard it said the right is living in a post-truth world. My response is that one could not fond a find a group of people more wedded to a doctrinaire and almost fundamentalist concept of truth.Talk about facts of the matter. The Trumpian right fetishizes and reifies facts with a religious zeal. Unfortunately they reduce scientific facts to simple causal relations. They tend to be metaphysical, or naive, realists about both ethical and objective truth.

It is this Ayn Randian mentality toward rationality that makes them unable to appreciate ambiguities and complexities of the sort that crop up in climate change and covid science. The continual on-the -fly adjustments in medical recommendations in response to new study results over the course of the pandemic do not fit the simplistic image many Trump conservatives have of how science was supposed to operate. Their thinking about science has on the whole not progressed beyond a Baconian hypothetico-inductive methodology. As a result, they lost faith faith in the veracity of what they were being told.

How does one organize previous interactions? Surely, it's only an image, memory or concept of them that can be organized - presumably for reference. Organize, how? Form a mental model? Classify as to type? How does this process differ from describing the interactions themselves and deducing natural laws? — Vera Mont

A cognitive organization , as a living system, exists by functioning , and it functions by continually making changes in itself, prior to volition. This self-changing process leads to the disintegration of the cognitive system (or organism) if it doesn’t manage to maintain a relative normative consistency throughout these changes. Notice I am not making a distinction between change from within and change from without. The cognitive organization has no pure interior; it is radically outside of itself , always already in the midst of its world. What we call knowledge of the world is the system’s successful accommodation to the unique aspects of new experience such that it can assimilate such experience within its normative schematics. This is what happens when a theory successfully predicts observed phenomena. Our world always appears ‘lawful’ to the extent that perceived events can be placed within a network of referential relations.

. In my dictionary, a "presupposition" is
a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action
i.e. that which has not yet been observed and analyzed — Vera Mont

There must always be pre-existing cognitive structure to organize what is perceived. With each actual perception, such structure is both invoked and altered by what is perceived. Accommodation from scheme to world accompanies each assimilation from world to scheme. But because this modifying of of scheme by world need to allow for a relative ongoing stability of meaning, the presuppositions we bring to every encounter with things remain fairly consistent for long period of time. Kuhn described this relative ongoing consistency of presuppositions in terms of normal science , and the significant alteration of presuppositions in terms of revolutionary science, or paradigm shifts.

↪Tom Storm I suspect that postmodernists talking about mathematics woudl be a dime a dozen. Google supports this.

But a mathematician talking about post modernism... that might be interesting. — Banno

As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.

This leads me to think that social constructivism/constructionism is not necessarily postmodern in the philosophical sense, even if these distinct approaches are lumped together in the popular imagination.

EDIT: And note that the theory discussed in that paper is based on the social construction theory of John Searle, not usually regarded as a postmodernist. — Jamal

One could examine social constructionisms along a realist-relativist dimension, with Searle being a realist and writers like Ken Gergen identifying themselves as postmodernist relativists.

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?
— Joshs

You can't pre-suppose the world. Maybe a creator god can, but humans are in and of the world. They can't suppose anything that they don't already know something about — Vera Mont

I wasn’t suggesting we pulled these presuppositions out of our butts. Presuppositions are the products of human-world interactions. They are guides to future interactions based on ways of organizing previous interactions, and subject to change as the way we modify our environment by interacting with it feeds back into these presuppositions.

The "laws of nature" are just descriptions of how things behave.

Perhaps you meant to ask why things behave the way they do, or why their behaviour is consistent? — Michael

Are they merely descriptions, or are they presuppositions concerning what things are and how they behave?

I would reflect on the Bodily feeling presently "occurring" or released (?) during what one might interpret as anger or as hatred. Presumably, both would be felt as, for lack of a better word, "unpleasant," subject to possible varying degrees or subtle undectable differences (if any. maybe degree of unpleasantness is the only difference) — ENOAH

The distinction between somatic feeling and cognition harks back to a long-standing Western tradition. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I dont agree with this split between feeling and thinking. Pleasantness and unpleasantness are not just meaningless bodily sensations that happen to get tied to different experiences via conditioning. They are better understood in terms of enhancement to or interruptions of goal-directed thought. We are sense-making creatures who attempt to anticipate and assimilate strange new events via familiar schemes of meaning. We strive to make the world meaningfully recognizable and relevant to our purposeful activities, and pleasantness-unpleasantness are meanings that express our relative success or failure in making sense of things. Anxiety, guilt, fear and anger result from our finding ourselves in situations that threaten to plunge us into the chaos and confusion of incomprehension.

. The deflationary theories of truth that came out of undecidablity, incompleteness, and undefinablity seem in the same wheelhouse (more an inspiration for POMO, or ammunition for it, than possible targets) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily. After all, Gödel, the originator of the incompleteness theorems, was guided by his self-declared mathematical Platonism, the belief that humanly-created formal systems are ‘undecidable' only in being incomplete approximations of absolute mathematical truths. Husserl’s phenomenology questions the philosophical naivety on which Godel's theory of the object rests.

↪Joshs Does that to you then imply that something like 1 + 1 = 2 is constructed within specific culture contexts, such that the quantity "1" is arbitrary rather than ubiquitously universal? — javra

I’m not a mathematician either, but I know that there are multiple interpretations of the status and role of the number one (and zero) , including whether it is a basis for all other numbers or whether it is derived. Some argue that the concept of 2 is more fundamental than 1. Theses disputes suggest in a subtle way the cultural basis of concepts of number.

They may question whether mathematical concepts truly represent universal truths or if they are constructed within specific cultural contexts.
— Tom Storm

struck me as inherently plausible as a PM position, but inherently implausible as a serious position per se. Im not sure how it could be argued that natural numbers, for instance, are culture-bound as a concept. — AmadeusD

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl analyzed the historical origin of numeration in terms of the construction of the concept of the unit. Number doesn’t just appear to humans ready-made as a product of nature. It requires a process of abstraction. First one has to recognize a multiplicity, and then ignore everything about the elements that belong to the collectivity except its role as an empty unit. Enumeration, as an empty ' how much', abstracts away all considerations that pertain to the nature of the substrate of the counting. Enumeration represents what Husserl calls a free ideality, the manipulation of symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification.
So rather than a perception of things in the world, counting requires turning away from the meaningful content of things in the world. The world is not made of numbers, the way we construct our perceptual interaction with the world produces the concept of number, and this construction emerged out of cultural needs and purposes , such as the desire to keep track objects of value.

↪Joshs
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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t think he wants to justify it, not as a trans-historical absolute. All preferences , for the large over the small, the faster over the slower, the more pragmatic over the less pragmatic, the more worthwhile over the less worthwhile, produce differentiations made intelligible with reference to a specified content , a sense of meaning. Thompson isn’t assuming that content is absolute. On the contrary, such preferences only maintain their stable sense within a given cultural context. So within Augustine’s cultural context it would make sense to say that his approach unfolds more quickly and with more agility than Thompson's, traversing greater depths of creative space.

This what Thompson means when he says

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.

He doesn’t mean that we navigate among these domains from some neutral vantage beyond them all, but by being shaped and changed in the interactions within and among them.

Anger is a manifestation of our own failure to find a more productive expression, one which solves the problem. The problem is, the proximate cause is not always the only - or the real - problem — Pantagruel

I think I agree, but I would add that it is not the expression of anger which is the biggest problem today in our polarized world, but the failure to see the world from the perspective of others such that what appears as malevant intent can be seen instead as the other’s best effort to live ethically based on their vantage. Anger is blame, and blame impugns intent, delegitimizing the other’s motives. Whether we express our anger or not , as long as we cling to blame, we delegitimize the other, as seen in today’s political discourse.

The point is, you can't reduce anger to a logically valid behaviouristic framework. Human interactions are "overdetermined" to use psychiatric jargon — Pantagruel

Yes, but overdetermined by what? The litany of aggravating events that pile up over the course of the day are not stored in some internal ‘anger pot’ as the accumulation of a random collection of negative energy, they are interpreted in terms of how they impact our ability to make sense of our world , how we are valued by others and how we value ourselves. Emotions are not expressions of assessment thought in terms of formal logic or rationality , but of our relative success or failure at maintaining a normative equilibrium, an ability to keep our world recognizable, coherent and anticipatable. This we share with all animals.

Our emotional health depends on our sense of control and agency, and everything that happens to us in the course of a day puts that equanimity to the test. Whereas a single disappointing or angering incident may be not threaten our confidence or self-esteem, a multitude of such events , especially by people we consider friends, may plunge us into self-doubt and magnify our anger.

↪Joshs a
Absence of emotion is an interesting area. In particular, the philosophy and spectrum of autism, raises this question. However, if does come down to what the absence of emotion signifies. Is it about being overwhelmed by the conflicts of the dichotomy of emotion. — Jack Cummins

Autists don’t lack emotion. No one on the planet lacks emotion. Autistics have difficulty in interpreting the meaning of emotion cues in others. Affect is never absent in our lives. What we call absence of feeling is a neutral or blase mood , but this is far from an absence of feeling. All experience is meaningful, and all meaning is valuative. All valuation is affective.

One can become angry, yet not allow anger to dictate or motivate one's responses. Becoming angry does not entail displaying anger. I guess anger could be viewed as a "motivational challenge". — Pantagruel

So the way I would construe anger is as a rapid , multi-step construal of a situation that begins with loss and disappoint, and is immediately followed by assessment of blame. The instigator of my disappointment deliberately did what they did , knowing i would be hurt by it. Alongside this blamefulness assessment is the mobilization for action to get them to change their ways. Given that anger is this complex of assessments , what would it mean to not allow anger to dictate or motivate one’s responses? If anger is preventing us from thinking or doing something else, isnt it because the way we are assessing the situation is preventing us from responding differently ?
1)that it is disappointing and violating
2) that the person responsible for our letdown did what they did deliberately.
3) that we may be able to coax, shame or force them to change their attitude or behavior.

Yes, we could choose not to ‘display’ anger , but that would involve modifying assessment 3, that we have a chance of correcting the other person. It would be a matter of employing the most effective strategy of provoking improvement in the other’s attitude. We could , for instance, decide that physical assault , while possibly effective, may land us in more trouble than it’s worth. But only if we changed assessment 2, that the other was completely culpable, would we be motivated not to display anger at all.

Anger can be legitimate and yetq still unhelpful. It can be a source of strength, courage, and motivation, but only if effectively sublimated. — Pantagruel

But this description seems to separate anger from the perceived meaning of a situation. In your paragraph above, what would happen if we removed the word anger and attributed legitimacy, strength , courage and motivation to the nature of the situation as it is construed , rather than to some separate device we call anger adding these qualities as some special spice? It is the world that is angering, not our physiology.

Would the absence of emotion and anger lead to indifference, and a consequent philosophy of ideas of indifference? — Jack Cummins

The absence of emotion would lead to the absence of experience. Emotion is not some coloration added to thinking, it is the ground of thinking. Every perceived distinction and differentiation is intrinsically affective in nature.

Discussions on the philosophy forum often deteriorate into angry exchanges. In those cases, anger is counter-productive to philosophy — Pantagruel

Bitch

where human emotions come from is also an important question. Emotions, and the instinctual aspects of human life may go back to the instinctual aspects of physiology. This is about lower and higher needs, as suggested by Maslow's in his hierarchy of needs. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I think the physiological and evolutionary aspects of anger (and emotions in general) won’t tell us the central things we need to understand about anger. Even if we could entirely remove what people think of as the ‘instinctive’ or reflexive physiological responses associated with anger, the essential features of anger would remain , which, as I mentioned above, have to do with a cognitive assessment of blame and culpability. The cool , rational judgement of culpability is just as much a product of anger as is uncontrolled flailing about in rage. To understand the origin of anger is to understand the basis of goal-directed cognition.

↪Joshs I'm of the opinion it's determinate of the person venting, regarding a strong or weak will. One can be angry at things that can't apologize. — Vaskane

I think , in a sense, when we are angry at things that can’t apologize, we are anthropomorphizing them. We angrily kick the chair that got in our way to punish it, as if it had a personality. We dont really believe this in a later moment of lucidity, where we realize the one our anger was directed at, the one we are trying to punish, isnt really the chair, but our spouse or our boss, orthe gods who put that chair in our way, or maybe even ourselves for being such a spaz. But as long as there is anger, there is a desire to teach a sentient being a lesson.

↪Joshs If one does not feel the effects of their power from venting, perhaps. Which, one's power tends to be easily felt, in the midst of an apology — Vaskane

I would think venting is only a first step toward dissipating angry thinking. It moves one from a state of active to passive anger without resolving the cause of the anger, so the anger will continue on as seething resentment. Getting the other’s contrition, or forgiving them, takes one further. But even these don’t tell us why the other deviated from our expectations of them. Only discovering that the other’s actions were not deliberately meant, or were justified in our eyes, can our anger be completely eliminated.

Hatred leads to formulated values? Anger is something the rises up, and can be overcome upon venting. — Vaskane

It is only reliably overcome by attaining the other’s sincere apology. Venting achieves only temporary relief.

In some ways, anger may be seen as something to be overcome emotionally, or as an idea,or frequency. How does it stand in connection with philosophical ideas and ideals of love and hatred? — Jack Cummins

I believe the affective spectrum of anger includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Anger is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

So what do all of these have in common? Anger is a complex multi-step process of assessment. It always begins with a disappointment of expectations , the perception that another has violated or fallen short of our standard of conduct. But this recognition is not enough to produce anger. Anger implies blame, and in blame we believe the other knew better than to do what they did to us in breaking a bond of trust . In other words, in anger we perceive that the other succumbed to some arbitrary , capricious impulse or temptation to deviate from how they knew they should have behaved with us. Thus, built into our angry assessment is the hope that we can sway the wayward other back into the fold, to return them back to where we believe they should have been, to ‘give them a taste of their own medicine’, ‘teach them a lesson’ to coax them to ‘mend their ways’, to repair a lost trust or intimacy. This hope is what gives anger its active quality. But the impulse of anger is not fundamentally aimed at destroying the wayward other , but toward achieving the other’s remorse, apology, repentance.

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 — Count Timothy von Icarus

Earlier, I commented that an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth” isn’t really how I see what I do when I find constant change in my experience moment to moment. An absolute statement is absolute only because the person who makes it has already decided that it will always be the case and doesnt have to be re-affirmed. When one believes a meaning is absolute , they don’t believe it has to be checked against the contextual changes that time brings. When I declare that the world continually reinvents itself moment to moment, this ‘truth’ is only applicable this moment. You’ll have ask me again next moment , and the moment after that , if I still find this to be the case. I am letting time, history and actual events dictate for me whether this ‘truth’ continues to be valid, and in what form, rather then deciding in advance what is absolutely the case.

Since l don’t believe there is any aspect of the world that sits still, that persists as itself, that isn't changed by a change in any other aspect of the world, truth and refutation mean something different for me that for you. Contradiction, in the sense of fundamental difference that precedes any notion of identity or the same, is thus the basic ‘fact’ of being. Can one understand something that contradicts itself every moment , yet continues to be the ‘same’ differently , through and as a result of this endless self-contradiction, as a style, pattern, theme? If we say that something is validated in the sense that it belongs to such a continually self-contradicting, temporally unfolding theme, pattern or style, then what do people mean when they say that something is refuted or is self-refuting?

Thompson would look at his approach as continually self-contradicting, but in a way that maintains a relative ongoing thematic unity. He would also consider Augustine’s model of truth as a continually self-contradicting thematic that maintains its own validity.
Augustine’s assertions already deconstruct themselves internally. When he depicts truth as presence, it is presence relative to a context of use and relevance, and this context of relevance re-affirms itself by altering itself. It may sound like I’m adding things that are foreign to and contradict Augustine’s assertions, but all I’m
doing is drawing out explicitly what is already implicit in his own thinking.

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.

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One could say that Thompson’s position subsumes and enriches Augustine’s without invalidating it. Each offers a valid, workable guide to navigating the world by anticipating events. To say that Thompson’s approach enriches Augustine’s is to say that Thompson understands from his vantage , and can effectively summarize and live within, Augustine's approach. But he can also place the dimensions of Augustine’s model within a more intricate structure of understanding that accomplishes what Augustine’s does, but exceeds it in of anticipatory power.

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 — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are equally valid, but not at the same time and in the same context. We only inhabit one social milieu at a time, and each dictates its own unique ways of making our way around. We may take these ways of sense making for granted. That is , their presuppositions may be hidden from us, but they are nevertheless always being put into question in subtle ways in the way our language continually shifts the sense of its meanings within a given culture. This is what Wittgenstein’s language games point to. Every time we use a word, its conceptual meaning subtly shifts its sense in response to the novelty of the context of interaction. Word use is thus a kind of questioning concerning what is at stake and what is at issue whenever we use a word concept. Wittgenstein said that these subtle shifts in sense of words via their use can be seen to share a family resemblance. But this resemblance is not a general category of meaning supervening on the particular senses. There is no common element among all the senses.

We take for granted that words just mean what they mean, that they are merely tools that hook onto a reality independent of the words. But this taking for granted doesn’t prevent actual word use from continually shifting. We simply don’t notice this in the way we tend to talk about the relation between concepts and reality. As we alter our milieu with our arts , sciences and technologies, the way these changes feed back to us requires us to alter our metaphysical assumptions and along with it the basis of our scientific truths. Again, we may take for granted that the truths about the world we describe with our word concepts remains constant as we adjust those concepts, because we simply don’t notice the subtle way that our paradigm shifts alter the very foundations of those truths.

This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
— Joshs

Can you elaborate on this evaluation? Why could a paradigm shift not be both? — Pantagruel

Actually, Kuhn would say yes. Paradigms shifts are revolutionary in the sense that the content of new schemes and standards of measurement and validation are not logically commensurate with those they replace. But they are evolutionary in that new paradigms solve more puzzles than older ones.